Utopian Realpolitik

The disposition of continuing to push for idealistic goals against unfavourable odds — because history repeatedly shows that what looks structurally impossible from inside the current equilibrium sometimes isn't. Relevant wherever activists, democracy workers, or reformers operate across systems that don't yet share their values.

Conventional game theory is a description of the world as it is — who holds power, what incentives they face, what moves are available. It is very good at explaining why nothing changes. It is nearly useless at predicting when everything does.

The abolition of slavery looked, from inside the game, like an impossible ask. The economic interests were vast, the legal structures entrenched, the political majorities absent. Every rational cost-benefit analysis pointed the same direction: this is not the hill. And yet abolitionists kept pushing — for decades, across generations, at enormous personal cost — and they won. Not because the game theory was wrong about the odds. Because they were playing a different game.

This is utopian realpolitik: holding an idealistic goal with clear-eyed awareness of the obstacles, and continuing anyway — not out of naivety, but because history has repeatedly shown that the obstacles are not as fixed as they appear. Suffrage. Decolonisation. The end of apartheid. Civil rights. Each of these was, at some point, considered structurally impossible by people who were neither stupid nor malicious — just thinking inside the current equilibrium.

There are at least two structural reasons why standard game theory underestimates the possibility of transformative change.

The first is preference falsification — the political scientist Timur Kuran's term for the gap between what people privately believe and what they publicly express. In systems where expressing certain views is costly (socially, professionally, legally), private support for change can be enormous while public support appears minimal. The result is that transformations look sudden and unpredictable from the outside — and impossible right up until the moment they aren't. Game theory models the public face and misses the private reservoir.

The second is that preferences themselves are not fixed. Game theory typically treats what people want as given — and then calculates who wins. Social movements operate on a different assumption: that what people want can be changed. Abolitionists were not just lobbying a fixed set of preferences. They were doing moral work — changing what people thought slavery was, what it meant, who the enslaved person was in the moral imagination of the observer. Once that shifts, the political calculus follows. You can't model this if you take preferences as exogenous.

Antonio Gramsci, writing from a Fascist prison in the 1930s, put the tension plainly: "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will." The intellect surveys the situation and finds it bleak. The will acts anyway — not in defiance of the analysis, but alongside it, sustained by a different timescale.

In the context of democracy work, this disposition shapes how practitioners engage honestly across all political systems — including their own. The starting point is not that any one system is the destination and others need to catch up. It is that any system — liberal, vanguard, consultative, hybrid — can be held to the same question: are you actually governing for the people you claim to serve, and where are the mechanisms that let those people tell you when you are wrong?

This matters because many people working seriously in the democracy reform space approach liberal democracy itself with wariness, not reverence. A liberal democratic government that selectively applies international law based on geopolitical alignment — that supports allied nations' actions it would condemn in adversaries, that allows concentrated wealth to capture its own electoral processes — is failing the same tests it applies to others. The use of democratic language to legitimise selective moral standards is not a feature exclusive to any one type of system. Recognising this is not cynicism. It is the same relative epistemology applied without a double standard.

The disposition here is to engage — honestly, in good faith, without uncritical acceptance of any system's self-description — across that full landscape. Finding genuine areas of overlap (accountability mechanisms, civic participation structures, transparency tools) while being clear about where any system is falling short of its own stated values. The interlocutor on the other side of the table, whatever system they operate in, deserves the same scrutiny you would apply to your own.

This is harder than either the idealist or the realist position. It requires holding two things at once: this is how it is, and this is not how it has to stay.

In practice, a community operating from this disposition will contain different emphases. Some will lean toward engaging power structures directly — working with the systems that exist, finding leverage points, building relationships across difference. Others will focus on building and testing what actually works — prototyping mechanisms, generating evidence, demonstrating alternatives. These are sometimes called utopic pragmatism in emphasis: less concerned with the power calculation, more with what moves the ideal forward in practice. Both are expressions of the same underlying refusal to treat the current equilibrium as permanent. The tension between them is productive, not a contradiction.

DOD is non-partisan and agnostic to any specific democratic model; inclusion here is not an endorsement of any particular system or movement.

Utopian Realpolitik

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