"The Future" Is Not Beyond Left and Right

I have never once heard a person who claimed to disdain those who "cling to outdated political classifications," or who crowed about being "beyond Left and Right" or who fancied they had found their way to the latest "Third Way" or the next "New Way" or the next "Post Politics" whose politics were not completely and transparently legible within the most conventional political terms: Democracy, consent, and equity in diversity across the Lefts. As against incumbency, authority, and hierarchy across the Rights.

And I find that such claims to post-politicizing novelty or innovation are not only readily translated back into these conventional political terms, but also disproportionately tend to expose essentially right-wing assumptions and aspirations once they are so translated. This should not be surprising, since to fancy oneself post-political, a-political, anti-political is usually simply to take for granted as natural or inevitable or necessary or optimal or most practical incumbent states of affairs that in fact could be otherwise and very likely have been otherwise hitherto and most surely will be otherwise eventually come what may.

To naturalize the status quo is to express an essentially conservative world view, to police its maintenance through de-politicizing inattention to the actually open futurity inhering in plurality, peer-to-peer (and usually this passive-aggressive epistemic policing is supplemented with actual police, or at any rate with engineers, pencil-pushers, and salesmen acting as police collaborators). These de-politicizing gestures typically: [one] invest some self-appointed elite with an unearned (unearnable) position of unaccountable authority over the majority of their peers in a naturalized hierarchy as in conventional ideological formations of the aristocratic/oligarchic type; or [two] treat historical arrangements or outcomes as "spontaneous" when they are in fact facilitated -- sometimes to an extent that approaches outright determination -- by contingent legal, normative, and infrastructural formations as in the endlessly proliferating variations of "market" rhetoric pervading neoliberal, developmental, libertarian discourses (it sometimes seems as though libertarianism is re-discovered and asserted as a rationale for naturalized hierarchy among would-be aristocrats on a daily basis, each time with some neologism to mark its "discovery"); or [three], treat as a technical problem for engineers or bureaucratic/technocratic quasi-engineers acting (in a sense perhaps better denoted as "behaving") on a warranted consensus what is in fact a political problem of a diversity of stakeholders to ongoing change actually acting to reconcile their dissensus of histories and hopes while maintaining a shared world.

Politics, recall, arises from the fact that we share the world with a diversity of peers with a diversity of aspirations that provoke an open and interminable diversity of contingent reconciliations. It is this open and endlessly re-opening force of futurity inhering in plurality that is disdained and denied by the politics of the right in its many variations, including those prevailing discourses that clothe themselves in the false futurity of "The Future." Typically, this gesture takes the form of [one] a parochial extrapolation from the status quo demanding calculation rather than deliberation or [two] a fraudulent salesman spiel promising a hyperbolic amplification of the privileges and pieties of incumbent interests or [three] a reassuring rationalization of present problems and injustices enabled either through an expedient location of the present within a progressive developmental narrative that pretends to infuse present imperfection with the coloration of inevitable perfections toward which it presumably aspires and in which it is asserted already partially but definitively to partake or presumes to survey present imperfection from a vantage of superiority from which it assigns imperfections the status of atavisms and to itself the authority (often depicted as responsibility) to impose conformity to itself in the name of education or treat difference from itself as consent to exploitation.

Every futurism is a retro-futurism: every solicitation of identification with or effort at selling through the conjuration of a "The Future" would evacuate plurality of the substantial futurity with which it presents us, in our own we-presence, peer-to-peer. This gesture is essentially reactionary, and almost inevitably authoritarian, despite its tendency to celebrate duressed outcomes as consensual, despite its tendency to celebrate conformism as spontaneism, despite its tendency to celebrate incumbent triumphalism as progress or even transcendence, despite its tendency to celebrate reductionism as imagination, despite its tendency to celebrate moralizing as ethics, despite its tendency to celebrate instrumentality as freedom.