“To Imagine, Without Restraint, the World We Actually Mean to Create”: A Conversation with Connie Razza

Less than six months in power, the second Trump administration has taken a sledgehammer to the economy and the foundations of American democracy. Its targets have included not only core democratic institutions like the civil service or the federal judiciary, but also the cultural pillars of a free society—from higher education to public media. Critics and supporters of the president alike have acknowledged this “burn-it-all-down” approach as a deliberate strategy of the administration. But to frame its actions as being in sole pursuit of destruction of the old order risks missing the ends to which this destruction is aimed: The administration is pursuing a radical reconception of American civilization and culture away from pluralistic democracy and toward the restoration of old hierarchies.

Understood this way, the MAGA movement is, first and foremost, a visionary project. Its politics and policies work in service of an ethnonationalist, patriarchal future that is dominated by private power. That’s not to say that the various factions of the MAGA Right agree on every aspect of that future. But ultimately, the Right has been able to coalesce and ground its political project in a galvanizing conception of the future.

The same cannot be said for the Left, which in recent years has been beset by myopia and risk aversion that locks it in a quasi-permanent defensive crouch. The broad Left has not grounded its efforts in a positive vision of a flourishing society and has instead focused on delivering piecemeal policy solutions that, even when successful, do not point to a cohesive vision of the good life. To be sure, policy successes are critical, perhaps now more than ever. But we must embark on the former effort—envisioning an equitable, just, and inclusive future—with the same degree of seriousness and investment.

To better understand this urgent need, I sat down with longtime strategist, movement organizer, and policy expert Connie Razza. Connie is the executive director of Future Currents and Future Currents Action, movement utility projects that help movement leaders and social justice organizations prepare for future conditions, build resilient relationships to confront crises and opportunities together, and develop strategies to achieve the future we deserve. In its recently released strategy memo, Future Currents conceives of the Left’s failure to articulate a positive vision of a good society as a “systemic deprivation of the future.” In our conversation, Connie explained the project that led to this conclusion, compared the Left’s and the Right’s approach to future visioning, and described how to reclaim the ability to imagine.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Shahrzad Shams: We’re here today to talk about a phenomenon you’ve described as “a systemic deprivation of the future,” and how we might see a positive future as many of our democratic institutions are being dismantled and delegitimized. But before we get into that, I’d love to start by hearing about your organization, Future Currents, and the kind of work you all do.

Connie Razza: At our core, Future Currents seeks to be a nimble utility for identifying holes in the progressive field’s readiness to meet future conditions. Working with movement organizations and leaders across the country, we pilot, experiment, and incubate interventions to help fill current gaps in our collective strategy, and to build power in—and often despite—present-day conditions.

Our work has included assessing the state of organizing with insights from experts across the field and around the country, at different levels of constituencies and from different organizing traditions. Sometimes, this work looks like scenario-planning various future possibilities with a range of organizations and leaders. Other times, it looks like orienting ourselves to a set of conditions in the here and now that jeopardize our collective well-being and future, such as the present moment, where we face the threat of authoritarian consolidation of power. Our goal is to work with partners in the field to test interventions and learn from them, whether they succeed or fail. We also seek to bring folks together to think about how we can craft better interventions going forward, so that we can build power for a robust and reparative democracy.

Shams: Let’s dive a bit deeper into the “Horizons Project” that Future Currents carried out, which was the impetus for the idea that our collective movement has been deprived of the “right to future.” Tell me more about that project and how it led to this insight that, as you put it in your strategy memo, we need to reactivate "future as a verb.”

Razza: Our Horizons Project was a scenario exercise we designed and ran from 2021 to 2024 in partnership with a wide range of movement organizations. It reached over 200 people and took place over the course of a year and a half. We wanted to understand the structures, relationships, and capacities our collective movement needs in order to move our worldview into the common sense. We also wanted to identify how we meet crisis and opportunity together, and the private and public policies and practices we should be implementing in those moments.

The exercise itself consisted of two scenarios. In the first scenario, people were put into a dire, 10-year future marked by authoritarianism and oligarchy. In this scenario, government was hollowed out, we faced widespread crises in public infrastructure driven by privatization and disinvestment, violence (state sanctioned and otherwise) was mounting and targeting our most vulnerable communities, and our familiar organizational structures and institutions faced deepening attacks—a future that actually doesn’t look all that dissimilar from where we’re at today.

In the second scenario, people were put into a much more hopeful, 30-year future—with holistic access to health and reproductive care, an expansive culture of belonging that leads to humane immigration policies, progress on climate goals, and increased civic engagement. This hopeful future was created by synthesizing the mission and vision statements of the participating organizations.

What we found was striking: People were far more at ease imagining a bleak, authoritarian future. They could readily describe what actions might be necessary as democracy unraveled—or even disappeared entirely—and spoke with clarity about confronting a future in which economic and political power had become so concentrated that they were nearly indistinguishable.

When we invited people to imagine a much more hopeful future 30 years from now, many of them froze. Some described feeling numb; others actively rejected the scenario, calling it unrealistic or even suspect. Some were so overcome with incredulity that they couldn't accept the premise of the hypothetical at all. Perhaps, they speculated, the seemingly hopeful 30-year future was not real, but a sophisticated illusion engineered by the authoritarian oligarch from the 10-year scenario to deceive the public into believing that they had arrived at a better world, when in fact they remained under his control. The resistance to this imagined positive 30-year future was striking, especially given that the scenario was built based on the mission statements participants had helped craft themselves!

