We Need a Politics of the Future
Masha Gessen has described Russia under Putin as a place where “the future is history.” In a strange and bitter irony, I think the same can be said of life in Russia’s Cold War rival.
I saw this locally when New York governor Hochul killed the congestion pricing initiative right before it was to go into effect. In the weeks since, the MTA has had to cancel all kinds of new construction and even basic maintenance due to the loss of revenue. Congestion pricing is a bold policy intended to ensure a better climate future and more livable city by cutting down on auto use and expanding mass transit. Its destruction is the product of a society that does not want change and does not think that the future is worth believing in. I heard so much belly-aching and whining about this policy from regular people in Jersey and NYC who treated a needed change from the status quo as a threat.
This anti-future tendency is all over American politics and society. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” is fundamentally grounded in a return to a nonexistent idealized past rather than looking to a new future. As is especially obvious after yesterday’s debate, the Democratic leadership in response has been an ossified gerontocracy that often plays by the rules of yesteryear. Bernie Sanders, who was supposed to represent leftist change, is older than both Biden and Trump and his appeal seemed to call more on an older leftist tradition in American politics than it pointed to something new.
The products of our culture industry reflect a similar obsession with nostalgia and lack of interest in the future. Old, established properties like Star Wars are being milked dry while any film from the 80s and 90s that might have nostalgic appeal is getting a sequel well after the fact. While many of these products may actually be of high quality, it still says something unsettling when a Top Gun sequel can be a major hit thirty-five years after the release of the original. Studios churn this stuff out not merely out of risk aversion or a lack of ideas; they know that nostalgia and comfort are what their audience want.
I even see this lack of future tendency in the cancerous growth of generative AI. These programs can be used to generate images and text, but they are merely reconstituting what has already been fed to the machine. AI by its very nature is incapable of creating anything new. The tech overlords pushing this stuff might style themselves as apostles of the future, but they mostly want to return to a pre-democratic, hierarchical society where they get to be the new aristocrats. Elon Musk’s embrace of nineteenth-century eugenics and race science is a case in point.
As frustrating as this lack of belief in the future can be, I cannot deny that it is based in some real material factors. The specter of climate change haunts our every waking moment, but it is easy for many people my age to just enjoy what they can now and let the people behind them deal with the consequences. The problem seems too massive to solve, so YOLO. There also just doesn’t seem to be much reason for faith in the political future based on recent events. 2020 brought the biggest protests in US history in response to racist police brutality, and the result has been MORE policing and a major backlash against DEI programs. Mass school shootings in the 2010s brought mass movements for gun control, and the result has been more gun proliferation and teachers in schools being armed. It seems that any attempt to change things in a progressive direction will be met with a reactionary backlash that will only make things worse.
Of course, hostility towards the future is a fundamental driver of that reactionary politics. The bone-deep fear and hatred of change can seem silly, such as all of the bitching about more efficient toilets and light bulbs. That said, it’s also deadly serious. Many red states are criminalizing trans people, treating their newfound visibility as an attack in need of crushing. Likewise, the assault on the youth via the banning of books in schools, rolling back of reproductive rights, and defunding public education speaks to a resentment and even hatred of those who represent the future. The whole “parental rights” thing is a cry by an older generation to force the youth into the beliefs they want them to have and to stifle any possible questioning of them.
The only way we can positively change anything is to envision a future that we want to attain, instead of defending a status quo that most people dislike. When it comes to Trump, too much of the focus on opposing him is about stopping his threat to the way things are without any mention of the way things ought to be.
I don’t have all the answers, but I can float some possibilities. Defending democracy against Trump means calling for deep reform of our system, not just preventing his election. We need to pass a new national voting rights act to roll back voter suppression, an expansion of the courts to counteract their attacks on our rights, use the power of the executive branch to regulate corporations and break up monopolies, and to talk openly about redistributing wealth through new taxes on the rich and universal basic income. Maybe these things will not come to pass, but people need something to be FOR.
I also think this should be done on the local level. For example, here in New Jersey the Democratic Party machine mostly runs the show and is more interested in its survival than in progressive change. It’s time for people invested in the future to run for local office and replace the hacks. Once we can make real, beneficial changes on the state and local level, people might believe that we actually can make things better, instead of clinging to the comfort of keeping things as they are.
Times of crisis demand vision. I love Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address for many reasons, but mostly because he found a way to reframe a crisis moment into an opportunity for a better future. In his words, the conflict ripping the country apart meant something higher, it was a “new birth of freedom.” He did not call to bring the country back together so it could be what it was before 1860, he proclaimed the creation of a new nation. We have been in a political crisis for almost a decade now, and it’s more than past time to look beyond crisis mode into the world we actually want to make. As Harvey Milk, another great American, once said “you’ve got to give them hope.”