A good bit of literature has studied the problem and arrived to recommendations that overlap in parts & depart in others with this playbook.
A former parliamentarian of the Hungarian government studied its slide into illiberalism, and suggested remedies for the current, similar trend in the US. Resist in the courts & media, and build a powerful social base at the state & city level throughout the country. The latter means
the Democratic Party must reconnect with the working class to preserve liberal institutions
Doing that means
- "creating new and strengthening existing local organizational structures, especially labor unions". Do not "on issues important to the active base only" such as "media freedom or democracy": this leads to "failures of mass mobilizations". "[E]ngage with [ordinary people] outside elections, focusing on issues that matter to them".
- "[T]o push through popular reforms that elites oppose", free "the party from elite capture" by shifting financing "from the corporate elite to small and micro-donations".
- "[C]ommit to left-populist economic policies".
- "[L]earn symbolic class politics", "embrace the mundane and be down to earth".
you don’t protect democracy by talking about democracy — you protect democracy by protecting people
I'm seeing the playbook overlap a bit with points 1 & 4, diverge from point 2, and not treat point 3.
Another article reviews research observing a decades-long trend of class dealignment: workers abandoning the left-wing party & joining the right. As unions have weakened and Democrats abandoned them, the party has increasing relied on & shifted appeal to urban middle class professionals & minorities. The review names 4 paths researched or discussed to reverse dealignment.
- inclusive populism: "appeal to working-class voters’ sense of resentment at economic elites and stress how elites use racial resentment to divide segments of the working class that share a common interest in economic justice"
- anti-woke social democracy: make "a clean break with factions of the party that embrace unpopular social and cultural messaging that alienates working-class voters"
- deliverism: "pass and implement large-scale economic reforms that benefit working Americans"
- institutionalism: "[reinvigorate a] labor movement capable of advancing working-class interest in politics and [re-embed] Democratic and progressive politics into the lived experiences of working-class communities"
It looks like the playbook is going with anti-woke social democracy & institutionalism, rejecting inclusive populism, not mentioning deliverism.
They seem to think the way to win the working class is to go more MAGA-like (anti-woke social democracy) instead of trying a competing strategy like inclusive populism. It also looks like they're choosing not to break from elite capture, which seems like a huge mistake.
How would you tally up the score of "development"?
If the score depends, essentially, on racist ideas of how human societies should look, valorizing old people who can read as the epitome of human achievement, then I think it should be dismissed.
And more than that, I think the entire game of defining a single consolidated "development score" is laughable at best. We can measure stats individually, and consider them in their own right. Any attempt to weight the individual scores to contribute to a total score is going to depend heavily on the judge's personal values. There is no value-neutral way to do it.
You may feel strongly that certain cultures are more developed than others, but that is based on the stats that you value. Even if you base it on data in some way, you are basing it on the data that states have bothered to gather, which almost always captures metrics that align with their priorities and views.
By evaluating individual stats, not entire societies, and by letting societies determine what they value.
You don't need to share other people's values. But you have no right to determine what other people should value. Big colonizer energy from you.