We live in a world where our possibilities and our realities are deadlocked and sclerotic, fully subservient to pure short-termism and the immediate gratification of the interests of the powerful. Public administration serves the immediate interests of public officials and business owners, with the implementation of policies, the application of regulations, or the awarding of contracts being subservient to the short-term gain of wealth for corporate executives, short-term enrichment of shareholders, short-term financial and material privileges of officials. Electoral politics and party machinery are subservient to the continued position of the already established, the continued stranglehold of dynasties, the clawing careerism of contenders and strivers, the constant jockeying for position, the zero-sum interests where talent or passion is punished to cut down potential threats early even if it reduces the overall strength of the organization and where anti-corruption or reformism is choked out even if the reality and perception of corruption and out-of-touch-ness is to its overall detriment. Where the iron law of institutions really is iron. The welfare of individuals, the flourishing of industry, the protection of the environment and natural resources, all of these are subservient: an empowered populace with a strong political consciousness isn't as easily manipulated, a thriving economy where businesses don't depend on favors means less opportunity for self-interest, a protected environment is one whose riches aren't up for brutal extraction for the enrichment of an elite class and Western shareholders. National sovereignty is subservient to the favors of the West, from privatization that enriched colonial powers, down through repressions and murder during the Cold War era to win favor and funds from the West, to more privatization that enriches global shareholder capitalism and flows funds away from the nation and to policies that allow the value-add of national resources to be captured by foreigners who ultimately make locals pay on net to use the products of their own resources.
Instant gratification at the expense of the long-term keeps the future uncontested. For those who perpetuate this instant gratification and this short-termism, the future isn't even worth contesting, because this way of acting is effectively acting as if there is no such thing as a controllable future – acting as if the only future that can possibly exist is whatever is created by the conditions which are that future's present. Where there is no such thing as the future as its own thing. No "ten years from now", just today's tomorrow's tomorrow's tomorrow's tomorrow. In an uncertain world, who cares about ten years from now? The only real security is that the money you put in your bank account ASAP from the power you gained ASAP. The only long-term thinking those benefiting from the status quo have is that the resources they accumulate now can last them long enough to stay rich regardless of the conditions outside of their own. The negative consequences we can project into our long term – the environmental degradation and climate change, the delayed development and continued corruption – aren't actively planned, they are the toxic byproducts of a process that just manufactures short-term gratifications.
I don't believe that the only determinant of the long-term is successive chained continuations of the short-term. We know this isn't just idealism because there already are forward-thinking countries or governments who make long-term plans for ten or twenty or fifty years into their futures. It's not true that the means of control over the future is by the conditions of the present. I don't believe that the stranglehold over the short-term implies one over the long term – rather, it leaves the long-term future as uncontested terrain. The lack of interest in the long-term is a fatal flaw of current systems of capitalism, corruption, patronage and rent-seeking. In the incentives of the current system, it is never worthwhile to put any resources or effort into the long-term, because it would always be better spent on being more extractive or more consolidating in the short-term.
That is a way in which the current system is broken. And we have long been able to diagnose the ways in which this lack of long-term thinking is broken and the negative consequences it has on the world. But for those of us who have beliefs and convictions that we value more than short-term gains, this means that the fight for the future can be on our terms, on our terrain. That we can ride ahead and make the future a hostile territory for those bearing the flags of the status quo by the time they arrive long after us. Just like the current ruling structures may have a seemingly unassailable hold on the present through a monopoly over the resources, the centers of power, the institutions and the means of production – there is also a means for us to have our own unassailable hold on the future by having a monopoly over giving a shit about the long-term conditions of the world.
Two fights in politics
What this means is that there are actually two fights in politics, even if most political operations only pay attention to one of them. The first is the immediate electoral battle – the next election, current voter anger and enthusiasm, rapid response to the news cycle, coalition negotiations, candidate selection, turnout operations. This fight has clear deadlines. It produces visible winners and losers. Careers rise and fall based on electoral outcomes. The urgency is constant and real, and so this is where attention goes, where resources flow, where the ambitious and the powerful concentrate their energy. A second fight, the one I argue here that we can focus on as an opportunity, is longer and slower and receives much less attention: the battle for hearts and minds over ten or fifteen years, building people who genuinely believe in a party's values and vision rather than merely voting against whoever they are angry at this cycle. This is the work of actually building up a constituency: cultivating voters and members whose loyalty comes from shared beliefs rather than circumstantial grievances, who will stay with the party through setbacks and scandals and unfavorable political conditions because they are committed to what it stands for. This second fight is neglected almost everywhere. Parties talk about building movements and cultivating the next generation, but the actual resources and talent and strategic attention flow to immediate electoral concerns. The long-term work is an afterthought, something to get to once the urgent demands of the present are handled, which of course they never fully are. The result is that this terrain is barely contested. For those willing to actually work it with seriousness and patience, this is empty land where sustained effort can produce outsized returns precisely because so few others are competing for it.
