For the last six months, I’ve been obsessing on and off about a question that I first heard posed by Robert Cruickshank and Jenifer Fernandez Ancona: What would a twenty-first-century, progressive version of the American Dream look like? The twentieth-century American Dream–of work inevitably rewarded and prosperity for all who deserve it–seems more like a fairy tale now, in an age when almost no one feels financially stable and when many Americans have come to see the simple act of retirement as an impossible fantasy. The need to replace and rejuvenate the American Dream was the subject of a session Cruickshank and Ancona held at a regional RootsCamp in San Francisco last November. Since then, I’ve been seeing the vacuum created by the lack of an answer to their question everywhere I look.
The most obvious place it appears is in the repeated spatial metaphors used by the President and by Democrats generally to describe their agenda. We need to go forward, not backward. In D, not R. In the right direction, not off on the wrong track. But the ship of state turns slowly. President Obama has said that, while he may sometimes zig to one side and zag to the other, he sets his course by the North Star in his quest to reach the land beyond the horizon.
This type of abstract language is almost impossible to avoid, of course. It has, moreover, an important function: it is meant to inspire hope for a future that simply cannot be exhaustively envisioned at present. And in the hands of an orator as skilled as the President, it can be extremely compelling. But it is so abstract that it can sometimes seem to cede any attempt to imagine the concrete, visceral reality of the future at all. The present struggle is real, sometimes all too real, but the future remains a bit misty. This contrast leads to a vague utopianism that seems to me to be at the heart of the often-remarked “messaging” problem that the Democrats have been struggling with since 2009: The American people simply don’t have a fully realized understanding of where their elected leaders want to lead them, or what that Promised Land will look like once we get there.
Conservatives have a far easier time communicating their goals in terms of place. After all, although the land they want to take us back to is one that never existed, it is nonetheless well defined in the cultural imaginary. When I’m in a snarky mood (which is often), I describe it as Petaluma, California (the filming location of both American Graffiti and Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign commercials). It’s a world in which the old American Dream still makes sense, in which everyone who works hard and lives decently prospers. And everyone is white.
I should emphasize that I don’t mean to single out elected officials or the Democratic Party for criticism here. The void where a contemporary version of the American Dream should be has been a general problem for pretty much all current progressive movements (I’m going to insist on that plural). I’ve been struck by the fact that most progressive organizations and leaders–although they use narratives constantly to drive individual campaigns–lack a broad, overarching, contextualizing metanarrative that is sufficiently ambitious, coherent, compact, and compelling to drive an entire movement or set of movements. A new American Dream would satisfy that need quite handily.
One example of the problem among many: At the national RootsCamp that took place in D.C. last December, a group working for Net Neutrality complained of the difficulty of organizing around such a complex issue. The battles surrounding Net Neutrality–even a workable definition of the term–are too complicated to convey to potential activists or supporters in a simple e-mail or sound bite. By the time you finish explaining what the issues are, what the policy options are, what the current proposals are, what the stakes are…you’ve lost most of your audience, and the rest still doesn’t know exactly what side it’s on.
Offhand, I can’t think of any important issue that isn’t that complex. And responsible organizers do not seek to obscure such complexity. But complications would become more manageable if there were a comprehensible roadmap toward our larger destination underlying each of the various marches to the various way stations on the journey. A larger narrative can clarify the ultimate import of labyrinthine laws and regulations (if not the laws themselves). Without it, effective grassroots organizing around the complexities of public policy is almost impossible, not least because it becomes so bloody difficult to discern the hair’s-breadth difference between victory and defeat.
[Here’s the obligatory Theory-laden paragraph, for those interested in such things:] As a good post-structuralist, I am of course aware that metanarratives are no longer all they’re cracked up to be and haven’t been for a long time now. (Jean-François Lyotard famously defined postmodern society way back in 1979 as being characterized by an “incredulity towards metanarratives,” a description that if anything applies more than ever.) Certainly, it would take a constantly renewed act of will to believe in anything as grand as a new version of the American Dream, or even to articulate one with a straight face. Postmodern society is too fragmented and plural to be neatly sewn together with an overarching story. The world of global late capitalism is too complex to wrap one’s mind around, which (as Fredric Jameson argued) is why old-style metanarratives tend to be replaced in contemporary society by stories of conspiracy, stories whose purpose is precisely to suggest the contours of a shadowy and nebulous world system that’s too big to grasp. In short, it is simply beyond the imaginations of most of us to come up with a story that both provides us with a useable map of the entirety of the world we inhabit and places us believably within that world as protagonists–as agents capable of meaningful action–which is the purpose in this context of any metanarrative.
So, that’s the problem I (and others) have been thinking about lately. How do we build some version of the American Dream that can make sense of, support, and even drive progressive movements in the twenty-first century, in the face of a world too complex for metanarratives and a populace all but incapable of believing in them? Tune in next week for…The Solution!
Hmmmm. Interesting stuff. You really do sound like a recovering academic. I consider myself almost a fully recovered academic. One of the best things, for me, about majoring in philosophy was getting about as deep into social/political thot (I spell it that way to take the “ugh” out) as possible, and realizing that there just wasn’t much there, particularly as a guide to how to live my life. I realize that there is a purpose to engaging in philosophical discourse – the Founding Parents would have been lost without the Enlightenment. But it’s not for me.
Insofar as I am interested in articulating a vision of how our society is transforming, I actually look to physics. I think we are making a transition from an understanding of how society works based on Newtonian mechanics – very orderly, understandable, like clockwork – to a relativistic one, i.e. characterized by uncertainty and probability, rather than certainty and stability. As a senior at Swarthmore, I wrote a paper for Phil Weinstein’s Modern Comp Lit seminar about how Joyce, in Ulysses, achieved in literature what Einstein achieved in physics. Einstein understood that space and time were part of a continuum – Joyce understood the same thing about form and content.
The best articulation that I have encountered to translate relativistic mechanics into an understanding of how society works is complexity theory. Unfortunately, I also haven’t seen much really interesting work being done there yet, and I also haven’t seen much expression of it in popular culture. or at least the intelligentsia.
I also think we are making a transition from two-dimensional thinking to three-dimensional thinking (and I don’t mean 3D movies), but I REALLY haven’t seen anything about that.
And, of course, it would be all but impossible to translate any of this into any kind of a politically useful soundbite. But I also don’t worry about that, because Barack Obama is president, he’s doing a good job, and lots of good things are happening in politics right now.