Stephen Duncombe is Professor of Media and Culture at New York University and author and editor of six books on the intersection of culture and politics. Duncombe, a life-long political activist, co-founded a community-based advocacy group in the Lower East Side of Manhattan which won an award for "Creative Activism" from the Abbie Hoffman Foundation, and is currently co-director of the Center for Artistic Activism, a research and training organization that helps activists create more like artists and artists strategize more like activists.

From the Preface to the new edition

Dream in an Age of Trump

I wrote Dream a decade ago. Tragically, it seems more relevant today than it was then.

At the time I was trying to understand the nature of politics in an age of fantasy and challenge a tendency amongst progressives to uncritically privilege rationality, reason and self-revelatory truth. With theories gleaned from the academy, and drawing upon two decades of activist experience, I aimed to provided tools and perspectives so that those left-of-center on the political spectrum might compete effectively on this unfamiliar landscape. Making the case for what I called "Dreampolitik", I concluded my opening chapter with these words:

To embrace dreams as part of a winning strategy for progressive politics may be just a dream itself, but really, at this point, what do we have to lose?

A lot, as it turned out. The US Presidential election of 2016, for starters. Enter Donald Trump, real-estate celebrity and reality TV star, a non-politician who built his base by dreaming up nightmares of "bad hombres" streaming in over the borders, and transformed the election into a spectacle to end all spectacles. After rolling over his hapless reality-based Republican rivals in the primary, Trump was left to face the Democratic contender, Hillary Clinton. Clinton was competent, knowledgeable and experienced; a self-described policy wonk who had a reasonable answer for every question posed to her. It was the perfect contest between the forces of fantasy and reality.

The match was fought with raucous rallies and incendiary tweets on one side, and staid press conferences and paid advertisements on the other. But the competition was played out most vividly, head to head, through a series of televised debates between Trump and Clinton. In these debates Trump failed at the most basic levels of logical reasoning. His "facts" were immediately refuted as lies, and his "arguments" consisted of a series of seemingly disconnected, but emotionally charged words and phrases. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, sounding every bit like the honor student she once was, coolly pointed what was fact and what was fiction and directed TV viewers to her website so they could check the facts themselves. To the intellectual class of pundits, pollsters and reporters it was obvious who was going to win. The New York Times Upshot polls were predicting a 93% chance of Clinton victory only weeks before the election. Truth Will Out!

Stephen Duncombe is Professor of Media and Culture at New York University and author and editor of six books on the intersection of culture and politics. Duncombe, a life-long political activist, co-founded a community-based advocacy group in the Lower East Side of Manhattan which won an award for "Creative Activism" from the Abbie Hoffman Foundation, and is currently co-director of the Center for Artistic Activism, a research and training organization that helps activists create more like artists and artists strategize more like activists.

From the Preface to the new edition

Dream in an Age of Trump

I wrote Dream a decade ago. Tragically, it seems more relevant today than it was then.

At the time I was trying to understand the nature of politics in an age of fantasy and challenge a tendency amongst progressives to uncritically privilege rationality, reason and self-revelatory truth. With theories gleaned from the academy, and drawing upon two decades of activist experience, I aimed to provided tools and perspectives so that those left-of-center on the political spectrum might compete effectively on this unfamiliar landscape. Making the case for what I called "Dreampolitik", I concluded my opening chapter with these words:

To embrace dreams as part of a winning strategy for progressive politics may be just a dream itself, but really, at this point, what do we have to lose?

A lot, as it turned out. The US Presidential election of 2016, for starters. Enter Donald Trump, real-estate celebrity and reality TV star, a non-politician who built his base by dreaming up nightmares of "bad hombres" streaming in over the borders, and transformed the election into a spectacle to end all spectacles. After rolling over his hapless reality-based Republican rivals in the primary, Trump was left to face the Democratic contender, Hillary Clinton. Clinton was competent, knowledgeable and experienced; a self-described policy wonk who had a reasonable answer for every question posed to her. It was the perfect contest between the forces of fantasy and reality.

The match was fought with raucous rallies and incendiary tweets on one side, and staid press conferences and paid advertisements on the other. But the competition was played out most vividly, head to head, through a series of televised debates between Trump and Clinton. In these debates Trump failed at the most basic levels of logical reasoning. His "facts" were immediately refuted as lies, and his "arguments" consisted of a series of seemingly disconnected, but emotionally charged words and phrases. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, sounding every bit like the honor student she once was, coolly pointed what was fact and what was fiction and directed TV viewers to her website so they could check the facts themselves. To the intellectual class of pundits, pollsters and reporters it was obvious who was going to win. The New York Times Upshot polls were predicting a 93% chance of Clinton victory only weeks before the election. Truth Will Out!