George Monbiot

Now, like all good restoration stories, this one resonated across the political spectrum.

Democrats and Republicans, Labour and Conservatives, left and right, all became broadly Keynesian.

Then when Keynesianism ran into trouble in the 1970s, the neoliberals, people like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, came forward with their new restoration story.

And it went something like this.

You never guess what's coming.

Disorder afflicts the land.

caused by the powerful and nefarious forces of the overmighty state, whose collectivizing tendencies crush freedom and individualism and opportunity.

But the hero of the story, the entrepreneur, will fight those powerful forces, roll back the state, and through creating wealth and opportunity, restore harmony to the land.

And that story also resonated across the political spectrum.

Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and Labour, they all became broadly neoliberal.

Opposite stories with an identical narrative structure.

Then, in 2008, the neoliberal story fell apart and its opponents came forward with...

Nothing.

No new restoration story.

The best they had to offer was a watered-down neoliberalism or a microwaved Keynesianism.

And that is why we're stuck.

Without that new story, we are stuck with the old failed story that keeps on failing.

Despair is the state we fall into when our imagination fails.

When we have no story that explains the present and describes the future, hope evaporates.

Political failure is at heart a failure of imagination.