There's lots of bad juju swirling around out there right now. The interminable health care debate may finally come to an end this week, although almost certainly without any semblance of a real public plan that could drive actual costs down (see my two posts on health care, here and here). The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are actually now on the upswing, with Obama painted into a corner by his own rhetoric as a candidate (i.e., 'we took our eye off the real ball, Afghanistan'). The employment picture continues to be bleak, as we covered last time. And lurking in the background of all these immediate concerns is the churning degradation of the world's natural systems, especially climate (a four degree Celsius warming is now looking like a possibility within 50 years, an utterly terrifying prospect).

As things continue to "go awry" (to vastly understate it), conservatives and conservative thinking seem to be gaining the upper hand, for various reasons. Democrats and liberals are on the ropes, as crazy as that seems, although often for different reasons. Partially, Dems are in trouble because of the squandered opportunities of the opening months of the new administration. With huge majorities and real mandates from the people last fall, Democrats have proceeded to foul up their messaging, drag their feet, and offer nothing but token resistance to the consistent attacks by the GOP. The cynics, including yours truly, tend to see these Democratic struggles not as mistakes, but actually as smoke-screens for a party that is completely owned by corporate interests. Thus the wailings and moanings of real "liberals," who now realize that hope alone is not something that can sustain a political movement for very long. Many lefties now understand that true progressive social and economic change is not on the agenda for this new regime.

Now, to be fair, Obama has only been office for 10 months or so, and he inherited an epic trail of Dubya detritus to pick up after. But it is impossible to deny that the new President's bark is much more lofty than his bite. Certainly, he is intelligent and thoughtful, and he takes his time before formulating policies and pronouncements. And clearly, the new Nobel winner is much better than his predecessor at marshaling international cooperation and good will. But his baseline caution and pragmatism, especially in the two areas which are doing more to bankrupt the country than any others (our two wars and profligate health care spending), are starting to look starkly dissonant from the direness of circumstances on the ground. And regular people can sense this mismatch between smooth Obama oratory and the brutality of socioeconomic disintegration. 

Which brings us back to the strange ascendancy and resonance of conservative thinking right now, even in the midst of their political minority status. What gives? It's not that they're offering anything positive as an alternative to the Democratic plans. In that respect, they're playing the usual role of a just-ousted minority party: decline to participate or even obstruct, in hopes of leveraging that into larger-than-usual reversals in the mid-terms. But something else is giving the (sometimes-kooky) conservative rhetoric more cache than usual, and I think it has something to do with the lack of a real Liberal Utopia.

Utopian thinking, or "utopistics," if we want to get really jargony, is a much-maligned phenomenon. We tend to think of utopian writing as a relic of the past, belonging to a time when the technological tools to actually create a heaven-on-earth were not fully developed yet. Why bother dreaming about flying cars and wonder-crops when we now actually have helicopters and bio-engineering? Similarly, the utopian genre itself has also given way to a more mature style of speculative literature: full-fledged science fiction and fantasy, including powerful dystopian visions of the future and complete parallel universes. And finally, but still closely related, the sheer visual power of the modern media can literally let us see a multitude of pictures of our hypothetical future. Movies, television, video games, CGIs -- these all bombard us every day with a swirling simulacrum of exciting stimuli, smashing through the hard lines of time, space, interior/exterior, and consciousness itself. In a very real sense, we are coming to mirror internally, as individuals, the contours of our electronic, external culture technologies. We are becoming our stimuli. But that is a different story, for another post.

For now, I don't mind conceding that utopian postulates of a better society stand little chance at holding the attention of many folks when stacked up against the sensorial intensity of our mass media. But it is important to recognize how much of our future-shaping capabilities we have surrendered to corporate media products. The endless images with which we are inundated really only have one vision of the future: a maximum number of consumers buying the maximum amount of stuff. Sure, that stuff will be greener and cooler and more 'environmentally-friendly,' but it's still all subsumed in an utterly-normal consumerist delivery mechanism. Any collective ideas about what we need to and could become as a society, beyond simply a society that consumes more and better loot, are completely engulfed by the private utopias of material fulfillment. 

Now, real utopian thinking, as opposed to corporate images of the future painted in the hues of breakthrough products, is something that directly challenges all of the current power arrangements at once, through the depiction of a familiar "nowhere." This nowhere of utopia is not like science fiction, in that utopian depictions tend to be more concerned with day-to-day power structures and the simple matters of making a living. As Paul Ricoeur describes it, utopias are the counterpart to ideologies in the social imagination. Whereas ideologies are absolutely essential in making sense of the vast world of stimuli around us, they tend to serve an inherently conservative function. Ideological stagnation is common. In this understanding, utopias are thus essential for breaking through the conservative function of ideology and thus driving substantive social change. Here's an earlier post on this subject from last fall.

Right now, what we have is a crisis in utopian thinking. The only alternatives are the private utopias of individual consumption, which bob on top of an overall matrix of techno-optimism, and the nostalgic utopias of conservatism (think small towns, farms, sweat-equity, lily-whiteness, English-only, Norman Rockwell, Thomas Kinkade, etc.). As the economy continues to implode, the utopias of personal consumption are further out of reach, ceding the high ground to the more conservative visions. As tax shortfalls and budget deficits close out our dreams for public action through government, there is automatic legitimacy to the conservative feeling that we are 'moving too fast,' and that we have forgotten what is really important in life and society. In this state of affairs, turning back the clock and dismantling the wasteful liberal projects of the last half century seems more sensible than ever. This is what is giving conservatism the upper hand right now. The unraveling of the "American Algorithm," as I call it, is casting doubt on everything we have done in the last 40 years. As the private utopia of individual consumption, facilitated by robust economic growth (which is itself a shoddy utopistic device), loses its moral and actual tangibility, the Kinkadian utopias of conservatism fill the breach. And needless to say, nativistic myths and visions of the future can turn ugly very quickly.

Of course, as regular readers of this blog can guess, one of the most important liberal tasks must be  the crafting of a brand new utopian vision of the future, to break through the paralysis of conservative ideologies, as well as the empty "progressive" utopias of continued economic growth and consumption (only "green-ified" and purified). This new utopisitc work has incredible potential, because in the current media landscape, it need not be limited to literature or philosophy. There are fantastic opportunities to create "Embodied Utopias," or real communities that enact a more collective form of living and offer a truly different path for the future.

As Daniel Quinn notes, "a culture is a people enacting a story." In Quinn's amazing book Ishmael, there is literally no more important power than the story we enact, the vision we live out every day, in our working and eating and resting and loving. And in current media conditions, where images and words and actions can be broadcast to millions or billions of people simultaneously, the power to spread a new story is unparalleled in human existence. New behaviors and patterns of living can be altered more rapidly than ever, as the wildfire of learning by imitation spreads at broadcast and broadband speed. 

The hard part in this is not the logistics, or the technology, or the public involvement. For God's sake, we've got reality shows of every conceivable stripe on hundreds of television stations. And we have millions of people voting for the best or worst singer or juggler or whatever the hell it is that they vote for. And we have viral videos and blogs and video-logs surging all across the planet within days or minutes. 

No, the difficult part is finding a group of people who are willing to directly challenge the old social forms and put a radically-new Embodied Utopia into the public spotlight, regardless of its corporate revenue-potential or political popularity. There must be a brave cohort willing to tell this new story.