In the Long Run

1. Democracy's Genesis: The Open and Malleable Future

If the future became central to modern democracy, it was more specifically an idea of the open future – of a future that would be different from the present and susceptible to concerted influence.

A new horizon. Modern democracy, unlike its ancient namesake, emerged as a future-oriented ideal, a goal to be achieved rather than a present reality. This shift was fueled by the Enlightenment's belief in an "open future"—a world not predetermined but capable of being shaped by human action and collective will. This perspective challenged existing monarchical and feudal orders, presenting their injustices as temporary rather than eternal.

Utopian visions. Eighteenth-century utopian literature, like Louis-Sébastien Mercier's The Year 2440, played a crucial role in this transformation. By depicting ideal societies set in the future, these works not only critiqued the present but also fostered a sense of collective identity and agency, encouraging readers to imagine a "we" that could endure and transform society. This imaginative leap from "elsewhere in space" to "elsewhere in time" made the familiar world seem transient and alterable.

Revolutionary action. The American, French, and Haitian Revolutions provided concrete proof of the future's malleability. These movements, driven by ideas-based collectives like the Jacobins, demonstrated that a different world could be actively constructed, not just dreamed of. The French Republican Calendar, with its "Year Zero," symbolized this radical break, immersing people in an outlook that asserted humanity's capacity to remake the world anew.

2. Navigating Time: The Crucial Balance Between Near and Far Futures

If democratic self-determination was to mean something, it would require a future horizon that was neither too close nor too far – one that left room for projects of transformation and could absorb the setbacks they would encounter along the way, yet was not so grand as to make action in the present seem pointless.

The allure of the distant. Early liberal thinkers, like Condorcet, championed the idea of indefinite progress, using the "far future" to explain away present-day problems as mere blips in a grand, universal trajectory. This perspective offered reassurance and legitimized existing systems, but risked making immediate action seem insignificant or even unwise, potentially fostering passivity.

The urgency of the near. Conversely, early socialists, such as Wilhelm Weitling, emphasized the "near future," driven by a desire for immediate, total transformation. While this fostered a strong sense of agency and mobilization, it often led to overestimating what could be achieved quickly, resulting in superficial or unsustainable political efforts.

The party's synthesis. Mass political parties, particularly on the socialist left, emerged as a crucial innovation to bridge this temporal gap. They combined:

• Concrete short-term demands (e.g., worker hours, wages)
• Long-term ideological projects (e.g., worker education, social revolution, equality)
• Enduring organization that could outlive individuals and absorb setbacks.
  This allowed for sustained commitment to radical goals while engaging with immediate political realities, providing a framework for collective action and democratic progress.

3. The Future Divided: Imagination Versus Calculation in Modern Society

The modern mind has become more and more a calculating one.

The rise of calculation. As urbanisation, industrialisation, and money economies advanced, a "calculating outlook" increasingly dominated modern thought. This involved focusing on regularities, predictions, and risk reduction, driven by the need for precision in commerce and the promise of scientific mastery over the unknown. This pragmatic approach often prioritized the near future, where trends seemed most certain.

Expertise and control. The calculative outlook elevated the role of experts, whether entrepreneurs in the market or technocrats in government. From the physiocrats' "economic table" to Soviet five-year plans and Western economic indicators like GDP, the goal was to quantify, measure, and extrapolate future trends to guide policy. This technocratic approach, however, often marginalized public participation and narrowed the scope of political imagination.

Democracy's challenge. This emphasis on calculation posed a significant challenge to democratic ideals. It tended to:

• Reduce citizens to predictable units with fixed preferences, undermining the idea of persuasion and collective self-rule.
• Foreshorten the temporal horizon, pushing abstract ideals like freedom and equality to the periphery.
• Empower elites who understood complex methods, making public authority seem ill-equipped to manage the future.
  The tension between imagining alternative futures and calculating likely ones became a defining feature of modern politics, often at democracy's expense.

4. The Peril of Impulsivity: Fascism's Destructive Embrace of the New

We intend to destroy museums and libraries, academies of every sort.

Rebellion against the past. Fascism, particularly Italian Futurism, emerged as a radical rejection of tradition, calculation, and the "drudgery" of mass society. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's "Futurist Manifesto" called for a movement oriented to speed, dynamism, and perpetual transformation, celebrating violence as a "hygiene of the world" and a means to break free from the past. This was nationalism in an impulsive, anti-rational guise.

Unconstrained action. Fascism's core was an exaggerated embrace of the open future, radicalized to question any enduring commitment or cumulative project. It emphasized:

• Personalized power and charisma over institutional norms.
• Creative destruction and transformation for its own sake.
• The primacy of doing over thinking, reducing words to "noise" and rejecting reasoned deliberation.
  This outlook fostered a politics of style rather than substance, where unpredictability and elusiveness became weapons against critics.

