Historically, Kuo notes, political parties were forged atop preexisting civic, class-based, and religious organizations. They did not merely contest elections but embedded themselves in local communities, linked citizens to state institutions, and cultivated political loyalty through ongoing interactions between election cycles. As Kuo notes of the era of machine politics in the late nineteenth century, maintaining strong connections with supporters “required knowing everything about voters: ‘their needs, their likes and dislikes, their troubles and their hopes.’”

In turn, parties served as the primary conveyor belt for ensuring information reached citizens about what the government was doing on their behalf. In this sense, parties are not just vote-getting machines but democratic intermediaries that both channel grassroots opinions and needs to the party and ensure that grassroots supporters are aware of the work the state performs for them.

In addition to the key intermediary function of parties in the early-to-mid-twentieth century, Kuo emphasizes the critical role played by labor-based and social democratic parties of the Left. These organizations, she argues, succeeded in transforming capitalism by embedding markets within democratic institutions. Left parties institutionalized collective bargaining between labor and capital, expanded social insurance, and advanced redistribution and economic planning to soften the harshest blows of the free market. During this period, political parties were widely understood as democratic solutions to capitalism’s excesses.

By the late twentieth century, however, political parties in the United States, Europe, and beyond had undergone a profound transformation. Where parties once operated as mass-membership organizations embedded in civil society, they have increasingly become professionalized, elite-driven, and disconnected from the everyday lives of most citizens.

This transformation involved the outsourcing of core party functions — such as voter mobilization, organizing, and issue framing — to networks of advocacy groups and consultants. As a result, what we call “parties” today are often little more than loosely affiliated constellations of interest groups, think tanks, donors, and media operations. As a result, parties have increasingly prioritized short-term electoral tactics, branding, and media messaging over sustained engagement with voters.

Rather than maintaining a durable, year-round presence in voters’ lives, modern parties typically appear shortly before elections — if at all — and deploy highly targeted outreach strategies to small and potentially decisive slices of the electorate. In this model, politics becomes episodic and transactional: voters are contacted when needed, segmented by demographic or behavioral traits, and urged to vote — but, beyond a small activist core, are rarely invited to engage in sustained, year-round party activities. Parties may still coordinate electoral coalitions, but they no longer serve as the primary site where political identities are forged or collective interests developed.

Kuo argues that the transformation of political parties was neither natural nor inevitable. It was the result of strategic choices and institutional shifts — many of them driven by center-left parties themselves. As neoliberalism took hold in the 1980s and 1990s, center-left leaders increasingly embraced market-oriented governance, turning to deregulation, privatization, and austerity as tools of statecraft.

During the neoliberal period, as center-left parties sought to stay within the acceptable bounds of economic orthodoxy, their capacity to offer bold and credible policies to help working people was severely curtailed. As left parties increasingly adopted market-friendly economic platforms and pursued political triangulation to broaden their electoral appeal, they became harder to distinguish from the Right on core economic issues.

In turn, their efforts to “compensate the losers” of economic globalization — particularly manufacturing jobs in industrial areas — did little to stem the decades-long decline in the living standards and life opportunities of communities left behind by neoliberal policies. This alienated many working-class voters, who found themselves increasingly unrepresented by the political system.

Yet as Kuo describes, the neoliberal shift did more than reshape economic and social policy; it redefined the role of the state and parties in society. Rather than positioning themselves as defenders of the state’s capacity to deliver collective goods, center-left parties often echoed the neoliberal view that government was inefficient or burdensome. In doing so, they contributed to a broader erosion of public trust in government.

This ideological turn was compounded by an organizational retreat: as parties shed their role as intermediary between state and society, they ceased to serve as the conduits through which citizens experienced the benefits of public policy. The result was a hollowing out of democratic representation, in which parties no longer linked voters to the state but merely sought their support at election time.

Meanwhile, elected officials from center-left parties grew more socially and economically distinct from their traditional working-class base and increasingly shifted their electoral appeals to more highly educated and affluent voters. This class divergence — combined with ever-more-professionalized and elite-driven party operations — further weakened parties’ ties to working-class communities and undercut their legitimacy among working-class voters.

