“I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will have Mexico pay for that wall.”
When Donald Trump conjured this vision in his June 2015 presidential announcement speech, he established not just his political program’s agenda but also its genre: freewheeling, fact-agnostic fantasy. The liberal centre reacted with an appeal to data: the Washington Post reported, for instance, that in Trump’s first 100 days in office, he made no fewer than 492 misleading public claims. But fact-checking Trump has done little to check his power. Trumpian fantasy can’t be contested by appeals to realism, a strategy that requires apologetics for the violent reality of capitalism, imperialism, and structural oppression. Today’s left wins when we challenge the right’s cruel and exclusionary imagination with more just, more beautiful world-making projects of our own.
Projects like Trump’s reach public consciousness from the top down, through politicians’ campaigns. Means of Production, a socialist film collective in Detroit, crafted video ads for U.S. representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and former congressional candidate Kaniela Ing’s electoral candidacies, exposing millions of viewers not to socialist ideas in the abstract but to concrete socialist visions of a good life. Momentum, the movement that formed in the U.K. in 2015 to support Jeremy Corbyn and a leftwards reorientation of the Labour Party, produced viral ads of a similar sort, framing socialist insights as both fresh and self-evident. Shifting the baseline of popular common sense, these short films helped make alternative futures more thinkable.
This story is from the July/August 2019 edition of Briarpatch.
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This story is from the July/August 2019 edition of Briarpatch.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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