Photograph Source: InformedImages – CC BY 4.0

The subversive power of imagination

In my last post I recalled the vision of historian William Appleman Williams seeking an American future beyond “empire as a way of life,” as he called and documented it through his career as one of the leading radical historians of the 20th century. Williams proposed reconstituting the United States as a confederation of regional commonwealths, each building social ecological economies geared to the needs of people and nature.

I quoted Williams from an earlier series I did on his thinking : “’We must return . . . to the Articles of Confederation. That document offers us a base from which to begin our voyage into a human future; a model of government grounded in the idea and the ideal of self-determined communities coming together as equals when and as necessary to combine forces to honor common values and realize common objectives.’ We must ‘create an American commonwealth of regional communities.’”

Obviously this is far from our current situation, where the Constitutional order is breaking down under an out-of-control president, a feckless Congress and a Supreme Court tilted far to the right. But this very breakdown opens the door to consider dramatically different alternatives. A system that brought us to this point obviously needs to change.

I posed Williams’ vision in the spirit of science fiction writer Ursula Leguin’s writings on the subversive power of imagination, which she demonstrated in her many books dreaming different........

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