Granted, Eugene Robinson beat me to the punch this week, calling for liberals to craft a Big Idea that can compete with the conservative bumper sticker of "GUB'MINT BAD!" But to be fair to myself (I'm all about self-referential fairness, you know), I was banging this drum three years ago when I detailed the need for a New Narrative to transcend the partial and faulty stories told by both liberals and conservatives.

Robinson asserts, in his column and then on Morning Joe this week, that Republicans are winning the day on the debt ceiling debate because their message is consistent, simple, and powerful: taxes and government spending are bad, and should thus always and everywhere be reduced. This trope resonates with people, especially in a recession, because who really likes paying taxes? And when you see the clowns from both sides of the aisle mucking up this debt ceiling issue, who wouldn't agree that Big Gub'mint needs to be ushered gingerly to that Norquistian bathtub, post haste?

But as usual when liberals move from diagnosis to prescription, Robinson falls flat. What should the progressive response be to the big conservative idea? "I'd suggest something pithier: jobs, jobs, jobs. People may dislike paying taxes, but they dislike unemployment more."

Yeah, that's great. So brave.

Here's how that shtick plays out. Liberals say 'jobs, jobs, jobs,' and then move on to propose what? More stimulus of course, this time with robust jobs programs: direct government hiring, perhaps a new WPA, funding for retraining of the unemployed, infrastructure spending, investment in education, etc..

And what will the conservative response be? No f'in way! 

That's the whole point of this current deadlock. Behind the simple conservative idea of cutting spending is a more sophisticated economic idea (wrong, but still noodle-engaging) that a bloated public sector 'crowds out' private investment and stifles growth. Liberals aren't going to get more spending for the triple-jobs thing (jobs, jobs, jobs) when Republicans are using the very failure of Obama's first stimulus package as a major plank of their 2012 campaigns. More federal spending is a non-starter.

And it's not just the Republicans anyway. The Democrats are reaping the whirlwind of the Blue Dog, DLC motif. Clintonistas of all stripes made a devil's bargain for campaign cash, and they are now stuck with the corrupt system they helped erect. When Democrats walked away from the underdog and the downtrodden, throwing their hats in with Big Finance, Big Pharma, Big TelCom, and other big-balled corporate entities, they locked themselves into a relentlessly algorithmic, boa constrictor of a lie: the idea that economic growth and business profitability are equivalent to social health. Once you equate dollars with civic virtue, relying on the sultans of profit to bankroll your political livelihood, you end up where we are right now: having national discussions in the deadly arena of debt ceilings, quantitative easing, curve-bending, and other nauseating financial arcana. Larry Summers and Cicero are light years apart.

Unfortunately, the ship has probably long since sailed on getting anything except business-boosterism from our national leaders. There are a few radical stalwarts, to be sure: the Sanderses and the Kuciniches and whatnot. And there are plenty of great liberal ideas out there on how to return government to the peeps: public financing of elections, instant-runoff voting, term limits, rolling back corporate personhood, etc. But there's virtually zero chance that these will gain any traction at the federal level. The pro-corporate substrate is too entrenched, and serious people in serious suits have too many ways of convincing us that what's good for Walmart and Exxon-Mobil is good for America.

So a pithy slogan of "jobs, jobs, jobs" is about as anemic as you can get for a future liberal revival. The perpetual growth thing is sunsetting. A new progressive Big Idea will need to come from the wilderness, from the barely-trodden paths of Peak Oil, decentralism, re-localization, and human ecology. The name of the game now is how to manage contraction. We're going to need to learn how to deal with the winding down of all of our complex systems, a phase that Jim Kunstler calls The Long Emergency.

Realistic pessimism like this does not mesh well with the stagecraft and soul-sucking bullshit of national American politics. So don't expect a Big Idea like this to be birthed from the White House Press Room or the Senate floor. The next big liberal ideal will likely emerge from the smoldering embers of our collapsed crap-culture.

Ironically, if the Tea Party set gets its way in the current debt debate, and then on into 2012, and the government really starts to shrink down, the door could actually be open for liberals to grab the ball and run with a full-scale plan for sane contraction, and perhaps for a transition to a different type of society altogether. We can hope.