In 2025, nothing is as it was

It’s been a year of turmoil, in the world and in my head. But it leaves space for new ideas and it is those we must cultivate if we are to save democracy.

I'm going to guess you don't know who James Carville is, yet he has played an enormous role in shaping your life. He as much as anyone is known as one of the key architects of the New Democrats, the corporate-friendly incarnation of the US Democrat Party that emerged under Bill Clinton and became the overwhelmingly dominant philosophy of the party.

When Bernie Sanders started his insurgency in 2016 it was Carville's legacy he was aiming at. Carville argued that big corporations were crucial partners in positive social change; Sanders came along and claimed they were the primary barrier. This fundamental clash has shaped the last ten years of Democrat politics.

Biden was president only as the last stand of the New Democrats trying to prevent change. They then chose the even more corporate-friendly Kamala Harris and only then realised they had reached the end of the road.

Now, spiritually, Sanders has handed over to Zohran Mamdani – and he has in effect polished Sanders approach into a politics that crosses political boundaries. It is therefore hard to overemphasise the significance of a recent New York Times op-ed by Carville. As the rest of us rub our eyes in disbelief, Carville has now announced he has converted.

His advice now? The Democrats should run on “a platform of pure economic rage” directed at the corporations. Think 'Pope converts to Islam' and you're about there. Whatever you thought the world was last Christmas, it isn't now.

This is by way of an apology if you've been reading my newsletter articles all year. I get that they've been more 'discursive' (or rambling perhaps) and longer than ever. Everything is changing and my head is changing with it and I dragged you along.

Let me recap a bit. Since the start of the year I've been arguing in favour of starting to think of 'the thing after next'. My career was always about looking directly in front and working out what is the next thing you can realistically get done, but that's because I had no option but to play the game as it is now.

It just hasn't been working, not for me, not for the politicians, not for anyone. Because the game is broken and the next thing you can reasonably do in our current context isn't worth doing. Look at Starmer – he is like a human form built from the layers of sediment of things that weren't worth doing. Like 'banning swift bricks' for no reason other than insulting environmentalists, and then reversing course because it was utterly stupid.

That's why I've been making the case that utopia is our best helper here. It is a 'higher place' from which we can see further. I am not naïve enough to think that utopias ever get built, but I am also aware that what was built in the failed attempt to create those utopias turned out to be pretty well the best things we built.

But utopia can't be a wish list, it has to be grounded in something. That is two other strands of what I've been writing – the source of problems and the nature of desires. First, you need to have some understanding of why your utopia is different from what preceded it. Nothing I've written this year is probably more significant in that regard than a seemingly obscure comment on electric vehicle supply chains.

The western way of doing things has created extreme inequality and enormously poor productivity and it is for the same reason – the thing that lets the wealthy take wealth out of a system is the thing that makes the system perform poorly. The rubbish about the effectiveness of the profit motive is measurably wrong.

From how we manage things to how we source them to how we count them to how we use them, I've been trying to show you that you wouldn't invent current practice if it didn't exist. More than that, I've been trying to show you why reform of broken systems is impossible. You can't reform a wine glass to make the poison in it less deadly. The component parts are the problem.

And when people do start to look at doing something different we often hit another problem; they rather assume they can impose it. There is so little real democratic consent for anything anymore that it seems to be affecting all of us. Since our Prime and First Ministers appear to show little interest in what we really want or hope for, socialists could just do the same, no?

What I've been arguing is that this is why the systems we have are failing. Politicians have been playing a game of telling citizens what they want to hear but then primarily doing something quite different that the corporations want. Labour didn't come to power promising to pay billions more for medicine to placate Big Pharma.

“If we all keep conforming in a system that is sinking, we will make the neatest and most orderly corpses anywhere on the ocean floor.”

So we could do that too could we? If populists could get 50 per cent plus one, we'd show them! We'd do what we want! Except what would we show them? That they're right to be cynical about democracy? That we can enforce change people don't want? That social consensus doesn't matter?

Well it does. If you want your systems to work they have to work for people as people want them to work. It is why I have spent so much time writing about enshitification. Corporate enshitification has ruined your experience of life; socialist or environmental enshitification isn't a better process which is going to create better ideas.

Talk big, act small and let more powerful forces knock the quality out of people's lives – how is that a recipe for success? It defines everything we do just now.

The devolution era in Scotland has amounted to little more than an accumulation of tweaks. Set aside one or two more ambitious projects and on the whole what wasn't working in 1999 is working worse now. The actual way things operate has not changed, only the detailing round the edge.

It shows. We're where we were. People are talking about bonfires of quangos again. We are living in an era where our politics is going to end up looking like an interregnum, a lacuna, a period of blankness while we wait for something else to begin.

In that context there was no more merited award than John Swinney winning Politician of the Year. No-one better distills the politics of Holyrood in their purest form – cautious, deferential, incremental, noise and commotion signifying little.

And so that's the other thing I've been trying to do, to begin to imagine what the thing after next might be. I'll be completely honest, looking back I almost certainly laboured the point about utopias because frankly I was nervous about revealing my more left-field thinking. Nothing gets you mocked in Scottish politics more than not conforming.

I'm not a natural conformist anyway but I now see rebellion as an act of survival. If we all keep conforming in a system that is sinking, we will make the neatest and most orderly corpses anywhere on the ocean floor. I suppose that's an achievement of sorts...

And so I'm also writing this to really encourage others. We're in a moment when really, no idea is so daft that it isn't at least worth looking at. What used to seem beyond the bounds of possibility (Prime Minister Farage, James Carville eating the rich, a socialist running New York, a US President all-but declaring war on Europe) is now known as 'Tuesday afternoon'.

I sit around and think about futures I'm not meant to, and I'm pretty sure you do too. I know ordinary people imagine radically different futures because I went through an independence referendum where we saw it happening in real time. That energy and spirit endured – until Holyrood killed it. Hell mend Holyrood.

We need that spirit back. That's what I'm asking here. Next year is vacuum-squared, at least for the first half – the stultifying nothingness of Bute House and Downing Street reduced further as cautious elections play out and the spoils are shuffled within two or three big voting blocks who are tussling inside themselves for who gets what. The rest of us are just fuel for this.

I'm going to keep doing this because nothing else is going to happen. But I encourage you to join me. You don't need to write long essays explaining how you got to where you got to, but email me your ideas at the usual address. Honestly, nothing too daft. I want to know what the thing after next looks like for others.

Things are changing so completely now that we need to imagine new things can happen. They can, but they don't happen on their own. Nothing was ever created that wasn't imagined first. When reality is this bad, our Yellow Brick Road is our imagination. It's time to follow it.