Here is the start of a new series to highlight just how bad things would be if we let the other side take over.

The big issue this week, of course, was the requirement that all employers, other than actual churches, offer complete health care to their female employees. Personally, I don’t like the idea of compromising with opponents of sexual freedom and equality, but many people I respect approve of the deal that was reached. The crazies over on the Right, however, seem intent on doubling down an allowing all employers to discriminate. So Scientologists won’t have to provide medication to the mentally ill, and white supremacists won’t have to offer fertility drugs to interracial couples.

And here’s an explanation — actually, one of the more coherent I’ve seen lately — of the Political Reality behind the HHS Mandate. Hint: It’s all those terrible unmarried women.

For a longer-term strategy, here are the Center for Marriage Policy’s Ten Marriage Values Policies. As someone just old enough to remember the world before the “Sexual Revolution,” let me assure you that you don’t really want it back.

An unfortunate graphic — and as a socialist, I do draw a distinction between “socialism”and “social democracy” — but a good question:

http://www.daytoncitypaper.com/why-not-democratic-socialism/

Some hopeful signs:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/wall-street-capitalism_b_1238210.html

Too bad it will take this:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175494/tomgram%3A_christian_parenti%2C_big_storms_require_big_government/#more

Just  few things for people to keep n mind.

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.

David Brooks has a recent column in which he argues that the “Red [State] Inequality,” between college-educated and non-college-educated people is more momentous than the “Blue [State] Inequality” between the 1% and the 99%. After all, college grads, on average, make 75% more than non-grads. (That’s less than double, for those who didn’t do so well in math.) The super-rich, on the other hand, make three-figure multiples of what most of us make.

Apart from a few fanatics — and Right-wingers looking for straw-men to beat up — nobody on the Left is looking for the kind of absolute equality that would strain at the gap between the more educated and the less. And the nice thing about education is that it can be made available to people from unprivileged backgrounds. (That’s how my family got where we did.) So why focus on that particular inequality? Two words: culture war.

Why bother addressing the fact that the capitalist economic system generates morally obscene — and ultimately unsustainable — levels of inequality when you can just encourage the 99% to point fingers at each other? The problem, after all, isn’t that a few people are getting rich by financial shenanigans — it’s that “snobs” and “elitists” use big words and put milk in their coffee (a.k.a. drink latté). And Brooks can’t resist the usual Right-wing dig at single mothers and other such miscreants.

Expect more of this in the months ahead. Hey, it’s easier than actually coming up with solutions that might pinch the real elites.