Colonial utopias. This destructive impulse was vividly expressed in fascist colonialism, where conquered lands were treated as "blank slates" for utopian experiments. Cities like Asmara were designed as "new Romes" embodying modernity, while local populations and their histories were forcibly removed or segregated. This demonstrated how the rejection of the past, combined with an impulsive future-orientation, could legitimize extreme coercion and violence.

5. The Hidden Future: Secrecy's Erosion of Democratic Trust

Although Roosevelt received multiple warnings indicating that an attack was imminent, he withholds this information and informs his commanders that negotiations with Japan are underway […] A number of government investigations concluded that there was considerable foreknowledge of the Japanese plans.

The allure of hidden knowledge. The idea of a future that is known but withheld is central to conspiracy theories, creating a stark division between "those in the know" and "those innocent." This fascination reflects increasing government efforts to veil the future in secrecy, particularly during the Cold War, where military forecasting and strategic planning often occurred behind closed doors.

Cold War foresight. The Cold War spurred unprecedented efforts in scientific forecasting, exemplified by agencies like RAND and the classified National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs). These initiatives aimed to predict enemy actions and prepare for existential threats, using methods like game theory and scenario planning. Secrecy was deemed essential for:

• National security (preventing enemies from gaining insight).
• Controlling public perception of threats (avoiding panic or instability).
• Managing political responsibility (avoiding blame for foreseeable disasters).
  This established a culture where knowledge of the future became a competitive advantage, not a public good.

Democracy's vulnerability. This culture of secrecy eroded democratic trust and accountability. It concentrated power in elite hands, creating a "credibility gap" between government and citizens. Selective disclosure of forecasts, like the 2002 NIE on Iraqi WMDs, manipulated public opinion, while the opacity of decision-making undermined reasoned critique. This bifurcation of public and secret knowledge contributed to the rise of conspiracy theories and a growing detachment between representatives and the represented.

6. The Fragmented Future: Individualism and Consumerism's Rise

There’s a Ford in your future! Count on it! One day, you too will know the joy of owning a new Ford – a car that will be eager to take you traveling in style …

Personalized aspirations. Post-war Western consumerism recast the future from a shared, social vision to a multitude of private aspirations. Advertisements, like Ford's "There's a Ford in your future!", sold objects not just for their utility but for the personal satisfaction, excitement, and status they promised. This "gadget utopianism" often substituted for social utopianism, implying the acceptability of existing social structures as individuals pursued self-betterment.

The car as emblem. The automobile became a powerful symbol of this individualized future. Initially seen as a marker of societal progress, by the mid-20th century, it represented a portable private space, a positional good signifying personal standing and adventure. "Planned obsolescence" in the car industry further cultivated a need for perpetual renewal, making money from the future by constantly consigning the present to the past.

Neoliberal reinforcement. Neoliberal ideologies rationalized this individualistic outlook, portraying society as a collection of competing units. Personal debt, credit ratings, and precarious employment further individualized people's circumstances, trapping them in predicaments experienced as uniquely theirs. This erosion of a sense of common fate weakened collective action and political parties, contributing to a foreshortening of the future horizon to what individuals could achieve alone.

7. Algorithmic Futures: Customization and Control in the Digital Age

All these technologies disaggregate societies into their component parts, both for the sake of analysis and to encourage the predictable forms of behaviour that make analysis attractive.

The new individualization. Despite rhetoric of societal progress, contemporary digital technologies, driven by algorithms, reinforce the individualization of the future. They customize experiences—from targeted ads to social-media feeds—to predict and shape individual behavior, often for profit or security. This disaggregates societies into component parts, making individuals feel uniquely addressed while inhibiting the formation of shared political action.

Opaque control. Algorithmic governance operates through "black boxes," where decisions are made without intelligible justifications. This opacity, combined with deliberate secrecy to prevent "gaming" the system, means people's futures are shaped in ways that are hard to apprehend. This directly clashes with democratic norms of justified decision-making and reasoned critique, fostering a sense of powerlessness.

Eroding political freedom. The aspiration of algorithmic technologies to know and predict individuals "in their entirety" threatens political freedom. By linking data across different domains (e.g., political views affecting job prospects), it erodes compartmentalization, making political involvement riskier. This can lead to:

• Political conformism
• A "spiral of silence"
• Ostracization of dissenters
  These systems trap individuals in their past behaviors, hindering their capacity to break with the past or embrace new political attachments, thereby closing the future.

8. The Age of Emergencies: Finitude and Powerlessness Define Our Present

The anxious sense of the future closing in, of impending threats and a scarcity of time, is the antithesis of the modern belief in the open, indefinite future.

A world of endings. The 21st century is defined by an "age of emergency politics," where public life unfolds against a backdrop of finitude and threat. From financial crises and pandemics to climate change and AI, there's a pervasive sense that time is running out, evoking breakdown and extinction rather than progress. This anxiety is amplified by decades of waning confidence in public authorities to pursue the collective good.

