Progressives need a plan for the coming crisis. Here’s a way to create one quickly.

At some point in the coming months there will be a historic opening for progressive politics. I know that as of February 2025 this may sound laughable.

Elon Musk and his team are enacting the authoritarian-libertarian dream of slashing the U.S. government, with no meaningful opposition so far. A far right party just placed second in the German national elections. Putin is on the road to Trump-assisted international redemption and a favourable outcome for Russia in Ukraine. 

It may all feel like an unstoppable march to victory right now. But it’s also starting to look like hubris. And history, literature and sports have enough examples of what usually comes after hubris. 

There are so many things that could go wrong for the authoritarian strongman narrative in coming months, that it’s hard to see how at least one of them doesn’t. 

The global economy is highly dependent on the stability of the U.S. government. To give just one example: U.S. treasury bonds have been considered a safe investment for so long, there are now 25 trillion US$ worth of them being held worldwide, equivalent to almost a third of global GDP. 

Musk’s DOGE team is messing with this highly complex, interconnected system on a daily basis. Any single slip-up could set off a chain reaction leading to a collapse that can’t easily be fixed. 

That’s before factoring in the impact of outside shocks. An invasion or attack in a critical location like Taiwan or the Suez Canal. A set of economic data coming in below expectations, spooking markets. A protest being put down with violence, generating exponentially more protest in the days after. Plane crashes or a new pandemic that could have been prevented. 

During the 2008/9 financial crisis, there were weekends where only quick action by the Obama administration stopped more banks from failing. 

Whatever the next shock is, Trump, Musk and co. don’t have the competence, principles or emotional bandwidth to respond in a similar way. They will double down on the only approach they know: scapegoating, creating distraction and spreading disinformation. Chaos in fact is likely the goal.  

But disinformation can’t blot out reality for everyone all the time. In a serious crisis with bad news landing on a daily basis, scapegoating and distraction will deliver diminishing returns. 

The myths underlying the authoritarian appeal will be exposed, from the one about business people being better rulers, to the ones about the government being inherently inefficient and minorities to blame for all social ills. 

In the 2008/9 financial crisis, only one story was quick enough out of the blocks: blaming government deficits and promoting cuts in public spending as the tough medicine needed. 

Alternative proposals and analysis came too late and were too dispersed to influence decisions. As it turned out, those spending cuts in fact made the crisis longer and deeper, sowing the seeds of discontent that would later be reaped by political opportunists. 

This time around it feels like there’s a lot more progressive raw material available, from policy, research and narrative proposals, to social movements and a larger private donor base. One aim of this newsletter is to look at some of these in more detail. 

The main goal, though, is to develop a strategy to pull them together. Specifically, it should include a progressive narrative, a policy overview, a campaign plan and a feasible fundraising approach, all in the shortest possible timeline. 

If there already is one and I’ve missed it, please do get in touch. I’ll be genuinely happy to support in any way I can. 

In the meantime, I’ll be following the advice of Texas-based artist Austin Kleon and using the Progressive Strategy newsletter to write what I’d like to read. 

Just in case I get hit by a bus (or in East Berlin more likely a tram), this first edition already outlines how one version of a progressive strategy could be built. 

Wanted: a progressive narrative 

The search for a progressive narrative is not new. In 2015 Naomi Klein called for a “counter-narrative that we can have a different economy with more, better jobs.” 

Since then there have been similar calls. In May 2024, for example, leading academics gathered in Berlin to sign a declaration saying 

“What is needed is a new political consensus addressing the deep drivers of people’s distrust instead of merely focusing on the symptoms…”

The declaration also sets out initial criteria for what that new consensus needs to do: 

“A new paradigm very generally requires a focus on the long term in decision-making; better systematic inclusion of the consequences that potentially disruptive developments such as globalization, digitalization or climate change entail socially; better anticipation of possible market failures in policymaking; and a better understanding of risks.”

A future newsletter will look at reasons why progressives haven’t yet got around to actually drafting that narrative. For now, I’ll focus on one: the progressive allergy to simple messaging. 

