Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There

Bregman distinguishes between “politics” (with a small “p”) as the preservation of the status quo and “Politics” (with a capital “P”) as the art of social transformation. The lawyer Joseph Overton popularized this distinction through the idea that politicians believe they need to stay within the mainstream to stay in power, and to stray outside the “Overton window” of what constitutes reasonable opinion would be their ruin. However, recent politicians, for good or ill, have seized power by blowing up prevailing norms and mainstreaming what was once radical. These figures have mainly been on the political right, while the left settles for a small-p politics for fear that an appearance of radicalism will ruin their chances. They settle for small fixes to serious social problems and profess solidarity with the downtrodden but can’t tell a story that mobilizes support and settle for academic jargon rather than a bold vision of social progress. Terms like reform, meritocracy, and innovation become tired buzzwords rather than deadly serious criteria for social policy. If a capitalist society wants to be efficient, it can do so by paying its poor citizens rather than dragging them through a Kafkaesque bureaucracy. “Freedom” can mean freedom from pointless, long hours at work—and genuine opportunity to ascend into the middle class. Work can and should refer to the overall art of improving one’s self and one’s community through one’s talents and skills. The first step in this new and more exciting form of progressivism is fully believing that such change is possible. One must find the confidence necessary to overcome the inevitable critique that one is not serious, which is just a conversation-ending cliché rather than a true argument. The next step is to find others who share these seemingly radical ideas and then for a group to organize and put the ideas out into the public sphere. History can change on a dime—but not unless someone is there to capitalize at the moment of opportunity. Every radical movement was seen as silly and utopian, until some of them became inevitable.