The Great Leap Forward was a formative event in Chinese history, taking place between 1958 and 1962.

It was largely an attempt to reorganize China's economy. The reorganization of agriculture was often disastrous. Bad weather was partially to blame for the resultant death toll, which was and still is widely disputed and subject to manipulation for propaganda purposes. (Though, honestly, if the Chinese planners hadn't bothered to factor bad weather into their plans, that's already a strike against them.)

One has to imagine that the Chinese put up with the Great Leap Forward because they thought it was, as advertised, a Great Leap Forward. And perhaps to some extent it was. But those years were years within an Age of Utopian Dreaming, in which people believed that, regardless of the enormous hardships they had to undergo, life would eventually get better. The Great Leap Forward was, then, a utopian dream, regardless of its successes or failures.

The most recent period, though, is a period in which the people of the world have been permitted one and only one utopian dream, which is the dream of the Utopia of Money. The Utopia of Money, however, is capitalism; it's an exclusive utopia, available only to those who can meet the high asking prices for its fruits. The rest of us get to be human furniture, throw-away servants in someone else's utopia. In this most recent period, the utopian dream has died for most people, and so we are justified today in discussing a set of "Great Leaps Backward," instances in which bad policy and bad weather combine to produce bad outcomes, and everyone knows it's bad policy and they're bad outcomes, but nobody is able or willing to change the overall pattern.

Politics in the United States today has degenerated into a continual shouting match between two different groups of tribalists, those whose identity is wrapped up in (D) and those whose identity is wrapped up in (R). Everyone is totally convinced of the paramount importance of being on one side or another of the shouting match, which has itself become an irrelevant distraction. There are, however, other forces in American politics, and now and then these forces make themselves known. Back in 2016, Bernie Sanders ran a campaign for President, which focused upon genuine issues of need in America. This campaign inspired huge rallies and a great outpouring of support for the idea that people ought to get something meaningful for their hard-earned tax dollars.

But when in mid-year 2016 the Sanders campaign conceded to, and endorsed, Hillary Clinton's campaign, and when, thereafter, Sanders campaigned for Clinton, politics in America went back to being the shouting match it had been previously. What had once been the promise of something better became fully absorbed in the shouting match. And so, as summer dragged into fall that year, Clinton boondoggled her campaign into a loss to Donald Trump, an even less worthy candidate for President. Afterward, as 2017 dragged into 2018, the committee choice was to recruit some spooks to cry "Russia" and the phony war on Donald Trump was on, inflaming the hearts and minds of (D) partisans everywhere with great concerns about foreign infiltration (no, not you, Israel) of American politics, to no consequence whatsoever. And so, Russia or no Russia, we're still getting nothing for our hard-earned tax dollars.

Here I am suggesting that we call this movement, of the endorsement of nonserious campaigns by serious ones, as a Great Leap Backward. I am not trying, here, to suggest that we are all caught in some sort of Edward Gibbon or Oswald Spengler dynamic of the decline and fall of civilizations. There could still be progress, and we could still work together to create a better world. But creating progress would take a massive, coordinated effort behind ideas commonly dismissed as "utopian."

Rather, the invocation of a Great Leap Backward is merely intended to dispute the notion that there is any sort of "progress" going on here, in an era in which people would love to pretend that they are "progressive." The oft-heard proclamation that electing Democrats is better than electing Republicans, while perhaps true in a general sense, is no indicator of "progress." The planks, proposals, and platforms of Bernie Sanders' campaign, moreover, are not an indicator of "progress" so much as they are stopgap efforts to mitigate the general disaster. Let's go over this briefly:

• Medicare for All: A measure designed to slow down the general regression of medical systems in the US
• College for All: A measure designed to slow down the deterioration in college life throughout the US, now pretty much on its way to becoming a debt-laden Internet spectacle designed to fulfill a job requirement.
• Green New Deal: A measure designed to provide a few jobs on the way to the eventual climate change holocaust.

And since there is no "progress," it is pointless to call oneself a "progressive." Now, this is not to say that I am against "progressive legislation." I am certainly for it. But I do think that such legislation can be whittled away so that its main selling point becomes that it is "better than nothing," and that "better than nothing" can be sold as "progress" when in fact it's nothing of the sort. It can become maybe student loan forgiveness for a few, for instance, as reflected in the Joe Biden platform. When we cheerlead for policy according to a definition of "progress" when in fact no "progress" is happening, our modus operandi is compromised.

So instead of a Great Leap Forward we are getting Great Leaps Backward. There will be long periods of mere regression, but a Great Leap Backward can be swift and traumatic. So for instance we have the Great Recession of 2008-2009 and the Coronavirus Event of 2020, but also much smaller previous events (e.g. the 2003 US invasion of Iraq) in which countries were "remade" in neoliberal fashion after (and sometimes in anticipation of) disasters. The key texts in documenting Great Leaps Backward are Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine and Philip Mirowski's Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To Waste. The disastrous effects of bad policy are there to be manipulated so as to produce more of the desired bad policy, so the Establishment stranglehold upon power can be ever stronger. We can see this today, for instance, in the Department of Justice demand that habeas corpus be suspended during the coronavirus emergency, amidst pseudo-protections from eviction in a time of mass unemployment.

The Establishment power behind neoliberal economic policy, behind downsizing and privatization and the destruction of democracy and basically leaving the mass public sh*t outa luck, is so pervasive that Bernie Sanders and his movement have barely scratched its surface. #neverbiden would maybe be a start if its adherents had something to do besides bicker with Biden bullies. But it doesn't, and they don't, at least not yet, and so we are still here, waiting for the consummation of another Great Leap Backward.