13 November 2025. Politics | Futures
Party politics is busy realigning itself // Ten theses on futures thinking. [J2T #652]
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My apologies, again, for the erratic posting schedule. It turns out that editing a book is time consuming. Which is a shame, because I have posts stacking up.
1: Party politics is busy realigning itself
It’s been an interesting few weeks for politics, or at least for elections. But Just Two Things tries not to write about stuff that you can read in the newspapers—I gave up journalism because I was more interested in structure than headlines and what wasn’t known then as “hot takes”.
(Zohran badge: via Redbubble.)
So I’m more interested in Zohran Mamdani’s Mayoralty election win in New York, and the by-election win in Wales by Plaid Cymru (over Reform UK) in what was a safe Labour seat, for what they tell us about politics more broadly.
The first port-of-call, then, is a report issued by the US NGO Democracy 2076 last week. Democracy 2076
provides strategies to inspire renewed faith in pro-democratic, pro-topian futures that moves people to action in service of a resilient democracy.
And usual disclosures: I have met the Director and Deputy Director, and some of my colleagues at School of International Futures contributed to the report I’m going to discuss here.
Of course, promoting faith in democracy and action in its service is a tough row to hoe in the US right now. But part of their starting point, in the report and more generally, is the observation by Walter Burnham that in the US, the main political parties have gone through significant alignment every 30-40 years or so. Democracy 2076 sees us as going through that moment right now: in other words, there is everything to play for.
Long term change
Theories of long-term change are like catnap to futurists in general, or at least to me in particular. Realignment theory is a bit controversial; there are multiple theories, not just Burnham’s; and there’s been a lot of critique of it. All the same, there’s a similar (and perhaps connected) theory by the US political scientist Gary Gerstle, of “political orders”, which comes into this space from political economy rather than political science or election analysis.
Gerstle similarly sees 40-year periods in which there is a dominant view of how the world works, which then shapes law, regulation, institutional behaviour, and so on. He’s written and edited books about both the New Deal and neoliberalism.
As he puts it in an interview:
Political orders are complex networks of institutions, constituencies, big-pocketed donors, and interest groups. If they are successful in establishing themselves, they can have enormous staying power and can enforce a kind of ideological hegemony on politics, not just on members of their own party but on members of the opposition.
Being an historian Gerstle is careful to suggest that this isn’t an iron law of history—as far as he’s concerned we just happen to have seen two forty year-ish periods.1
But it useful to consider why these periods of “ideological hegemony” come to an end:
A political order usually breaks up as a result of an economic crisis big and severe enough to cause a governing crisis, during which existing formulas for managing the economy and the polity no longer work. Chaos and failure to enact successful policies, and the popular protest that results from such failures, create an opportunity for political ideas long consigned to the margins to move to the mainstream.
So it’s probably worth my while saying that I suspect that the political science theories about realignment are symptoms of these deeper changes.
So this is a good point to go back to Democracy 2076 and some of the detail in their report. In my view it’s unnecessarily complicated, although I can see what they’re trying to do. They’ve identified 17 tensions, under six headings.2 There’s no simple way to unpack them all, but the headings are: identity; geography and economics; governance and authority; values; demographics and generations; and political structures and international dynamics.
They also have five scenarios, although the relationship between the tensions and the scenarios is a bit uneven.
And some of the tensions are problematic, in that it is possible to believe one end of them from completely different political positions. For example, the very first one: “education as a social equalizer” vs “education as a status reinforcer”. You can believe the second of these be true, and that this is a good thing—or that it is true, but a bad thing, from either a Marxist or populist position of critique.
Political realignment
In a post that’s partly behind a paywall, the British blogger Joxley goes to the other extreme and suggests that politics is in the process of realigning from a left-right (primarily economic) axis to an open-closed (primarily attitudinal) axis:
The definitions are contested and fluid, but broadly mean those who are internationalist and committed to the global liberal order on one side, versus those who are insular, national, and nativist on the other.
If Democracy 2076 is a bit too complicated, I think that this is a bit too simple. When you think about the Political Compass, say, it adds a second social dimension (authoritarian-liberal) to the economic dimension that runs from left to right.
(Source: Political Compass)
Joxley is interested in the future of the centre-right party, specifically in Britain, which has historically been the most successful ruling party in Europe. But it is also a creature of economic alignment, and he wonders where it can go in an open-closed world.
But I think what might be happening here is a bit more straightforward. The open-closed axis looks quite like the authoritarian-liberalism axis in the Political Compass, with open at the bottom and closed at the top. The economic axis is still there, but has been rewritten by the Global Financial Crisis and its aftermath.
The ‘credentialled precariat’
The demographic-structuralist theorist Peter Turchin doesn’t normally write about current affairs (a recent post focused on the impact of the invention of horse spurs on empire size in the middle ages). But he made an exception this week. In a post he referenced his book End Times, where he wrote about the growth of the ‘credentialed precariat’, who have degrees but are also saddled with debt and high living costs. (The most recent group of degree holders is also being squeezed out of entry-level work by companies using AI as a short-run cost-cutting device.)
