It’s the fantasy/strategy heuristic

To be, or not to be unburdened? That is the coconut question.

A few months ago, my friend David Klion named a contradiction lingering between the dual memes of Kamala Harris: how can we both exist in the context of all that came before us, and yet be unburdened by what has been?

The friction between what is and what could be stokes the engines of history. Progressives — the unconscious inheritors of the faith that we can remake the future — are familiar with this tension. How do we realize a better, fairer, more just world with the tools available to us in this one? How do we shrug off the trauma of the past while remaining clear-eyed about the challenges of the future? Is it possible to learn to live at home in this world while we dream of making it anew? 

Maybe you, like me, are asking yourself these questions right now. Two threads here overlap, but I want to keep them separate. One is affective: where do we summon the will to keep on moving towards our desire? The other is mechanical: what is the best path to get us there? Together, they’re stitched into a contradiction: the dream of what can be, unburdened by what has been, can only come to life in the context of all that came before us. 

Call it the fantasy/strategy heuristic. Fantasy tells us where we’d like to go. Strategy tells us how to get there. 

In July, Democrats were unburdened of their historically unpopular nominee. But what could have been a rebirth looks more like a resurrection. Kamala Harris really does exist in the context in which we all live. In the euphoria of Biden’s dismissal from the top of the ticket, many of us on the left expressed hope that a new nominee might forge a new platform, particularly on foreign policy. Surely, Harris would see the folly of continued unconditional arming of the far-right Israeli government. But the fact of the American imperium cannot be overcome by swapping candidates and hoping for the best. I am reminded of Joe Biden’s 2019 promise that “nothing will fundamentally change” under his presidency. Do you think you fell out of a coconut tree?

Power must be accepted, understood, and confronted. Developing that skill in analyzing power relations is a major theme of this blog precisely because we can use the context of our power in order to equip ourselves with the best strategies to win.

Let me put the fantasy/strategy heuristic in action. I’ll use myself as an example. I wrote in The Nation over the summer about why I regretted my vote for the Green Party in 2012. Back then, I was running a campaign targeting my college endowment’s fossil fuel investments, and I was dreaming of what could be, unburdened by the two-party electoral system. I was young and naive. I voted for Jill Stein.

Was this an act of fantasy or strategy? A good way to test is to assess how many people I convinced to join me. People are smart; they can tell when something is worthwhile or not. While I could organize classmates onto the divestment campaign, I couldn’t make a strong case for voting third party. Any campaigner knows that you need to offer someone a credible path to victory in order to organize them into joining you. 

So was there a credible theory of change backing my vote? Every four years, the Green Party runs a candidate for president on lefty-ish commitments and anti-establishment rhetoric. The party’s high-water mark came in 2000 with 2.7% of the national vote total. The last third party candidate for president to win an electoral vote was George Wallace in 1968. The last candidate from a new party to win it all was Abraham Lincoln more than a hundred years before that. Our country’s first-past-the-post voting system — in which the candidate who wins the most votes, even without a majority, wins the race — means that the kaleidoscopic interests of the electorate are reduced to two major, factious parties. The odds of anyone without a D or R next to their name becoming president of the United States in November were, and remain, nil. 

Nevertheless: I hoped my vote, and enough like mine, would send a message to the Democratic Party not to take the youth vote for granted. 

I think it’s fair to say this was wishful thinking on my part. The Green Party does not have a compelling theory of change, an analysis of power, or a willingness to develop either of them. The fantasy that Jill Stein might get enough votes to scare the Democrats into becoming more amenable to my values stemmed from my unwillingness, on some level, to admit that the world really does reward those who have power. It was a child’s conception of politics. 

Another good place to apply the fantasy/strategy heuristic might be the different attempts this summer to force the president’s hand on delivering a ceasefire. In February, 100,000 Michiganders — more than enough to make the Biden campaign nervous — voted “uncommitted” in protest of the administration’s indifference towards the war crimes committed by American bombs in Gaza. There’s a strong theory of change here: demonstrate the power of discontented voters in a key swing state to gain leverage over Biden. The eroding of Biden’s support soon became too much to stanch, and the president at last passed the torch.

Then in June, Palestinian solidarity group Within Our Lifetime crashed a get-out-the-vote rally for Jamaal Bowman headlined by AOC and Bernie Sanders. The biggest socialists in Congress were there to galvanize support for Bowman in the face of millions in attack ads spent by the Israel lobby over his pro-Palestine advocacy. Bowman had become one of the most vocal supporters of Palestine in Congress, but his support for Joe Biden nevertheless drew the protestors. In a way, Within Our Lifetime got what it wanted. Bowman lost the election. How this gets us closer to a free Palestine or even a ceasefire remains a mystery. 

If this is a defense of hard-nosed strategic clarity, then let me be clear that I believe in fantasy’s role in politics. We cannot accomplish changing the world through the iron of realpolitik alone. It must be tempered by some other spark as well — the belief that the world can be different, and we have the power to make it so.

Fantasy’s role in politics is to nurture those seeds of possibility. Things can be different, a better world is possible. In early 2019, in the wake of the sit-in that changed American climate politics forever, Nancy Pelosi dismissed AOC and young Sunrisers as the kids behind the “green dream, or whatever they call it.” The implication was that we were fundamentally unserious. Of course, the adults in those rooms were stuck in a fantasy of their own, whether climate denial or faith in institutions that had already crumbled. The dream that Sunrise popularized — oh, maybe the government can take a more active role in decarbonizing the economy while providing for its citizens ravaged by economic inequality — expanded the bounds of political common sense. Green industrial policy is now the law of the land. 

But green industrial policy is not the Green New Deal. The social safety net is in tatters. The populist right is on the verge of power. The American war machine bulldozes along.

So yes, things can be different, but right now, they are not. Fantasy risks ungrounding us from the real world, with our heads in the clouds. It’s power analysis  — who has it, where they got it from, how we can get some — that brings us back down to earth. 

The work of the left is not to adjust ourselves to a reality that we find unacceptable. The point is to change it. We cannot accomplish that through fantasy or strategy alone. In order to change the world, we first have to accept it as it is.

We are more powerful than we think. We are less powerful than we want.