The progressive trilemma

Humans imagine the future. We know it will happen, want some control over it and try to plan ahead for it. We also tell stories about our world to make sense of it and our decisions. As a result, we like big ideas and strong leaders that point towards a believable and positive future. They are reassuring, making the messy and unknowable clear and knowable, enabling us to plan ahead and invest effort.

Some people crave power and influence.

When enough of the world has strong leadership and a shared, positive idea about the future, people can be happy and confident about what they are doing and why.

Personalities that crave power and influence align themselves with the direction of travel and use it for self aggrandising but ultimately benign purposes.

When the world lacks singular direction and, instead, is a collection of competing and conflicting stories, people feel insecure and angry as they are unable to plan ahead or feel confident about investing effort into the future.

Personalities that crave power employ populism, focusing on sewing anger and confusion, in order to receive support from the angry and confused. Attacking such populists head on as immoral liars does not work as the anger and confusion they are tapping into is real. The only way out, is to tell a bigger story that encompasses all of the day’s major stories and yet elevates itself above them to paint a positive, believable vision of the future and how to get there.

The challenge for progressives is therefore to marry believable, positive and big. Pairing two of these is easy, but joining all three requires intellectual heavy lifting.

Believable and positive, but small are the stories of individual, business or community endeavour and success we hear every day. They can inspire but will not change the fundamentals.

Believable and big, but negative, is the climate crisis, mass population movements and threat of war. They are all real but not compelling.

Positive and big, but far-fetched, is the promise of a big-spending government that solves all our problems without impoverishing us or restricting our freedoms.

Taking on this challenge also means accepting that the populist formula is, unfortunately, easier. Just think of all the negative, small and believable ideas you can, how depressing they are and how much you want to argue they are wrong, and therefore inadvertently highlight.

So, what is the believable, positive and big story, and what are the policy ideas that make it tangible? That’s the challenge.