How progressives can win the battle of ideas
As we launch HopeWorks, a new online platform for progressives, we hear from HopeWorks founder Peter Hyman and Marc Stears, Director UCL Policy Lab, about why now is the time for big ideas.
When we first started talking about the possibility of a new online platform for progressives, we thought about how previous generations had worked together to think big and take on the challenges of their time. From Beverage to Blair, politics has been shaped by groups of thinkers, campaigners, and communities coming together, those who placed a genuine belief in the power of ideas to shape politics and the lives of those politics seeks to serve.
This is the spirit in which HopeWorks was born.
In many ways, the new right personified by Donald Trump has forged new ground, shaping not just policy debates but also the cultural and social mood in the United States and around the world. This isn’t just about the force of one man; it is about a wider network helping to test and craft their own mode of politics.
In our weekly newsletter, we’ll share fresh ideas and the latest debates. Never shying away from confronting the challanges we face. We’re going to have guest editors share their own favourite new works, be they books, article or research papers. We hope this can be a shared endeavour, part of a wider conversation about the age in which we live and the need for big ideas to shape it.
Peter Hyman and Marc Stears in the New Statesman on the launch of HopeWorks
Progressives have a choice: either sit back and let Donald Trump and nationalist populists shape a new paradigm on their terms, or get our act together and come up with a set of bigger, better and bolder ideas. We can deny change and continue with the old ways of doing things, in the hope that something will turn up to save the day. Or we can respond to the need for a new agenda and describe what a progressive version of that change should look like.
That is the choice we are laying out this week with the launch of HopeWorks, an online platform for engaging with ideas and arguments for a different, fairer future. This will be a place for robust debate, brought together by some of the major think tanks in Britain today and a host of individuals working on new ideas. It is a non-partisan resource for people to draw on, as we do the difficult work of building that alternative project.