The Utopian-Pessimist Manifesto

To be a good optimist, you must admit the worst-case-scenario is lurking.

Futurism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote, is a car crash.

Futurism is “danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness,” it is “courage, audacity, and revolt,” it is “aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.”¹

It means driving your car into a ditch, then hopping right back in the driver’s seat to screech down the highway.

Marinetti was an Italian poet and theorist who helped create one of history’s most revolutionary and unconventional art movements. In launching his new ideology, he called for lovers of a new world to burn down the libraries and museums, calling them “cemeteries of lost efforts, calvaries of broken dreams, registries of aborted attempts.”

Clinging to the past might be fine for “the moribund, the sickly, and prisoners,” he wrote. “It might be a balm for their wounds, this admired past, since the future is forbidden to them. But we want don’t want it, us, the young, the strong, and the living Futurists.”

Marinetti imagined a rational state, obsessed with progress, technology, and art. He imagined machine-man hybrids, who could use their metal extensions to turn dream and desire into reality. The only barrier to this new era of abundance and advancement was the old guard. He called on his fellow Futurists to use fire and fighting to destroy the old world and make a new one.

Marinetti was also a deeply naive pawn. Despite agitating for war, he only served for a few weeks in World War I before being relieved of duty. (Some of the most talented Futurist artists weren’t so lucky, and died fighting.) After the war, he founded the Partito Politico Futurista to bring about this enlightened world, though it soon merged with another Futurist organization: Led by Benito Mussolini.

The Futurist aesthetic became core to Mussolini’s rise to power. But Marinetti’s dream of a reactionary, revolutionary, rational world became subjugated to Il Duce’s own ambition and mission. Far from unleashing the radical ambition of the Italian youth, Mussolini crushed dissent, destroy independent art, and dragged Italy into defence of genocide. The end of World War II buried Futurist art and dogma for decades, as a relic of a nihilism and evil.

The strange marriage between Futurism and fascism — between optimistic vision and repressive totalitarianism — is one that still looks so odd, a century later. But in many ways, we’re seeing it again.

This week, on a very special U.S. election edition of Bug-eyed and Shameless: I consider what it means to be an optimist at a time when things could go very, very, very wrong.

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“The country is not going to be saved by people who are depressed and have given up,” J.D. Vance told a crowd of young conservatives last year, “it's going to be saved by people who believe in the future. So, believe in the future — I certainly do.”

This summer, I wrote about the dark heart of the reactionary right’s obsession with fertility. (Dispatch #106) Earlier this month, I penned a long take on how the modern far-right is trying to engineer post-democracy. (Dispatch #112) But this week, just a day before the (say it with me) most consequential election in American history, I want to briefly visit the topic of optimism and pessimism.

I have a single point to make: The reactionary right-wing has weaponized and monopolized optimism. And it is really working. The institutionalists, liberals, and progressives, in turn, need to think more seriously as pessimists — imagining just how bad things can be if the neo-reactionaries win. And, finally, the enemies of fascism, if they want to regain the initative, need to seriously start relaying a vision for the future that breaks with the past.

This all might sound abstract but, hey, so was Futurism.

Optimism, as the Futurists showed, doesn’t actually require much of a vision for what a better world would look like. Marinetti’s political philosophy basically turned on a rejection of classicism and formalism, a celebration of individualism, and a fetishization of technology. But because it called for a blind run into the unknown, it was an inherently optimistic philosophy. In the absence of anything practical or real, Mussolini was able to use that aesthetic and ideology as a trojan horse for totalitarianism. And when he did, Italians thought they were entering a new era of hope.

Today, it’s much the same. The reactionary right has enthusiastically adopted the trappings of the future — Bitcoin, a quest to colonize Mars, biohacking — while offering a painfully regressive agenda for tomorrow. There is nothing futuristic about mass deportations or banning abortion. But because it promises a demolition of the present, and because it is supported by a gang of Web 3.0 podcasters and space race gurus, those frustrated with the now grab hold of it with excitement.