The Berlin declaration, for example, warns against 

“…falling into the trap of populists who pretend to have simple answers.”

The reluctance to jump in with simple answers to complex questions is understandable. (The Bertrand Russell quote comes to mind: “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”)

But there’s a difference between recognising the world is complex and rejecting simple proposals outright. 

Simple answers in themselves are not necessarily a problem.  The real problem is when simple answers are also wrong (see: Brexit). 

Take this list, for instance: 

• Our planet has limits and we’ve already blown past them. 

• We need to move away from fossil fuels as fast as possible. 

• There’s more than enough money and resources to go around. The problem is how unequally they are distributed. 

• There are many things that only governments can do. From putting a man on the moon to providing quality healthcare and transport for all. This is why it’s so important to have a functioning, well-run government. 

• A well-run government needs funding. 

• Cutting taxes on the wealthy doesn’t actually generate more jobs. 

• When taxes on the wealthy are raised very few of them really do leave the country. 

• In developed countries the government’s overall debt is usually not as big a deal as it’s made out to be. It’s much more important to invest in the future, and especially in renewable energies. 

• We need to strictly regulate lobbying and the funding of political parties. 

These statements are more than a matter of opinion. A majority of the academic communities working in the fields of climate or inequality will agree they are supported by available evidence. (I’m not suggesting these messages should be delivered in this format; a political communication expert would surely want to rework them.)

Simple answers can also be truthful and necessary, even in complex contexts involving hard choices about trade-offs and distributive effects. 

Without them, progressives start from a position of weakness, letting authoritarian opponents dominate political spaces. 

Here’s a test in three questions: 

• without looking it up, can you quote a progressive campaign slogan from the last 10 years, in your own country or anywhere in the world? 

• If you can, is it one a citizen picked at random in that country is also likely to recognize? 

• What does MAGA stand for? 

Conservative movements have long played to win, acting as if power is their birthright and taking it their primary goal. In part because they know the policies they want do not actually have popular support, they have also been getting comfortable for decades with strategies like stoking culture wars. 

Starting with Victor Orban’s victory in Hungary in 2010, election results (when not manipulated) have repeatedly proven the effectiveness of the modern authoritarian-conservative approach. 

For clarity: I’m not about to propose a progressive strategy should copy authoritarian tactics. I’m not suggesting, for example, progressives take money from dubious sources to spread disinformation. 

But if strategy is understood as a series of structured decisions about available resources to reach a goal, the authoritarian approach ticks a lot of the right boxes. 

Progressive efforts, meanwhile, are largely uncoordinated, spread across policy proposals, campaigns and research projects by individual writers, organisations and social movements. Parallel initiatives haven’t yet added up to an impactful collective project, and are unlikely to do so spontaneously.

Lacking an underlying narrative, progressive policies face an uphill political battle, too easily dismissed as impractical or radical despite high levels of support in polls. 

Meanwhile, largely evidence-free claims about society are promoted as being the “common sense” of “real people” by traditional and social media whose views and algorithms are skewed towards the interests of their owners. 

There’s no lack of awareness of the need for a cohesive progressive approach. But to date it seems no single entity or group has felt it has the mandate or legitimacy to lead it. 

The modern right has few such qualms.

With no initial mandate or legitimacy but their own ambition, they openly treat the world (and apparently also space) as their chess board, with humanity and its institutions as the pieces. 

From Brexit to DOGE, the authoritarian conservatives decide on their goals, ignore the risks and counter arguments, and then take the shortest route available to reach them. 

They may not have a strategy document and formal structure, but there is clearly a playbook and coordination across countries. All supported by some truly unpleasant background characters who write things like

“...as the crappy govts we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign & independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions.”

In the 19th century most of these people would have been handing out pamphlets in the park. 

With access to the internet and the funding of billionaires, right now they are doing victory laps. 

The Progressive Strategy Challenge 

The progressive strategy I’m trying to find, build or convene has to include two things: First, a long-term narrative and policy package that aims to become the new “common sense”, tackling the core issues of our time: economic uncertainty and insecurity, climate change, inequality, social cohesion, and international stability. 

