Right now, according to British political theorist Jonathan White, the future seems very close. Our time horizon is closing in. Crises press in on us, shadowing contemporary politics with an “air of finality,” of “temporal claustrophobia.” Climate change, geopolitical instability, social inequality, out-of-control technology — together they invoke a sense that “time is running out,” forcing irrevocable decisions to be made in conditions of “time scarcity.”
Democracy is not made for such times, White warns in his latest book, In the Long Run. Immediate responses are demanded, deadlines imposed, but “democracy hits trouble when the short term predominates and time is felt to be scarce.” The urgent demands of emergencies, real or invented, are better matched to take-charge autocrats, opportunistic populists and unaccountable technocrats than to democracy’s sense that the future is open to collective shaping.
White is a student of time, and this book provides a disturbing, fascinating account, in equal parts brilliant and frustrating, of the “future as a political idea.” Popping and sparkling with provocative ideas couched in a rich vocabulary of time-based language, his book investigates how different ideas about the future have fuelled politics over more than two centuries, and specifically how these ideas affect democratic behaviours and institutions.
One of his key insights is that mismatch between the time-consuming properties of democracy and the time-scarce properties of crisis response. He is more concerned about this mismatch than he is about the consequences of these crises per se — higher global temperatures, for example, or the threat of nuclear extinction.
Democracy needs time for deliberation, consensus-seeking and institutional evolution. It responds to public opinion and tolerates dissent. Its outcomes are provisional, with losers accepting an electoral or legislative defeat today so as to rebuild for future victories.
Emergencies, by contrast, impose non-negotiable demands and strict deadlines. They foster impatience with disagreement and nuance. They bypass institutions and popular consent, calling forth impulsive, transformative, even rejectionist responses. Cue Trump and Musk. Cue also, in an interesting twist, the libertarians, “sovereign citizens” and others in fear of an ever-encroaching state.
Where democracy can deliver, White insists, is in dealing with the consequences of crisis. Democratic politics can still decide “the extent of the damage, who bears it, and how.” It can also ensure that many, not few, voices influence those decisions, improving both the quality and acceptability of the outcomes.
He’s right. But he overlooks the contribution of leadership. While he rightly emphasises the role of charismatic individuals in delivering autocratic outcomes, democratic leaders can help societies adapt to necessary change, identifying the right problems, allocating and compensating the losses, and containing disagreements within a democratic space.
In his book, and in various presentations accessible on You Tube, White traces the emergence since the late eighteenth century of different types of futurity that have animated political movements as diverse as socialism, fascism, neoliberalism, managerialism and militarism. His evidence ranges from the utopian fiction of the French post-revolutionary period to the Futurist manifestos of pre-Fascist Italy and Ford automobile advertisements in postwar America.
He identifies twelve types of future, which he arranges as dichotomous pairs: futures open and closed, near and far, imagined and calculated, rational and impulsive, public and secret, shared and apart. He describes each in its historical and political context and carefully sets out the implications for democratic practice.
The imagining of a far distant future, for example, was often premised on gradual but inevitable progress towards prosperity. This liberal-Enlightenment assumption of steady continuous improvement justified social injustice at home and colonialism abroad. The well-off were embedded in positions of privilege; the rest were enjoined to patience and passivity while awaiting the workings of the invisible hand or the trickle-down.
A focus on a nearer future, on the other hand, paired well with agency. Revolutionaries urged immediate disruption and a resetting of calendars to Year Zero; socialists and social reformers — Robert Owens in New Lanark, for instance — tried to bring forward the desired future by building model communities for the present-day workforce and their families.
Another of White’s dichotomies contrasts “shared” futures — those promoted by collective action through institutions such as government, parties and elections — with futures “apart,” promoted to individual consumers by advertising and, increasingly, algorithmic disaggregation.
Consumerism builds on dissatisfaction with the present, to be sure, but it does so with a conservative bias, suggesting that individual betterment can be pursued within the current arrangements, White argues. Individuals isolated by their digital news sources, online shopping options and political disengagement, have effectively chosen “exit” over “voice” — which further diminishes those very institutions best suited to promoting collective well-being.