It helps immensely that Donald Trump’s core political skill is in his ability to inspire optimism. His patina of success makes people believe that they, too, could climb out of poverty and into the boardroom. When Elon Musk bounces around onstage next to him like a goober, Trump’s working class voters and uber-online fanboys imagine a world of unbridled advancement. When Jordan B. Peterson talks about his ideal future, he calls up his young male listeners and asks them to act like lions to secure a prosperous new age.

The message is clear, and it is repeated constantly by this reactionary media ecosystem: The past is over, the present is terrible, and the future will be either glorious or dystopia. Trump offers unbridled growth and abundance, Kamala Harris offers none of the glory of the past nor the ambition of the future, only the scarcity and decline of the present.

Harris has no real counter-message for this line of attack, and that’s on purpose. Her hopes of political success go through the normies, the nervous people distrustful of Trump and his band of Futurists. These voters, Democrats believe, should not be spooked. “We won’t go back,” her slogan, correctly diagnoses Trump’s plan for America as a fundamental rolling-back of personal freedoms, the social safety net, and the rules on big business. This is all reasonable, but the implicit message of her slogan is: We must stay where we are. That is a deeply un-optimistic message.

What she is getting right, however, is the pessimism — Harris recently unsheathed the word ‘fascist’ to describe Donald Trump. She was castigated by some liberals who have proven themselves incapable of understanding how bad things could, indeed, get. The Supreme Court is beholden to Trump and the MAGA movement has purged all the institutionalists. Trump’s supporters are ready to use violence, Republican lawmakers are ready to justify any powergrab, and the right-wing media is ready to spread any lie necessary to set these wheels in motion. There is now a coherent plan to remove any remaining guardrails that would constrain a second Trump administration. The contingency plan for if he loses remains secret, but it is likely to be even scarier.

Harris is helping people understand that, while America has had a pretty good track record with democracy, it is just as capable of voting in fascism as Italy was in 1924. Good.

Being appropriately pessimistic means realizing that modern society has shown a real willingness to support fascism when things are hard, the technology that governs our lives has made these ideas accessible and popular, and the protections we built to stop that slide are only as good as those willing to defend them.

But being pessimistic isn’t enough. You’ve also got to be a (small-f) futurist.

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While it remains somewhat esoteric for normal people, I think one of the most important documents published over the last few years has been Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto.

As an actual political statement, it is sophomoric. It ranges from self-aggrandizing nonsense on the supposed heroic traits of Silicon Valley start-up founders to a repackaging of genuine fascist ideals. But what’s interesting about it is right there in the title: That it’s about optimism.

Andreessen, like many of his colleagues and competitors in the dot-com boom, had been more of a libertarian. As a technologist and investor, he brought us Netscape and pumped capital into some of the biggest social media companies on the globe. In the 2010s, he began thinking about a world where robots did all the labor and everyone lived in abundance and producing art and science all day — it would just require the government getting out of the way, he believed.

“Utopian fantasy you say? OK, so then what’s your preferred long-term state?” he wrote on Twitter in 2014. “What else should we be shooting for, if not this?”

In recent years, however, Andreessen’s futurism took on a darker hue. In his 2023 manifesto, he starts talking like Marinetti. He lists the enemies to progress and imagines smashing the social structures and movements which he believes stand opposed to this growth.

In Andreessen’s new political philosophy, which has seen him turn into an ardent supporter of Donald Trump (whom he did not support in 2016), gone is the utopic vision.

Andreessen even writes that “our enemy is…Thomas More’s Utopia.” Techno-Optimists, he wrote, “believe the constrained vision — contra the unconstrained vision of utopia, communism, and expertise.”

He argues that liberal optimism is airy-fairy and repressive, whereas reactionary optimism knows what doors to kick down in order to unleash success.

But we know that’s not the case. The kind of optimism that Donald Trump offers is regressive, cruel, and destructive. It is not libertarian, but instead believes in using the state to settle scores and destroy social movements. It will not bring about happiness and culture anymore than Mussolini’s reign did. Trump will use Andreessen and the futurists to smash the state and remake it in his own image. Weaponizing state power never achieves freedom.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Liberalism can be futuristic, too.

