Feeling our way to utopia

Today democracies around the world are being voted down by electorates looking for right-­wing authoritarian leaders who will fire up their grievances, insecurities and disappointments – who will gladly target the ‘elites’ and enact something like the ‘general will’ instead of prosecuting the greater good.
But it’s not only right-wing extremists who have embraced the politics of feeling, sensibility and blame. Increasingly those who consider themselves left, progressive and tolerant spend a great deal of time assigning culpability to ‘the privileged’, a conveniently vague catch-­all category, when they would be better off considering pragmatic class issues and promoting practical reforms that will work for the whole of society. When the sensibility-­rich slogan of ‘who’s to blame?’ outguns ‘how do we fix this together?’, society is in big trouble.