from Bruni, Brooks, and Black that communities and people who form them matter. They must be acknowledged, listened to, and engaged – regardless of background or position. It is both a matter of respect and an opportunity to progress. As Zakaria has noted: “Those who enter a new era with size and strength often do not master it. Those who adapt best to that new age thrive.”35
It could also learn to lean into inevitabilities, not to accept our fate but to define it. We have known since the 1990s, that, as a form of governance, the nation state has been in decline. As first articulated by Kenichi Ohmae in 1993, “the nation state has become an unnatural, even dysfunctional, unit for organizing human activity and managing economic endeavor in a borderless world.”36 And the conclusion drawn – that the nation state will ultimately be replaced by regional economies – has been validated by the work of environmentalists such as such Miklos Udvardy, who catalogued bioregions around the world, and by Joel Garreau, when mapping the nine nations of North America, as well as thinkers such as Parag Khanna, who like Garreau has mapped what a new America might look like if built not around state boundaries but regional economies.37 Though each offers up a viable structure in different ways, the focus on bioregions and economies underemphasizes the cultural underpinnings that form the life and lifestyles of people living within such regions and such economies
The point of this discussion and thinking is to first note that history is not static. It will change, and if America wishes to bind itself to the past it will be writing its own obituary. The second point is to note that given the proper orientation, people could move America forward in ways that once again would lead the world.
This process could blend traditional political activism and community organizing (pamphleteering, social media, meetings, etc.) with newer technologies (simulation modeling, AI, etc.) to create structures and systems around eco-cultural communities, which would be defined both through its naturally occurring biosystem and the economic and cultural identity of the people living therein.38 This would structure a means to realize much greater enfranchisement as the boundaries of eco-cultural communities would not follow existing nation state lines, but would instead be constructed by integrating social, economic, and environmental factors. The lines defining eco-cultural communities would, in other words, have much more in common with the maps generated by Khanna than our contemporary global mapping of nation states.
As for the basic political organization of such a society, it might well incorporate positive attributes of socialism, democratic socialism, and environmentalism like bioregionalism and localism. But ultimately, the organization should inherently evolve from the information gathered and from the decisions made by individuals within the eco-cultural community itself.
One could speculate that most likely eco-cultural communities would no longer be defined through state dictates to members of the nation. The localism of the community, brought about not only through new community-based systems of representation but by advances in technological means of communication, would present a constrained form of government as conversations between men and women would serve to localize dialogue. This would suggest governance would more likely engage parliamentary systems, where multiple political parties would represent very different types and locations but also coalitions of like-minded eco-cultural communities.
Such a framework would address concerns of theorists and advocates like Arendt and others, who argue the rise of stateless peoples, brought about by the decline of the nation state, opened the door to totalitarianism.
This is because new parliamentary systems, based as they would be on eco-culturally defined communities, could readily be
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