Second, it has to provide a short-term path to a series of electoral victories by progressive parties. 

In more detail, the components are: 

Progressive Strategy 

= 

Narrative + Policies + Campaign Design + Funding + Core Team + Network + Execution 

The fastest possible way I can think of to build this strategy has three parts:  

1. the Alien Ultimatum conference: Narrative, Policies and Campaign Design;

2. Finding Funding;

3. Delivery: Core Team, Network and Execution. 

Below is an outline of the first two. 

Progressive Strategy Part 1: The Alien Ultimatum conference 

The Alien Ultimatum is a device to create a sense of urgency around a non-negotiable deadline. 

The idea is to make sure the kick-off meeting I’m proposing here comes up with concrete suggestions, however imperfect. A less imaginary catastrophic scenario could also work for this purpose.  

Something like, I don’t know, climate scientists willing to go to jail to warn about what’s coming. Or a drug-addled billionaire and his senile sidekick dismantling the U.S. government and the international order from within. 

This is the conference assignment: 

“Aliens in a massive spaceship have appeared out of nowhere and are now parked next to the moon. They have given 48 hours to deliver a new progressive narrative, policy overview and campaign plan or they will blow up Earth.

If you are in this room, you have been selected to produce Earth’s response. Nobody else is working on this, and you collectively have final decision-making authority. Good luck.”

In the room would be three teams, with a total of not more than 50 people. 

The first team would be independent progressive thinkers and organisers who are also strong communicators. 

The second would be strategists, campaigners and political communication specialists. 

The third would be in charge of delivering the strategy: Organisers, project managers, social media experts and back-end teams ideally already employed full-time for this purpose. 

So far I have a draft list of Team 1, the progressive thinkers: 

Isabella Weber

Rutger Bregman 

Ida Bae Wells

Gabriel Zucman

Mariana Mazzucato 

AOC

Luisa Neubauer

Adam Tooze

Stephanie Kelton

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Carole Cadwalladr 

Timothy Snyder 

George Monbiot 

Kate Raworth

Grace Blakely

Brett Scott

Zeynep Tufekci

Martyna Linartas

Benjamin Tallis

Sarah Kendzior 

Ingrid Robeyns

Nathan Tankus

In a future newsletter I’ll add remaining participants and outline the detailed agenda and format for the conference. As a facilitator I can think of Duncan Green. 

For now, here’s a short summary of how it might be possible to get to a policy overview, overall narrative and campaign plan over 2 days. 

Alien Ultimatum Conference, morning of day 1: the policies 

Let’s start with the relatively easy part: the policy overview. 

Each of the Team 1 participants (the progressive thinkers) has proposed or endorsed at least a handful of policies throughout their careers. 

For the Alien Ultimatum workshop, they will be asked to bring along one policy proposal on not more than one page. Including what the policy is, why it matters and how it could be implemented. 

They will each get two minutes to present, with a few minutes for questions and feedback. 

Once all policies have been introduced, there’ll be a short round to explore if any major areas are missing and iron out overlaps. 

As Team 1 is presenting, team 3 (implementation) will be taking notes and will have received the policy one-pagers in advance. 

Right after the session, they will produce a single policy overview or “progressive policy pack”. 

It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just needs to be ready to show to the aliens so they don’t blow us up. 

Alien Ultimatum conference, afternoon of day 1: the narrative 

The second part is trickier. How to come up with an overarching progressive narrative in such a short timeframe? 

One place to start could be this checklist: 

• Individuals are selfish, rational decision-makers seeking to maximise their own satisfaction through income and consumption

• The goal of a business is to maximise its profits. This means that it has to be as efficient as possible. If it is not, it will eventually lose out to market competitors

• Governments are inherently inefficient and should leave the provision of goods and services to private markets as much as possible. This means that the government's main job should be to cut taxes and regulations while reducing public spending 

• Global institutions' main goal is to provide a stable framework for private markets by minimising conflict and promoting international capital flows and free trade

• The overall goal is economic growth

• The core value is freedom. 

The list above is obviously an attempt to summarize the free market narrative. I’m aware it has other names, that there is a huge amount of research and debate about it, and that in practice it has most often been used as a cover story to weaken labour rights and boost corporate profits.  

