Conservatives always talk about the good ole days and how we need to return to those days.

It’s hilarious that conservatives think the Good Old Days were the 1950s, and that leftists see capitalism as a defining event requiring a dialectical response, when in reality humanity still hasn’t solved the problems caused by agriculture, much less the Industrial Revolution.

Agriculture did good things, but it also caused enormous human misery and rampant inequality. Because people are fundamentally terrible and greedy, everywhere agriculture developed so did a rapacious elite. We still haven’t figured out how to deal with that.

Before the Industrial Revolution, it was advantageous to have kids work the farm, and policing was handled at a community level. After the Industrial Revolution, kids were a net burden and policing had to be professionalized.

The logic of capitalism & the decline of the family farm forced people into atomized nuclear families. The nuclear family is a historically unusual mode of organization & it doesn’t really work. During 19th/20th centuries it was papered over by indenturing women as homemakers.

Now you have a poly-crisis of impossible proportions: education, childcare, and housing are all far too expensive, people work too many hours, and there isn’t enough time or money to make it all work. Birthrates have declined, and there isn’t enough housing or childcare.

You can try to redistribute your way out of this, but even in the most advanced social democracies birthrates have plummeted, housing is soaring and people feel stretched. Increasing immigration can help but also fuels fascist xenophobia, which hurts social safety nets.

The conservative answer of going back to the 1950s is as ludicrous as it is evil. You can’t put the freedom genie back in the bottle, and even if you did it wouldn’t solve any of the problems. It’s not like anyone can sustain a household on one income anymore.

But the socialist answer of “ending capitalism” doesn’t get there, either. End capitalism to do…what? “Ending capitalism” won’t suddenly create communities that truly take care of each other, it won’t build automatically build more houses or fund childcare workers.

Besides, a socialist/communist state still has to decide how to allocate resources. Ideally, you do that as democratically as possible. But people are selfish and elites are self-dealing. Politburos are inevitably and always corrupt. Good luck figuring out the greatest good!

The policing problem is beset with patriarchy & racism like everything else. But a bunch of strangers won’t coexist safely on restorative justice, & no modern neighborhood is a real “community” in the old sense. Professional police are a necessary evil, inherently corruptible

It’s not just a question of giving people enough money to have kids (and good luck with that!) It’s also a question of giving them enough *time*. And nothing gives time and incentives like fostering real community and expanding the idea of family.

Solving all this isn’t just a matter of fixing the tax code, removing the surplus value of labor profit margin, or going back to some trad version of oppressive inequality. People weren’t meant to live this way, in isolated, atomized nuclear families.

If we want to live in an industrialized society with all the benefits of it, we have to figure out how to solve for all the problems it caused. Communism, liberal capitalism, and trad fascism all fail to address the root causes or deliver real solutions.

My point is that we need to be focused on solving more fundamental cultural problems. And I would start by questioning the nuclear family.

This is all a threaded tweet by David Atkins.