Last week Josh Marshall put together a dire warning in the form of Notes on Preserving the American Republic. In it, he quotes from an interview with First Amendment scholar Lee Bollinger. Marshall is rightly concerned how Bollinger frames the active authoritarian takeover of our government, but I was drawn to this particular line:

Our problem in part is a failure of imagination. We cannot get ourselves to see how this is going to unfold in its most frightening versions. You neutralize the branches of government; you neutralize the media; you neutralize universities, and you’re on your way.

I can’t help but think that all of this is, in part, because of a lack of imagination. We refuse to imagine a world or a country reimagined through the lens of community and compassion. To take the very real problems of governments and use them as a path to a new government that actually looks out for us. Create cities and towns that center community over transportation. Build internet spaces that are welcoming and unique and provide protections for people's identities and data. Rethink a criminal justice system that is unethical and draconian. And on and on the list goes.

But we fail to imagine, and these things don't happen. We allow the fox into the hen house and then act appalled when he rips the hens to shreds.

I’m reminded of a conversation I had with somebody once who was adamant that public transportation was such an unseemly idea that the only we could solve the problem of traffic was to let the tech oligarchs build hover cars to create multi-layer driving lanes. All to avoid sitting next to somebody else on a bus. In his mind, I'm sure he envisioned this as some sort of bold future. But it suffers from the same lack of imagination as everyone else.

And that’s what we’re suffering from now. A failure to imagine a world that can actually be different, limited instead by a perception that things are as they always were. I fear that we may never be able to break through.