“There’s always problems in life. You know, there’s this problem, solve that problem, solve that problem. But, you know, there need to be things that inspire you. There need to be things that make you glad to wake up in the morning and say, ‘I’m looking forward to the future.’” Those were the words of Elon Musk, speaking just after U.S. President Donald Trump’s second inauguration. “I’m super fired up for the future,” he continued. “It’s going to be very exciting.”
In the space of just two and a half minutes, Musk mentioned the future five times. His speech stood out in part for its fervor: Who speaks like this in politics today? As a source of inspiration, the future often seems dead, having been replaced by nostalgia and crisis management.
“There’s always problems in life. You know, there’s this problem, solve that problem, solve that problem. But, you know, there need to be things that inspire you. There need to be things that make you glad to wake up in the morning and say, ‘I’m looking forward to the future.’” Those were the words of Elon Musk, speaking just after U.S. President Donald Trump’s second inauguration. “I’m super fired up for the future,” he continued. “It’s going to be very exciting.”
In the space of just two and a half minutes, Musk mentioned the future five times. His speech stood out in part for its fervor: Who speaks like this in politics today? As a source of inspiration, the future often seems dead, having been replaced by nostalgia and crisis management.
At the same, it was a reminder of where the future lives on—among the zealots of Silicon Valley. As politicians turn away from the politics of vision, they cede the radical imagination to the corporate sphere, where it serves agendas that resist democratic control.
For two centuries, modern politics took its cue from the future. Across the 19th and 20th centuries, parties and movements defined themselves by future-oriented programs of change. Short-term goals, such as improved conditions for workers, were paired with longer-term projects of transformation. For Karl Kautsky, a leading theorist of socialism and German social democracy in the late 19th century, it was all about clarity of vision: “All other political parties live only in the present, from hand to mouth; the Socialist party is the only one which has a definite aim in the future, the only one whose present policy is dictated by a general, consistent purpose.” What socialists pioneered, others would copy—the party as the vehicle of a long-term cause. Winning elections meant mobilizing the masses, and a manifesto for progress was crucial.
It was not just partisans but democrats in general who had reason to embrace the open future. Multiparty politics meant convincing those of different views to endorse the same institutions. On what grounds might people accept the results of elections that went against them—how could there be “losers’ consent”? One answer lay in the abundance of time: Those denied access to state power this time might claim it the next. From the perspective of the future, political fortunes could be seen as provisional: The defeated had reason to continue their involvement and hold back from violence when things went astray.
The opening of the New York World’s Fair in Queens, New York City, on April 22, 1964. The event showcased futuristic technology and culture, influencing the latter half of the century. AFP via Getty Images
Things look quite different today. One sees politicians peddling backward-looking stories of greatness lost and forever firefighting the latest emergency. Presentism, even nihilism, is the outlook of the age. To the extent that officials do lift their eyes to the future, a preoccupation with quantitative targets and manageable risks tends to displace more encompassing visions of how things could be shaped. Whether it is objectives for growth or for decarbonization, the focus is on particular policies rather than programs of change. The future-oriented concepts that make an appearance—“recovery” and “resilience,” for example—tend to be vague and lacking in agency. No surprise that many tune out, caught between fatalism and frustrated impatience.
So, what led to the demise of the politics of the future? At one level, it is a function of turbulent times—why make plans when the world is in flux? Long-range speculation can look irrelevant. From financial crashes to pandemics and wars, it is the relatively near horizon that can look the most crucial.
Loch Johnson, a scholar of U.S. national security and intelligence, observes that security officials increasingly discount the long-range forecasts that their advisors prepare for them, preferring short-term forecasts that address the pressing concerns of the moment. Rather than peer into the distant unknown, policymakers want to be told “what happened today and yesterday, and what is likely to happen tomorrow.”
Especially for public officials accustomed to avoiding anything that smacks of ideology, a sense of emergency inspires a focus on immediate and practical steps. As international politics becomes increasingly multipolar, this redoubles the sense of a volatile world, too unpredictable to plan in advance for. Such views find their corollary in everyday life. For individuals trapped in immediate concerns—debt, precarious jobs, and on short-term contracts—planning for the future can seem like a luxury.
