Drastic Change We Can Believe In

A Natural Wine Party platform for 2028 (if we're that lucky).

Don’t get me wrong. I already voted for Vice President Kamala Harris by absentee ballot in Pennsylvania. And I will be elated to have helped elect America’s first woman president. My intense hope is that Harris’ upbeat, centrist campaign will be sufficient to eliminate, once and for all, the threat of ever again seeing Elon Musk’s midriff exposed in mid-leap at a Trump rally.

In face of the rising nihilist bloc¹ that Trump’s electorate represents, I’m proud to cast my ballot alongside a historically diverse coalition of voters who believe in something, anything at all. I see you, Liz Cheney! Right on, Sexyy Red!

But I’m not alone in feeling that, on a societal level, this year’s election has been lost even if it is won today (or weeks from now). If the nihilistic vision of a serial fraud and sex offender is even close to beating your argument, your argument is not great.²

AMERICAN NORMALCY

If there has been an enthusiasm gap, I suspect it’s because Democrats are fighting to preserve, or in certain cases recover, a status quo that many voters, whether consciously or not, instinctively recognize as unsustainable. The failings of American normalcy are manifest in the increasing frequency of climate-related disasters, the near-impossibility of home ownership for young people, the outright financialization of academia, the environmentally-catastrophic libertarian fantasy of cryptocurrency, and so on. But the crisis of American normalcy is revealed most starkly in the terms of the election at hand: half the country appears to have little or no attachment to democracy, to say nothing of other public institutions. It’s come to this.

If Trump is once again within a hair’s breadth of the presidency on a platform of spewing incoherent bile about America, we have to conclude that many Americans wish to hear, if not his exact message, then one that shares its contours. This isn’t so much mass psychosis as national masochism³. Many Americans - like many citizens of advanced economies around the world - feel that their nation and its way of life is somehow wrong, and are responding to a figure of authority offering reprimand and reprisal. (Tucker Carlson may have intuited something with his recent creepy rant about spanking.)

Details aside, I think many on both sides of the political spectrum would agree: America does need to drastically change. America is, on various levels, a terrifying, lurid place, where major news outlets report on the hundreds of millions spent on political advertising as if these and related fundraising figures were points of pride for the campaigns, rather than a sign of a) the near-total capture of our political system by wealthy interests, and b) the obscene waste inherent in pushing ideas that should be self-evident through an overcapitalized media maelstrom to a disengaged, atomized electorate.

Trump transfixes half the nation when he brainstorms aloud about drastically changing the country. He does so for purposes of personal enrichment, but his supporters are prepared to overlook this, as long as it results in drastic change.

What we’re missing is a party proposing, to misquote another former president, drastic change we can believe in.

THE NATURAL WINE PARTY

This is why I’d like to announce the founding of the Natural Wine Party, which aims to enact sweeping legislation to create the social conditions that permit and encourage the small-scale production of natural wine and naturally farmed foodstuffs in the United States of America. The party is premised on the idea that a re-valorization of small-scale organic agriculture and manual craft is a necessary precondition for the re-establishment of dynamic rural communities, which themselves are required for a healthy body politic. It seeks to decouple, within the popular imagination, the pursuit of happiness from the mindless pursuit of wealth.

The Natural Wine Party’s platform includes:

• Free healthcare (to alleviate our life-or-death desperation to make more money at all times)

• Free higher education (ditto)

• A ban on glyphosate and other herbicides

• A ban on systemic pesticides

• The institution of yearlong national service in small-scale organic farming and food production

• While we’re at it, national service in restaurant service, too, so the entire population learns how to behave in restaurants

• A national program of food stamps redeemable at small-scale organic farms, financed by a wealth tax

These are by no means the only ways to achieve the Natural Wine Party’s goals, nor would they be sufficient in and of themselves. They are just the first things that sprang to mind as I sat wringing my hands about the real election.

If you have other ideas about how to transform America into a place conducive to the small-scale production of natural wine and naturally-farmed foodstuffs, fire away in the comments section. Perhaps some enterprising young pol will assume leadership of this promising new party⁴, founded upon the surefire electoral prospect of suggesting that Americans should spend more of their available income on groceries. Let them eat organic artisanal sourdough bread.

*

If you’re looking for more ways to distract yourself from election doomscrolling, check out my new podcast with Alsace vigneron CHRISTIAN BINNER, my report on the ambiguous rise of ALSACE NATURAL WINE NEGOCIANTS, and recent interviews with Alsace enologist XAVIER COUTURIER, Alsace natural wine négociant PIERRE DIETRICH of PEPIN, and Alsace natural wine retailer JEAN WALCH. Plus a profile of Alsace market garden-turned-wine estate LES JARDINS EN-CHANTANTS, an excellent example of neo-rural dynamism if there ever was one.

Stay strong out there, everyone! Believe in something, anything! And vote!

Aaron

---

FURTHER READING

My June 2024 blurb on the EU parliamentary elections.

My December 2019 piece on Trump’s wine tariffs.

1. The US election, like many around Europe and beyond nowadays, has become about staving off this expanding nihilist bloc, which unites much of the right with a worrying segment of the hard left, and which refuses to acknowledge the necessity of public institutions or the reality of global geopolitics, or the rate at which either these things can plausibly change without inflicting gratuitous societal trauma.

2. To be fair to Vice President Harris, it’s hard to represent a change ticket - or even a coherent path forward - when basic democratic norms are at stake, and when undreamt-of success would mean clawing back rights the Supreme Court has recently taken away.

3. Sort of like how British people seem to like being scolded or yelled-at, in the manner of A.A. Gill or Gordon Ramsay, when appreciating fine cuisine.

4. I myself am disqualified for having spent too long living in France, like a fruitcake. Any fluency with French culture is a massive electoral liability, as John Kerry can attest.