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.
My favorite example I’ve read recently was a collection of short stories called A People’s Future of the United States. Not all utopian, some were pretty bleak, but they all had something hopeful even if it was just a small act of joy or resistance. Shoutout to Borderlands in SF for the recommendation!
Ok, what you need are realistic possibilities. I live in Norway and just had a daughter. I get 2 weeks off from work, paid, from arrival of the baby. My wife is now on mother’s leave from her job, paid, for about a year, (there’s math, but nvm), then I get paid parent leave for about 3-5 months when she is done. Kindergarten here costs about 200$ (US) per month, recently lowered from around 300$. All children have a right to kindergarten from they’re a year old (simplified).
My dad just spent a month in hospital in Sweden. The total cost was 400$.
Universities here cost about 100$ per semester + living costs, which the state owned student loan bank offers at decent interests to cover, and if you pass your exams, 40% of the loan is turned into a grant.
I could go on. Main reason on my opinion is the Nordic model of labor organization, where the state, businesses and workers try to make compromise so that businesses go well, workers are well paid and the state mediates when necessary. There are issues of contention, it’s not paradise, but it works quite well for quite a lot of people. Bernie has talked about the Nordic model for years. It’s real, it works quite acceptably, and it can be yours.
First step, strong unions and politicians that support them.
Here in the US, racists would break this. If you help one black person who “doesn’t deserve it”, then angry whites would rather shoot themselves in the eye than let the program stand. Well, that’s the angle that right-wing pundits use, anyway, and it’s shown to be effective time and time again.
The Nordic model is good, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not ambitious enough to set as a target. Plus, by being a real thing rather than an aspiration, people will look at the real flaws in the system as proof that it isn’t viable elsewhere. Ya know, like the xenophobia that people point to as the secret sauce of the Nordic model (not saying they’re right, just pointing it out as an example).
Creating a holistic vision of a future you want and the steps needed to be taken to get there will get far more results than pointing to real but flawed existing systems that can be attacked for being “imperfect”.
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.
the ml artistic fantasy wrapped in pseudo science accurately described as “rich utopian accounts”
been keeping you motivated since the shiny story was invented, and never worked once