Most political operations focus almost entirely on the immediate electoral battle. The next election, the current news cycle, which demographics are angry about what, what coalition arrangements might hold together long enough to form a government. This is where the resources go. This is where the attention goes. This is where careers get made and broken. And because this is where the action is, this is where the ambitious and the powerful concentrate their efforts. This means that the long-term fight, the work of building genuine ideological constituency over ten or fifteen years, is a battlefield they have effectively abandoned. If someone wants power or wealth in the near term, a ministry in the next government, business opportunities flowing from their current position, leadership of their faction within a few years, they have no reason to invest in projects with fifteen-year time horizons. The payoff is too uncertain and too far away. Aiming for power one era from now involves so much uncertainty that nobody operating from pure self-interest would rationally pursue it. Why would a politician focused on the upcoming election divert resources toward winning an election in 2033? Why would a corrupt party boss care about what the party looks like after they are dead? They would not, and often they do not. The people with the most power and the most resources in any political system are precisely the people least interested in the long-term. Anyone going up against them on their turf is outgunned. But they bring their big guns to the short-term battle and leave the long-term battlefield empty for those armed with conviction to march in.
Those willing to play the long game have advantages that self-interested actors simply cannot match. One is conviction: caring about political outcomes that extend beyond one's own career, whether from genuine ideological commitment or because one's goals require time horizons longer than personal advancement allows. Another is patience: a willingness to wait for outcomes that people chasing near-term returns will never wait for. And finally, coordination: because predicting how people with shared beliefs will act in ten or fifteen years is far easier than predicting how self-interested actors will bargain and maneuver. Self-interest is volatile. Today's alliances of convenience fall apart the moment interests diverge. But shared conviction is stable. A coalition built on common values can coordinate across time in ways that transactional arrangements never can, because the people in it are not constantly recalculating whether the partnership still serves their personal interests. Resources, connections, power, the means of production, those are the weapons of the short-term. Beliefs and conviction, patience, selflessness, and coordination can be the weapons of choice for the long-term.
The practical meaning of all this is that the long-term fight is more winnable than the short-term fight for those who are not already powerful. Someone who lacks wealth, who lacks connections to the right networks, who is not already positioned within the top of a party hierarchy, faces steep odds in the battle for immediate power. The people currently holding power have every advantage there. But the long-term battle operates by different rules. The powerful are not competing for it. They do not care about it. The field is open.
Planting seeds
The question is, how do we dominate the uncontested future? What seeds do we lay now for the future to have vast forests? What soil do we till now for the future to have abundant bounty? What books do we write now for the future to have an enlightened and conscious populace? I think this is a big question, one where the mantle is borne in so many different ways by so many people. By the artists and the writers and the filmmakers who create the culture that shapes the future. By the educators, by the scientists. By every single individual, because none of us are small when each of us consist of whole worlds, and when every single person whose lives we can touch through our actions are whole worlds in themselves, yes. On some level, by everyone who cares enough for a better future to not shape their lives around instant gratification of wealth or career or material gain or status or power. We all can snatch away the future from under the noses of those who are too focused on gratification to notice as we build a better world.
One part of this is the implementation-level leaders of the future. The very term "future leaders" or "leaders of tomorrow" is a cliché at this point, but we don't need to follow the same LinkedIn demon resume-padder vision of future leaders as beloved by international donor organizations (if anything, that likely has selection bias for people who orient around short-termism and immediate career success over convictions). What I mean by future leaders is in a more literal sense: future public servants or activists or NGO workers or whoever, future leaders of teams or units or departments or programs, not an abstract "youth leader" UN awardee or some party youth wing career politico. Just regular young people, at a stage where they have not yet been captured by the incentive structures that make the present what it is. Before they have been recruited into the machinery of extraction, before they have learned to see the world primarily through the lens of personal advantage, before years of operating within broken systems have constrained their sense of what is possible or ground them down into the cynicism that makes the status quo feel permanent. At this point, worldviews are still being formed, capabilities are still developing, and philosophical commitments to humanity and the good can take root.
The formation of young people under current systems is a process of capture, of bringing them into alignment with the incentive structures that dominate the status quo and channeling their energy toward the reproduction of what is rather than the creation of what could be. How the world invests in young people as instruments of dominant structures looks very different from investing in them as builders of the future. The current system does the former: it trains people for slots, develops skills in service of existing hierarchies, cultivates loyalty to factions, rewards those who learn to navigate toward personal advancement within the constraints of what already exists, and uses the seeming blessing or endorsement of "the youth" to validate bearers of some version of the status quo.
