Dan K recently posted an interesting challenge to think about what the left might want to accomplish by 2058.  Because I didn't see his blog until near the end of it's life-expectancy on the recommended list, I had a chance to look over all the comments.

There was a decided amount of groupthink that was apparent.  I mean, who isn't for a kindlier, gentler, future?

The problem is that you have to graft any meaningful discussion on the realities present.  For those of you who view this as a needlessly negative exercise, I remind you of DF who once said it's not pessimistic to point out that the rip cord needed to be pulled earlier if you don't want to go SPLAT!

I posted a comment to Dan's blog, but thought it was so late in the game, that it might make a reasonable airing as a stand-alone blog.

Before we talk about what the left can be doing, we need to put it into a context.  Going forward, there are at least several overarching, critical issues that will shape society:

1)  Fear of Individual Safety
The next terrorist attack on US soil will be more devastating than 9/11 -- regardless of actual physical damage. Now that we have the DHS, people presently assume they are safer than pre-9/11.

They are not.

The DHS isn't doing it's job -- not because of any particular corruption, but rather because it's such an unwieldy bureaucratic organization. Therefore, when the terrorist attack occurs, people will assume that it's because the DHS didn't have enough power. As a result, people allow for even more of their civil liberties be given up for their safety.

2)  Willing Loss of Privacy
Part of this trend to decaying liberties will be advanced by the huge databases being generated on people even as we speak. Myspace and Facebook are in the process of negotiating sharing databases. Google has vast servers that save your gmail from forever.

Interestingly, this fear of loss of privacy was usually directed at Microsoft  -- an entity that is frequently portrayed as an evil corporation. However, the hip, arty, young crowd allowed the confluence of other entities (deemed cute and friendly) to assemble such a structure. And they did (and do) so willingly.  It is not accidental that Google, for example, has done a lot to avoid the missteps of Microsoft in terms of their public image.  Google learned from that example!

From these bits of info, it's possible to deduce more than just buying habits, but personal preferences, friends and associates, and prejudices. When combined with blogs, family photos etc. and you have a pretty complete dossier on any individual who spends anytime on the Internet.

The government can then access this information.

Note that the government couldn't have assembled this as efficiently as a host of corporations and that the corporations have had the willing compliance from their users.

Thus, again, there is no "conspiracy" or nefarious force to enable all of this.

But it is enabled.

3)  The End of Cheap Energy
The end of cheap energy will cause cataclysmic changes in society. Despite comments about "renewable energy sources" it amounts to little more pie-in-the-sky hope. If this view seems unnecessarily pessimistic, remember that in 1939, everyone was "sure" we would have flying cars by 1983. I've gone over the various issues associated with a post-peak oil world in several other blogs and so will not do so here.

The good news is that the large-scale monitoring of citizens will be more difficult with the loss of cheap energy.  (Say good-bye to large-scale organization and access to large-scale information.)  The bad news is that modern society as we know it will slowly dissolve.

Suffice it to say that human labor will become far more important for important things like farming. It's probable that we will see a rise of a peasant class in the US (much like existed in Europe before the Renaissance) with people (again) trading liberty and "rights" for security.

In its most extreme case, we may well find a class of indentured servants, possibly even slaves (a la the class of people that existed as slaves in Roman times). Gender roles will eventually ratchet back as well with 18th century views being more common than 21st century views.

While this radical societal change won't happen orderly, and won't be complete in 50 years, the general trend is clear:  without the slavery of machines to do our bidding, manual labor will make a huge comeback and society will reorganize around the same forms that it did spontaneously before the rise of the industrial age.

While I don't think that all of these trends will playing out to completion in 50 years, this will be the direction. As a result, the left can do it's thing best by helping to merely hold on to where we currently are.

In 2008 that thought seems defeatist and gives a goal to easy to accomplish.  But it will become increasingly difficult in the years ahead.