Unlearning “a ‘great leader’ will fix our problems”

This chapter starts with people doing politics, in British history, in India and Africa. It takes issue – if that is still needed – with Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, which told Global North voters that their only job was to decide who ran the unending system of neoliberal capitalism. It argues for encouragement of popular enthusiasm, of Carnival and creative art as a central part of political projects. It highlights the disastrous return of the “strong leader” model of politics, with the explicit attempt by the Far Right tech bros and their friends to tear up the very idea of democracy. The chapter explores the many ways in which politics is being creatively done from below, prefigurative and playful approaches seeking to build alternative models of society, from the Slow Food movement to local currencies, from the drive to bricolage to attempts to co-create with the more-than-human entities new ecological realities. Dismissing “nudge economics”, associated with discredited behavioural economics and social psychology approaches that explicitly focus on individuals, not systems, it notes that they are inextricably enmeshed in a replicability crisis. Similarly, solutionism that seeks to solve problems rather than rectify their causes is a dead end.