Building the better future also isn't about trying to win over youth early into some kind of party loyalty, but about development of a pro-humanity worldview as well as development of the ability to actually implement policies, carry out programs, and deliver services. We do want young people to hear the arguments made by movements toward a humanist approach and to go through an ideological journey of awakening their political consciousness as citizenry and members of a community with a duty of care and reciprocity for those around them – not loyalty that comes from faction or family or material incentive, but conviction that has been arrived at through actual reasoning, through wrestling with the real questions about what we owe to each other and what kind of society is worth building and what we are willing to sacrifice for it. This kind of conviction cannot be instilled through slogans or drilled through repetition. It can only be developed by taking people seriously, by engaging with their questions and doubts, by making the real arguments rather than asserting conclusions, by creating the conditions where they can think things through themselves and arrive at commitments that are genuinely their own. Conviction developed this way can survive throughout an institutional career where it would often be easier to go along with how things are than to push for how things should be.
But a key part of my view here toward planting seeds is also planting actual capabilities and capacity. Having worked in government roles for some time, I have seen first-hand that capacity gaps and challenges are a massive limiting factor across governments and especially across remote or rural areas where brain drain is common. Many young people who might want to enter work don't get opportunities at the entry level to learn the skills they need to become effective implementers of policies or designers and project managers for programs. The skills that actually determine whether intentions become results – policy design, implementation, project management, logistics and coordination, team leadership, working with diverse stakeholders, assessing needs, diagnosing problems, monitoring whether interventions are actually working and adjusting when they are not – are capacity which is not well developed by most entry-level positions in government or civil society. People learn fragments of these skills haphazardly, through trial and error, often from others who themselves never received standardized trainings, within organizational cultures where dysfunction has become normalized and nobody quite knows how things are supposed to work because nobody was ever properly taught. Correctly planted seeds would not just have strong beliefs and convictions, but also know how to design programs that achieve their objectives, who can manage implementation in ways that connect what happens on the ground to what was planned, who have the diagnostic skills to understand why something is failing and what might fix it. Good intentions without the capacity to execute produce failure nonetheless. And each failure becomes another reason for cynicism, another data point for the belief that change is impossible and nothing ever really works.
What changes the future is people who have both: conviction that a different world is worth building and the practical skills to actually build it. This combination is rare because nothing in the current system is designed to produce it. It has to be built deliberately, through programs that develop both the moral and intellectual foundations for commitment and the practical capabilities that translate commitment into results.
Then, over years and decades, they rise through the ranks of civil service and local government and national ministries, into business and civil society organizations and research and journalism and education, eventually reaching positions where they make decisions that matter. When they do, they can apply their skills and high capacity to effectively actually implement policies and programs that deliver public services as needed, and they bring what was formed in them: the conviction that something better is possible, the skills to actually make it happen, the understanding of real conditions that lets them design policies and programs that work rather than policies and programs that look good on paper but fail on contact with reality. Each one becomes a node of competence and commitment within their institution, pushing against the entropy and cynicism and self-dealing that might otherwise dominate. This matters everywhere but it matters most where capacity is most absent: in regional and rural areas where training is weakest, where qualified people do not want to go or live, where supervision is thin and dysfunction has become normal. The lack of capacity may seem like a technocratic issue to focus on, but capacity gaps means a lack of effective public service delivery, which means a basic breakdown of the relationship between citizens and state where the state is expected to actually deliver outcomes for citizens as a representative body, which means a breakdown of belief in the ability of society to maintain itself functionally and provide for others, which encourages a culture of bribery and corruption being seen as the only means of receiving needed outcomes, which then creates cynicism and apathy and a dissatisfaction with democracy that makes people sympathetic to authoritarianism that promises a cure to dysfunction. Planting seeds that bring practical capacity with them can help make sure that the future we build isn't just all talk that can't deliver.
Seeds do not become forests overnight. But shaping what the country becomes a generation from now means shaping who will be running it, and shaping who will be running it means reaching people before they are captured, forming them with both conviction and capacity, and trusting them to carry what was planted forward into futures we cannot fully anticipate. This is how the uncontested terrain of the long-term gets claimed – not through controlling institutions right now but through populating them, eventually, with people who will make something better.
Defining a clear vision and values
Often, individual parties are unable to offer a clearly defined vision, explicitly stated values, and a clear belief system or worldview to voters who can form an ideological association with and investment in that party's outcomes, with a credible belief that those values will be applied and that vision will be worked toward as long as that party is ever able to do so.