The emergency imaginary. While emergencies can feel like ruptures, they often reinforce existing perspectives. Emphasizing events as unforeseen can minimize responsibility, while the "logic of emergency" frames policymaking as responding to necessity rather than pursuing chosen goals. This leads to:

• A focus on the near future and immediate, quantifiable goals.
• Marginalization of justice and deeper structural issues.
• A conservative objective of restoring normality, rather than radical change.
  Deadlines, like those for climate action, create urgency but also foster a sense of "no time for error," challenging democracy's deliberative nature.

Power shifts and powerlessness. Emergencies invite an elitist style of rule, concentrating power in executives and technocratic institutions (e.g., central banks) that operate with speed and discretion, often in secrecy. This marginalizes democratic institutions and fuels a "politics of the showdown," where neglected concerns are phrased as non-negotiable demands. This environment also fosters impulsive, anti-system politics, from libertarian tech billionaires to far-right movements, who embrace chaos as a path to "rebirth" or to assert social hierarchies.

9. Democracy's Enduring Value: Beyond Instrumental Effectiveness

If democracy is to work under present conditions, it will need to look different, however.

The instrumental trap. In an age of emergencies, democracy is often judged instrumentally—by its capacity to "get the job done" on issues like climate change. This perspective risks reducing democracy to a mere tool, making it vulnerable to being discarded if deemed inefficient or too slow compared to technocratic or authoritarian alternatives. While democracy can be effective, an instrumental defense is fragile, encouraging disaffection when things go wrong.

Intrinsic worth. A stronger defense of democracy lies in its intrinsic value: its promise of political freedom and self-determination. It is the only way to legitimately manage disagreements over desired outcomes and prevent authority from becoming merely the tool of the powerful. This intrinsic value becomes even more critical when considering the open-ended nature of future challenges.

Beyond "transition." The idea of a definitive "transition" (e.g., beyond the carbon economy) is misleading. Future problems, from biodiversity loss to AI governance, will be continuous and complex. There will be no moment when democracy can be "restored" after a temporary suspension. Therefore, sacrificing democratic principles for short-term gains is a permanent loss, as the power to define and address future risks must remain democratically contested.

10. Reclaiming Democracy: Accountability and Long-Term Vision

When people can recall their representatives from office, they hold a degree of power redolent of direct democracy but embedded in a representative frame.

Intensifying representation. To counter powerlessness and the sense of scarce time, democracy needs to be intensified. This means reconfiguring institutions to make representatives more accountable and committed to a politics of ideas. Mechanisms of recall, allowing citizens to remove representatives between elections, offer a powerful tool. This:

• Disciplines representatives to act consistently with commitments.
• Creates opportunities for debate and programmatic renewal.
• Weakens the sense of decisive electoral outcomes, softening defeat.
  Recall mechanisms, especially within parties, can foster deeper democratic engagement and programmatic "readiness."

Beyond electoral cycles. While frequent elections risk short-termism, recall mechanisms could allow for extended terms of office (e.g., seven years). This balances increased accountability with the incentive for leaders to pursue more demanding, long-term objectives. Such reforms, however, must be underpinned by broader socio-economic changes.

Empowering citizens. Realizing radical representative democracy requires:

• Reducing economic inequalities and strengthening worker rights to ensure citizens have the time and security for political engagement.
• Fostering alternative media and regulating algorithmic surveillance to counter episodic, fragmented understandings of politics.
• Reviving parties as ideas-based associations that offer accessible visions of a collective future, inspiring sustained commitment beyond immediate concerns.

11. Beyond Borders: The Imperative for Transnational Democracy

One thing democracy must somehow engage with, under capitalism or otherwise, is the limits posed by its territorial boundaries.

Global challenges, local limits. Today's greatest challenges—climate change, economic insecurity, automation—are cross-border, yet national democratic reforms risk entrenching a closed future elsewhere. The weakness of national institutions in addressing global problems fuels powerlessness, making transnational democratic action essential.

Internationalism's legacy. The history of political activism is rich with internationalist efforts, from socialist internationals to contemporary progressive networks. These platforms:

• Connect like-minded individuals across countries.
• Allow political energies to transcend slow national electoral rhythms.
• Provide enduring causes despite national setbacks.
  Such networks multiply opportunities for identification and contribution to political projects, fostering a sense of shared fate beyond national borders.

Transnational party models. A relatively underexplored model is the transnational party that competes in multiple national elections, linking local campaigns to a common policy program. This offers richer, denser opportunities for contestation and a focal point for transnational sentiment. While challenging, such parties could become crucial foundations for expanding political participation and channeling hope, particularly for issues like climate politics. Ultimately, building executive power beyond the state, perhaps through radically reworked international bodies, is necessary to adequately govern the future and ensure democratic influence on a global scale.

Last updated: January 18, 2026