I used to really like The West Wing. I think I first watched it in college, when I was still at the left end of liberal, in US terms. It presented a vision of the world in which the US government was largely run by people of good will, who simply disagree on certain matters of policy or personal morality. Looking back, it feels like the peak of the “end of history” era, in which the fall of the USSR had signaled the triumph of liberal democracy as the final state of human governance. We had developed the perfect system of governance, and all that remained was to tweak around the edges. A tax rebate here, a new slogan there, and we’re on our way to stability! The process worked, and if we just trusted it, things would just keep getting better.

The rise of neoliberalism presented (many of) us with a new vision of how the world could be made better without any real effort to change it.

In essence, the process of making the future better had been automated so that we could spend our time on more important things, like taking care of our own, short-term needs. “Market forces” shifted from a description of how the interplay of supply and demand can “naturally” manage resources, to a quasi-religious dogma, in which market forces were the only acceptable way to change the world. You want things to get better? Do it using the existing system. You can march and demonstrate, with government approval and within proscribed boundaries. You can participate in electoral democracy, and if you win you can nudge things a little; and if none of that works for you, you can start a business about it, or you can stop complaining.

The idea is that the aggregate of all of human activity, put through the machine of capitalism, will produce superior results for everyone than cruder, more old-fashioned approaches like direct action or some sort of revolution. You don’t do things, you prompt the machine to do them for you, and if you don’t like the results, you don’t try to go around the machine, you prompt better.

It’s a form of utopianism that contains within it a rejection of utopianism. Don’t try to make the world better, because it’s already getting better, and if you interfere, you might hurt the machine and make everything worse.

We could look at US history and see a progression of things getting better, from the abolition of chattel slavery, to women’s suffrage, to the Civil Rights movement, to winning the Cold War. Not only that, but we saved the ozone layer, and ended the use of leaded gasoline, and stopped the acid rain crisis, and we were going to solve climate change any day now! The Utopia Machine works! If you think it’s too slow, or it’s not working, you’re just too impatient, too immature to understand.

I believe utopian thinking is important. It’s good for us to think about what a perfect society might look like, not because we believe we can create such a society, but because it provides us with a lens through which we can inspect the one we have. What does our idea of utopia have that the present situation lacks? Or, if we are considering a particular policy, does it bring us closer to, or farther from that utopia?

We’ve been encouraged to accept that the little nudges made by the Democratic Party have been small steps in the right direction, but as the years have passed, that has felt more and more like climate deniers pointing to periodic dips in temperature as proof that there’s no warming. The Democrats may be better than the Republicans, but they seem to have taken no meaningful action to stop the increasingly obvious Republican project of imposing right-wing authoritarianism on the United States.

The dogma became “better things aren’t possible”. We were told, year after year, that even the good things we had were too expensive. We couldn’t afford a social safety net. We couldn’t afford a public healthcare system. We couldn’t afford retirement. All of that was just out of reach, and “serious” people – the ones who understood the utopia machine – knew that we just had to cut back. The only option was austerity.

At the same time, profits kept rising, the rich kept getting richer and owning more of the economy, and there seemed to be infinite money for war, and for police. To refer back to a recent post, the machinery of oppression was already in place for Trump or someone like him to use, because it was deemed worth the investment.

A huge portion of the US was persuaded to hand over the reins to people who, we were assured, knew better than we did. Our responsibility was to look after ourselves. To make money, and pay bills, and vote. We were able to do that, supposedly, because the professionals were taking care of things. We stopped making the future, and became consumers of futures built and imagined by others.

This is not to say that everybody in the past was an activist. American democracy came out of feudalism, a system in which the people have even less power, and fewer avenues for political involvement. American democracy itself was a sham at the nation’s founding, and for generations after, but the notion of “a government of the people, by the people, for the people” was something that began to seem within reach.

Between the Gilded Age and the end of the Cold War, there were many big changes, driven by big movements. The New Deal, for all it’s often framed as a gift from Roosevelt, was a response by the savvier members of the ruling class to protect the bulk of their power by giving a bit of it away. The Civil Rights movement might have been even scarier, because it threatened to close the working class divide that had been maintained for so long through white supremacy. The US government’s domestic mission during the Cold War years was to break the power of those movements, and to “keep progressives out of government“.

And now, as the US left works to build power, the ruling class is working hard to re-impose something resembling feudalism, in which mass surveillance and the threat of increasingly brutal and sadistic agents of the government will keep the peasantry from ever rising up again. It’s the boot Orwell spoke of, stamping on a human face, forever.

It turns out neoliberalism wasn’t a utopia machine, it was a fascism factory.

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So what do we do?

We need to destroy it. We need to build something better, and keep building it. Fortunately, there’s already a playbook for this, and it’s to treat democracy as one of the daily responsibilities of adulthood. That does mean voting in elections, but I believe current events make it clear that that cannot be all we do, especially when we have an obscenely wealthy ruling class that is constantly trying to sow division, and increase its own power at our expense. The working class has immense power, but for it to be exerted, it must be organized. That means unions. It means community groups. It means doing activism as a regular practice, not just to make things better, but also to maintain the capacity to act in coordination.

Part of that is also education, which can be arranged through unions and community organizations. Literacy and numeracy are important, but it goes beyond that. We need a higher level of political and historical education in general, so people can understand the systems that surround them. That’s important if you want to apply pressure to those systems, or to dismantle them altogether.

And here’s the important bit: All of this work, especially when done in community with others, builds hope within the people doing it. It’s not going to make you forget all your problems, and it’s not going to magically cure your depression, but it’s a lot easier to have hope for the future if you’re actually doing something to build that future, and you can see others doing the same. If nothing else, it is a form of exercising power, and it’s a lot easier to feel like a better world is possible if you feel you have even a little power over what happens.

None of this is easy. All of it requires time and effort, and very often money. Not only that, it’s slow to get results, especially in the early stages. It’s like building a rail network: You can’t go anywhere at speed until you’ve done the monumental work of laying the rails. It’s a big ask, especially when everything’s going to shit, and everyone’s worried about their ability to look after themselves and their families. That’s kinda the point. It’s not an accident that it’s getting harder to make ends meet. It’s not a coincidence that that has come along with the rise in fascism. It has both helped to drive some to embrace fascism, and helped to suppress resistance. It’s all very hard.

The thing is, it’s going to get harder from here no matter what you do.

Not only will the fascists not stop their destruction until they are forced to, the planet is warming fast, and it’s hard to overstate how much worse that will make everything. If you can find a way to get involved in collective action, you will be building the power needed to make things easier.

I’m a big fan of modern technology and automation, when it helps people live fuller lives. When it’s being used to force more people into poverty and servitude, on the other hand, I think it’s a serious problem that needs to be addressed. Somewhere along the way, most of us allowed the knowledge and skills of collective power to fade away, while we were under the mistaken impression that we no longer needed them. The good news is that in my lifetime, there have never been more people actively and collectively working to build a better future for themselves.