That’s the end of the current cycle in the Mayan calendar, scheduled for December 21, 2012. There’s no evidence that any ancient Mayan ever attached particular significance to the date; all it really means is that a new cycle begins, just like happens every New Years Day — except that this one is five thousand some years long. (Take that, Y2K.) When the last b’ak’tun started, the first cities were being set up in what is now southern Iraq.

Even though the world (hopefully) isn’t really going to end, however, 2012 is slated to be a big one. This one of a few critical election cycles which are deciding what kind of a country we intend to be. And, as always, there are people on the Left who cannot bring themselves to support the Democrats.

Forget Obama. Forget the Democrats. They aren’t the issue this year. We have the Republican governing coalition — the alliance between the extremist free-market capitalists and the social, cultural, and racial backlash — on the ropes. Their very extremism — outlaw birth-control? end direct election of the Senate? — is proof of their desperation. Their game is just about up.

Over on the Right, there are people crowing about record gun sales in the last holiday period. They’re telling their troops that if Obama is re-elected, it is essentially the end of America. If they lose, expect violence. So be it — maybe the boil just has to be lanced.

Step back for a moment and look at how deep in enemy territory we are playing. The economic system itself has become the issue. Even the right-wing Republicans are beginning to use the expression “vulture capitalism.” If “Slick Willard” Romney is the Republican nominee, we can spend the next year urging the American people to vote against unbridled capitalism. Even the mainstream media may end up framing the issues that way. The capitalists actually have to defend their system. When did that last happen? (We’re almost in field-goal range.)

We have a choice between sitting back complaining about how disappointing Barack Obama turned out to be — though whenever I hear someone on our side call him a conservative, I recall that there are nutjobs on the other end who think G.W. Bush was a liberal — or spending the next eleven months campaigning hard against a full-throated defense of the capitalist system, in its most shameless form, against a “socialist” opponent.

If the Democrats win, what will have changed? Just this: The winning political strategy will no longer be appealing to racial and cultural resentments, but appealing to economic populism — the one percent against the 99. Even assuming that Obama and the Democrats are totally insincere in this — the truth is actually much more complicated — their very appeal to class interests will shift the ground of American politics. It already has.

This year could indeed change everything. And we could have a lot of fun.

The election is less than a year away, and once again the perennial debate reopens over whether to support the Democrats. I’ve been in this game long enough to know that no one is likely to be moved off his or her position, but I’ve got a few thoughts to consider.

People say that we must not work with the Dems because they are a “capitalist” party; what we need is a “socialist” party. All right, what are the assumptions behind that assertion? How do people maintaining it imagine the coming of socialism?

Early in the history of our movement it was assumed that socialism would come when a specifically “socialist” party came to power, formed a specifically “socialist” government, and enacted a specifically “socialist” program — expropriating the expropriators. That was the assumption Marx made in the Manifesto. It underlay the Communist movement — as well as the policy of the Labour government in Britain right after World War II. It’s not a dumb idea, but it didn’t work out so well back in the Twentieth Century.

The coming of socialism will be no more coherent, straightforward, or deliberate than the coming of capitalism — or feudalism before it. That’s not how systems change. Socialism will be the result of a vast array of struggles, under no one’s central control. There will be fights for new entitlements, for redistributionist tax policies, and for stricter regulatory programs.The unions will have to be rebuilt and allied with each other and with non-labor progressives. Identity groups have their own programs and cultures to build. New forms of economic organization and systems of control will have to emerge. And some of these goals have to be approached indirectly. (Personally, I suspect a lot of the people working on these projects will think of it as building the next phase of capitalism — let them.) None of these things is “real socialism,” but they’re all a piece of it.

This is a chess game, not a boxing match.

It is against the background of this complexity that we have to evaluate the question of working with the Democrats. Are they all, or even mostly, socialists? Of course not. No one except our enemies, looking for a fight, thinks they are. But is a Democratic Party government worth having? Yes, I think it is — and not just because they are the “lesser evil,” though of course they are.

Our main strategic problem at the moment is to defeat the three-decade counteroffensive to undo the New Deal. Radical capitalists have taken advantage of the backlash against racial, social, sexual, and cultural change to mount a general attack on activist government. It was a brilliant idea, but it’s almost played out. That’s why the other side has gotten so extreme in the last few years — they realize they don’t have much time left. Their leaders are telling their troops that if Obama is re-elected, it is the end of their America.

I say we make that happen. I say we rub their faces in their loss of control of the culture, of the future. And at the risk of sounding cold, if someone on the other side snaps and gets violent — there’s a lot of talk about “Second Amendment solutions” over there — I say we play that for all it’s worth.

