Finding Hope in America’s Pandemic Dystopia – The American Prospect

The Open Mind explores the world of ideas across politics, media, science, technology, and the arts. The American Prospect is republishing this edited excerpt.

Heffner: We seem to be living through a dystopia for realists now with the Iran-U.S. confrontation, the global pandemic, and now worldwide protests. Is that a fair way to look at it, or are we going to come out of the dystopia into a utopia?

Bregman: You know its very understandable if people are pessimistic right now. I always like to make a distinction between optimism and hope. I mean, you certainly dont have to be an optimist right now. But I think there are some reasons to have hope because hope is about the possibility of change, right? I think that this moment gives us a lot of reasons for hope as well. I mean weve seen that ideas that just a couple of years ago were dismissed as quite unreasonable and radical and crazy have been moving into the mainstream. Now they still have a long way to go yet, Im talking about ideas like universal basic income or higher taxes on the rich or you name it. But that gives me some hope.

Heffner: Is there a reason to be more cynical about the condition of humankind in the United States right now?

Bregman: Institutional racism and racism and discrimination, these are not uniquely American phenomena. It exists everywhere in the world and in Europe, sadly as well. There are some things though that we can learn from other countries. In the book, Ive got one example of how prisons in Norway are organized. The U.S. could learn quite a bit from that. So what you have in the United States are sort of taxpayer-funded institutions that are called prisons, where you have citizens who go in there for small crimes I dont know, small drug offenses and they come out as criminals. They create this kind of bad behavior.

Now in Norway, they have the opposite. They have an institution where people go in as criminals and they come out as citizens. If you look at these prisons, theyre very strange. Actually theres one prison called Bastoy, a little bit to the South of Oslo. It basically looks like a holiday resort. Inmates have the freedom to relax with the guards, socialize with them to make music. Theyve got their own music studio and their own music label called Criminal Records.

So sort of your first intuition is like these small regions have gone nuts.

Like this is very crazy, but then you look at the statistics, you look at the numbers, it turns out this is the most effective prison in the world because it has the lowest recidivism rate in the world, the lowest chance that someone will commit another crime once he or she gets out of prison. So investing in these kinds of institutions, you will actually get a return on investments. These things save money in the long term because the chance that someone will find a job actually increases with 40 percent.

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Now, its just unimaginable that this will ever happen in the United States. But, I try to show that actually it wasnt just the U.S. that was the first country that experiments it with these kind of prisons in the sixtiesjust as the U.S. was almost about to implement a universal, basic income to completely eradicate poverty at the beginning of the seventies. Thats where historians may be useful. They just can show that, you know, things can be different, you know, they can be much better.

Heffner: Those solutions that you describe are innovative and imaginative at a time when this country couldnt even honor the commitment of frontline essential workers.

Bregman: The country is capable of the compassion because we see so much compassion. We see millions of very courageous protesters in the streets. Its just that we need a political revolution here. The short summary of my book would be something like most people are pretty decent, but power corrupts.

For the vast majority of our history, when we were still nomadic hunter gatherers, there was a process going on that scientists call survival of the friendliest, which means that actually for millennia, it was the friendliest among us who had the most kids and so had the biggest chance of passing on their genes to the next generation.

Then you look at current policies and it seems like, well, thats not survival of the friendliest, this is survival of the shamelessand its not only the case in the U.S. its also the case in the UK with pretty shameless politicians like Boris Johnson or in Brazil with [Jair] Bolsenaro. Its a real indictment of the so-called democracy we have created that [its] somehow not the most humble leader [who] rise to the top, but the most shameless leaders.

Heffner: Does your book advocate for a specific tactic that can be used by protestors to try to in this new tech age to actualize their movement for reform when the political means to achieve it really dont seem apparent.

The country is capable of the compassion because we see so much compassion. We see millions of very courageous protesters in the streets. Its just that we need a political revolution here.

Bregman: Its not up to me as a white European to say, I know this tactic is better or that that, that tactic is better. Or if they say that people shouldnt try it or whateverlike Martin Luther King said a riot is the language of the unheard. But it is interesting though, that if you look at the scientific evidence that the approach that the vast majority of protesters are taking right now, very courageously so, the peaceful approach is also the most effective one.

Weve got the work of sociologist called Erica Chenoweth whos built this huge database of protest movements since the 1900s. She discovered that actually peaceful protest movements are twice as successful as violent ones. The reason is that they bring in a lot more people on average 11 times more, right. You bring in children and women and the elderly and older men, and you name it, so everyone can participate in these more peaceful protest movements.

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Im not saying that a certain amount of rioting or violence [should not occur]. Im very hesitant to sort of condemn that when we see sort of the horrific brutal savage police violence, thats the real story. Thats what we should really be talking about. Im hopeful and Im so impressed just to see this for ordinary uprising of so many peaceful protestors who are against all odds keeping their self control and doing whats right. Its, its very, very impressive.

Heffner: Do you think that in the wake of the pandemic our economy can recover in a more equitable fashion?

Bregman: Every historian knows that throughout history, crises have been abused by those in power. Think about the burning of the Reichstag and then you get Adolph Hitler, think about 9/11, and then you get two illegal wars and massive surveillance of citizens by the government. This is an old playbook.

But weve got other examples as well. The New Deal, they came up with it in the midst of the Great Depression. Think about the Beveridge Report, the primal text of the welfare state in Great Britain was not written after the war, but in 1942, when the bombs were falling on London. So now is the time to do something like that.

Heres my hope: If you, again, zoom out and you look at the past 40 years, I think you could describe it as the era that was governed by the values of selfishness and competitionthe greed is good mantra. My hope is, and I do sense a shift in zeitgeist here, is that we can now move into a different era thats more about solidarity.

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Finding Hope in America's Pandemic Dystopia - The American Prospect