Building a mass constituency of voters who share a similar vision for the future, similar values and morals, and similar worldviews is a more permanent base of power for the future. As electoral strategy, defining these values and worldviews will be crucial. But the way that this connects back to short-termism versus long-term convictions is that the formation of constituencies and deeper ideological principles is a longer-term project, and thus one where short-term players often don't have as much interest. Short-termism focused on winning power immediately can sometimes be lazy about what is perceived as the wishy-washy philosophical work, and even the conception of party identity and ideology in a short-termism view is about marketing and branding for popularity rather than as an ideological project. In the present, electoral politics can make incentives be all about marketing, but that doesn't have to be the future either: a party where the values and vision is so defined that it's irreducible from the party as a whole means that marketing and branding has to reinforce those values and vision, not just be dressing to cover up its absence or atrophy.
Often, electoral success built on anti-incumbent sentiment, on the personal popularity of a leader, on patronage networks that deliver benefits in exchange for votes, are all inherently unstable. Circumstances change. Leaders age and die or become unpopular. Patronage resources fluctuate with government budgets and economic conditions. A party that relies on these things without having voters who support it because of what it actually stands for will find itself at the mercy of factors entirely outside its control. An ideological constituency is a vote floor – a baseline of support that holds even when external circumstances turn unfavorable. These are voters who believe in what the party stands for, who will turn out even when the candidate is uninspiring, who will stay loyal through changes in the political environment that may drive away voters with weaker attachments. When a party has this kind of constituency, a single bad election or a period of unpopular decisions does not threaten its fundamental existence. There is a foundation to fall back on, a core that remains even when the periphery erodes. This creates space to take risks, to make necessary but unpopular choices, to lead rather than merely follow the mood of the moment.
Without ideological differentiation, elections become purely thermostatic referendums on whoever holds power where voters punish the incumbent when things go badly and reward them when things go well, regardless of what anyone actually proposes to do. The party's platform becomes irrelevant. Policy positions do not matter. All that matters is whether people are satisfied with the status quo at the moment they cast their vote. Parties operating in this environment have no control over their own fate. They win when circumstances favor them and lose when circumstances turn, no matter how competent or visionary or well-organized they might be. Building ideological constituency is the path to political agency: the ability to shape events rather than merely react to them. Parties with genuine constituencies can set the agenda, can take positions because those positions are right rather than only because they poll well, can invest in issues that will mature over time rather than chasing whatever seems popular this week. They can develop and implement a coherent vision across multiple electoral cycles rather than lurching between contradictory stances based on momentary calculations.
This long-term constituency building requires clarity about what the party actually stands for. For established parties, this is not necessarily about inventing ideology from scratch. Many have historical identities and accumulated positions that provide raw material to work with. But historical identity can become vague over time, different factions may interpret the party's meaning in conflicting ways, and new generations of members and voters need something more explicit than osmosis from a political culture they did not grow up in. The work is sharpening, making explicit, creating shared vocabulary that everyone in the party can articulate and that voters can understand and identify with. This requires working through foundational questions that political actors rarely address directly but that underlie every policy position and political choice. These are questions about values and priorities and what kind of society the party is ultimately trying to build. And when there is a vision and ideology which can provide consistent answers to these questions that fit a consistent set of moral beliefs and a consistent worldview, it gives voters who can buy into and see the value of those values and worldviews a way to understand what kind of a polity they want to create, and to have faith that even when new policy questions come up, the answers will reflect what they believe.
In summary
Status quo interests are beholden to short-termism and leave long-term terrain up for grabs. Here, I suggest some approaches to try occupy this future and make it a better one.
One part is planting and dispersing seeds: equipping young people with the ideology and skillset to be effective policy implementers and public service providers, with the understanding that in ten years from now as they rise up the ranks and become leaders who direct policies and programs in the future, they will bring humanist views and values to their work and be able to carry them out effectively based on skills gained and experience developed, turning seeds into forests.
Another is building genuine ideological constituency through clearly defined visions and values – not as marketing exercise but as the foundation for durable political strength that can survive setbacks, enable agency, and provide the stability to pursue long-term goals rather than merely react to the moment.
Both of these are ways to contest the future. Neither requires winning the short-term battle first. Neither requires the resources and connections that the powerful monopolize. Both require conviction, patience, and the willingness to commit to outcomes we may not personally see.
The powerful fight over immediate advantage while the future lies uncontested. For those with conviction and patience, this is opportunity. The question is who will do the work. Who will plant the seeds that become forests? Who will articulate the vision that inspires commitment beyond electoral calculation? Who will demonstrate through action that their values are genuine?
The future belongs to whoever cares enough about it to actually contest it.