How Trump and the new right came to ‘own' the future – while apparently exploiting the past

The Guardian

18-02-2025

At first glance, today's politicians appear to have shifted their eyes from the future to the present and the past. The way to win power, it seems, is to make Maga-style appeals to the glories of yesteryear, while the best hope of keeping it is to pursue the short-term gains that will emerge before the next election. Observers of democracy have long said such patterns are inbuilt: for the 19th-century thinker Alexis de Tocqueville, 'It is this clear perception of the future, founded on enlightenment and experience, that democracy will often lack. The people feel much more than they reason.' Yet today's politicians, rather than being oblivious to the future, seem increasingly obsessed with it.
The ascendant far right in North America, Europe, Israel and beyond finds much of its appeal in stories about what lies ahead. Nativist desires to protect the west from cultural decline and demographic 'replacement', while ostensibly backward-looking, find their urgency in anxieties that it will soon be too late to change course, mixed with hopes of a political showdown. For the true believers, the future is a source of impending collapse, one that will sharpen identities, hierarchies and boundaries, something to accelerate towards. Today's identitarian new right is concerned less with the warm glow of the imagined past than with new possibilities that lie in store in 'the aftermath of the chaos', as the French new right activist Guillaume Faye described it.
The appeal of the future is clearer still among those strands of the techno-right flocking to Trump. Silicon Valley tycoons embrace ideas of 'disruption' that are all about upending the status quo for the sake of passage to something better. Their manifestos draw favourable links to figures such as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, leader of the early-20th century political and aesthetic movement of futurism, defined by its aversion to existing codes and a restless fixation on the new. Then and now, such futurists can be elusive about what they hope to achieve – tie yourself to a programme and you limit the disruptive potential. An aura of unpredictability helps keep opponents on the back foot. Historically, this elusiveness has been no barrier to influence. 'Without futurism,' said Mussolini, 'there would never have been a fascist revolution.'
Today's liberal centre and centre-left are preoccupied with the future in a quite different way – as something to calculate and control. Economic measures like GDP are constantly monitored for the trajectory towards growth or recession. Targets for inflation shape the activities of central banks. Public authorities invest in 'horizon scanning'and 'early warning' systems. Decarbonisation goals are set in response to the escalating effects of climate breakdown. Again, this suggests anything but indifference towards the future, but it is generally about particular policies rather than a broader programme of change. It is a managerial stance, focused on adapting to the probable and dodging the worst.
'Any transformative vision of a common future died in the early 1980s,' the political scientist Adam Przeworski writes. 'Social democrats moved from revolution to reform to coping with problems as they appear.' Whereas the disruptive outlook of the far right is deliberately ill focused, centred on vague anxieties and the thrill of upheaval, the centre left's approach is all too concrete. It is about particular targets and metrics, abstracted from broader ideas of change and the organisational forms that could support it. Rather than embrace a visionary approach, parties of the centre left more often define themselves against it, to burnish their credentials as pragmatists.
This technocratic approach to the future may be less offensive than its far-right equivalent, but it struggles to compete with it politically. One reason is that it is anodyne. A focus on targets and threats gives people no sense of being part of a collective endeavour, of standing for something in common. All the stuff of political engagement and debate – why the target should be a target, why the threat is a threat – is lost without a narrative of the values at stake. This is a future for experts and insiders, schooled in the practices of forecasting and calculation, with little role for the wider public. However frightening the apocalyptic outlook of the far right, its promise is the promise of a shared experience, of an assault on things we are said to hold dear.
A technocratic approach can also be self-defeating in policy terms. Render the future too concrete and it becomes harder to think about far-reaching structural change. In the language of the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, an ethics of probability tends to crowd out an ethics of possibility. Moreover, the precision of targets can make failures more glaring, as goals are missed and deadlines pass. This weakens commitment in adversity – a point made by sympathetic critics of a climate agenda centred on 'hitting the carbon numbers'. Arguably one of the preconditions of radical politics is an element of imprecision. The anticolonial thinker and activist Frantz Fanon once warned of the 'curious cult of detail' that could afflict the scientific mindset in politics, causing its bearer to lose sight of the bigger picture: 'Thus, if a local defeat is inflicted, he may well be drawn into doubt, and from thence to despair.'
Far-right ideas of breakdown and disruption prosper when the left gives up on more demanding visions of the future. In any context where people have become dissatisfied with the status quo, the promise to throw things up in the air is likely to do better than a politics of exact targets and metrics. It responds better to the yearning for change. And for those with economic and political power on their side, it is often enough to embrace the future as chaos: throw things in the air from a position of strength and you can assume they will land in a favourable way. Disruption needs no coherent ideology, no consistency from one day to the next. The challenge for the left is different. To pursue change against the grain of existing power relations, you need a vision of where you are going.
The left abandoned a programmatic approach to the future because of the belief it was distracting and dangerous. As the former SPD German chancellor Helmut Schmidt memorably put it, 'anyone who has visions should go to the doctor'. Sticking to tangible goals promised a more reasonable and credible politics. But in the age of far-right futurism, this calculus may no longer hold. To invert Tocqueville's logic: exactly because people need emotion as well as reason, they need the hope of a better future they can commit to and shape.
Jonathan White is professor of politics at LSE. His latest book is In the Long Run: the Future as a Political Idea (Profile).