We’re always told that liberalism can no longer think big, build things, or usher in innovation. Talking about a bold future is a toxic trait for progressives these days, even socialists. Optimism makes liberals look dreamy, unserious, and — worst yet — utopian.

Yet liberalism has always been at its best when it imagines building unlikely things. FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society were examples of ambition wrapped in optimism. Building NATO, the European Union, the World Bank, the International Court of Justice, and so on — all wildly unlikely, impractical, unwieldy and ultimately good projects that were made possible because politicians thought in terms of ambitious futures instead of current anxieties. The internet itself was built out of technological advancement sponsored by government funding, then enabled — in a responsible way — by smart government regulation.

Today, our liberal leaders seem so protective of our institutions that they are terrified to admit they may be broken. Thus, they are unwilling to offer a comprehensive vision on how to fix them. Worse yet, they are positive that voters are so nervous and afraid of the future that it’s better to cement politics and policies in one-or-two-year increments.

To that end, there’s lots of inspiration to be found in Thomas More’s Utopia — which I don’t think Andreessen even bothered to read.

If you haven’t either, let me give you the briefest of summaries: The book is a series of fictitious letters from More, who is visiting the island of Utopia, to his friends in Europe. In the letters, he explains how this small nation has managed to come up with policies meant to allay every social ill, maximize happiness, and organize society in the fairest imaginable way.

It is not, despite how the word gets used today, a perfect civilization. Nor does it envision some kind of futuristic advancement that unlocks this kind of idyllic society. (In fact, More’s imagined civilization exists explicitly on the back of slave labor.)

Instead, More was trying to illustrate how sensible policies and decisions could be made, one-after-another with democratic buy-in, until a community of people are living happily and harmoniously. (Slaves and women excepted.) It is not a natural state, nor one created by some deus ex machina, and it requires constant improvement. Freedom exists, albeit within reason; laws are on the books, though there are no lawyers; social cohesion is paramount, and is enforced reasonably and collectively.

But also, Utopia is very specifically and pointedly not perfect — the fictionalized version of More even confesses that aspects of the community are “absurd.” Still, he writes, Europe could learn a thing or two from Utopia.

As George Logan and Robert Adams write in their translation of Utopia, More believed that “no human society could be wholly attractive; and even the attractive arrangements that are theoretically possible are in practise very difficult to achieve.” But, in striving for utopia, More insists “that things can be made at least a little less bad.”²

That’s what made Utopia such a hit upon its release. It asked people to stop focusing on their immediate problems and to start considering a state with no real problems at all — then to work backwards from there. It gave them something to strive for.

Today, most liberals seem to think of themselves as realists. But nobody wants to vote for a realist.

If you’re going to compete with the Techno-Optimists, you need to both recognize the immense threat they pose and accept the challenge they’ve issued: What else should we be shooting for, if not this?

To that end, be a pessimist about how bad things could be — but offer a utopian vision for how good they could get, if only we get our shit together.

If this Utopian-Pessimism Manifesto had a ‘we believe’ section, it would go like this:

1. We believe there are a lot of things that need fixing

2. We believe fascism often comes in very attractive dress

3. We believe that people want the most positive-sounding vision for the future, even if that’s fascism

4. We believe utopia is a process, not an end result

5. We believe utopia is a lot better than fascism, and we should give people that choice

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That’s it for this odd little dispatch. Thanks for indulging me.

Tomorrow I’m heading to Washington, D.C. to keep tabs on the election — and, in particular, the Trump campaign’s attempts to overturn it, should things not go their way. Except some kind of update on that over the next 48 hours.

My utopian gut tells me that Kamala Harris will win, but my pessimism tells me that things could get very ugly in the weeks to come.

For paying subscribers who want a bit more detail about the nature of the reactionary right’s appeals to optimism (and this week’s music selection) I’m including a section of my conversation with Henry Farrell, who studies democracy and international affairs at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. I called him up after I read his absolutely fascinating piece about a new kind of reactionary politics emerging from Silicon Valley.

Our conversation was for an article, which will be out eventually, on the state of uber-online anti-democratic movements. It’s a pretty fascinating exchange, I think.