THE STATE WE ’RE IN
jonathan wolff
Tomorrow is Another Election
In the Long Run: T e Future as a Political Idea
By Jonathan White
(Prof le 264pp £20)
‘In the long run we are all dead,’ wrote John Maynard Keynes in his 1923 work A Tract on Monetary Reform . Ve r y s h a r p , Mr Keynes, perhaps so sharp you’ll cut yourself. T e remark is open to the riposte that although Keynes and his reader will be dead, future generations have a good chance of still struggling on – unless, of course, we’re talking about deep geologi- cal time. Whether Keynes was really as indif erent to the long term as this remark suggests is open to debate. As the author of the semi-utopian ‘Economic Possibili- ties for our Grandchildren’ (1930), he was prepared to gaze on a more distant future, predicting, among other things, a massively reduced working week by the year 2030.
Jonathan White’s deft and attractively written new book takes its title from Keynes’s quip. At its heart is an examination of the tensions that arise when democracy comes head to head with a range of long-term issues. T e sense that we are at the edge provides the context of contemporary politics, White argues. ‘Time is running out’, and we live under the threat of all-consuming emergencies. Climate change has taken over from imminent nuclear war as the most signif cant danger, but other spectres that haunt not just Europe but the entire world include out-ofcontrol economic and racial inequality, international instability, artif cial intelligence and, of course, pandemics. Democracy can often feel too slow-paced to deal with the crises staring us down. Does ef ective action on climate change, or banking reform, or pandemic preparedness really have to wait another electoral cycle or two for the right president or prime minister to come along?
Chapter by chapter, the book provides highly perceptive, engaging and sometimes startling analysis of six temporally related tensions. We time-travel through futures that are – as the chapter titles have it – open and closed, near and far, imagined and calculated, rational and impulsive, public and secret, shared and apart. T e book is rounded of with a couple of chapters ref ecting on emergencies and democracy, making the case that the consumerisation of politics has invited governing parties to be judged less on their capacity to advance a vision of a shared future than on what they will achieve within a single electoral cycle.
Political leaders have the challenge of maintaining stability while at the same time of ering visions of benef cial change. But institutions and constitutions, built to provide stability and to thwart disruptive change, can choke of productive innovation. Stability and change are uncomfortable companions. We a r e , i n ef ect, presented with two conf icting visions of the world: one in which politics consists of planning for the near future, under stable conditions; another of an open future where together we choose our own fate with many degrees of freedom. White’s claim is that democracy can go hand in hand with this second picture of an open future so long as the impulses of the imagination don’t result in the sort of chaos encouraged by, for example, the Italian Futurists in their ill-fated embrace of fascism.
Another tension that appears in several guises arises from the question of why today’s voters should accept the result of an election that goes against their immediate interests or preferences. T e answer – that this kind of system is for the best in the longer run – presupposes that those voting today have an interest in that longer run. Here we see why the idea of being part of a community or a project that will exist in some sort of shared future seems essential to democracy.
White’s range of references is wide and includes a fascinating melange of plotters, planners and romantics. In bringing his many arguments to life, he introduces obscure utopians, such as Louis-Sébastien Mercier, who in 1771 dreamed about the year 2440, and Mary Grif th, who in her book T ree Hundred Years Hence (1836) envisaged the advent of gender equality by the 22nd century. T ey take their place alongside more familiar, if still sometimes surprising, f gures and groups, including Robespierre, Bernard Mandeville and the Club of Rome. We visit not only Futurist Italy, but also Haiti, New Lanark and Silicon Valley, to pick a small sample, and always in the company of White’s lively, jargon-free, smartly written prose.
Although no single claim or thesis underpins the book as a whole, the general message is that democracy needs to take both an immediate and a longer perspective, but trends in electoral politics and broader political practice have encouraged only a shortterm framing, which makes democracy vulnerable to claims that rule by technical experts better suits our needs. At several points in the book, political parties and trade unions crop up as ways of providing the type of continuity that creates the conf dence in the future – a future beyond the lives of present citizens – that democracy requires. T e subliminal thesis of the book seems to be that threats to democracy go hand in hand with the type of short-term individualism associated with the decline in political parties and trade unions, and that democracy, parties and unions are all worth saving for both intrinsic and instrumental reasons. Yet this is more hinted at than drawn out explicitly.
White ends the book with suggestions for revitalising democracy. He is somewhat sceptical of ef orts to incorporate mechanisms of direct democracy into everyday politics, and instead of these recommends procedures that allow for the recall of representatives, as well as a type of transnational democracy in which parties in dif erent countries form alliances. While both are certainly worth ref ecting on, we have to wonder whether experience to date can of er much hope that these will prove ef ective. In British politics, campaigns for the recall of MPs often represent the most dismal form of politics, taking place in the murky twilight of corruption allegations and ideological capture of local party organisations by ill-tempered activists. International cooperation between parties has most often been associated on the Left with the Comintern and on the Right with fascist movements. But no doubt with suf cient thought and caution there will emerge more promising ways of developing both tendencies, or some other democratic elixir. We have to hope so, because White is convincing in making the argument that democracy is ailing and that the type of watchful waiting so often recommended by the local GP will only accelerate the problem.
february 2024 | Literary Review 11
