Stuck in the Present

For some time now, it’s been fashionable on the Left to be “anti”: anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-carceral, anti-capitalist, etc. Notably, these identities define themselves by what they oppose rather than what they aim to build. That is, they are progressive in form but reactive in function. After Bernie Sanders’s 2020 campaign, even many self-described socialists more closely resemble this “anti-” left than they do nineteenth- and twentieth-century social democrats. The latter had a self-assured confidence that the future was theirs to build.

In contrast, today’s progressives veer between despair and denial. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, for instance, insist that we’re witnessing “end-times fascism.” While they criticize the “bunker mentality” of the far right, their vision aims no higher, or further, than mere survival. “We have reached a choice point,” Klein and Taylor argue, “not about whether we are facing apocalypse but what form it will take.”

Elsewhere on the Left, prophets of climate catastrophe deliver millenarian sermons about the end of all life on Earth. It’s no wonder, then, that interest in left-wing “preppers” has recently surged. The “acclaimed climate expert” Alex Steffen commands a progressive audience that numbers in the tens of thousands. He offers a course on how to “Ruggedize Your Life” in preparation for impending social collapse.

With a discount code, you can secure a spot in the course for just $149.

This focus on survivalism is repeated by many of today’s radical abolitionists, whose guiding term is not socialism or any broader vision of collective flourishing, but a vision of simply getting by in ever-more harrowing circumstances. But a Left that prizes “survival” is one that thinks the future isn’t theirs to win, but a terrifying force to steel against.

As the economic historian Adam Tooze recently noted, these days the Trumpian right “is actually more willing to talk about the future and to do so in bold and bright terms” than the Left. Today the Right acts and the Left reacts — a stark reversal of their traditional relationship to history.

How did we get here? When did the Left get stuck in the present?

Since the decline of the postwar compact, liberals and progressives have trapped themselves in unceasing cycles of ’68, endlessly rehearsing the slogans and priorities of that cultural revolution over and over again. Periodic protests against racism and sexism burst out; ever-more discrete civil-rights-movements-for-our-time pop up. But little truly new takes shape. We measure progress by removing barriers to participation in liberal capitalist society, but we don’t aim for moving beyond it. By the 1990s — the inauguration of the “end of history” era and the big slide in social democratic party membership numbers — the Left gave up on providing any compelling vision of the future society.

Not surprisingly, a Left that doesn’t really know what it is fighting for hasn’t grown very strong.

Borrowing the Future

The cycle of stagnation isn’t limited to activists either. Consider the major electoral breakthroughs of the broad left in the past half-century. Bill Clinton, the last Democratic president to carry the vote of all sections of the working class (white, black, and Latino) did so by adopting right-wing plans for the future: free trade, financial deregulation, and tax breaks.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama, the last Democratic president to carry the working class as a whole (despite losing working-class whites) promised “hope and change” while upholding a remarkable continuity with his predecessors. Liberals liked to think Obama’s election marked the ultimate triumph of the ideals of the civil rights movement, while overlooking his studied conservatism. His was a liberalism that borrowed its future from the Right and its prestige from its past. Perhaps more than anything, the Obama era unveiled a precursor to today’s futurelessness in the notion that “demographics are destiny.” The future didn’t need to be forged — it would simply arrive when all the stodgy old white people died.

And what about Joe Biden? He became the first Democrat to win the presidency while losing the working-class vote. He was, undoubtedly, more progressive than his predecessors. Yet it was Donald Trump who provided the historical rupture that made Biden’s experiments in de-globalization and fiscal policy possible. In the end, though, Bidenomics failed to deliver the goods. While some of Biden’s programs — like his infrastructure bill and the now dismantled Inflation Reduction Act — were genuine policy achievements, the government was ultimately unable to confront the interlocking challenges of rising prices, skyrocketing debt, stagnant wages, and low taxes.

He isn’t alone, the global democratic left has been incapable of developing an economic agenda that looks beyond the next election cycle. As Wolfgang Streeck has argued, social democratic parties all over the world have been “buying time,” literally borrowing their futures with debt backed spending in order to maintain social services and keep a modicum of social peace. No new model has emerged that can credibly promise prosperity and equality for the next generation.

No new social future has been invented, or even really contemplated, in decades.

