Why my utopians vs. conformists distinction is important

[dropcap]R[/dropcap]emember 2016? Our Candidate of the Left ⁽¹⁾ was Bernie Sanders. After having defeated the other Candidate of the Left, Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose election would have delivered nothing to the Left, Sanders was cheated of victory by election fraud. Sanders then endorsed Clinton, who then lost to Trump. And Trump delivered the Left less than nothing.

So how is it that all the nice leftists acting in lock-step conformity (the optimists call it “unity”) ended up giving themselves less than nothing? Explanations don’t seem to provide solutions. “Oh it was Hillary’s fault.” So what happens next time the Democrats suppress the Left and then lose the election? All of these analyses of “the Left” are frustrating.

Things look more optimistic when looking from a “utopians vs. conformists” perspective. Bernie Sanders appears as a mild utopian who chose a conformist stance for the November election. The problem is more clear: the Left has no basis for political participation because its members subscribe to a politics that is not utopian enough. People are politically empowered when they believe they can get what they want from politics. It’s the utopian energy, energy fed by utopian dreams, that distinguishes meaningful politics from the neoliberal politics that has dominated America over the past forty years. Conformism is a waste of time. The existing system is doomed. As I suggested in the last diary:

Conformist politics is not a real defense against bad utopianism, nor does it pose any serious response to forthcoming disaster. Climate change? Death of the oceans? Global economic collapse? Nuclear war? The conformist response is at best a steady application of band-aids to cure a cancer. Conformists can only be comfortable with the overall inadequacy of their doctrines in light of their total possession of power.

So what if, instead of spending all that money on weapons systems, the government spent it on medicine? Think of it decades into the future. We’d have cures for all the illnesses which currently take our loved ones from us. We’d be able to choose our genders and ages and go in and “have it done.”

So what if we took all of the land used for empty parking lots and devoted it to gardening cooperatives? We’d all have a seasonal supply of free organic food, that’s what.

So what if all the energies currently devoted to “finding revenue sources” were put to use building sustainable housing? Maybe we could leave the forests alone, and they could grow back.

So what if everyone were doing something productive instead of using power to devising scams? We wouldn’t be wasting time on traffic jams, for starters.

So what if the government created a car company, and offered to exchange everyone’s fossil-burning vehicle for a new electric or veggie-oil-burning vehicle, free of charge? We’d stop making excuses.

So what if Bernie Sanders had a foreign policy? We might debate it, and we might actually come to the conclusion that there’s a link between screwed-up foreign policy and capitalist plunder.

Well?