In the political vacuum left by center-left parties’ pivot toward neoliberalism, disaffected working-class voters are often mobilized not by programs of economic renewal but by right-wing populists who redirect class grievances into resentment over immigration, multiculturalism, and crime. As Kuo explains, “Working-class voters opt for populist and extreme-right parties on issues related to immigration and law and order, particularly when the mainstream parties downplay the salience of economic issues.”

When mainstream parties fail to prioritize the economic concerns of left-behind communities, they leave space for authoritarian populist leaders who translate those anxieties into cultural grievances, often in the service of elite economic policy goals or undermining democratic institutions.

Kuo proposes a range of strategies aimed at reembedding parties in society and regaining the trust of citizens to stem the tide of authoritarianism and plutocracy. She calls for rebuilding parties as associational institutions through reforms such as centralizing party control over campaign financing to mitigate the role of outside funding, reinvesting in local party infrastructure, and broadening membership participation.

She also describes creative efforts by some European parties to offer incentives for joining — ranging from offering opportunities for policy input and discounted services to social events and leadership access. Other scholars have similarly found that grassroots inclusion is vital to maintaining strong ties between parties and citizens: research on Uruguay’s Frente Amplio shows that offering activists a real voice in decision-making helps sustain support and mobilization. In Mexico, the Morena party has taken a more radical approach, randomly selecting candidates from lists of party activists — dramatically increasing representativeness and deepening voter identification with the party. But while these measures may encourage involvement at the margins, they are unlikely to reestablish the kind of social embeddedness that once sustained mass parties.

Indeed, one of the limits of Kuo’s analysis is the extent to which it underestimates just how historically contingent strong parties were. As Kuo recounts in detail, strong parties emerged under very specific conditions: industrialization; a large, politically active, and less occupationally differentiated working class; and a much stronger fabric of civic-associational life.

Those conditions have largely disappeared. Without them, it’s unclear whether anything resembling the mass-party model can be revived. Kuo acknowledges this tension but does not fully reckon with its strategic implications. If parties can no longer rely on the labor movement or civil society to sustain them, what are the real prospects for party renewal? Or are we simply left with an understandable but largely unhelpful nostalgia for an admirable yet sadly anachronistic mode of politics?

If the era of mass-membership parties built over the scaffolding of strong civic institutions is unlikely to return, a different kind of party-building effort is needed — one that reverses the traditional relationship between parties and civil society. Instead of waiting for strong intermediary institutions to buoy party renewal, local party efforts may now have to generate social ties where few currently exist. That means rejecting the model of campaigns as large ad buys and last-minute voter-turnout efforts, and instead investing in long-term organizing strategies that build relationships, trust, and shared purpose in politically neglected communities.

One promising example comes from the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative (RUBI), whose Community Works program operates in low-income rural counties in Virginia and Georgia. These programs — food drives, safety equipment distribution, neighborhood cleanups — are nonpartisan in tone but backed quietly by local Democrats. They aim to reestablish a positive, sustained presence in communities often written off by the party.

Over time, such efforts might not only improve public perception but also provide the basis for more enduring political ties. While this is just one small example, it reflects a broader strategic orientation: progressives must think less in terms of electoral cycles and more in terms of the long-term rebuilding of hollowed-out institutions.

Of course, developing this kind of political infrastructure is a major challenge, but the resources needed to begin the work on a significant scale are not hard to find. In the 2024 election cycle, for instance, Democratic campaigns spent billions of dollars on ephemeral tactics like ad buys of uncertain electoral value. Redirecting even a modest share of that spending to year-round, community-rooted organizing could build meaningful ties in areas long abandoned by Democrats, and without significantly affecting the resources needed to compete effectively in the next election.

This is not to suggest that local party-building alone can resolve our current crisis of democracy. But it may be one of the few viable tools left for restoring the link between citizens and state. Political parties will not save democracy on their own. Yet without them, democracy’s future may prove tenuous.

For some time now, it’s been fashionable on the Left to be “anti”: anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-carceral, anti-capitalist, etc. Notably, these identities define themselves by what they oppose rather than what they aim to build. That is, they are progressive in form but reactive in function. After Bernie Sanders’s 2020 campaign, even many self-described socialists more closely resemble this “anti-” left than they do nineteenth- and twentieth-century social democrats. The latter had a self-assured confidence that the future was theirs to build.

