Where are the leftist utopias?
All the fake news, conspiracy theories, alt-right, and everything else swimming around the election of Trump has everyone talking about how we live in alternative realities. There are two or three ways that left-leaning commentators have dealt with this:
- Through deep analysis of the right-wing’s alternative reality echo chambers: talk radio, Breitbart, the alt-right’s origins in 4chan, etc.
- By spinning conspiracy theories about Russia, Bannon, and just how fast the Trump administration can push us into autocracy, fascism, or civil war.
- Through shallow self-criticism of how the liberal media — and its beloved “statistics” — covered candidate Trump. This is followed by doubling-down on the exact same form of technocratic prognostication: trying to predict the Fall of Trump using the same methods that failed to predict the Rise of Trump.
So what? This amounts to: 1. trying to understand the opposition’s alternative reality; 2. construction of our own alternative realities; and 3. attempting to reestablish our preferred methods for accounting for “real” reality. These are natural responses to these events, and (quite frankly) exercises that I have engaged with whole-heartedly.
The problem is this: while I think we are occasionally doing an adequate job of understanding the opposition (#1), we are doing a piss-poor job of understanding ourselves (#3), and are obsessing over alternative-realities that are only marginally plausible or useful to the leftist cause (#2).
So let’s start with the self-critique. It is not just rightist irrationality and extremism that led to our current crisis. Nor is it just the cynicism of “traditional” conservatives harnessing themselves to the Trump bandwagon. There was plenty wrong with the left even before Trump. Despite a majority of Americans supporting Obama and the general run of liberal causes, Democrats are also stuck. They are:
in the minority in Congress with no end in sight, have only 16 governors left and face 32 state legislatures fully under GOP control. Their top leaders in the House are all over 70. Their top leaders in the Senate are all over 60. Under Obama, Democrats have lost 1,034 seats at the state and federal level — there’s no bench, no bench for a bench, virtually no one able to speak for the party as a whole.
Part of this is due to bewilderingly poor strategy. Part of this is because of Republican villainy. But a lot of it is because the left lacks a convincing vision to unite its various constituencies.
For nearly three decades the best we have had on offer at the presidential level — from Bill Clinton, through Gore, Kerry, Obama, to Hillary Clinton — has been a left-leaning vision of centrist technocracy awkwardly conjoined with the culturally liberal form of neo-liberal economics. Technocracy is not value-neutral. Meritocracy is not fair. Liberalism is not equitable. At best they fail to protect disadvantaged populations. At worst they actively hurt them.
And its not like that “bench” has had much else to offer. For all that he incited a wave of left-leaning populist sentiment, Bernie Sanders is a paleo-progressive. So is Elizabeth Warren. Not only are they old, the visions they represent are outdated. Despite liberal shouting to the contrary, unions, protectionism and financial regulations are A. not sexy enough to win elections in the 21st century, and B. not going to save us anyway.
This means the critique of the leftist technocracy needs to go beyond tweaking the models. The critique of leftist mobilization needs to go beyond borrowing Tea Party tactics. The critique needs to get to the core of the American left: its vision (or lack thereof).
The American right has harnessed some very convincing narratives.
Some were purpose-built for the conservative movement: the intensely outdated vision of American greatness built around the 1950s; Ayn Rand, for some reason.
Some were unintentional, but just as damaging. Dale Beran has shown how the apolitical troll culture of 4chan became political, with a core of ideas emerging around GamerGate, harnessed by Milo Yiannopolis and other deplorables, to coalesce around Trump.
Or as Liz Ryerson explains:
Games are a natural fit for realizing the self-fulfilling fantasies of hyper-rationalist numbers-based thinking. Games provide fully realized worlds constructed out of hyper-masculine colonialist power fantasies and filled with racist and sexist caricatures. Games, in general, give a great amount of power to deeply troubling and oversimplified narratives.
In other words, the right — in all of its permutations — is grounded in powerful fantasies. The fantasy of reviving the 50s for the older, more Christian right. The fantasy of objectivism for the C-suite right. And the more literal fantasies of games and anime for the troll right. And they formed a coalition through their shared celebration for quasi-traditionalist hierarchies of race, gender, church and nation-state.
So what alternative narratives does the left have to offer? As noted above, the Democratic party seems stuck in two models that have failed: a left-center technocratic neo-liberalism that is not actually progressive, and a resurgent paleo-progressivism that fails to meet the true crises of the present moment.
So isn’t this where science fiction can save us? Where are the novels that present a liberal vision for the future? As several commentators remarked even before Trump, there is a distinct lack of utiopian fiction being written — all we seem to have are dystopias. And the utiopias we do have are grounded in that same technocratic heroism that represents the left’s great failures of the last few decades.
Where are the games that don’t ground themselves in self-fulfilling hyper-rationalism? Rules-based models of reality simply do not reflect historical dynamics, soon they will not even reflect computation, but they can inflict us with inequity by reifying statistically-realized patterns as unbreakable rules.
Where is the fiction that represents society in all its chaotic dynamics, that tells history in all its heavy-tailed non-determinism, and that provides a vision for finding pluralism and social justice from amidst the stew of iniquity?
I don’t have a complete answer, or a simple one. But I do have a partial one. The stories I find myself returning to are ones that find messy, pluralist orders amidst a chaotic world. Places where misfits can become part of the in-group and strive together toward an imperfect future. Strangely, I find myself looking to young adult fiction. Harry Potter comes close, with Hogwarts, and Gryffindor (and strangely, Hufflepuff) accepting all comers under a shared vision, but one that permits failure and difference. So does Redwall, which brings together unlikely heroes under an enlightened abbot as father figure. Or even Ender’s Game, about a emotionally-damaged boy leading a team of misfits to save the world. But these stories are now quite old, and have their serious flaws as parables: the elitism and dynasticism of Harry Potter; the psedo-racializing element of Redwall’s animal species; the Orwellian background to Ender’s struggle (and the undesirable politics of his creator). Are there newer stories that give hope and narrative to this position? If so, I’d sure like to read them.