In other scenario-planning exercises we had done prior to this one, folks repeatedly expressed a telling sentiment: that people in philanthropy have the luxury to think about the future, while organizers were forced to confront immediate threats that leave little room for long-term vision. That idea—that imagining the future is a privilege—really stayed with me. It led me to the concept of “futures poverty,” which asks why it is so difficult for so many of us to hold onto and prioritize the future we aspire to. Why does it feel distant or implausible? How do we transform that vision into a tangible destination—something we believe is not just possible, but likely? And how can we organize ourselves to prioritize, plan for, and move toward that future with confidence?

Shams: We are, of course, having this conversation at a moment when there is unbelievable chaos unfolding at the federal level, which is clearly intended to demoralize and overwhelm any opposition. This administration is disappearing people off the streets and sending them to foreign gulags. It has launched a war on DEI and threatened law firms and universities with retribution if they don’t bend the knee. It has waged an assault on press and speech freedoms, and the very foundation of our civil rights apparatus. The threat of a recession lingers in the air. Federal workers continue to face intimidation and arbitrary terminations, and many of the societal functions we’ve come to take for granted—like scientific research, food inspections, and aviation safety—are being defunded or otherwise deconstructed. I could go on and on and on; there are so many things that demand our attention right now. How do you begin to locate the future and a long-term vision in the midst of this assault, when there are fires quickly spreading all around us?

Razza: In movements, our charge is our communities. When our people face urgent needs and real threats, we are called, again and again, to respond. We show up, protect, and defend. These attacks are materially significant and demand our attention. At the same time, they also pull us into a constant state of reaction, making it harder to move proactively toward what it is we need to be building—a world and future rooted in mutuality, care, and collective power.

I’ve come to view the deprivation of the future as a systemic problem—a systemic stripping away of the future, a denial of the right to imagine and pursue a future. It is designed to keep us stuck in the urgency of the present. Even the way we approach campaigns reflects this. In practice, we often build power just to spend it on a single fight: We organize, we defend, we win a policy—but we don’t actually grow power in the long term. So what would it look like to access generation-spanning political capital in our organizing? What would it look like to not just spend our power, but to reinvest it? To compound it?

I think we’re in a moment where there’s openness to that kind of approach. And honestly, it’s what movements often do best when we’re not bound to a specific campaign. The larger goal—of protecting the future, of building a robust and reparative democracy in our governance, economy, and culture—gives us the chance to design efforts that look like campaigns, but function differently. They help us build enduring power rather than just deploy that power. They allow us to organize in ways where each action generates more capacity, more vision, and more momentum.

Shams: When it comes to long-term futures, it can seem like the Right has an inherently easier task. They’re comfortable with a narrow and exclusionary conception of who should be included in public life, who counts as an American, who is deserving of public provision, and so on. The preservation of long-standing hierarchies is fundamental to the Right’s political project. The Left has often stood for challenging those same hierarchies to actually realize a multiracial democracy. In other words, the world we want requires far more building than burning. Do you understand this as a disadvantage? If so, how can we overcome it without compromising our values and remaining a true people-first movement?

Razza: Well, it’s not just that they’re burning things down; they are also building. They’re actively working to preserve power and reassert hierarchical power structures. While we’ve spent decades trying to democratize power, what they’re doing is, in many ways, a restoration project. It’s a deliberate effort to rebuild the hierarchies that were. I’m not sure if they have it easier, but what they do have is time. They have given themselves time. And we mostly don’t. The analogy of wealth versus money can be instructive here: if the right is working with long-term capital, we’re often working with short-term resources.

For us, long-term is a few years, maybe an election cycle or two at most. For them, long-term means decades or generations. And with that long view comes a greater tolerance for risk and failure, and an ability to remain invested in their vision of the future even if things don’t work as quickly as they’d like. For many of our organizations, the margin for error feels razor-thin. One failed policy fight or misstep could mean we’re not invested in again, and then how are you going to continue to do your work? It makes it harder to take creative risks and to boldly imagine.

The other thing we’re experiencing is the realization of the Right’s hostile, but radical, imagination. The Left, on the other hand, has tried to reach a liberatory future by reforming a system that was never truly built for us, but that we hoped might be made to work. Maybe our ideals, compared to the system’s ideals, sounded aligned—democracy, freedom, and justice—and so we didn’t want to destroy that system outright. The result was that, with hopes of reaching that liberatory place, we ended up constraining our own imagination. We limited our vision to what seemed achievable within existing institutions, rather than asking what it would take to build something fundamentally different, truly liberatory, from the ground up.

It matters that even in our most imaginative or “unconstrained” organizations, our thinking still tends to stay well within the lines. Now compare that to what we’re seeing from the current administration. What we imagine is possible with our power, what we believe it means to have power, and how we respond to those pushing beyond the bounds of convention—l’d argue that all of that is still pretty rigidly defined and enforced.

There’s a strong disciplinary instinct, even among progressives, when someone dares to act outside the accepted boundaries in pursuit of a greater democracy in our governance or economy. That instinct keeps our imagination remarkably circumscribed.

So do they have it easier? I’m not sure. But I do think they’re more unfettered than we are.

To me, the real opportunity lies in allowing ourselves to imagine, without restraint, the world we actually mean to create: a world that is radically inclusive, a country that is radically hospitable, an economy organized around care and dignity for all. What would it look like to imagine that future fully, and then chart a path toward it with the patience, discipline, and long-term power building it requires, all while we fight the consolidation of authoritarian power in the here and now? Both tasks—future visioning and resistance—feel essential to meeting this moment and rising to the demands of this era.

If you ask Eleanor

“I believe that we face a crisis in this country today which requires of us, as a people, courage, knowledge, imagination and vision . . . Potential courage, knowledge, imagination, and vision are in our people, for they have had it in the past and they will certainly have it again if only their leaders will trust them, tell them the truth and draw from them the qualities that are needed to meet the crisis and the problems of the day.”

- Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day (November 28, 1937)

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