Conservative apologists for the status quo often stigmatize their opponents as “utopian.” But socialists and feminists shouldn’t be afraid of the term, since utopian thought can play an important role in helping us develop practical alternatives.
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Today’s conservatives do not merely resist change. Project 2025, for instance, is in many ways a textbook example of utopian thought, with an ethical vision that grounds its specific policy proposals and touches on every aspect of society, from family to trade, from gender to taxes. This imagined world is one they want to produce, not preserve, even if it’s wrapped up in traditionalist ideology.
The Left needs its own counterproposals: rich accounts of a transformed society that both help us decide what steps we should take now and keep us motivated for the long haul. I’m not suggesting all leftists should unite around one utopia but rather that debate and experimentation around ambitious aims for social transformation is an urgent political project rather than a matter of merely academic concern. Pace Marx and Engels, utopia’s radical potential has not yet been exhausted.
Isn’t the left already seen by most people as crazy hippies who live in delululand?
At this point, “we should install more solar panels and waste less food” is seen as crazy hippy delusion by the American right.
If anything, the American Democratic Party has swung too far in the other direction, portraying itself as defenders of the status quo - even being willing to move further right - in order to avoid being seen as “crazy hippies”.
Meanwhile, MAGA is a utopian movement - it wants to completely transform America in the image of an idealized Christian conservative past, and doesn’t care what laws it has to break in the process.
The Democrats haven’t been able to effectively challenge MAGA’s utopian vision, because all they offer is a return to the status quo under Biden, and Americans are sick of that status quo. And the American left outside the Democratic Party has been so marginalized (mostly by the Democratic Party) that even mild “let’s do things a little bit better” leftists like Bernie Sanders have no real voice in American politics.
It’s not about being crazy hippies. It’s about having a vision for a better America, a plan to carry it out, and the courage to fight for that plan even when people call you a crazy hippie.
I feel like wasting less food is a non-starter. Here in the UK they got rid of expiry dates on fruit and veg a while back to supposedly reduce food waste (read: sell shittier produceand it’s such an assault on the psyche. Now I just assume they’re all single use and toss em if I haven’t just bought em, probably throwing away way more than I ever have before.
Are you talking about fresh fruit and vegetables? That sounds like you’re wasting a lot - in terms of money, not just in terms of food. It’s pretty easy to tell whether fresh fruit and vegetables are going bad (getting rotten, getting moldy, and so on), and if they’re not going bad they’re fine to use, whether there’s an expiration date or not.
Which is to say, I don’t think reducing food waste is a non-starter, but I do think it’s a matter of bottom-up education and practice (for you, I think that would mean learning how to tell when fruits and vegetables are going bad, and being confident enough in your knowledge that you can feel secure eating fruit and vegetables you didn’t buy recently) as much as it is top-down changes in policy.