‘The shrinking political imagination is a threat to democracy’

15 July 2025

By Elena Polivtseva

In early 2024, Jonathan White, Professor in European Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science, published his book In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea. White explores how our ideas about the future have evolved - and how these shifting perceptions are reshaping democracy today.

The book argues that in an era of relentless crises, the future has come to seem unpredictable, fragmented, and dominated by short-term calculations. Instead of imagining new possibilities, we increasingly rely on forecasting models and economic metrics. Public opinion is measured, markets are predicted, and progress is tracked through numbers and indicators. As a result, the future is no longer something to be envisioned collectively - it is something to be managed and controlled.

Jonathan White, Deputy Head of the European Institute and Professor in Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science

The book explains how politics becomes pragmatic and technocratic, citizens are recast as consumers or spectators, and democratic life loses its shared sense of purpose. While digital algorithms fuel a culture of hyper-personalisation, individuals project their own futures as private pursuits of gain or security rather than as part of a common story. In this ‘world of dangers,’ policymaking becomes preoccupied with staving off threats and delivering immediate fixes. The idea of working together toward a long-term vision recedes into the background. The future has increasingly become more ‘calculated’, short-term and individualised.

As White contends, this narrowing of political imagination is a threat for democracy. Democracies depend on the conviction that the future is not merely something to be calculated and managed - it is something we can shape together. Democracies rest on the faith that strangers can form solidarities and act collectively in the name of a better world.

Today, as the European Union grapples with how to chart its course - from negotiating long-term budgets to defining its political priorities - I spoke with Jonathan White about how Europe, as a shared democratic project, can endure in an age when the space for collective visions of the future seems to be shrinking. And what role culture might play in reviving that sense of common purpose.

EP: In your book, you traced how political discourse has become increasingly driven by crises and emergencies - fueling public anxiety and demanding more calculated, predictable, and reactive decision-making. A lot has happened since your book came out early last year. How has this trend developed since then?

JW: Over the past year, the emergency mode in policymaking and political discourse has only intensified. We can even say there is an escalation of this sense of crisis, a bewilderment. A clear impulse for this is the re-election of Trump in the US, which has deepened anxiety and uncertainty about what the future holds, particularly around geopolitics, the old divides between West and East, and traditional security paradigms. Overall, these recent developments have widened the path for a politics obsessed with preparedness, predictability, clarity, and certainty - so, the trends described in the book have only gained more ground.

EP: At the same time, if we look at how people are responding, it’s clear they are turning away from viewing the future in purely calculated terms. For example, the green movement - which directly addresses real threats and offers precise targets, like cutting carbon emissions by 55% by 2030 or keeping global warming below 2°C - has been losing influence in Europe. These kinds of quantified appeals don’t seem to resonate. Instead, people are drawn to broad, emotionally charged slogans like Make America Great Again, which are very ambiguous but manage to invoke a sense of belonging and purpose.

JW: Yes, this past year has also been a kind of real-time experiment testing whether an alternative to the current pattern of systemic decay is possible. It comes back to the Trump vote, which signals a desire within society for the unpredictable. This embrace of uncertainty is a form of rebellion against the dominant policy-making impulse to calculate and control the future. People have shown they are eager to step outside the present trajectory, preferring unpredictability over the mere continuation of existing trends.

“We’re seeing signs of protest against the spirit of reducing the future to numbers and targets. People are looking for a shared project that can’t be reduced to metrics, a more holistic vision of change.”

In this sense, we’re seeing signs of protest against the spirit of reducing the future to numbers and targets, which can be quite limiting because it assumes continuity and isolates one variable as the thing to change. When people rally behind slogans like Make America Great Again, they’re rejecting the idea that progress is just a matter of hitting specific decarbonisation figures or growth metrics. They are looking for a shared project that can’t be reduced to metrics, a more holistic vision of change.

There also seems to be an effort to reassert a sense of shared fate and collective future, pushing back against the idea that all we can hope for is incremental personal improvement. In this way, the constant appeals to emergency might actually reverse the ongoing individualisation of societies. Crises are, after all, moments of collectivity - times when your problems become everyone’s problems. 

EP: So, calculated and quantified visions coming from politicians do not seem to appeal to people. But power-holders continue to demand quantifiable evidence from civil society and other public sectors in order to secure political trust and justify, for example, the allocation of public subsidies. We see this clearly in the field of cultural policy, where artists and cultural organisations are increasingly expected not only to prove their impact through clear metrics but also to predict this impact in tangible ways. If there is a natural human tendency to resist these calculated futures and measured dreams, wouldn’t it make sense for decision-makers to change how they engage with public sectors?