But this presentism also tracks how politics is now structured. If governments today are marked by the absence of vision, it is because power tends to be concentrated in the least ambitious. Sociologist Stephanie Mudge has traced how parties have evolved to marginalize their activists, where future-oriented commitments are typically strongest, in favor of leaders, electoral strategists, and policy advisors. Operations are run by those most focused on short-term success; opportunism is the name of the game.
The appeal of a more radical stance is evident when politics falls into the hands of an activist base, as with the Zohran Mamdani campaign in New York City. But for the most part, such groups are kept far from positions of influence. Party platforms and manifestos, once the stuff of bold vision, have widely been reduced to a catalogue of small goals, whose achievement or failure matters little.
British Ghanaian author Kodwo Eshun once observed that those who neglect the future cede this terrain to others who may use it against them. To shape hopes, fears, and expectations is to exert a distinctive power. “In the colonial era of the early to middle twentieth century,” Eshun wrote in 2003, “avant-gardists from Walter Benjamin to Frantz Fanon revolted in the name of the future against a power structure that relied on control and representation of the historical archive. Today, the situation is reversed. The powerful employ futurists and draw power from the futures they endorse, thereby condemning the disempowered to live in the past.” In other words: Those who fail to develop visions for the future are condemned to live in a world shaped by the visions of others.
The demise of future-thinking in contemporary politics coincides with its renewed embrace in the world of Big Tech. Consider Palantir CEO Alexander Karp’s 2025 book, The Technological Republic, nothing if not grand in its ambitions: “The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the national and the articulation of a national project—what is this country, what are our values, and for what do we stand.” Karp writes scathingly of firms that seek only a quick profit, insisting on the need for a higher purpose: “Palantir itself is an attempt … at constructing a collective enterprise, the creative output of which blends theory and action.”
Palantir CEO Alexander Karp speaks during the New York Times DealBook Summit in New York City on Dec. 3, 2025.Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Peter Thiel, of the same stable, addressed his 2014 bestselling book, Zero to One, to budding entrepreneurs, encouraging them to view the start-up as the “largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.” Corporate monopoly should be the goal, as the basis on which “to make the long-term plans and to finance the ambitious research projects that firms locked in competition can’t dream of.” Such figures cast themselves as seers with eyes on the bigger picture. Among Thiel’s investments today is Praxis, a company seeking to build private cities from the Mediterranean to Greenland, packaged as libertarian utopias for the rich.
Political manifestos may be largely dead, but corporate manifestos are not. Today’s Kautskys work in the private sector. A recent mission statement from Palantir was explicitly political in ambition, with an agenda including compulsory national service and long-term military spending. The text evokes history on a sweeping scale, charting the shift to a “new era of deterrence” built on artificial intelligence.
Another Silicon Valley tycoon, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, published a “techno-optimist” manifesto in 2023 that likewise extolled the need to build the future on AI. “Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential,” he wrote. “We believe we are poised for an intelligence takeoff that will expand our capabilities to unimagined heights. We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone. … We believe [it] can save lives—if we let it.”
These corporate actors seek to ensure that the future is imagined to their benefit, reserving them and their projects a central place. Many are the issues of public concern where social hopes and expectations can have material significance yet on which democratic politicians now seem so reticent. Big Tech and AI are areas where public input and control may clearly be warranted, but it will happen only to the extent that people believe regulation is possible and desirable.
Likewise in an increasingly tense geopolitical context, the old questions of disarmament and nonnuclear deterrence are as relevant today as to the peace movements of the 1960s but will have purchase only insofar as we can look beyond a future of automated systems designed for war. Reordering the economy to serve equality and democracy is as relevant today as in the 19th century, but that depends on seeing trajectories of change that are not those endorsed by corporate elites.
Democratizing the future means building new sites of imagination and collective power. As with the parties of old, politics needs places where people can organize and dream—where they can “look forward to the future” without being a CEO. The rich and powerful are already mapping and making the future they would like to see. Their opponents must do the same.
