Long, long trends of growing inequality, of poverty, of institutional racism, of ecological destruction – trends that do not bend in more than token ways to the politics of reform – these define problems that have their origins much deeper in the political–economic design of the system itself.

It is instructive also to remember that the fourteen–year period which preceded the advent of the New Deal began with the “Red Scare,” one of the greatest eras of political repression in American history, and that it continued through the deeply conservative presidencies of Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover. Even so, many of the programs and ideas that became the basis of the next stage of progressive development were refined in the state and local laboratories of democracy during this challenging period, as in many ways were its larger political theory and vision.

Straightforward, though bracing: if the design of corporate capitalism is unable to sustain values of equality, genuine democracy, liberty, and ecological sustainability as a matter of inherent systemic architecture, what systemic ‘design’ might ultimately achieve and sustain these values? (Especially given the total failure of the traditional twentieth-century alternative, state socialism?).

Without institutional connections, individuals swim in a lonely political sea, ready to be preyed upon by the likes of Trump. They also are a critical form of underlying political power – which is why conservatives from Ronald Reagan to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker have worked to undermine them.

From Ferguson to Flint, it’s clear from thousands of broken communities across the country that the current American system is troubled and challenged at its very core. The wind of history is no longer at our backs. Confident narratives of progress and equality are giving way to the triage demands of austerity, muddling through from one crisis to the next, with each “recovery” lowering the expectations of the next generation while the wealth at the top continues to concentrate.

The opening of the system question is being driven as much by despair as it is by idealism – the speculative force of the American dream, in which each generation could count on a brighter future for the one it was raising, has crumbled, hemmed in by failed cities, mass incarceration, precarious low-wage work, and the looming threat of ecological collapse. Dispossession, deindustrialization, and disinvestment have created a geography of inequality and diminished expectations, in which it is all too painfully obvious that the old solutions will be insufficient.

It is clearly time to get serious both about a different vision for the future and – critically – something far more sophisticated about what a meaningful “systemic design” would entail. We need to go beyond rhetoric about a broken system to a critical and informed understanding of how a real systemic alternative might actually work.

What is new in our time in history is that the traditional compromise positions – namely progressive, social democratic, or liberal politics – have lost their capacity to offset such power even in the modest ways the American welfare state once did. At its heart, the Pluralist Commonwealth is a way to think about a different system for the ownership of the economic institutions underlying our society, one which is constructed to secure far better outcomes than seem possible in a system characterized and determined by increasingly concentrated private wealth.

Contrary to both the corporate capitalist vision – which lifts up private ownership above all else – and the state socialist vision – which focuses on bureaucratic, centralized forms of public ownership – this is a fundamentally pluralist vision, in which multiple forms of public, private, cooperative, and common ownership are structured at different scales and in different sectors to create the kind of future we want to see. The vision begins and ends with the challenge of community.

Ownership is the major determinant of systemic outcomes, but real democracy – economic and political – requires attendant forms of transformed governance, institutional development, and cultural mobilization in order to be sustained.

In the long-term, it’s not electoral contingency or individual charismatic leaders that shape or constrain our present and future – it’s the basic structure of the underlying institutions, especially the economic ones.

In times of crisis and manifest systemic failure, new ideas about new institutions can have an outsized effect in shifting the course of history, especially if prior on-the-ground development work has set the stage for real change.

We live at a time when the dominant institutions of corporate capitalism have come under question, one in which a democratic socialist candidate came very close to becoming the nominee of the Democratic Party, and a time when millions of Americans sense that something is fundamentally wrong with the way the current system operates.

No one has as yet come up with a serious “model” that might achieve both efficiency and self-directed management — and an equitable, ecologically sustainable culture and system. All have flaws. Part of this is due to the nascent state of the debate — in a political culture which has operated under the assumption that “there is no alternative” to corporate capitalism for decades, it is reasonable to expect serious discussion of systemic change to be hampered by a lack of intellectual infrastructure.

It is imperative that today’s activists – energized around questions of environmental, gender, racial, and economic justice – have a sense of not only what they are against, but of what they are for, really, over the long haul.

Too many people mistakenly suppose that a single strategy or principle – like localism, worker self-management, or public ownership – provides everything we need in terms of a systemic design. On the contrary, a system robust, rigorous, and resilient enough to tackle all the hard questions – around scale, efficiency, power, sustainability, democracy, equity, and liberty, to name a few – should be at least a little bit complicated. The Pluralist Commonwealth thus offers a vision, beginning with community, of a constellation of interlocking institutional elements, in which an attempt is made to ensure that the strengths and weaknesses of each different piece are balanced in the total structure.