JW: Indeed, the accountancy mindset, once born in the economic sector, has now crept into a whole range of other fields. Sometimes people refer to new public management as a way of organising institutions since the 1970s, where everything has to be shown to be measurable - the costs and benefits quantified, value for money demonstrated. You always have to be ready to convince someone looking over your shoulder, whether it’s an investor, an accountant, or any figure demanding tangible proof that what you’re doing is justifiable on those terms.

And as you say, it probably doesn’t work very well in many sectors. It may not even work particularly well in its supposed core: the corporation or economic actor. Many decisions in business are more improvised than this model suggests. The companies that succeed - if profit is the measure - often do so less because of carefully crafted strategies and budgeted outlooks, and more because of luck, inspiration, or individual actors at the right moment. But even setting that aside - whether or not it works in that quintessential setting - this mindset certainly doesn’t translate well beyond it.

Because the essence of creativity is unpredictability. If you could predict exactly where creativity or originality would lead, it means your project would already have been done and even replicated by many people. It’s precisely because it is so hard to foresee - and requires a moment of looking beyond what you can plausibly extrapolate from the present - that it happens at all. We in academia, of course, have something similar to the art sector in this respect. When you’re trying to secure funding for research projects, if you already knew exactly what you wanted to achieve, then maybe it isn’t actually worth doing - because you more or less already know what it’s about. If the research is genuinely worth pursuing, you’ll probably struggle to justify precisely what you’re trying to do, how you’re going to do it, or what you expect to find, because its significance lies in its unpredictability.

So yes, this accountant’s mentality doesn’t travel well beyond the core components of capitalism - if it even works there. 

EP: Do you think that policy-makers also start realising that the quantification of public value ultimately reduces it?

JW: Yes, I actually think that people in decision-making positions don’t really believe these modes of operation are relevant either. They aren’t convinced by the metrics; they understand that political change needs a value-driven appeal. Yet we all go along and continue playing the game by its rules. Everyone assumes they’ll be seen as crazy or reckless if they deviate from these established ways of operating.

“I think people in every corner of authority are perfectly aware that there’s something hollow about this constant emphasis on calculation. The problem is that we are short of alternative solutions and trapped within existing structures.”

So if this accountant mindset in all fields of policy-making is a kind of ideological mechanism, I don’t think it’s about decision-makers losing touch with reality. It’s more about a felt need to adhere to certain practices, because to depart from them would be to expose the weakness of your position, the fragility of your authority, and the essentially arbitrary nature of making decisions under conditions of scarcity. That’s the interesting part: it’s not that decision-makers don’t see it. I think people in every corner of authority are perfectly aware that there’s something hollow about this constant emphasis on calculation. The problem is that we are short of alternative solutions and trapped within existing structures.

But this public servant trap yet again led to a rebellion in society and politics. Populism is obviously a word that conceals many things, but in shorthand, you might say that populism is a politics of volition - doing what you want to do rather than what you have to do. Much of the support for populist movements over the last 10 or 15 years has been exactly this kind of rebellion. People like Trump, Boris Johnson, or Milei in Argentina all present themselves as charismatic figures who simply refuse to bow to necessity. They don’t do what the economists tell them what they have to do. They don’t follow what the strategists say is required to win elections. They do what they want to do. At least, that’s the public image: being yourself, being authentic, being undisguised in your intentions. So I think that anyone drawn to those parties on these grounds is perhaps engaged in a form of rebellion.

EP: When I was reading your book from the perspective of someone working in cultural policy or cultural advocacy, I was frankly pleased to see that whenever you described a major paradigm shift in history, there was always some kind of creative element involved. Utopias were often shaped by writers and artists - not always for good, of course. The Futurist Manifesto, for example, was created by an artist and later embraced by fascists. In our sector, we believe that if today’s imagination crisis can be addressed at all, the solution lies partly in the arts. That’s where you can still imagine beyond what exists today - to think about the future in ways not limited by today’s problems. What role do you think arts and artists can play today in reviving ‘future as a political idea’? Can art help channel that rebellion in society against the status quo we were talking about into something more meaningful than populism?

JW: I believe art can play an important role here. But from my sense, art has increasingly come to understand itself - especially over the course of the 20th century - in a rather apolitical way: as something that demonstrates its quality precisely by standing apart from philosophical or political disputes. This actually weakens the capacity of art to be that space outside politics from which critical reflection can emerge - the kind of reflection that ultimately makes change possible. 

Yet, art is essential to overcoming today’s crisis of imagination in many ways. First of all, art can historicise the present - to remind us that the lives we are living are not unprecedented or beyond comparison. Art can convince us that we can still understand people in different centuries. Someone can tell the story of a 19th-century life, and it still resonates with us. We can recognise the emotions, hopes, and purposes people had in other eras.