White also critiques the “calculated” future imagined by market economists and state planners. Their method is predictive, using quantified measures to extrapolate the future from prevailing economic and demographic conditions. Pioneering entrepreneurs sought thereby to manage risk and reduce uncertainty for their commercial transactions; early socialist planners targeted improvements in production over five- and ten-year periods.
Again, White spells out the democratic implications. Calculative methods value technical expertise over (unpredictable, changeable) popular involvement. Trend analysis, with its requirement for continuity not change, snuffs out “democratic imagination.” Even democracy itself was made susceptible to the same process of quantified forecasting with the emergence in the 1930s of public opinion polling, inviting the citizen to become spectator rather than participant.
White’s critique of planning and targeting leads him to contentious conclusions, however. Have not the IPCC targets for carbon-emissions reduction, for example, produced better outcomes than could have been otherwise attained? Well, not necessarily:
By making net zero carbon emissions an overriding objective, authorities marginalise a range of other considerations that are no less relevant to human wellbeing and environmental protection — biodiversity, global health and economic inequality, for example…
By emphasising a particular set of variables within a delimited timeframe, targets and deadlines get us thinking more about the near future, crowded with specificities, and less about the further horizon and the more general, incalculable goals that belong to it.
But this surely puts purity ahead of practice. Targeting, precisely because it is designed to constrain contemporary choices, might fail to win prior democratic assent but provides a focus for necessary priority action. Retaining an open future full of incalculable options provides no roadmap, no agenda, no cause around which to mobilise, no guide to the complex trade-offs that are the essence of democratic politics. If everything is to be pursued, then nothing may get done.
In a similar vein, ever reluctant to cede democratic control, White is also uneasy about central bank independence:
A bank can do unpopular things, and can keep doing them consistently over time, no matter how many elections occur. The place of procedures and institutions of debate and disagreement and of public participation in general, is thus weakened.
This black-and-white approach fails, I think, to acknowledge the desirability of authoritative institutions — central banks and Future Funds, electoral commissions and, equally, armies and high courts — operating in ways that are independent of immediate populist control. Strong legislation, deep conventions and transparent procedures allow democrats to retain ultimate control without requiring democratic consent for each shift in interest rates.
Despite these reservations, White’s insistence on the importance of future time is a welcome addition to political science research, which is often conducted as if it involved taking snapshots of stationary objects.
Political parties, for instance, are typically analysed as networks of relationships between their various components — elected members of parliament, branch members in the community, officials in head office. This approach also highlights a well-recognised democratic virtue of parties: they embrace many actors spanning the whole of society, providing linkages up and down the ladder of accountability from parliament to the grassroots.
But those static metaphors of networks and ladders neglect the dynamic character of parties. They change through time, in ways that political science recognises as path-dependent — that is, influenced by their past. Their history matters, and understanding how they were formed and the sequence of their development requires political science research more like shooting a documentary movie than taking a snapshot.
White pushes party research further, to consider not just their past but the character, distance and quality of their end point. Parties, he argues, can provide a consistent connection between policy and long-term vision. In his rich language of futurity, parties are redefined as “lasting communities of the like-minded, defining themselves by a vision that combines short- and long-term demands.” Their democratic project is continuing, sustained, and “the prospect of elections-to-come gives reason to build a forward-looking programme.”
White desperately wants to see responsive and programmatic parties survive, but his suggestions for nurturing such rare orchids are frustratingly weak: recall mechanisms and more frequent elections to promote accountability among elected representatives; more intra-party democracy. His most intriguing idea is for parties to transcend national boundaries and compete in multiple local and regional campaigns under the same banner and organisational structure. Climate politics, he observes, is already transnational in character and may be ripe for this kind of development. (He appears not to have heard of the Greens.)
Some specifically Australian innovations — Saturday voting, compulsory voting and preferential voting — would have added to his range of options while broadening his focus beyond Europe.
It is always the political theorist’s prerogative to soar above practical problems of implementation. If White’s prescriptions are weak, he has still written a brilliant and provocative diagnosis. •
In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea
By Jonathan White | Profile | $39.99 | 272 pages