The Narcissism of Now

A reluctance to stake flags deep into the future was once considered a hallmark of political conservatism. “Nothing is more foolish,” argued Karl Kautsky, the leading theorist of Germany’s Social Democratic Party, “than the idea that distant ideals have no practical significance in present politics.” Yet today, an obsession with the present is apparent among liberals, progressives, and socialists alike.

Among moderates, a near-sighted pragmatism forecloses long-term thinking about social reorganization. Among those further on the Left, catastrophism reigns. Ecoterrorists, various “abolitionist” tendencies, and radical antinatalists like Bartkus, are committed to foreshortening our future. By suggesting that tomorrow may never come, they overvalue the present. There is, no doubt, a certain narcissism in this. An ambivalence toward future generations involves an overestimation of one’s own.

Our view of the social horizon has steadily shortened. And now we just stare at ourselves. The demands of the present are inward-looking: more permissiveness, more tolerance, more autonomy for the individual. The new social horizon, it seems, is to be left alone. What’s more, a futureless left refuses to consider how the battles it picks today — from the liberalization of drug laws to the dismissal of social norms — affect tomorrow’s political ends.

To be sure, there are good reasons to avoid thinking about tomorrow. Escalating wars, dire climate projections, a bleak political outlook, and the slow-rolling economic crisis are reasonable causes for hopelessness. Add to these new anxieties about artificial intelligence and despair might seem a rational, not emotional response. But without a flag staked in the future — a clear vision of the world we want for our children and theirs — we lose track of where we want to go.

Not surprisingly, the contemporary left seems perennially lost and lacking the self-confidence needed to inspire followers. Intellectual timidity and insecurity prevails, despite the sheer number of academics, writers, and thinkers who count themselves among progressives. Are there any intellectuals of the Left today whose insights and commitment to humanity’s long-term horizon rival those of Karl Marx or Karl Polanyi?

Does this mean the Left is cooked? Not necessarily. Society needs — and will always need — a force that speaks for the interests of ordinary people, in favor of popular democracy, equality, and social solidarity. So long as liberal capitalist societies continue to disappoint, intelligent and ambitious people will be drawn to the socialist tradition. And the proactive among them will inspire new waves of reform. The reactivist left, however, will continue to lose. An “anti”-left can’t win.

What electorate would put their trust in a political cause that says it doesn’t care about what comes next? How could this Left inspire any faith in progress, if it’s all the same to them whether the manatees take over and the maternity wards empty out?

A Tradition of the Future

Ironically, to regain the future, we need to look backward. To be progressive is, definitionally, to be connected to the past. “Tradition” as G. K. Chesterton colorfully put it, “ is the democracy of the dead.”

It’s not only that all successful movements for human advancement draw inspiration from the past (this magazine is called Jacobin after all); it’s also that the old ideals have never been realized. Instead, innumerable new ideals have popped up purporting to take their place — many of them disconnected from the grand narratives of the past, or any coherent conception of a social and democratic future.

Our short-sightedness means we typically walk part way down the road of some faddish ideal before abruptly changing course — and then we wonder why we can’t seem to get anywhere. What we lack is fixity: a sense of where we’ve progressed from and to where we’re progressing. As a result, the New Deal’s Four Freedoms seem further away today than they did when they were first declared eighty-four years ago.

Meanwhile, with a new Pope Leo in the Vatican, it’s hard to ignore the warnings of his namesake predecessor: that the collapse of the future poisons our moral vision of the present. At its most extreme, giving up on the future means a surrender to the present as an endpoint — or as the end. It’s to see the project of humanity as completed.

The fertility clinic bomber and other “promortalists” embrace this mindset. In their own words, they are not wrathful, but charitable. They see humanity as defined by suffering — and reason that, because new life will suffer, the compassionate act is to prevent it altogether. Dwelling in this darkness, the whole of humanity unravels.

In contrast, Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, in The Principle of Hope, defended the future. He rejected what he called the “pure infamy” of the present. Capitalism, he believed, harbored a wickedness — a humiliation of human dignity through poverty and the instrumentalization of human life. He judged society not against the sins of the past, nor by some abstract principle of minimizing suffering, but against the potential of a brighter future. Evil, he argued, could only be conquered by hope — a concept defined by reference to the future.

And when it comes to children, contra the antinatalists, aren’t they the very embodiment of hope? There is no more concrete way to demonstrate faith in the future of humanity than to give life to it.