Mia Mulder, former Swedish politician and future empress of Scandinavia, presents the case for the necessity of Big Ideas to move society forward in her latest YouTube video essay.
By way of illustration she cites what the American right is currently doing with Project 2025, and contrasts this with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s center-left Abundance manifesto, claiming that it fails to rise to the level of a Big Idea due to the constraints imposed by Francis Fukuyama’s conception of the “end of history” — if liberal democracy is the apex of humanity’s social evolution, what can we do but tinker around the edges, and fulfill our destiny as homo economicus?
A useful concept Mia evokes is the “politics of refusal”, where action primarily occurs in repudiation of negative forces rather than as movement toward a positive vision of its own (a quick search indicates that scholars of refusal might contest this definition, but setting that aside). Mia contends that this has been the left’s posture for the past several decades, and provides the counterexample of the recent election of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who won off the strength of both his personal charisma and bold ideas, boldly asserted.
Mia ends with a call to action: join her think tank — website pending — and come make Big Ideas too.
I agree with Mia’s thesis: we need a clear vision of the positive future that we want to build together, and by proposing big things that make a fundamental difference, even if we get only part of the way there, we change the reality of the circumstances — and equally critically, we set the conversation around our agenda.
This is something I’m personally thinking about in my own advocacy here, and not just defining myself in opposition. The uncritical adoption of AI and the expansion of ICE are two powerful Big Ideas that I think are bad, but “thing bad” is a pretty anemic statement when the world is at stake. What are the Big Ideas I want to promote in their place? (Watch this space.)
I don’t think the importance of Big Ideas is limited to the political arena, and really, I don’t think it’s essentially political at all: people want to dream of a better future, and to do that, we need a vision of what that future looks like and how to get there: artistically, morally, materially, spiritually, politically; on any valence of human experience there’s an opportunity to dream clearly and capaciously beyond the bounds of what “the end of history” has told is us our destiny as economic animals.
No conclusion here today other than: yep! Let’s do the thing.
It’s Big Idea time, baby.
Featured image by Andrew George on Unsplash