With the forces of social and cultural backlash and reaction crushed politically, the capitalists will have to defend their system on its own terms. And people are beginning to get sick of the constant drumbeat of tax-cuts for the rich. The political situation could be transformed sooner than anyone realizes — almost like the bursting of a dam — and then we’ll have opportunities for progress on many fronts at once.

And that’s how we’ll get socialism.

As I’ve said before, the Republican political strategy of playing to the backlash to shift wealth to the super-rich was going to run out eventually. Is this it?

This must be a real shock to the other side, but they really have only themselves to blame. They have been running around saying that the survival of the capitalist system is at stake, and now they find people talking about whether that system really ought to survive. For a generation, politics has been about the social issues and the “culture war” — all the while the super-rich have been grabbing everything they can — but now the issues are the role of the capitalists (a.k.a. “job-creators”) and just how much they ought to get and keep.

Now they actually have to defend their system — not just promise to stop abortion and gay marriage, promises which were somehow never actually kept. Their arguments range from the relatively sophisticated (faith in individual opportunity is what keeps the system running) through the fallacious (the Supply-Side Lie) to the downright demented (protestors smell bad). The point is that people are finally talking about this.

There are quite a few steps between here and making serious change — and it will take longer than we can really expect people to be camping out in the cold. In the next few months, everything will start to coalesce into an election campaign. (Obama has disappointed all of us, but we can’t just let him go down — but that’s another, much longer post.) A start has been made.

Maybe the Mayans were right after all, and 2012 will be the year the world changes.

A few thoughts:

1. The phenomenon which some are calling “white nationalism” is more about culture than about crude skin-color prejudice. (There is still a bunch of the latter about, of course.) Large numbers of (white) Americans have their identity tightly bound up with a vision of America as the only advanced country with the moral fortitude to reject national health care. What we most condemn about modern America is precisely what they are most proud of — and the possible loss of which most outrages them. There are assumptions about the proper relation between the individual and the community, and the proper role of the state, which have to change if we are to have a decent future. And I submit that our main task is not so much to persuade the other side, as to mobilize as many people as we can against them — and to cow as many half-hearted opponents as possible into silence.

2. It also would help for everyone to take the proverbial deep breath. Given the force of the other side’s resistance, it would be easy to lose sight of how deep in enemy territory we are playing. The political mainstream is arguing over the role of the rich in society and how much they should be expected to pay in taxes. Even if it looks like the other side is winning at the moment, it is significant that we are talking about it. Bob King, president of the United Auto Workers, had an column in one of the Detroit papers recently, in which he argued that America should try to be a country where we have a broad middle class; someone wrote a long letter in response that America should instead strive to be a country where deserving people get rich. I’m ecstatic that people are having those sorts of arguments in the mainstream media.

3. People should also cool it with assumptions that the Republicans WILL hold the House, WILL take the Senate, and WILL elect a President. Maybe yes, maybe no — but it doesn’t help to lose heart nearly a year and a half before the elections. The GOP is in disarray at this point, and there may be (metaphorical) blood on the floor at their next convention; the teabaggers hate the establishment, and vice versa. (1964, anyone?) For the moment, I still expect Obama to be re-elected, and if it’s not quite the exciting prospect it was in 2008, it will be psychologically devastating to the Right. They’ve convinced themselves that “the American people” reject Obama and all his “socialist” works, and a clear demonstration that this is no so will positively break their hearts.

I can hardly wait.

So here we are, tooling down the highway at high speed, heading toward a fork in the road. We can go right, or we can go left. The government is holding the steering wheel, but the navigator is the American people — you!

The driver turns to the navigator and asks, “Which way?” To which the navigator replies, “AAH! DO SOMETHING!”

Well, I’m sitting there, and I say, “I think we should go left.” To which the guy sitting next to me says, “No, we should go right.” And the navigator screams, “STOP IT! BOTH OF YOU! DO SOMETHING!”

Did I mention that the car has no brakes? History never does.

They keep complaining that we should put “the country” or “the people” before “party” or “special interests.” Fair enough. I believe that we should become a society in which the super-rich paid their fair share and everyone’s basic needs were provided for. That’s the best thing I could wish for my country. Needless to say, there are other people who believe the exact opposite.

Now, I hate their guts — I really do. But I have more respect for them than I do for the “centrist,” stop-it-both-of-you crowd. For them, I have just three words: lazy (unwilling to do the work of figuring out which side to take), cowardly (lacking the nerve to take a side), and childish (expecting someone or something to save them from the consequences of the first two).

We can’t duck these decisions, folks. We can go right or left — or we can crash. I know which side I’m on. Do you?