The Death Of Deliverism

This has been doing the rounds lately, reportedly gracing the desks of many a newly-minted Labour MP. It challenges a “naive”, “transactional” vision of politics which fails to recognise or respond to widespread unhappiness across “landscapes of despair”, creating fertile ground for authoritarianism’s “emotional alchemy” which “overrides facts and material reality”. It presents an urgent rallying cry to “take social connection, isolation, and community much more seriously”; reinvigorate the “craft” and “mindset” of organising; and recognise that our task is not to “find the magic message or to deliver more popular policies”, but instead ”to offer a compelling, energizing, persuasive vision of the good life and to organize mass-based organizations through which people shape and live out those values in the here and now.”