In Defense of Dreaming

I want to offer a grounded, realistic defense of the importance of utopian thinking in politics. We can characterize this as the value of dreaming big.

When we look back over the past two centuries, we see a world defined by constant utopian dreams of a better future, from artists to political theorists to ordinary workers clocking in from nine to five and dreaming of a better world for their children. We see this in the twentieth century with the philosopher Bertrand Russell writing In Praise of Idleness and defending a vision of human flourishing in which we are not bound to repetitive labor and with the economist John Maynard Keynes speculating on a future in which we need to work very few hours to meet our needs. This line of thinking, widespread during the Great Depression and in the aftermath of World War II, occupied a prominent place in the consciousness of post-war America. Indeed, the twentieth century was replete with American dreams of abundance in which utilities, food, and, eventually, everything, is produced without the need for human effort.

There are many popular culture and academic examples that illustrate this line of thinking. Kurt Vonnegut’s 1952 novel Player Piano questioned how humans will find meaning without the need for day-to-day employment. In the 1960s and 1970s Star Trek offered a vision of a world in which material scarcity is gone. The radical anarchist Murray Bookchin wrote in the 1960s that humanity was finally reaching a period of “post-scarcity.” This kind of thinking dominated much of the 19th and 20th centuries. 

These dreams in midcentury America were not simply those of the radical left; rather, they were mainstream and widely shared, even aspired to by ordinary Americans of all types and political persuasions.

When did these dreams die? And why? The second question is more difficult to answer, so let’s focus on the first. We see some of the change reflected in pop culture—the 1979 film Alien depicts an industrial, dirty, grimy future of exploited “space truckers” who make a living by traveling throughout the galaxy and mining. Think of it as the anti-Star Trek future. Taxi Driver’s depiction of mid-70s New York City is far from utopian. Or take the apocalyptic song London Calling by The Clash in which they lament/crow that “phony Beatles mania has bitten the dust.” Each of these seem to reflect a much broader post-Vietnam, post-Watergate loss of innocence in which utopian dreaming went out the window. It’s as if political scandal combined with economic stagnation killed off the utopian impulse.

When we look at the facts this shouldn’t be too surprising. Americans work more hours in 2021 than we did in the 1970s. Yes, more hours. And as Robert Reich recently pointed out in testimony to the US Senate, although the economy is roughly three times as large as it was in the 1970s, the hourly wage for average American workers is roughly the same. That is a good starting point for explaining the demise of utopian hopes and dreams.

Can we no longer dream big? Did all our hopes of a world beyond scarcity simple disappear? Given the possibilities offered by technological development, and the necessity produced by rampant inequality, isn’t something like a basic income achievable? To put it really simply—our society is rich, why can’t we just pay everybody enough to live on?

I want to suggest that it is time to think big again. We should be able to automate away all the dangerous, repetitive, physically exhausting and soul-crushing tasks that define so much of work in the world today and replace them with a basic income. Journalist Paul Mason rightly stresses that “in the early twenty-first century the means to liberate ourselves from work are close at hand…we could be free of most physical work within a century.”

For those focused on the current Democratic majority in Congress and the questions regarding what to do now with that power, the questions I am asking might seem like a distraction. And the focus on what Democrats should do now is really important. What bills should they prioritize, and what do they have the votes to accomplish, between now and the 2022 midterms? These questions are crucial but also necessarily more immediate.

What does this have to do with dreaming? And how is this defense of dreaming practical? Because we also have to think long term. Politics is not only the art of the possible—for ordinary citizens it is also the art of contesting what in fact is possible. What is politically achievable is not fixed. It is the result of debate, discussion, writing, activism, protests, money, lobbying, and many other competing factors. Why have the Koch brothers invested so much in think tanks and lobbying? Because these actions don’t just impact what government majorities will do now; they impact what government majorities will do, and aspire to do, in the future.