In contrast, today’s progressives veer between despair and denial. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, for instance, insist that we’re witnessing “end-times fascism.” While they criticize the “bunker mentality” of the far right, their vision aims no higher, or further, than mere survival. “We have reached a choice point,” Klein and Taylor argue, “not about whether we are facing apocalypse but what form it will take.”

Elsewhere on the Left, prophets of climate catastrophe deliver millenarian sermons about the end of all life on Earth. It’s no wonder, then, that interest in left-wing “preppers” has recently surged. The “acclaimed climate expert” Alex Steffen commands a progressive audience that numbers in the tens of thousands. He offers a course on how to “Ruggedize Your Life” in preparation for impending social collapse.

With a discount code, you can secure a spot in the course for just $149.

This focus on survivalism is repeated by many of today’s radical abolitionists, whose guiding term is not socialism or any broader vision of collective flourishing, but a vision of simply getting by in ever-more harrowing circumstances. But a Left that prizes “survival” is one that thinks the future isn’t theirs to win, but a terrifying force to steel against.

As the economic historian Adam Tooze recently noted, these days the Trumpian right “is actually more willing to talk about the future and to do so in bold and bright terms” than the Left. Today the Right acts and the Left reacts — a stark reversal of their traditional relationship to history.

How did we get here? When did the Left get stuck in the present?

Since the decline of the postwar compact, liberals and progressives have trapped themselves in unceasing cycles of ’68, endlessly rehearsing the slogans and priorities of that cultural revolution over and over again. Periodic protests against racism and sexism burst out; ever-more discrete civil-rights-movements-for-our-time pop up. But little truly new takes shape. We measure progress by removing barriers to participation in liberal capitalist society, but we don’t aim for moving beyond it. By the 1990s — the inauguration of the “end of history” era and the big slide in social democratic party membership numbers — the Left gave up on providing any compelling vision of the future society.

Not surprisingly, a Left that doesn’t really know what it is fighting for hasn’t grown very strong.

The cycle of stagnation isn’t limited to activists either. Consider the major electoral breakthroughs of the broad left in the past half-century. Bill Clinton, the last Democratic president to carry the vote of all sections of the working class (white, black, and Latino) did so by adopting right-wing plans for the future: free trade, financial deregulation, and tax breaks.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama, the last Democratic president to carry the working class as a whole (despite losing working-class whites) promised “hope and change” while upholding a remarkable continuity with his predecessors. Liberals liked to think Obama’s election marked the ultimate triumph of the ideals of the civil rights movement, while overlooking his studied conservatism. His was a liberalism that borrowed its future from the Right and its prestige from its past. Perhaps more than anything, the Obama era unveiled a precursor to today’s futurelessness in the notion that “demographics are destiny.” The future didn’t need to be forged — it would simply arrive when all the stodgy old white people died.

And what about Joe Biden? He became the first Democrat to win the presidency while losing the working-class vote. He was, undoubtedly, more progressive than his predecessors. Yet it was Donald Trump who provided the historical rupture that made Biden’s experiments in de-globalization and fiscal policy possible. In the end, though, Bidenomics failed to deliver the goods. While some of Biden’s programs — like his infrastructure bill and the now dismantled Inflation Reduction Act — were genuine policy achievements, the government was ultimately unable to confront the interlocking challenges of rising prices, skyrocketing debt, stagnant wages, and low taxes.

He isn’t alone, the global democratic left has been incapable of developing an economic agenda that looks beyond the next election cycle. As Wolfgang Streeck has argued, social democratic parties all over the world have been “buying time,” literally borrowing their futures with debt backed spending in order to maintain social services and keep a modicum of social peace. No new model has emerged that can credibly promise prosperity and equality for the next generation.

No new social future has been invented, or even really contemplated, in decades.

A reluctance to stake flags deep into the future was once considered a hallmark of political conservatism. “Nothing is more foolish,” argued Karl Kautsky, the leading theorist of Germany’s Social Democratic Party, “than the idea that distant ideals have no practical significance in present politics.” Yet today, an obsession with the present is apparent among liberals, progressives, and socialists alike.