The point here is to show that it is possible to fit a narrative about the whole of society on less than one page. 

Whatever its logical and conceptual coherence (iffy at best) and the societal outcomes it’s led to (on balance, not great), the free market checklist has been politically successful across different countries and contexts for decades. 

Since the 2008/9 financial crisis there have been occasional claims that the free market worldview is on the way out. Having just sat through a week of TV debates leading up to the German national election, I can report that in 2025 this narrative is alive and well. 

When not talking about migration, every major party was faithfully rolling out the free market mantra, promising to cut taxes and reduce bureaucracy to generate economic growth. Climate change and inequality got virtually no airtime. 

This week, we got Jeff Bezos announcing that “free markets and personal liberties are right for America” and that the newspaper he owns, the Washington Post, will be “writing every day in support and defense” of those “two pillars”.  

How has this narrative managed to survive for so long, against the mounting evidence that it is never going to sustainably improve majority living standards? What are its advantages over the competition? 

It’s true that it aligns with powerful interests, who have invested billions in political donations, think tanks, lobbying and PR to promote it.

Far from emerging naturally, the free market framework was constructed and boosted over decades, initially by a loose alliance of academics and business people and later also by think tanks. They saw themselves as plucky defenders of the enterprise system and individual freedom, in grave danger of being “submerged by the rhetoric of the New Left and of many liberals”. 

But funding and PR are not the only reasons the free market has so successfully been positioned as being “just common sense”. 

Two additional features stand out. 

The first is that it’s complete. The free market story claims to be valid at every possible human scale, supplying a simple answer for everything and a role for everyone.

Second, the narrative is unashamedly prescriptive. Individuals should maximise their income and consumption; corporations should maximise profits; governments should deregulate, privatise and cut taxes; global institutions should promote free trade. 

With short messages drawing on a single shared framework, for several generations speakers and politicians have easily been trained, soundbites inserted into 30-second segments and campaign slogans fitted on to billboards. 

Having an answer for pretty much everything also tends to instill and transmit confidence. And few things are as convincing as conviction. Particularly in times of uncertainty, people turn to the comforting stories they know rather than take a risk with untested approaches. 

Back to our Alien Ultimatum assignment. Inspired by free market chutzpah, this is the template I’d propose for a Progressive Narrative:

Individuals are ___________________ and should _________________

Businesses are _____________________and should _________________

Governments are ____________________ and should ________________

International institutions are___________ and should____________

The core values are___________________

The overall goals are______________________

Team 1 would again be split into groups and get a couple of hours to fill out the template. If they want to add more elements, adapt the format, or write down how different elements relate to each other, that’s great. As long as it all fits on one page. 

Once they’re done, each group would present their proposals and the implementation team would collate them into a single one-page summary narrative. 

As there’s likely to be controversy on what to include and what to leave out, it could help if the Team 1 participants nominate a small sign-off group. The sign-off group doesn't work on the drafting but are given advance authority to make the final call on the one-page summary. 

I can imagine there will be objections to this approach, with claims that it’s impossible, irresponsible, unserious or naive to try and fit a progressive societal narrative onto one page. 

To which I say: by all means, do set up a participatory drafting process with a robust governance structure to produce a comprehensive narrative report. 

Just a reminder that while that is happening, we’ll be losing ground, institutions, jobs and lives every day to a bunch of white supremacists whose declared strategy is to “flood the zone with shit”. 

Shall we move to day 2? 

Alien Ultimatum conference, day 2: the playbook 

Throughout day 1, the campaigners, PR specialists and implementation teams (Teams 2 and 3) will have been in the room listening in and taking notes. 

Day 2 is when they move into action. Whoever can stay on from Team 1 (the progressive thinkers and campaigners) will of course be very welcome to. 

This is the assignment for day 2 of the Alien Ultimatum conference: 

“You have $100 million US$ for the next 12 months. Your mission is to build and implement a progressive campaign playbook to win as many national elections as possible, while positioning the narrative summary and policy pack as the new long term common sense. 