Debates, organizing, activism, scholarship, and all sorts of other factors have impacted how the Democratic Party is using its power following the 2020 elections. 

We can compare the priorities today as opposed to the Democratic agenda after the 2008 elections to see how things have changed in just over a decade. Imagine how much things can change in another few decades.

“How long can a culture persist without the new?” cultural theorist Mark Fisher asked. It is our task in politics to “make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.” So while we focus our attention on the Federal government today, let’s also make time to push for a tomorrow in which there is a universal basic income and people take on jobs not because they have to but because they want to.

Thinking big, and even dreaming of a utopian future, is one way in which we make such a future possible. To put it more bluntly, without dreaming of a better world we will never achieve one.

Our political institutions are broken. Participatory democracy can help.

It has become a commonplace in recent years among journalists, academics, and civil society reformers to emphasize the declining levels of trust ordinary Americans have in the major institutions of government. More broadly, declining trust in institutions of government is a widely shared feature among the longstanding democracies of the world.

Rather than dwell in pessimism, I want to offer a ray of hope. Is there something that can help to rejuvenate our political institutions and restore some measure of faith in American democracy? The answer can be traced back to the founding fathers. As Thomas Jefferson said (more or less), the answer to the problems of democracy is more democracy. Specifically, participatory democracy.

What is participatory democracy? The best way to describe it is to contrast participatory democracy with representative democracy. Whereas representative democracy involves periodically voting for representatives who will then act on our behalf, participatory democracy involves regular and ongoing citizen involvement in the process of decision-making, usually at the city level. UCLA political theorist Carole Pateman argues that participatory democracy occurs when “all citizens have the opportunity and the right to participate each year in a major part of city government.”

So what does this look like in practice? The most famous real-world example is known as participatory budgeting, which began in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre in the 1980s. The basic idea, implemented by the left-leaning workers party (the Partido dos Trabalhadores in Portuguese), was that ordinary citizens should have a direct say in key budgeting decisions at the city level. What followed was an organized process in which residents routinely meet in their neighborhoods to formulate budgeting priorities and ultimately vote on which projects they want to fund. In the cities where this has worked best, residents have had the power to directly decide how to spend millions of dollars of new capital investments.

Participatory budgeting is not perfect and there are plenty of cases where it did not work as planned (usually because the city government refused to hand over any real power to the citizens). It has, however, had many success cases and inspired years of research on the ins and outs of the budgeting process.

The most important takeaway is that when given the power to make key decisions on multi-million dollar city investments, regular citizens have been up to the challenge. They have participated in large numbers, enjoyed the process, reduced corruption, and transformed how their cities operate. They have, in other words, been effective democratic citizens. Moreover, less-educated and less-wealthy citizens participated in much higher numbers than expected. This does not mean that participatory budgeting is perfect—after all, Brazil (like any country) has many problems that cannot be resolved just at the city level. But it does offer a counterpoint to those who would suggest that citizens are incapable of smart, hands-on participation in the mechanisms of government.

This is what participatory democracy is about: direct access to and participation in government. Participatory budgeting stands out because it offers more than an advisory role. This is not some council of citizens to be consulted—rather, participatory budgeting allows citizens to make binding budgetary decisions themselves. As participatory budgeting has become more mainstream it has spread to cities around the world, including cities in the United States, beginning with Chicago and New York City.

If participatory budgeting has begun to spread to American cities, have we felt its effects? This is a question that will take years to answer but we can look to Brazil and other countries for some evidence of its impact on politics. 

As political scientist Brian Wampler has documented, participatory budgeting in Brazil has helped to redirect city expenditures to badly needed public works projects in underserved city neighborhoods. In addition to its redistributive impact participatory budgeting has also been a critical locus of participatory democratic citizenship for the poor and less educated, who participate in PB in higher numbers than might be expected. It thus has the potential to serve as a “citizenship school” for the traditionally disempowered. Survey evidence also indicates that participants feel empowered by the experience and consequently, when citizen participation is combined with positive tangible outcomes, the result is a virtuous circle of participatory democracy.