In End Times, Turchin characterised American politics—this is the broad brushstrokes version—as benefitting only a small fraction of the electorate:
Ten years ago the political landscape in the US was dominated by two parties: one of the “1 percent” (wealth holders) and one of the “10 percent” (credential-holders). Both parties focused on advancing the interests of the ruling class, while ignoring those of the 90 percent.
We know how that ended up. Trump channelled that into the capture of the Republican Party by MAGA. In places like New York, degree holders are less likely to opt for right-wing populist politics. But looking at one of Democracy 2076’s ‘tensions’, both might agree that current institutions—particularly economic institutions—need dismantling rather than mere improvement.
Turchin reviews Mamdani’s exit poll numbers and says that they
provide strong support for the idea that Mamdani’s win was largely propelled by the young credentialed precariat: the youth with college degree, or higher, earning just enough to live on the edge.
And he points to a piece by John Carney in Commonplacemagazine, written when Mamdani won the Democrat nomination against expectations:
The neighborhoods where Mamdani won [the nomination are] zones of post-industrial drift, populated by nonprofit managers, freelance writers, overburdened teachers, and software engineers who live paycheck to paycheck despite six-figure incomes. This is a class increasingly defined by contradiction: culturally elite, economically unstable, and structurally blocked from mobility.
So all of this suggests to me that there is still an economic axis here, but it runs from something like ‘inclusive economics’ to ‘extractive economics’, depending on who the economy is being run for. We can take ‘extractive’ as a shorthand for a whole range of rentier business models, including debt-driven private equity ownership and enshittification by Big and Small Tech, which have been encouraged by the lax regulation and weak competition law under the neoliberal ‘regime’.
(Source: Andrew Curry/ Just Two Things)
What’s striking about this simple, even simplistic, diagram, is that it still tells you a lot about the potential for political realignment. In the US, generally, the Democrats are still trapped in the world of Wall Street and Big Tech, in the top right. In the UK, the Labour party lurches around the map, sometimes Open, sometimes Closed (cf Palestine Action), but definitely in hock intellectually to the rentiers of the Extractive economy, whom they wrongly associate with economic growth.
Trump, meanwhile, talks Closed/Inclusive while doing Closed/Extractive, which is one the reasons his polling numbers have plummeted.
Political energy
And all the energy is on the other side, both in the US and the UK. Mamdani is Open/Inclusive, while MAGA is Closed and against Extractive: although it lacks a coherent economic philosophy, it is largely dependent economically on those bits of the US government system that try to be inclusive (and which Trump and Russell Vought are trying to dismantle). In the UK, the Green Party (and in Wales, Plaid Cymru) are clearly Open/Inclusive, which is why they are peeling polling support away from Labour. You might notice a pattern here.
In contrast, the hard-right Reform UK mirrors Trump; certainly Closed but disguising a love of Extraction with populist economic rhetoric about Inclusiveness.
This contradiction suggests that populist right wing parties will tend to come unstuck if they get too close to government. In the UK we’re seeing some of this in the councils that Reform UK won earlier this year. At heart, they are creatures of crisis that thrive as a ‘political order’ is breaking up.
And in turn this might suggest that Joxley is wrong about the prospects for the centre-right, although it will need more imagination than they have shown signs of in the last decade. But you could see a form of Conservatism that represented a light version of the Closed axis combined with some traditional support for more local businesses, rather than hedge funds.
And if you need a reminder of what’s at stake here, this is Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post cover on the day after Mamdani won—and no, this is not a parody. The picture on the right shows the Soviet image that the Post’s designer stole it from. Because there’s nothing about ‘Open’ or ‘Inclusive’ that is good for Rupert Murdoch’s political or business interests.
(The New York Post marks Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the election for New York City’s Mayor with Soviet-flavoured propaganda.)
Thanks to Ian Christie for sharing the Joxley post.
2: Ten Theses About The Future
Guest post by Paul Graham Raven
Paul Graham Raven is a futurist and writer who has also been a colleague, on and off, the past decade or so. Perhaps because he’s also has a doctorate in futures, he has a more heterodox view of futures than many of those who work in the field. He published these Ten Theses About the Future on his blog, Worldbuilding Agency, and I’m sharing them here with his permission.
(Detail from Jannis Kounellis, Senzo Titolo, 2005. Museum of Contemporary Art, Naples. Photo: Andrew Curry, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
The moment to change a mental model is the moment at which it becomes an obstacle to understanding rather than a scaffold for it.
The relatively recent emergence (and strange architecture) of future tenses, in those languages that even have such a thing, rather implies that human beings got along without “the future” for the vast majority of our existence. Getting an idea into a language is much easier than removing one; changing the way an idea is thought—and the ways it is thought with—is also hard, but presumably less so.
