Crisis and Transformation: Build Back Better and the Utopian Impulse in Politics
Let the river run
Let all the dreamers wake the nation
Come, the New Jerusalem
Carly Simon
One of the most important fantasies in politics is the fantasy that government has the power to make the world what we want it to be, and that political struggle is the struggle over who will control government and in so doing have the power to create the world. When this fantasy takes hold, the result is that politics will be dominated by a utopian impulse: the impulse to act as if it were possible to create immediately a world in which need calls into being the means for gratification: “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
The magnitude of the solution would, then, fit the magnitude of the problem.
The history of the Build Back Better legislative initiative is a good case in point. It began as a 3.75 trillion-dollar proposal (6 trillion if we start with Bernie Sanders’ original plan) that would make a significant, indeed watershed, contribution to solving many if not most of the pressing problems we face as a nation, problems ranging from child poverty to global warming. It was sometimes described as a change on a par with the New Deal, a change that would not merely fix this or that particular problem but overhaul the economic and social system as a whole and especially the role of government in it. This way of thinking about the task at hand led to insistence that a myriad of specifically targeted pieces of legislation be packaged together as a single initiative. By packaging them this way, the whole would be made more than the sum of its parts and the depth and scope of the real underlying problem laid bare. The magnitude of the solution would, then, fit the magnitude of the problem.
To my way of thinking, there was much of value in the bill. Yet, it did not gain sufficient support to pass, at least in a form that could be said to fulfill the impetus behind the fantasy that shaped it. Its failure to pass was not due to opposition on the part of those who stood to lose if the bill passed, but due to opposition on the part of many who would have been better off. Their opposition was a frustrating reality that stood as a dividing line between the desired and the possible especially as those were conceived by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
A central element in progressive thinking has long been the idea that real change comes about in the wake of crisis, that those who have in the past opposed their policies would come to see the error of their ways when current conditions became so bad that they could no longer ignore the connection between disaster and the social and economic system that spawned it. And disaster we have surely had in the period leading up to the Build Back Better bill.
The Build Back Better initiative developed in the context of the radicalization of the Republican Party and its violent attack on Congress and on the normal process of electoral transition. It also developed in the midst of a pandemic that radically disrupted ways of life, sharply divided the country, and caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. These were obviously real events with real effects on people’s lives. But, when considered from the standpoint of the political process and the programmatic initiative with which we are concerned, they also represented a crisis thought to be of a magnitude capable of waking the nation to the need for radical change.
There may or may not be historical justification for the link between crisis and transformation, but I suspect the assumption that there is such a link is based less on supporting evidence than on a theory about human behavior. That theory, briefly summarized, looks something like this:
We suffer because we live in a world dominated by a system that causes our suffering, but we assume cannot be changed. What makes the system seem impervious to change is that those who are suffering in it are unaware of the fact that their unhappiness is caused by it. Indeed, they are convinced that the system is the best, indeed the only possible, system capable of satisfying their needs. Only a radical disruption in the conviction that the system can and will keep us safe and well cared for will undermine its claim to inevitability. What can bring about this radical disruption is an equally radical failure of the system to secure our welfare. The resilience of the system depends on the dominance in people’s minds of a misunderstanding of the reality in which they live. And this misunderstanding can only be disrupted when the reality of the conditions they live in come to differ sharply enough from the false understanding of their conditions they have been led to believe is true.
A term sometimes used to describe this situation is “false consciousness.” The term false consciousness refers to the dissonance between belief in the capacity of the system to assure that people’s material needs—food, shelter, clothing, health care—are satisfied and the reality in which they are not. How do those who use the term know that this belief about the system is false? More specifically, how do they know that the system by its nature cannot assure the satisfaction of needs?
We might begin to answer this question if we consider the conviction of the inevitably of failure as something for which there is significant evidence not in history but in personal experience as registered in memories of a failed system of care.
We might begin to answer this question if we consider the conviction of the inevitably of failure as something for which there is significant evidence not in history but in personal experience as registered in memories of a failed system of care. At first glance, this may not seem a very promising line of investigation. For most of those concerned with the matter of false consciousness, their material needs had been attended to when they were growing up: they had a home that kept them warm and dry; they were fed and clothed; they were safe in their neighborhoods. And yet, in the depths of their psyches, they may not have felt safe; they may not have felt attended to; and they may not have felt they had a home. The apparent care they received hid a deeper reality of being uncared for, unattended to. Their conscious understanding of their world was at odds with their emotional experience of it.
