Reflections on Jonathan White’s In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea
Matteo Marenco is post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. His work investigates the relationship between employment and social protection institutions and the digitalisation of work.
A couple of months ago I was in Manhattan’s Union Square for the first time. The sun was just setting when I unexpectedly stumbled upon the famous Metronome climate clock indicating how much time is left before the harms caused by climate change become irreversible. Looking at the rapidly decreasing seconds, I felt an urgency to act and a simultaneous sense of hopelessness – a mix that stuck with me for the remainder of the day. At a time when we are faced with the fact that life conditions on our planet will become harder, if we do not modify the polluting foundations of our economies, Jonathan White’s In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea (London: Profile Books, 2024)compellingly reflects on how to strengthen our democracies by developing shared and future-oriented visions of our societies that can help us re-gain a long-run perspective on what lies ahead.
Future as a Key Terrain of Conflict
The book is based on the premise that democracy is a political project that needs a medium-long term run to thrive. In line with a rich field of scholarship in sociology (Suckert, 2022) as well as economics (Shiller, 2019), it thus identifies the ‘future’ as a critical terrain of political conflict. In so doing, White’s book critically identifies a number of futures – e.g. open and closed, near and far, imagined and calculated – that depict the evolution of the understanding of what lies ahead across different historical periods. While this stands out as a valuable analytical effort in teasing out the varieties of future imagination and their implications, the linear description associating future types with specific historical periods turns out to be rather limiting. Open and closed, near and far, imagined and calculated: these futures are all likely to transcend specificities of a given historical period. For this reason, it would be more fruitful to analyse how futures travel through time than associating them with certain periods in history.
In fact, the main argument of the book shows the importance of this point. While In the Long Run underlines how modern democracy has developed around the idea of an open future, it also documents how that openness is currently under siege: the idea of ‘closeness’, which characterized conceptions of the future in pre-industrial societies, is making a comeback. How is this happening? As the author himself argues, climate change, by depicting potentially harder life conditions on our planet, is partly responsible for this. Moreover, recent analyses (see especially Zuboff, 2019) have argued that the pervasiveness of digital technologies is largely responsible for ‘closing’ the future by reducing the room for unpredictability.
What might past and current unpredictabilities have in common? The chronological fashion in which the various futures are identified and described on these pages unfortunately leaves such questions largely unanswered.
How Democracies Grow Weak: Sense of Finality and Short-termism
‘Closeness’, in White’s reading, is linked to a ‘sense of finality’ that is widespread in our societies. Acknowledging such a societal sentiment, the author goes on to compellingly criticize it. Importantly, he underlines how ‘temporal claustrophobia’ is a recurrent phenomenon in history – “the sense of a future closing in on the present is hardly unique to the current moment” (p.4). Countering a ‘presentist’ attitude that tends to look at current events as unprecedented helps to tame the ‘sense of finality’ by showing that democracies have been through periods of low trust and multiple crises before.
While there is indeed a need to relativize our present sense of finality, it does not follow that all crises have the same relationship to the future. By putting into question, the very foundations of our extractivist attitude to economic activities, climate change and global warming stand out as partial exceptions. I would therefore argue that a sense of finality is not only more understandable with respect to climate change, but it could even be necessary to stimulate a fruitful political debate. To be sure, finality alone will not suffice. The mere reference to climate catastrophes far ahead in time will not prove particularly effective in tackling climate change. To stand a chance at converting our economies, political discourses need to combine long-term effects with positive short-term implications, especially in terms of economic incentives.
‘Short-termism’ is a second element that the book identifies as damaging for democracies. In the current context of several concomitant challenges calling for swift responses, our societies, so the argument goes, struggle when it comes to developing long-term visions. Because democracies need temporal breadth, ‘short-termism’ is undermining them by propelling a time-scarcity mindset. For White, contrary to what is commonly held, short-termism is not an intrinsic feature of democracy, yet an element that makes it wither. In partial disagreement with the author, I would maintain that short-termism is an intrinsic trait of democracy that can indeed weaken it. Electoral politics is an important aspect here that White’s book does not satisfactorily address: while it is true that electoral politics is by definition concerned with shaping the future, its promises are often driven by short-term considerations inextricably linked to electoral results. This holds even more true in an age of social media when electoral promises directly and instantly reach millions of voters. In this sense, social media make electoral politics even more grounded in the present, thereby reinforcing short-termism.
How to counter the latter in a period in which it seems to be in such a robust shape?
(How) Can We Change Democracy?
Not only does In the Long Run discuss symptoms affecting democracies, it also intriguingly reflects on possible cures. So how could democracies overcome the existential threat stemming from the closing of the future and short-termism?
White argues that politics and politicians are increasingly remote and hard to reach, which contributes to the already low trust in democratic institutions. While a sense of powerlessness is no doubt widespread among citizens, I think the author falls into the trap of ‘presentism’ when arguing that the political sphere is ever less reachable. Again, I maintain he underestimates the role of social media and the internet in general. Among the many implications of social media on political communication and electoral politics, an important one is that politicians have gained visibility among citizens by developing communicative strategies aimed at engaging more directly with them. While this does not necessarily hold true in each case, it weakens the argument that politicians are even less reachable.
However, regardless of its extent, there clearly is a certain distance between politicians and voters. Could direct democracy, asks White, help to reduce the abovementioned sense of powerlessness? I concur with the author that direct democracy has the merit of increasing citizen participation, yet its tool par excellence, i.e. referendum, is a one-off moment normally devoted to one single issue and is not meant to be regularly repeated. This makes it hard for referenda to increase citizen engagement with the day-by-day exercise of power and management of complex policy agendas. Therefore, direct democracy may not be the most suitable form of government to tackle voters’ powerlessness. Instead, it may be more fruitful to reflect on how to change mechanisms of representation. Personally, I find the point on radical representative democracy compelling. Giving citizens the power to recall their representatives would not only help them re-gain trust, but also incentivize politicians to serve the common good.
Beyond discussing institutional reforms, White argues that a crucial way to shelter democracies is to defend values associated with them rather than ‘only’ the positive results they bring. The author contends that “strengthening associations that can build commitment over the longer term is how the future can be made open and shared” (p.208) is the most fruitful way to defend democractic values. Such an answer would be collective and consist in reconstructing shared futures as opposed to prevailing individualized ones. While the idea is potentially relevant, the book neither specifies the sorts of associations, nor how their reinforcement could take place. Does the author refer to civil society organisations, trade unions, independent collectives, or something else altogether? Most importantly, how can they be developed and empowered in a context where individualisation is dominating and the propensity to build share futures remains limited? In the Long Run leaves these two crucial questions unanswered.
By contrast, the author’s final insight that we should stop thinking about the end of democracy as it fuels a time-scarcity mindset, which in turn weakens democracy, is intriguing. While the self-fulfilling dynamic this alludes to seems plausible, the book does not discuss concrete, applicable ways to halt it. The strengthening of collective associations does not seem to suffice.
To conclude, In the Long Run is a timely and accessible book that has the crucial merit of problematizing the relationship between democracy and future imagination. While the book does an excellent job at identifying problems affecting this relationship, it has a harder time putting forward path-breaking solutions.
References
Shiller, J. (2019). Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events. Princeton University Press.
Suckert L. “Back to the Future. Sociological Perspectives on Expectations, Aspirations and Imagined Futures.” European Journal of Sociology. 63 (2022)/3:393-428. doi:10.1017/S0003975622000339
Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile Books.
