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A review by mburnamfink
In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea by Jonathan White
4.0
In the Long Run is an apology for democracy and the importance of the future in the face of the escalating polycrisis of the early 21st Century. It gestures towards some important ideas while unfortunately falling short of what I wish it could be, a futures-oriented version of Benedict Anderson's classic Imaginary Communities. Those are massive expectations, unfair for any book, but is there anything more important than the future?
White's basic contention is that futurity is a key resource for democracy, dating back to the experiments of the French Revolution. He describes political parties as shared visions of the future, ideas capable of holding party members together against the various forces that would separate them, as well as linking the temporal frailty of a human lifespan to any grand project to create a new world. The issue is that today, the future is foreshortening, with climate change on one side, authoritarian revanchism on the other, and slow and ineffective democratic institutions in between. Iterated prisoner's dilemma (a useful model for any social choice that breaks down to cooperation or exploitation) unwinds from the end, and if a person sincerely believes that the electoral game is nearing a conclusion, either because of climate change, because one side is child-murdering Satanists, or because you're being called a child-murdering Satanist for just vibing, democracy becomes a lot less appealing.
White runs through several stages of futurity and democracy, though without much of the specific heat that characterizes a truly convincing argument. The first debate was on the Left, between the various utopian socialist factions of the 19th century on one side who envisioned a better world buttressed by incremental social change, and the Marxist revolutionaries who demanded a specific and pragmatic plan to organize workers and overthrow capitalism.
This was echoed by the Italian Futurists, who celebrated machines, speed, masculinity, and death in the lead-up to the First World War, and who's surviving members evolved into the Fascist movement afterwards. Italian Futurists demanded an end to rule by antiquarians and traditions, a strong statement from people living in a country defined by the Catholic Church and the remnants of the Roman Empire. Fascism is difficult to define, but I find the political aesthetics of violence to be at its core. A fascist has to hurt someone now, because rapid destruction defines their worldview. For White, while fascists can appeal to tradition, their future is about a complete breach with the past; continual reinvention in the furnace.
The Cold War and the rise of strategic planning and foresight created a new kind of future, the classified prediction which could not be released for the sake of state security. Operational secrecy has always been an element of war, but the conditions of the Cold War meant that nuclear war plans could not be publicly discussed, even if the basic premise, that a thermonuclear war was omnicidal, was of undeniable public concern. And as much as profitability requires sensitivity to changes in the market, corporate plans are also secret.
The final chapters, on emergencies and how the demand for response to the coming crisis prevents both long-term planning and democratic participation, is some of the better scholarship in the book, though still vague and frustrating. I think White makes an excellent point that contemporary political parties have decayed to a median center-right platform of hundreds of individual micro-issues rather than coherent visions. However, his reforms, increased recalls and more citizen "participation", seem at odds with the way that "fuck you and not this!" towards anything is the dominant political ideology everywhere.
I do believe we need a better idea of the future as a resource. And I think the problem is not with the ideology of democracy, per se, but with the processes of democracy in practice. What if we spent time writing good laws as opposed to grandstanding?
White's basic contention is that futurity is a key resource for democracy, dating back to the experiments of the French Revolution. He describes political parties as shared visions of the future, ideas capable of holding party members together against the various forces that would separate them, as well as linking the temporal frailty of a human lifespan to any grand project to create a new world. The issue is that today, the future is foreshortening, with climate change on one side, authoritarian revanchism on the other, and slow and ineffective democratic institutions in between. Iterated prisoner's dilemma (a useful model for any social choice that breaks down to cooperation or exploitation) unwinds from the end, and if a person sincerely believes that the electoral game is nearing a conclusion, either because of climate change, because one side is child-murdering Satanists, or because you're being called a child-murdering Satanist for just vibing, democracy becomes a lot less appealing.
White runs through several stages of futurity and democracy, though without much of the specific heat that characterizes a truly convincing argument. The first debate was on the Left, between the various utopian socialist factions of the 19th century on one side who envisioned a better world buttressed by incremental social change, and the Marxist revolutionaries who demanded a specific and pragmatic plan to organize workers and overthrow capitalism.
This was echoed by the Italian Futurists, who celebrated machines, speed, masculinity, and death in the lead-up to the First World War, and who's surviving members evolved into the Fascist movement afterwards. Italian Futurists demanded an end to rule by antiquarians and traditions, a strong statement from people living in a country defined by the Catholic Church and the remnants of the Roman Empire. Fascism is difficult to define, but I find the political aesthetics of violence to be at its core. A fascist has to hurt someone now, because rapid destruction defines their worldview. For White, while fascists can appeal to tradition, their future is about a complete breach with the past; continual reinvention in the furnace.
The Cold War and the rise of strategic planning and foresight created a new kind of future, the classified prediction which could not be released for the sake of state security. Operational secrecy has always been an element of war, but the conditions of the Cold War meant that nuclear war plans could not be publicly discussed, even if the basic premise, that a thermonuclear war was omnicidal, was of undeniable public concern. And as much as profitability requires sensitivity to changes in the market, corporate plans are also secret.
The final chapters, on emergencies and how the demand for response to the coming crisis prevents both long-term planning and democratic participation, is some of the better scholarship in the book, though still vague and frustrating. I think White makes an excellent point that contemporary political parties have decayed to a median center-right platform of hundreds of individual micro-issues rather than coherent visions. However, his reforms, increased recalls and more citizen "participation", seem at odds with the way that "fuck you and not this!" towards anything is the dominant political ideology everywhere.
I do believe we need a better idea of the future as a resource. And I think the problem is not with the ideology of democracy, per se, but with the processes of democracy in practice. What if we spent time writing good laws as opposed to grandstanding?