There is reason to be optimistic that PB can have similar impacts in the US if city governments are willing to devote a substantial portion of city budgets to the process. There is, however, at least one obvious objection worth mentioning. How can city-level experiments in democracy tackle the many global, interconnected problems facing the world today? These include climate change, trade, and refugee flows, to name a few.

While it is true that participatory budgeting and other municipal reforms cannot resolve these issues, they can play an important part in addressing them. As many scholars have noted, a majority of the world’s population and economic activity are located in cities. This gives mayors, and city governments more broadly, enormous power to collaborate, at a city-to-city level, in tackling problems such as climate change and income inequality.

Indeed, with the rise of the global parliament of mayors and other efforts at bringing city leaders together, cities may well be a major site of political innovation and change in the 21^st century. (I am not the first to make such a claim—political theorist Benjamin Barber spent much of the past decade writing and organizing around this issue). And because cities, due to their ability to conduct government affairs in person on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis, are the main sites of participatory democracy today, this means that we can address issues of global concern in a more direct and democratic manner than that offered by our gridlocked national representative institutions.

Can participatory democracy solve all the problems plaguing our representative democracy? Of course not. But, now more than ever, when it is so easy to fall into hopeless pessimism, we need to retain at least a sliver of optimism. Democracy’s long, varied history is not over yet.

For more on this topic, see my dissertation, A 21st Century Defense of Participatory Democracy and my recent trilogy of books, Democratic Knowledge, Against Elitism, and Does Democracy Have a Future?

Expanding Economic Freedom: A Brief Case for a Basic Income

I’d like to make a brief, freedom-based case for a universal basic income. 

There is a habit on the right of equating market relations and right-wing politics more broadly with “freedom.” Whereas earlier conservatives like Edmund Burke (who defended tradition, authority, and hierarchy) would have recoiled at calls for unbridled freedom, in the 20th and 21st century figures on the right, from neoliberals like Milton Friedman, Friedrich Von Hayek, and James Buchanan, to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel, have couched their worldview in terms of a desire to expand “freedom.” 

This is a powerful rhetorical move but it is ultimately a sleight of hand. Here I want to focus on the common claim that individuals are "free" to choose their workplace and "free" to leave if and when they want. This is a poor definition of freedom because of the following:

 1) I must work to acquire the necessities of life. If I don't work I will become homeless, lack medical care, and potentially lack access to food and water. At its most basic, I can choose not to work on pain of death. This is essential to recognize, even if I am overstating it slightly. The point is, I have to work.

As political theorist C. Douglas Lummis said of the coercive nature of capitalism, “It is anti-democratic in that it requires kinds, conditions, and amounts of labor that people would never choose—and, historically, never have chosen—in a state of freedom.”

Lummis notes that historically economic coercion has taken many forms: it can involve taking away the common land and old means of livelihood from the poor (enclosure), forcing people to work (chattel slavery, indentured servitude, or political terror), or by making it necessary to work so as not to starve, be homeless, and in desperate poverty. It is of course this third form of coercion that defines work for many in contemporary capitalism.

2) I don't have much choice where I work. This is especially true for low-wage workers. If the choice is merely between several different low-paying, undignified, dictatorial workplaces, then I have no choice at all. Choosing whether to work at the McDonald’s or the Burger King down the road is hardly a meaningful choice.  As participatory democrats have pointed out, there are few democratic workplaces, so in nearly every case I don't have the option of choosing to work in a democratic firm. Moreover, due to what economists call monopsony, in many locations, particularly small towns and rural areas, there are few employers. In these cases I literally have almost no choice, not even the choice between multiple low-wage jobs that those in more populous areas sometimes have (though this is not much of a choice, as noted above).

