Utopia Is Possible -- Yes, Even Now, Especially Now -- but We Have to Demand It

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

56% : But the fact is that what Sanders was proposing -- health care for all, free college, expanded Social Security, a $15-an-hour minimum wage, and requirements that employers provide paid parental leave, sick leave, and vacation time -- sounded utopian for a lot of working-class Americans.
55% : There are serious discussions about ending poverty, precarity, and inequality with universal basic income schemes.
52% : A new generation of campaigners propose to save the planet and the people who inhabit it with a Green New Deal.
52% : That's a reasonable restatement of the historical view of the political power of utopian thinking -- a view that has been accepted and utilized by figures as distinct as Paine; Fanny Wright, the feminist, abolitionist, and anti-capitalist social reformer who established a multiracial utopian community in the 1820s; Edward Bellamy, the utopian novelist whose best-selling 1888 book Looking Backward: 2000-1887 would be credited by Eugene V. Debs as "the first popular exposition of socialism in this country" and, eventually, earn plaudits from New Dealer Arthur Morgan as "almost a catalog of social legislation of the past half-century"; and W.E.B. Du Bois, whose groundbreaking 1920 story "The Comet" wrestled with overturning white supremacy in a visionary anticipation of Afrofuturism that imagined a post-apocalyptic New York where a surviving Black man comes to recognize himself as the Adam of a new world.
51% : That media outlets like Prairie Public Broadcasting would ask, "Is a Universal Basic Income too Utopian to Work?"
43% : Where UBI, abolition, and climate justice went unaddressed in the fall presidential debates of 2016, they framed the debates of 2020.
42% : After she lost the fall race to Donald Trump, Clinton wrote a book in which, Vanity Fair noted, she argued that Sanders had "hijacked the Democratic primary and derailed her White House bid by misleading voters with his utopian, pie-in-the-sky proposals for free health care, free college, and free ponies for all."
39% : Biden was resistant, declaring when the climate crisis came up that "The difference between me and the new green deal is they say, automatically, by 2030 we're going to be carbon free.
31% : It was to be expected that right-wing Republicans in Congress would dismiss the Green New Deal as "a radical reshaping of American society in the name of utopian environmental policy," as did Republican Representative Morgan Griffith from Virginia.

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