Politics Beyond Politics
The shrinkers have shranked us into a shrunked-up shrunkenness
Here’s one of the central ideas motivating Progressive Worldbuilding:
The unconscious shrinking of the imaginative aperture of political possibility is, in itself, a major contributing factor to the current political pandemonium that now whirls all around us.
Thinking that politics is only about the small number of things we’ve labeled “politics” (voting, donating, protesting, yelling at the television) deceives us into thinking that political action is restricted to a minuscule, circumscribed subset of activities within the vast cosmology of human activity that’s forever tumbling headlong, ass over teakettle, into our unknown future.
But “politics” is not just politics and has never been just politics.
Politics is worldbuilding.
If all we’re doing is farming out important work to politicians and politicos playing “politics”—that infuriating game of Calvinball unfolding in a given political system in a given place at a given time in history—I believe we will lose the very consequential game of worldbuilding that so many of us don’t even realize we’re always playing.
We typically don’t think our exertions at work or in our community, or the choices we make about how to use our money or our time, or how we raise our children, or interact with the people in our lives are always and inextricably political—but they are.
Beyond 2025
Nearly every week in 2025, someone I know told me they had no idea what to do. They expressed overwhelm, shock, anxiety, fear, anger, outrage, disgust, dread, despair. This suffusion of helplessness and paralysis is both imagined and learned—it’s not real. It is not inescapable. It exists in our heads, not in reality, and we are never as helpless as we might think we are. And yet an engulfing helplessness has been spreading like a creeping rot throughout the body politic of American progressivism.
Hammering everyone into a gutted, panicky, demoralized, exhausted, directionless state of blitzed despair and hopelessness is the strategy. If we succumb, they have won. And to fight back, we must reclaim our agency—not just in the political arena, but in everything we do.
Not all of us can run for political office. Not all of us are being paid to organize campaigns or mobilize voters. We may not have money to donate. We may not have the inclination or ability to protest. We may have hard lives. We may have limited disposable time. We may be working all day long just to keep our heads above the perilously rising sea levels of American life.
But we must recognize and remember: None of us can do everything, but all of us can do something. Exploring, discussing, and proposing what, specifically, we can do is the primary purpose of Progressive Worldbuilding.
Because everything is politics and all politics is a worldbuilding enterprise in a world in which time only moves in one direction, we are either progressively building the world we actually want to live in, or we’re building a world in which we don’t. This is the fundamental project that governs all others, including our political disputations and wranglings.
Politics is a ceaseless million-fold tug-of-war over the future of our civilization. We are always moving toward something or away from it, and we are always building something or tearing it down, and we can either do things like throw up our hands, sulk, complain, squabble amongst ourselves, throw stones at glass houses, buy some more plastic junk, build shoddy strip malls of the soul, or tune out and stop giving a fuck, or we can stand up, get out there, and get to work.
Our Invisible Army
Millions upon millions of progressives are doing this very thing every day in every nook, cranny, corner, and cavity of America, even though—depressingly—most people seem to be unaware that all this great stuff is happening beyond their knowledge or awareness, often right down the street from where they live, or that all this effort and investment directly benefits them and their children and their family and their friends. Everywhere all around us, invisible armies of unsung people are working really hard to solve really hard problems. They are the ones keeping our society running.
I’ve worked in progressive spaces for more than two decades now, and I continue to be surprised anew whenever I stumble across yet another person or organization I didn’t even know existed doing something impressive, important, and urgently needed. But how we go about the business of doing all this stuff can undermine everything we’re doing. If 2025 America taught us anything, it should have taught us that centuries of hard-won progress can be undone in months, weeks, or even days.
All of us are now tottering atop a wobbly Babylonian Tower of fracturing democracy.
If we cede our agency, if we waste all our time and money squabbling amongst ourselves like pissy little Hobbits, if we fall into one obvious trap after another, if we continue to fly off every which way in all possible directions trying to do everything at once, if we don’t unify and mass-mobilize every organization in every sector to achieve the highest-priority objectives right now, if we sleepwalk into yet another foreseeable nightmare the world has seen too many times before, the world we want to build, the world we all want to live in, will crumble into rubble—and it could take generations to rebuild.
If the only people who know anything about politics are politicians, politicos, and political-science professors—and many of them very much appear to think they are the only ones who do—progressives wouldn’t be losing so much right now.
We need to ask ourselves: If all of these smart people are so smart, why are we losing to a bunch of losers?
We need to stop thinking that only politics is politics, and everything else is something else. All politics is worldbuilding, and worldbuilding is politics.
But we must build that world together, in our every action, every day, with whatever we’ve got.
Are you with me?
~SEA
Last revised 1.25.26