Frankly, this lack of choice is true even for many educated workers. The pay may be better but in many cases professional class workers don't really "choose" where to work. If one is lucky enough to possess a bachelor’s or postgraduate degree, they must send out dozens (or hundreds) of applications, cross their fingers, accept whichever job is offered out of that opaque process, and move to wherever it may be. 

Obviously, there are few or no cases in the real world where people have unbounded freedom to choose between any and all possible options. So one might object by saying that I am attacking a straw man, since of course Friedman et al. aren’t arguing that capitalism gives workers total freedom. But this is not a straw man. First of all, the wealthiest individuals in the world come reasonably close to this genuine freedom of choice in occupation. Wealthy individuals can choose whether to work at all, and secondarily, they will have much more freedom than the rest of us in choosing where to work. But for everyone else, we have very limited choices, if any at all. Labor markets, and capitalism more broadly, do not offer the pinnacle of freedom that thinkers like Friedman seem to stress. Indeed, Michael Menser, summarizing a number of studies, estimates that 85% of all workers are in this coercive situation.
 
However, this problem is not insoluble. There is an answer for how to realize the free market vision of empowered workers freely choosing their workplaces: a universal basic income.

If there is a universal basic income, as well as universal medical care, child care, and some other universal public services, then I really am free in a much more robust sense. Concern 1) is addressed because I won't die or otherwise be severely lacking if don't work. I am then in a real sense free to say no to work, precisely because I have all my needs met via the basic income. This is the important point not addressed by those on the right. To be genuinely free in my choice of where to work I need to be free not to work. I need to be able to say “no.” When I have to take whatever job I can get because I need that income to pay for necessities, then by definition I can’t say “no.” 

Concern 2) is also addressed in so far as I can now quit a bad or oppressive job without worrying about losing my benefits. In other words, the exit costs of quitting are lower. This will empower me to demand better work conditions because I can genuinely say “no.” One hopes that this would in turn increase the number of accountable, democratic workplaces because workers will have the leverage to demand better pay, conditions, hours, and more decision-making authority.

In current circumstances, as Elizabeth Anderson puts in in her book Private Government, “the exit costs of leaving a workplace are high.” But again, with a basic income and other universal social programs, those exit costs are reduced, if not altogether eliminated. Quitting becomes a genuine choice.

An additional benefit is that as social programs become universal they are no longer the private responsibility of a given firm and thus there will be no incentive for workplaces to save money by cutting benefits. Furthermore, if workers can say “no” this will tighten the labor market, putting pressure on employers to raise wages in order to draw and retain workers. 

But ultimately the case here is a simple one: a universal basic income will expand the freedom of ordinary workers by letting them choose whether to work at all and giving them more power over the conditions and location of their work, should they choose to seek paid employment.

(For an alternative perspective, some Modern Monetary Theorists argue that we should seek a federal job guarantee rather than a universal basic income—see, for example, the work of Stephanie Kelton and William Mitchell & Thomas Fazi).

Democrats and the Demographic Argument

In liberal circles it has been common to hear various optimistic claims regarding the impact that changing demographics will have on the Democratic Party’s electoral fortunes in the coming years.

The simple version of this demographic argument claims that as the USA becomes more ethnically diverse, Democrats will perform better and better in elections, eventually becoming something of a permanent majority party because they reflect the country’s multi-racial future, whereas the Republican party reflects the country’s older and whiter past.

Optimists might point to states like Georgia, Arizona, and North Carolina becoming purple as evidence of this trend.

Now there is clearly some truth to the argument. More Americans identify as Democrats than as Republicans, more Americans consistently vote for Democrats in the Senate and often the House, and most striking, Democrats have won the popular vote in all but one Presidential election in the past 30 years.

In addition, public opinion polls, while imperfect, do give a rough sense of popular opinion, and the country appears to be populist and left-leaning on many economic issues and also increasingly socially liberal, though still quite divided on that score.

So it ain’t total nonsense. But I’m here to dampen your liberal enthusiasm. 

