(Part I of a series)
Progressive politics needs a sense of the future that goes beyond being a response to the present, that makes the motivating cry, “A better world is possible!” slightly more tangible and specifically imaginable than the mere certainty of that better world’s plausibility.
It is no longer good enough to simply invoke famous “isms”, most especially socialism. It’s a word that either has almost no specified meaning for many people or far too much meaning, in terms of referencing recently past political regimes that were not the better world for which we long. What socialism would be if not the regimes that claimed to be socialist or communist is no longer clear. What we often mean by it now is “anti-capitalist”, which is a coherent intent but not something we can concretely envision in its own terms.
To have a vision of what the near-term future of specific domains of social and political life might be, and what it might rest upon foundationally, is important in terms of gaining support. Even more, it’s the only way to avoid getting trapped into dialectical incrementalism, answering every technocratic nudge of the status quo with a ever-so slightly harder progressive push.
Progressive politics often stalls out when it tries to play an unwinnable game whose rules are controlled by mainstream centrists and status-quo politicians. On one hand, a movement like Occupy gets challenged. What are your demands? What is your agenda? Tell us what you want, and then we can negotiate. As most Occupy participants knew, that’s a trap: none of what they wanted was anything that the powers-that-be would negotiate over. On the other hand, the refusal to concretize a near-term future vision beyond “Not what we have now” leaves a movement nowhere to go except the permanent reiteration of its refusal of the present. (Compare to the “velvet revolutions” of Eastern Europe or the Arab Spring: neither of those mass movements has produced the changes they sought in full measure, in some cases not at all, but it wasn’t hard to grasp what it is that they were seeking in most cases.)
On the other hand, providing a highly specific blueprint of a future that’s put in the form of a legislative proposal just gets blasted as implausible, improbable, impossible, in the most patronizing fashion possible. “Do you realize how expensive it would be to have single-payer health care? It can’t be done! Golly, I love your impractical and utopian ideas but you should leave thinking about politics to people who know what’s possible,” says the centrist about a system that works perfectly well in twenty other countries. Progressive legislation is “critical race theory” for mainstream centrists and technocrats: a thing they can scorn, deride and forbid without having to know anything specific about what it actually says or proposes. This is not to say that we shouldn’t keep trying. Representive Cori Bush’s just-introduced People’s Response Act, for example, is a useful approach to the issues I’m going to talk about in this series over the next month or so.
However, defenders of the status quo will never want more than small adjustments and yet never want to say as much. What they are perpetually looking for is an opportunity to transfer attention from what they are doing or what they advocate to another party who will serve as an explanation for why they haven’t accomplished what they have no interest in accomplishing. Are they for reforming police power? Well, they have some ideas, but they just can’t go into it while there’s still someone out there saying “abolish the police!” They’d like the marching band to take the field and play, but there’s one goddamn tuba up there that’s still out of tune and nothing can happen until that kid gets it right. Sorry not sorry.
Many progressive movements do have a general vision of a better future in mind. It’s typically conceptually or philosophically congenial to liberal democracy rather than determined to demolish it. Black Lives Matter encodes the idea into its name: lives matter, hence at this time, black lives matter most urgently, because it is at this time that black lives are most at risk from the institutions and structures of present societies—most especially from and within those institutions supposedly dedicated to making human life secure and successful: justice, health, education, employment, housing, environmental safety, scientific inquiry. The proposition that lives matter and the lives most threatened matter most urgently can’t help but refer back to the guarantees that liberalism in its most expansive form promises universally to all human beings (and then at best fails to secure or protect, more frequently actively violates of its own accord).
The problem of good enough futures from a progressive perspective is deciding whether there are meaningful ways to push liberalism to cover the last mile (or perhaps more the last hundred miles) between its most expansive promises and its actual delivery of freedom and security, or whether that gap is fundamentally unbridgeable and even a “good enough” future requires imagining some comprehensive replacement for liberalism and capitalism. That will be a continually live question in these essays, but for this particular series, I’m going to stick to the “ways to push liberalism to cover the distance between its present failures and its promises”.
What I want to do in this series is focus on the issue that Black Lives Matter most particularly has pushed into the center of contemporary American public discourse: policing, prosecution, incarceration, and crime. What I want to do is strip away the fig leaf that sensible centrists use to hide their substantive reluctance to pursue sustained reforms of the American justice system, which is deliberately getting hung up on slogans like “abolish the police”.
What could justice and crime be like in an attainably good American future? Which highly possible reforms in the present start us down a clear road that leads to that good enough future, and which are just muddled reorganizations of the present? That’s what I’ll be trying to think through in this series. To get there, I’ll have to go back to the past as well as try to map out the roads between the present and the future. To recognize that policing, incarceration and crime could be different than they are follows first and foremost from reminding ourselves of how they have been different, often dramatically different, in the not-too-distant past, and what, if anything, is similar. That’s for next week.