Jonathan White’s In the Long Run argues that the rhetoric of urgency is politically damaging, and a driver of the very short-termism that it proposes to correct. Orienting toward “the future” as a location in time—again, definitive and singular, even if also implicitly plastic and partially open—does something strange to our attention.
Once you’ve tacitly agreed to a linguistic map of time in which there is one definitive and inevitable future, you’ve also tacitly agreed to a political struggle over what it will look like—over which future, or rather whose future, we’ll all end up inhabiting.
The problem with “the future” is that it has become fetishised, a sort of rhetorical obsession—like a meme, if you like, just bigger and slower than the pop-cultural blips that we tend to associate with that term. Indeed, “the future” is very much a meme in the original Dawkinsean sense of that term: an idea which has successfully colonised human beings as a means to its own reproduction. But what was once a symbiosis has become something much closer to a parasitism.
Put another way, we could say that “the future” is discursively over-privileged. It’s not that thinking and talking about “the future” is bad, so much as that we spend too little time, relatively speaking, thinking about the past. But of course “the past” actually bears a lot of the same conceptual shortcomings as “the future”: definitive, singular, monolithic, etc. (It’s not that conservatism doesn’t have utopias; it’s that conservatism’s utopias are always located behind us in time, rather than ahead.)
The definitive future began to solidify and dominate during the period in which scientific modernity was gleefully dismantling the old assumptions about what had gone before: as “the past” became less a source of comfort and continuity, perhaps we sought those things in its opposite?
We would do well to pay much greater attention to history—not as a replacement for the attention we currently pay to futurity, but rather as its counterbalance. Our problem is not in the duality between these two orientations, but rather in the rigidly either/or approach we take to them: the assumption that we can only be looking one way or the other. We can of course look both ways, as our parents wisely taught us to do when crossing the road.
When we over-privilege the future or the past, what we lose is the present—and the present is the only temporal location in which action can be taken. The future and the past both encase us in the amber of causality: either we’re trapped in the solidified decisions and structures that were laid down before us, or we’re treading a tightrope toward some over-hyped yet under-examined sociotechnical omega point. Both these attitudes are narrowly determinist: call them fate and destiny, respectively.
But in the eternal words of Sarah Connor: “there is no fate but that we make”. For all their ostensibly being about “the future”, the Terminator movies—or at least the first two; I’ve not kept up with the bloating expansion of that franchise—are trying to tell us the only way we can shape tomorrow is by doing good things today.
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A couple of quick reflections from me. The first is that some of this reminds me of a phrase by Wendy Schultz, that “good futurists also need to be good historians.” When I am explaining the underlying principles of futures work, I sometimes quote Paul Saffo, that “you should look back at least twice as far as you look forward”. But in practice, that’s nowhere near enough. You have to look back at least a hundred years, and go with the flow if (say) a workshop participant wants to go back further.
In turn this links to ideas about the long-term present. The radical futurist Elise Boulding used to talk about “the 200-year present”—which stretched a hundred years back and a hundred years forward, covering about seven generations. The notion of “the thick present” is also gaining currency in the futures world. It was popularised by Robert Poli in an influential paper, and the important point about it is that the ‘thick present’ is entangled with both future and past—there is never a clean temporal break between these—and that it contains “latents”, which, if acted on can in turn influence the way the future unfolds.
Other writing: music
One of my other recent distractions has been moving the modest folk music site I write for, now called Salut Folk, from Typepad to Wordpress after Typepad announced that it was closing at the end of September. This was something of a technical education, but the new site looks a lot better and can showcase more of our articles.
Since the re-launch we’ve had pieces about the English singer Katherine Priddy, obituaries for the great British bassist Danny Thompson and the Scots singer Archie Fisher, something on Robert Plant’s new folk album, and a three-part series marking the 50th anniversary of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue. But since it is the week of the Armistice, let me mark here instead Eric Bogle’s anti-war song ‘No Man’s Land’, in June Tabor’s fine version.
j2t#652
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My best explanation of why 40 years might be more than just empiricism is that it represents the two halves of a working life: the first when you pay your dues and get acculturated, the second when at least some people get to change the the things they hated in the first part. It’s worth noting that in their Fourth Turning model, Strauss and Howe propose an eighty year generational cycle that goes from crisis to crisis in eighty years, via a rebuilding stage, a stage where the benefits of rebuilding are enjoyed, and an unravelling stage—effectively positioning a mini crisis in the middle. As a systems model, it follows the same pattern as other models. But their timings of each phase, which go back to the middle ages, are suspiciously post-hoc, and the generational mechanisms they propose are unclear.
Our short term memory can hold 3-4 things in it, which is a good guide to the level of complexity that people can absorb when you explain concepts to them. Which is also why we write down shopping lists.