Among moderates, a near-sighted pragmatism forecloses long-term thinking about social reorganization. Among those further on the Left, catastrophism reigns. Ecoterrorists, various “abolitionist” tendencies, and radical antinatalists like Bartkus, are committed to foreshortening our future. By suggesting that tomorrow may never come, they overvalue the present. There is, no doubt, a certain narcissism in this. An ambivalence toward future generations involves an overestimation of one’s own.

Our view of the social horizon has steadily shortened. And now we just stare at ourselves. The demands of the present are inward-looking: more permissiveness, more tolerance, more autonomy for the individual. The new social horizon, it seems, is to be left alone. What’s more, a futureless left refuses to consider how the battles it picks today — from the liberalization of drug laws to the dismissal of social norms — affect tomorrow’s political ends.

To be sure, there are good reasons to avoid thinking about tomorrow. Escalating wars, dire climate projections, a bleak political outlook, and the slow-rolling economic crisis are reasonable causes for hopelessness. Add to these new anxieties about artificial intelligence and despair might seem a rational, not emotional response. But without a flag staked in the future — a clear vision of the world we want for our children and theirs — we lose track of where we want to go.

Not surprisingly, the contemporary left seems perennially lost and lacking the self-confidence needed to inspire followers. Intellectual timidity and insecurity prevails, despite the sheer number of academics, writers, and thinkers who count themselves among progressives. Are there any intellectuals of the Left today whose insights and commitment to humanity’s long-term horizon rival those of Karl Marx or Karl Polanyi?

Does this mean the Left is cooked? Not necessarily. Society needs — and will always need — a force that speaks for the interests of ordinary people, in favor of popular democracy, equality, and social solidarity. So long as liberal capitalist societies continue to disappoint, intelligent and ambitious people will be drawn to the socialist tradition. And the proactive among them will inspire new waves of reform. The reactivist left, however, will continue to lose. An “anti”-left can’t win.

What electorate would put their trust in a political cause that says it doesn’t care about what comes next? How could this Left inspire any faith in progress, if it’s all the same to them whether the manatees take over and the maternity wards empty out?

Ironically, to regain the future, we need to look backward. To be progressive is, definitionally, to be connected to the past. “Tradition” as G. K. Chesterton colorfully put it, “ is the democracy of the dead.”

It’s not only that all successful movements for human advancement draw inspiration from the past (this magazine is called Jacobin after all); it’s also that the old ideals have never been realized. Instead, innumerable new ideals have popped up purporting to take their place — many of them disconnected from the grand narratives of the past, or any coherent conception of a social and democratic future.

Our short-sightedness means we typically walk part way down the road of some faddish ideal before abruptly changing course — and then we wonder why we can’t seem to get anywhere. What we lack is fixity: a sense of where we’ve progressed from and to where we’re progressing. As a result, the New Deal’s Four Freedoms seem further away today than they did when they were first declared eighty-four years ago.

Meanwhile, with a new Pope Leo in the Vatican, it’s hard to ignore the warnings of his namesake predecessor: that the collapse of the future poisons our moral vision of the present. At its most extreme, giving up on the future means a surrender to the present as an endpoint — or as the end. It’s to see the project of humanity as completed.

The fertility clinic bomber and other “promortalists” embrace this mindset. In their own words, they are not wrathful, but charitable. They see humanity as defined by suffering — and reason that, because new life will suffer, the compassionate act is to prevent it altogether. Dwelling in this darkness, the whole of humanity unravels.

In contrast, Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, in The Principle of Hope, defended the future. He rejected what he called the “pure infamy” of the present. Capitalism, he believed, harbored a wickedness — a humiliation of human dignity through poverty and the instrumentalization of human life. He judged society not against the sins of the past, nor by some abstract principle of minimizing suffering, but against the potential of a brighter future. Evil, he argued, could only be conquered by hope — a concept defined by reference to the future.

And when it comes to children, contra the antinatalists, aren’t they the very embodiment of hope? There is no more concrete way to demonstrate faith in the future of humanity than to give life to it.