The big story there, unwritten by much of the media, was a huge surge in support for a green/left offering a bold vision of a different kind of country. This is where the third story comes in: the recent election in Bregman’s home country of the Netherlands. But Bregman is right to call progressives out – and he echoes Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in his calls for us to move away from what they call “folk politics” and demand what some might call the impossible. When the Government is attempting to hack away at the welfare state and deregulate the entire economy it’s hard not to be in defensive mode. There are, of course, reasons for underdog socialism to have thrived.
As Bregman points out so well the left simply haven’t been offering a vision of how we’d do things differently – instead finding ourselves trapped in a period of what he calls “underdog socialism”, where we accept the premise of the mainstream debate and fail to put forward serious alternatives.
And we have a jobs market that’s changing beyond recognition. We have an economy that functions in some traditional sense (it’s growing a little) but leaves young people at the bottom of a ladder with rungs so far apart that they stand little chance of climbing. The first was that child poverty in Britain is now at four million – back to 2010 levels – and the second was the continued rise in zero hours jobs. Three stories really struck me last week as I read Utopia for Realists. But it isn’t just his writing style or use of case studies which has made Bregman’s book take off as it has – it’s also tapped into something big happening in politics: the rise of right-wing populism and the consistent failure of the left to paint a picture of the kind of world we want to live in.
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