Highly Aspirational Political Movements

Many of today’s movements seek extensive restructuring of society. Some such examples include “Land Back,” indigenous people’s movements to reclaim sovereignty over unceded territories, or “No Borders,” the movement to abolish state boundaries. These sorts of movements are most recognizably characterized as radical or, perhaps, utopian; however, such characterizations do not offer an analytic construction that helps us see the movements for what they are. In this paper, I argue for an analytic construction of movements that aspire to change everything. By taking movement members seriously in their commitment to vast social change, we can step back and reconsider their movements as highly aspirational. Highly Aspirational Political Movements (HAPMs) exhibit the following pattern. One, movement members are dependent on the very institutions and ideology they criticize. Their dependence keeps them in a bind where their attempts for structural transformation are hindered by continuous use of systems they criticize. Two, they rely on imagination to overcome structural dependencies and to generate political strategies for a pathway forward. Three, movement members have a sense that their movement is operating on a generations-long or even indefinite timeline; they are open to the possibility their movement may never succeed, yet they persist. I illustrate the pattern through three case examples: prison industrial-complex abolition, Hawaiian sovereignty, and Christian Nationalism.