Nostalgic versus Future-focused

The day has finally arrived: the political terms left and right are bankrupt. Done. Kaput. And it had been coming for a while. In a doomed attempt to keep them alive, there was a period a few years ago when we no longer classified political parties and positions only from left to right, but also as progressive or conservative. The idea behind it? Not every left-wing party is progressive, and not every right-wing party is conservative.

Think of a party that calls itself left-wing, but is actually conservative on socio-cultural issues, or yearns for how things used to be organised. Or a party that is economically right-wing, but holds genuinely progressive views on culture and ethics. Such combinations exist in almost every political landscape, and they show that a single line running from left to right has long since stopped being adequate to describe reality.

Somehow the left-right-progressive-conservative quadrant faded back into the background. Could it be that social media algorithms simply work better on a binary than on a four-way split? Or perhaps this quadrant was just the first sign of the binary's own bankruptcy. In a kind of last convulsion, the political landscape is currently being carved up again into a neat left-right split, but now with an extra layer of polarisation poured over it: far-left versus far-right. And on social media it's all reduced to woke versus fascist, bitter-left versus stupid-right.

“And on social media it's all reduced to woke versus fascist, bitter-left versus stupid-right.”

The questions that, oddly enough, surface in me amid all this polarisation are: "Why is left called left and not right, and vice versa? And why left and right at all?" To find out, I had to do some googling. It turns out the terms date back to the French Revolution. Back when the king still held absolute power, the progressive politicians who wanted reform sat to the left of the king. The royalist, conservative politicians sat to his right. The terminology stuck from then on, and even became internationally established. But it could just as easily have been the other way round. So we essentially owe the terms left and right to the interior decorator of the French court.

Whatever the case, in a political context the words left and right say very little about what they literally stand for, and not much more about what they used to stand for figuratively either. The terms conservative and progressive do at least have some substantive meaning, but even those no longer capture today's political landscape. The word progressive sounds like "change for the sake of change: anything but staying the way it is now." The word conservative sounds like "preserve what exists, because it's good the way it is now."

Neither is accurate.

On the one hand, I see a growing group of people who get called conservative, but who don't actually want to preserve what exists now at all — precisely because they are deeply unhappy with how things currently stand. That group doesn't want to preserve anything; it wants to go back to how the country once was, in their perception. Oriented towards an imagined past, out of dissatisfaction with the present.

“That group doesn't want to preserve anything at all; it wants to go back to how the country once was, in their perception. Oriented towards an imagined past, out of dissatisfaction with the present.”

On the other hand, I see a group of people who are worried about what they perceive to be coming: a whole heap of misery, including things like climate change. You could call it doom-thinking, or alarmism. That group is trying to protect the world from disaster. Regardless of exactly how big any particular problem is, or which solutions will work best, all these issues have one thing in common: they demand choices that reach further than the next election.

Will it really come to that? Time will tell. What is certain is that time only moves in one direction, and that is: forward. We are increasingly confronted with matters we can no longer keep kicking down the road: maintenance of roads and bridges, drinking-water supply, the capacity of the power grid, the quality of surface water, staff shortages in healthcare, the obesity epidemic, the effects of agricultural pesticides on soil and insect populations, moving away from fossil fuels, and the housing shortage.

These are all very different examples on the face of it, but they share one thing: if you've kept half an eye on the trends, you'll know that every single one of these is a topic that experts and politicians alike have been raising for years, without sufficient action being taken. On all these issues we respond with band-aid fixes instead of drawing up structural, long-term plans.

Why the short term beats the long term — outside politics too

I think this can be explained by a number of factors. All these issues require short-term investment to solve something in the long term. For politicians that's a bad deal: you have to spend money now to achieve something at a time when you yourself may no longer be in power. In other words: cut back now to help your successor. Not exactly an appealing story. On top of that, the focus of much policy is short-term by design, partly because of the four-year election cycle — assuming a cabinet even lasts that long.

On top of that, in my view, there is still the effect of "outrage politics." Rob Wijnberg wrote a fine column about "goldfish journalism" years ago (De Correspondent, a Dutch journalism platform): the frenzy of the day in the media and on social media determines the political debate far more often than the other way around. Relatively unimportant but media-friendly topics get priority over dull long-term issues.

I recognise this pattern just as much in organisations, by the way. There too, the quarterly figure often wins out over the investment that will only pay off in three years' time. Maintenance, training, data infrastructure, process renewal — these are all things that are easily pushed back, until the problem grows too big to ignore any longer. The mechanisms are similar to those in politics: whoever invests now often only reaps the rewards under their successor, and the frenzy of the day (the escalating client, the urgent project, the reorganisation) crowds out structural thinking about where the organisation wants to be in five or ten years. Future-readiness is therefore not just a political issue, but exactly the kind of question organisations and companies should be spending a substantial part of their time and budget on. Not endlessly slapping on plasters, but sharpening the underlying course, informed by a changing outside world.

Finally, the most important explanation: we live in a time when many things simply aren't sustainable anymore. Some call it The In-Between Time, the Interregnum, The Great Turn, or The Twilight Twenties.

The future is coming, whether we like it or not. The developments that come with it will carry on, whether we enjoy them or not. So as far as I'm concerned, the question is not whether a party, or an organisation, is left-wing or right-wing. The question is: "Are we working towards becoming future-ready?" And whether we get there via the left or the right, that's something we can debate.

“The future is coming, whether we like it or not.”

But please, let's stop longing for the past. That is burying our heads in the sand, looking away and wishful thinking — in politics, and in organisations alike. Ask yourself, your team, or the next political party you vote for, for a description of the future. What will the world look like in 10 to 20 years if we carry on as we are, and what do you think it should look like? And what are the plans for the next four years to get there?

From that moment on, the terms left versus right can go in the bin, and we can divide things up according to a new spectrum: nostalgic versus future-focused.

Being future-focused doesn't mean we have to reject the past or forget fond memories. It means that in our decision-making, policy and strategy, we let ourselves be guided by the world that is coming, not the world that once was.