First of all, while a greater percentage of the country is nonwhite, and Democrat leaning, a greater percentage of white voters are voting Republican than in the past. Thus, Republicans have been making up for the shrinking share of white voters by winning a greater percentage of them. 

As a simple illustration, imagine a town with 100 voters. In 2000, let’s say that 70 of the voters were white and 40 of them voted Republican. Now 20 years later, in 2020, let’s say that the number of white voters in the town has decreased to 60. But the percent of them voting Republican has increased, so instead of winning 57% of the white vote (40/70), the Republicans now win 66% of the white vote (40/60), thus retaining 40 votes, even as the number of white voters has shrunk. This is a stylized version of what has happened in America in recent decades and while the numbers above are hypothetical, they reflect the strategy that Republicans have used to remain electorally competitive. Indeed, this has helped them to become more competitive in some states, like Ohio and Pennsylvania.

But the biggest factor that undermines the demographic argument is the anti-majoritarian structure of the American constitution.The US Senate is the most unrepresentative electoral body on earth. Since each state gets two votes, the smaller states have hugely disproportionate power. And with democratic constituencies increasingly concentrated in urban centers in a small number of liberal states, they are at a huge disadvantage in the Senate. Small, white, rural, and heavily Republican states are overrepresented relative to their population and this trend is increasing. Contra the demographic optimism of some liberals, the Democrats may have an increasingly difficult time winning the Senate in the future. The current 50 Democrats in the Senate represent over 40 million more people than the 50 Republicans in the Senate. Again, given the geographic location of Democratic voters, this imbalance is likely to become more extreme in the near future.

The US House of Representatives, due to severe gerrymandering in some states and a more general concentration of Democratic voters and dispersion of Republican voters, means that Democrats are also at a disadvantage in the House. They can win more House votes and still lose the House, as has happened multiple times. And their victories, when they happen, won’t be as large. The 2018 Democratic House victory was larger, in terms of the popular vote, than the 2010 Republican House victory, and yet the Democrats gained 41 seats in the 2018 midterms while the Republicans gained over 60 seats in the 2010 midterms. Furthermore, with so many safe seats, control of the House comes down to whoever can win a handful of competitive districts. This means that control of the US House of Representatives will often be decided by a few thousand votes on a few toss-up seats, not national demographic trends or national popular opinion.

Add in the further disadvantage that turnout usually declines dramatically in midterm years, particularly among Democratic constituencies, leaving the midterm electorate older, whiter, wealthier, and more conservative than the population as a whole. This in turn impacts crucial seats at the Federal, state, and local level during non-Presidential years.

Finally, consider the electoral college. In the 21st century the Democrats have won the popular vote in five out of six Presidential elections (2000, 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020) but have only won the electoral college, and thus the Presidency, in half of them (2008, 2012, 2020). This antidemocratic institution is a huge impediment to Presidential victory for the Democrats, giving the Republicans something like a 3-5% boost relative to their electoral popularity.

First of all, this is deeply undemocratic and absurd. Presidential elections in the 21st century are not decided by the American people as a whole but by a small number of voters (tens of thousands, at most a few hundred thousand) in a few decisive swing states. Most states, on the left and the right, large and small, are effectively ignored.

Second, it hurts the Democrats and undermines the optimism of the demographic argument. As long as Republicans can win Presidential elections while winning a minority of votes, they will have no incentive to change. The same goes for their success in the House and Senate. And as long as the Presidency is decided by a small number of people in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, why would Republicans change? 

Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump by nearly 7.1 million votes and yet his path to the electoral college came down a handful of voters in those states along with Arizona and Georgia. Thanks to the electoral college, the path to the Presidency lies not with persuading, winning, and representing a national majority but rather with motivating and turning out one’s base in those few states. The Democratic Party may represent the majority but in a system of anti-majoritarian institutions that is no guarantee of success, now or in the future.