Insofar as art cultivates that sense of cross-temporal understanding, it carries a very important political message. A lot of politics is about building projects that connect us with those who came before and those who will come after. That’s another crucial thing: the space of culture offers the capacity to place the present in context - and to link it to a longer human story. This can happen for example through a book that reflects on the past or offers a vision on a future.

EP: But an individual piece of art cannot change the world. Today, a single manifesto might change the minds of a few people within a small bubble - an audience reached through the algorithms of our channels. In our current climate, with so much precaution around everything, there is very little space left for radical imagination. As you suggest in your book, a creative idea alone cannot mobilise people. It needs to be given a political shape. So my question isn’t even about what messages artists or their individual works send, but rather: what practices do they offer? What modes of thinking or values do they convey that could be embraced in politics to help build a better future?

JW: I think perhaps one distinction - though not a perfect one - between the left and the right is that right-wing politics often invokes ideas of community and shared experience, but rarely pairs this with any real participation in decision-making or control over organisations. For example, the US Republican Party isn’t in any meaningful sense a party where ordinary people participate.

This politics of the community on the right is often more symbolic than substantive. Even movements like Trumpism keep the fundamentals of the economy intact. In that sense, they are fundamentally status-quo-oriented.

What other parties could potentially offer - but too often fail to - is something different: a politics of community grounded in actual involvement, self-determination, and real equality. You see this in certain ideas of movement politics or more participatory parties that have tried to foster hands-on engagement. Participatory budgeting in parts of South America in the 2000s was one attempt to do this.

Insofar as the cultural sphere can create spaces of sociality that feed into this kind of political organising, that’s one pathway to nurture a more genuinely participatory community politics. It all starts with local organising. It always has. Local concerns - like housing, public spaces, or simply having somewhere to gather - are the kinds of ultra-local causes that nonetheless carry wider political significance.

Because if you build habits of people getting together, of seeing each other in a more favourable light, that can slowly change how society works. One challenge of contemporary life is that we often see each other at our worst: online, in moments of anger or confrontation; on the street, as rushed individuals just trying to get by. What we have fewer occasions for is seeing each other as thinkers, as people willing to talk, deliberate, or act out of something other than self-interest.

Creating spaces where strangers can encounter each other in a more generous light - whether it’s a reading group, a cultural street event, or a music festival - is, in a way, a form of proto-political action. These experiences can reveal the stranger as someone who shares emotions you recognise and value, someone who appears as you’d hope to see yourself, rather than as you fear you are seen in daily life. So building spaces can spill over into community and participation out of which real change might grow.

Artistic and cultural practices and experiences can also demonstrate what the decommodification of time, relationships, and, essentially, wellbeing and the ‘good life’ can look and feel like. This can be a backbone of sustainable living, and ultimately strengthen the greening agenda.

“The EU should also see itself as more than an engine of economic growth - as a community of citizens who share values and a future. Somewhat paradoxically, the rise of the far right shows there is genuine appetite for this.”

EP: Today, Europe faces a range of profound challenges and threats. In many ways, Europe stands at a crossroads. This is reflected in the title of Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s political guidelines: Europe’s Choice. At this moment, Europe also seems to face a choice between further developing the EU as, in your words, ‘an individual consumer project’, or building it as a shared future and a true community project. It is clear that solidarity and a sense of unity are desperately needed to withstand the challenges ahead. As new long-term priorities for the EU are taking shape, and the next budget is being designed, how do you think the EU can respond to this crossroads?

JW: To make the EU a generator of real solidarity, it must become much more assertive in addressing economic inequality and pursuing an egalitarian agenda around wealth distribution. True solidarity requires policies that confront deep economic divides within countries - not just between them. Yet EU mechanisms still mostly operate on the principle of transfers between richer and poorer member states, which misses the fact that the major inequalities run through societies, not only between them.

The EU should also see itself as more than an engine of economic growth - as a community of citizens who share values and a future. Somewhat paradoxically, the rise of the far right shows there is genuine appetite for this. Increasingly, far-right parties aren’t simply anti-European nationalists but are promoting an alternative vision of Europe - one that rejects technocracy and calculation in favor of a rhetoric of belonging, sacrifice, and deeper purpose.

Of course, the far right grounds this in narratives of cultural threat and hostility to migration, which are dangerous. But their success demonstrates that many people want a politics motivated by more than material abundance. The idea that there are things worth sacrificing for - something larger than profit or consumption - resonates widely.

The challenge for other political movements today is to tap into this desire for meaning and shared purpose without reproducing the exclusionary politics of the far right. But if the question is whether there is an appetite for a different vision of European politics, the answer is clearly yes. The task is how to meet that appetite with an inclusive, democratic alternative.