Because of this dissonance, the powerful feeling of being uncared for was hard to validate in the world in which they lived, a world where, to all appearances, their needs were met.
Because of this dissonance, the powerful feeling of being uncared for was hard to validate in the world in which they lived, a world where, to all appearances, their needs were met. And this difficulty was compounded by the risk involved in acknowledging that their caring world was one in which they were not cared for because doing so might cost them their attachment to their families and to the care available to them there, care that, however inadequate it might be, was considerably better than nothing. Indeed, at least remaining in the family kept the hope alive that the care they needed but did not get would be provided, that the parents would come to recognize what it was they needed and do something about it.
To deal with their internal struggles with this dissonance and especially the aggressive feelings directed at their caretakers provoked by it, they projected the experience of being uncared for onto a suitable external object: those whose material needs were not satisfied and were therefore visibly neglected by the economic system on which they depended. They experienced their own false consciousness as the experience of others who, like them, seemed unaware of it, or at least unaware that their suffering was caused by the system’s failure and not their own. Put simply, they reinterpreted their emotional neglect as material neglect, something clearly visible and real, and discovered it not in themselves but in others.
Considered as the impetus for the form the Build Back Better initiative took, this enactment might account for the insistence that there must be something more in the bill than the sum of its parts. This something more is attending to the needs of the self for care and attention. The term false consciousness then refers to the power of the family mythology of care when, in reality, care is inadequate or unavailable. This mythology comes to be formulated as the idea that emotional need will be satisfied if there is a system in place to assure that all material need is satisfied all the time.
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Preoccupation with the connection between crisis and transformation has its roots in the aggression born out of the failure of the family to provide needed care and the redirection of that aggression onto an object outside the family.
Preoccupation with the connection between crisis and transformation has its roots in the aggression born out of the failure of the family to provide needed care and the redirection of that aggression onto an object outside the family. Destructive impulses originating in the family now become the impulse to destroy the failed social and economic system. The fantasy of destruction of the world outside the family comes to represent the displacement of both the target and the source of the destructive impulse onto the world outside. Yet, fantasies of destruction associated with the idea of a crisis can be dangerous because, were they realized—were fantasy to have the power to alter reality—then the only available and known structure of care would be destroyed. This means that the risk is great that we would find ourselves in a destroyed world.
The fantasy of crisis and transformation is essentially the fantasy of revealing through destruction the falsity of the system of care while protecting the family from the aggression born of it. That it is a fantasy of false care shaped by memories of failure of care does not make the theory about the world outside wrong, though it might be. There is, after all, a strong link between the structure of family life and the structure of social institutions outside the family. Both can be sites of failure of care and of the development of a false consciousness that invests institutions with qualities the opposite of those they, in reality, possess.
The problem is not that the theory must be altogether wrong, but that it suffers from the dilemma that defines the original memories and the fantasies spawned by them, which is that, by definition, there is no way out. The kind of destruction associated with crisis does not solve the problem but exacerbates it. And, because care for the body is used as a surrogate for care for the self but does not constitute care for the self, no amount of care for the body will ever be enough.
I think that the lately popular metaphor of “wokeness” captures something important about the phenomena just briefly summarized. We can think of the myth of the family and the false consciousness associated with it as a kind of dream state that the child imagines having awakened from as he or she moves outside the family and begins to see it from an external perspective. But because of the need to protect the family from the aggression born there, being woke to the false reality of the world outside becomes a way of protecting the dream state associated with life in the family. Being woke is a way of remaining asleep.
When our understanding of social and economic issues is shaped by the dynamics just summarized, we inevitably understand those issues on the model of our internal conflict. There is no room for any alternative interpretation because any alternative would place the family dream state and the myth it represents at risk. Then, if the model we use takes us away from the reality of the world in which we live, it will lead us to pursue change in a way unlikely to be effective in resolving the all-too-real failures of care many experience there.