Guiding questions: 

• Which countries would you focus on initially?

• How would you assess which messages and policies are likely to resonate most in each? 

• Which networks have to be built? 

• Which political parties would you support? How much would you donate to each? What other in kind support would you offer them?  

• How much would you spend per country on hiring local coordination teams, social media, in-person events, traditional advertising, training speakers, etc? 

• What’s your roughly estimated cost, including overhead, for a long-term presence and ongoing progressive campaign in each country, including in between elections? 

• How would you keep track of progress and adjust as needed?”

I don’t yet have a format for this session. My first suggestion would be to work with the facilitator and a small team of participants to design one. 

Ideally the process would include space for regular feedback, but it would have to make sure that by the end of the morning there is at least a draft outline of a progressive campaign playbook. 

The afternoon of day 2 would be to agree on next steps, make sure the implementation team has the support they need and clarify outstanding questions and future roles. 

Progressive Strategy Part 2: Funding

The idea of the $100 million in the planning session above is that it’s an amount large enough to impact politics in any country, but not too large it leads to the illusion of unlimited resources. 

For example, it’s close to double the total amount all the main political parties in Germany received in private donations in 2023. 

It’s also an amount that, at least mathematically, could be raised from multiple different sources. 

Inequality has gone so far off the scale that there are now thousands of people for whom $100 million is a fraction of their total wealth. 

The latest Global Wealth Report from Swiss Bank UBS says there are 2.638 individuals worldwide with wealth of between 1 and 50 billion US$ - that’s 4 billion US$ on average. 

(This is not even the top tier of global wealth, by the way.)

Here are 4 ways to get to $100 million just based on this group: 

• 1% of the group with “average” wealth - that’s 26 people - each donate 0.1% of it, leaving the other 99.9% intact

• 10 of those average individuals, 0.4% of the group, each donate 0.25% of their wealth 

• A single average billionaire in the 1 to 50 billion bracket donates 2.5% of their wealth 

• A billionaire at the very bottom of the bracket donates 10% of their one billion (and still has 900 million left.)

It’s not unthinkable to imagine billionaires supporting a progressive initiative that might end up curtailing their own power and wealth. 

A few wealthy individuals have already started to do just that. A group called the Patriotic Millionaires, for example, collected 260 signatures for a public statement in January 2025 saying that they would be proud to pay more in tax. (One of them is Brian Cox aka Logan Roy in Succession.)

This doesn’t mean they will easily be convinced to fund a new progressive strategy. Wealthy individuals are approached on a regular basis by fundraising initiatives of varying degrees of credibility. 

Yet still, compared to other sources including private foundations, governments or crowdfunding they look like the most plausible source of funding. 

Much smaller amounts would be enough to get started in the meantime. 

Crowdfunding or grants from foundations could work for individual components like the Alien Ultimatum conference. If the progressive thinkers and event organisers are willing to donate their time, a 2-day meeting for 50 people could be pulled together for well under 150 thousand euros. 

But for the long term, flexible and reliable funding will be essential.  

Which leads to a broader question: how realistic is all this? 

How might we get some of the world’s leading progressive thinkers to gather at short notice, and some of the world’s wealthiest individuals to fund a new collective strategy? 

Enter the Bob Geldof role. 

At the time of the original 1984 Live Aid concert, singer Bob Geldof wasn’t a major star. 

But he did have the network and credibility to pull together the biggest performers in the world for a then unprecedentedly large event in a matter of weeks. 

Many of the progressive thinkers on our list above already have large audiences and serious convening power. I’ve never met Gabriel Zucman or seen him live, for example, but he strikes me as a natural Bob Geldof candidate. 

I have no illusions about this happening quickly. With the informational and emotional overload many people are living with (and the state of their inboxes), it will be very difficult to break through initially. 

The most likely scenario is that I’ll be sending emails for months while plugging away at this newsletter and on Bluesky before gaining any traction. (Also, I’ll probably look back at this first edition and cringe.)

But if just a couple of influential people or organisations pick up this proposal, even if it’s to rework it completely, things could start moving fast.

The only thing left to do now is to hit publish.