Have you ever been in a meeting that turned into a game of “who can be the most apocalyptically pessimistic?” The rules are simple: whoever makes the most credible case for imminent doom—whether it’s climate change, authoritarianism, warfare, or AI—wins. The more you think facism is inevitable, the more radical your politics!
Feeling good about securing green affordable housing? Don’t get too excited; it’s insignificant compared to the billions who will inevitably be displaced by climate change. Happy about your local city council race? Hold off on celebrating; American democracy has never been more threatened. Enjoyed playing around with Chat GPT? Skynet is realer than you think. And by the way, the next war between great powers is practically inevitable.
Remarkably, this cynical tone seems to unite everyone on the left—from mainstream Democrats like President Biden to the most radical local activists.
Then came “Brat Summer.” As the Kamala Harris-Mike Walz presidential ticket gains momentum and polling numbers improve across the board, this same coalition seems to have rediscovered the value of hope.
Suddenly, the world isn’t just divided between beleaguered defenders of dying democratic institutions and fascists at the gate. It’s now a battle between those who believe in freedom—in its fullest, most multi-dimensional sense—and Trumpers who are, well, weird. As it turns out, freedom plays better than pessimism.
Natalie Foster’s upbeat new book, The Guarantee, is the perfect read for this moment. Her optimistic tone and forward-looking policy agenda are as inspiring as they are ambitious. She’s not just trying to convince you of a whole new economic paradigm, one that guarantees people’s needs like income, housing, education, and care. She goes further, aiming to persuade you that this paradigm is already on its way to victory.
Two Kinds of Cynicism
For the record, I agree with Foster’s argument. Chapter by chapter, she details how people working on various issues—from guaranteed income to universal family care—have steadily pushed the envelope and achieved extraordinary breakthroughs in the past few years. Sure, it’s not enough. But there was a time when we were winning nothing. Now, it’s clear we’re in a new era. It’s time to get our bearings. It’s time to get more ambitious.
But honestly, the argument isn’t the main reason I think everyone should read this book. I think everyone should read it because it has a contagious mindset, one that’s much better than the cynicism that could easily resurface at the first sign of trouble in national politics. Foster directly tackles one form of cynicism (that of liberals and the right) but implicitly challenges another form of cynicism more associated with the left. In doing so, she argues for a theory of change that’s as simple as it is powerful: provoke, legitimize, win.
Let’s unpack this. The first cynicism is the basic idea, peddled by the far right for so long, that all people care about is themselves; that only by individuals pursuing their self-interest can you achieve good outcomes; that government interventions cause more problems than they solve; that if you’re poor, especially if you’re Black, it’s your own fault.
The whole first section of the book focuses on the ocean of people challenging this framework with Foster’s theory of change. In the “provoke” phase, they were laughed out of the room. Over time, however, they won more allies; they built power. This is the “legitimize” phase. And then they started to win, particularly during the crisis moment around the pandemic. Some victories were temporary, like momentarily cutting poverty in half through a dramatic expansion of the child tax credit. But Foster convincingly demonstrates that the old neoliberal way of doing business has been shattered. We’re in a moment where the paradigm is up for grabs. That doesn’t mean all our problems are solved, but it does mean we have a real shot.
And yet the world is still so bad! That’s true. Foster doesn’t minimize the difficulties of inflation, the tragedies like the genocide in Gaza, or the threat of authoritarian leaders like Trump.
Instead, she subtly pushes back against a second cynicism. A cynism on the left that’s content to loop endlessly on how bad the world is, as if this kind of self-destructive pessimism actually accomplishes anything.
I couldn’t admire her more for this. Countless books have been written about the right’s power. We know about the Powell Memo of the 1970s that outlined an alliance between big business and social conservatives. We know how the right captured the courts, how powerful Fox News is, how they dominate economics departments, and most of all how they strategically use racism to scapegoat people of color in order to win elections and justify cutting social programs. Most pundits have written some kind of article about Trump, Modi, Putin, Xi Jinping, and how we’re at risk of authoritarians taking over the whole world. After reading these kinds of books for the better part of two decades, I humbly request a moratorium. I’m just no longer interested in lengthy treatises about how bad things are if they don’t have something useful to say about what we can do about it.
And—perhaps this is controversial—just gesturing towards “social movements” doesn’t count. The United States, like the world as a whole, saw more people protest in the 2010s than at any other time. It’s not enough to think that the world gets better by getting worse; that deteriorating conditions will drive people into the streets, and by “speaking truth to power,” they’ll bring about the revolution.
Instead, Foster insists that we can act strategically. She borrows the term “hopepunk” to describe this mentality. It’s neither “grim dark”––the tone of prestige television where every episode ends with something impossibly bad happening––nor “noble bright”––where the world can be viewed through rose-colored glasses as if nothing is wrong. Hopepunk is as messy as reality; it doesn’t deny that you may get laughed out of the room at first. But it insists that you can’t stop there; you have to persist. It’s possible to win allies. It’s possible to win. But you can’t be satisfied with mere provocation. You have to figure out how to legitimize and then find a credible path to victory.
Readers should decide whether or not they find Foster’s argument persuasive, but she tries to make the case that pandemic era policy shifts were not a fluke. Later, Foster provides a helpful summary table of all the social policies created during the pandemic. Sure, much of it was temporary, and it’s impossible to imagine these sweeping changes passing without a national crisis. But it’s hard to picture dramatic expansions in child care subsidies, Medicaid, housing vouchers, and even bans on eviction if we were still living in a moment when conservatives created the fundamental economic paradigm for policymaking. Nor can the crisis explain it all away. Many of us remember living through the financial crisis of 2008-09. That was much more directly related to the failure of the conservative economic paradigm, yet there was no equivalent response in social policy to what we saw during the pandemic.
Foster puts it best:
The question is: will we fight for it? Part of fighting is believing it’s possible, and with this book I hope to spread that sense of just how far we’ve come. The provocation I leave you with is this: What if the events of 2020-2022 weren’t some momentary blip, but the foundations of the new story and the new social contract? What if history books written in fifty years reveal the pandemic years as the beginning of a new era?
Of course, this doesn’t mean the right is beaten. There are plenty of ways to maintain social hierarchy without relying on the neoliberal economic philosophy the right relied on in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
This is where I hope Foster will expand in the coming years. It’s clear that the right wasn’t as all-powerful as we might have been led to believe; but it also seems they’re inventing new ways of maintaining social hierarchy,often using racism even more explicitly. They’ve certainly been doing their own provocations, and while they lately seem to be struggling on the “legitimize” front, it still feels like we’re always just one election away from them gaining all the legitimacy they need to push through an agenda far more radical than ours. What is the word for this new terrain, where we have both much more opportunity and much more danger than before?
Again, I suspect these questions will be answered in time, with Foster playing a leading role in driving the conversation. We may always have some measure of disagreement about the relative strength or weakness of the right. But I sincerely hope Foster’s book contributes to the attitude adjustment our movement needs. We have real opportunities. There is good in the world. Let’s make The Guarantee happen.
