Dreaming Politics
For the last four months, I interned with a Democratic Member of Congress from my home state of Michigan. It was my first formal introduction to federal policymaking and a headfirst dive into the debates facing our nation today.
I was a progressive loaded with questions: Why did change take so long here? What is stopping progressive ideas from even getting voted on? What vision is the pragmatic Democrat working towards?
These questions are not unique to me. Many members of my generation — Gen Z — are wondering themselves how to create the society they want to live in.
We’re a generation that grew up in an America post 9/11, entered high school during the Trump presidency, faced a pandemic as we took our first steps into adulthood, and witnessed a violent insurrection on our Capitol. We worry about whether we will grow old just to see a planet decimated by climate change and whether our fundamental bodily and personal freedoms will be stripped away. And we are tired of the slow walk toward racial, gender, and sexual justice. We’re ready to run.
We also have seen progressive ideas and figures pillaried by the news. We’ve watched progressivism get pitted against pragmatism. And we have seen progressive ideas shot down in the name of “problem-solving.”
A watershed moment occurred for me during a briefing led by Reverend William J. Barber’s Poor People’s Campaign. Over fifty faith leaders descended onto the Capitol to deliver their calls for racial and economic justice. Then, with conviction so strong it made the air heavier, a rabbi gave us an order: “we ask our nation and our elected officials: repent and renew.”
Those words struck me. Repent. Renew.
He commanded us to feel remorse for our wrongdoings. We were to turn our attention to our very soul — to look up on it, see where we had gone wrong, and repair the harm we had caused.
But we also had to renew. To find within ourselves the fight and the people that had led us into this room. He gave us permission to start again.
This call for renewal invigorated me. It made me want to dream of what our world could be. Dream of a world free from poverty, closer to solving climate change, and filled with justice for people of all identities.
And it’s in that dream that I found my answers.
What progressivism offers are freedom dreams. These are not marijuana-induced fantastical utopias. Instead, freedom dreaming requires that we look at the largest, most intractable problems our society is facing and create a vision. It’s a dream for us all to look to, built on principles we are working towards sharing. It’s a place to draw strength from when our solutions fail, and we must start again.
A famous freedom dream is our Declaration of Independence. It was the least pragmatic thing our Founding Fathers could have done: They had no money or troops and were now willingly putting their lives on the line. But their vision of a new nation had grown so large that they would not solve it transactionally; it required them to act transformationally.
The transformational leadership of our Founding Fathers sought to change people’s values and principles — ultimately bringing them to a shared vision of a better world. They acted pragmatically, as is necessary within our political system, but did so as a tactic, not philosophy. Without their dream, their pragmatism would have been rudderless (notably, “rudderless pragmatism” was coined by President Obama and Robert Fisher in his final semester at Harvard Law School). They knew they would have to govern pragmatically, but that building lasting coalitions first required a dream.
And the time to dream is now. We will not solve gun violence, climate change, poverty, mass incarceration, and so many other significant problems with just the right number of votes. Rather, they will require solutions we don’t even know exist yet, which requires people willing to keep looking for them for a long time. And this cause is rooted in people and communities who face systemic challenges to organizing compared to well-funded corporations and interests.
It is a false choice to decide between pragmatism and progressivism. Pragmatism needs progressivism because progressivism gives us a dream. Without a dream, pragmatism is just cynicism — it’s soulless.
Freedom dreams are a mechanism for transformational leadership — it builds coalitions among people you’ve lost, helps diverse groups come together, and find principles they can believe in.
There’s no question that freedom dreaming requires tension. Building coalitions eager to solve our world’s most pressing issues will undoubtedly require we reach out to people who don’t consider themselves progressives. But we must lean into that tension.
It’s within the tension required by freedom dreaming — the tension in ourselves as we remember how to dream and the tension when we reconcile our dreams with those of others — that we come together. And once we craft that dream, we will have looked into our soul.
And so I implore us all engaged in the fight to “restore the Soul of our Nation” to dream — to not just lean into our tensions to make transactions but to discover where our visions of a better world intersect.
It’s within that dream that we can finally renew.
