(Why) Elizabeth Warren’s Plan to Save America is Awesome

The Next American Revolution

umair haque
Eudaimonia and Co
Published in
9 min readJan 3, 2019

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Imagine for a moment that a notable American actually came up with a plan to save America. A good one. Maybe even one that was a little revolutionary. To turn this state of ruinous collapse around. What would you expect the pundits, politicians, columnists, and talking heads to do? Especially if she was a woman — and they were all men? I’d expect them to furiously ignore it — when they weren’t mocking it or insulting it. How else did we get to this point in history, after all? Unsurprisingly. that’s exactly what is happening.

Over there, the usual coterie of people is arguing furiously over Bernie versus Beto — when they’re not fixating on Trump and his latest clownish (or Hitleresque) antics. Meanwhile, in this corner, is Elizabeth Warren, and her suprising plan to save America. And it’s getting more or less no attention. But it should be. She’s getting Hillaryed, in fact — “but is she likable?!”, gasp the pundits, a condescending, reductive demand they never make of men, because that’s patriarchy in action — instead of considering her ideas on their merits. So let’s do what they won’t and can’t.

Warren’s plan to fix America is the most intelligent, courageous, and wise set of ideas I’ve heard an American leader propose in my lifetime. It’s the only agenda or vision I’ve seen for anything close to a New Deal for the 21st century. It’s so good, so well thought out, so admirable, that every one of us should be talking about it, thinking about it, reflecting on it. It’s genuinely radical, more than a little bit revolutionary, and promises to be pretty transformative. I’m impressed — which is something I rarely say about American ideas. Let’s go through a few of its components.

First comes a plan for the government to manufacture generic drugs. Brilliant. In case you haven’t noticed, American life expectancy is plummeting, unique in the world. It’s shocking and scandalous that people are dying younger every year in a “rich” country. Why does no one talk about it? The reason is that healthcare is unaffordable, and that means medicine is, too. Insulin costs ten to a thousand times in America what it does anywhere else in the world (even Pakistan). Why is that? Well, it’s because capitalism exists only to…

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