Tomorrow as Tribute

The Argument

No single account in the existing literature explains why voter populations across a dozen contemporary cases have agreed to trade their material futures for fantasy pasts. Standard liberal accounts attribute the trade to misinformation and propaganda. Nationalist accounts attribute the trade to legitimate grievance. Tomorrow as Tribute argues that both standard accounts miss the level at which the transaction operates. The voters know what they are buying. They have access to the same evidence as everyone else. They have decided, election after election, across many countries simultaneously, that the fantasy past is worth the material cost. The decision is the transaction. The transaction is the trade.

This book draws on political science, economic history, comparative democratic studies, and primary-source reporting from each of the thirteen contemporary cases. The argument is structural rather than empirical. It does not claim to have discovered facts about the rise of authoritarian movements that specialists in each country have not already documented. It claims that the facts, read across national and ideological boundaries rather than within each separately, describe a transaction whose character has not been adequately named. The name proposed for that character is the politics of tribute. The working metaphor deployed for the relationship between the voters and the fantasy past is the ancient relationship between a tributary polity and the dominant power that collects the tribute.

Political scientists who focus on Russia do not typically write about American voter behavior. Americanists do not typically write about Hindu nationalism. Indianists do not typically write about Turkish secularism. The literature on contemporary authoritarianism has been fragmented across area-studies boundaries that cannot see each other. Tomorrow as Tribute crosses every one of those boundaries because the argument requires it. The trade operates the same way in every case the book examines. Across each case, the literature that describes the trade has been disaggregated. The book is an attempt to see them together.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Burnt Future

Part One: The Trade Defined

Chapter 1: What Utopia Was

Chapter 2: When the Future Died

Chapter 3: The Trade Defined

Part Two: The Trade Across the Cases

Chapter 4: Russia and the Fantasy Empire

Chapter 5: America and the Restoration Myth

Chapter 6: Hungary and the Illiberal Settlement

Chapter 7: India and the Hindu Rashtra

Chapter 8: Turkey and the Long Erdoğan

Chapter 9: Hard Cases I: Brazil, Argentina, Israel

Chapter 10: Hard Cases II: Italy, France, Germany

Part Three: The Mechanisms

Chapter 11: Propaganda and the Manufacture of Consent

Chapter 12: Institutional Capture and the Long Project

Chapter 13: The Coalitions of Tribute

Part Four: The Counter-Future and the Long Restoration

Chapter 14: The Counter-Future: What Restoration Requires

Chapter 15: The Long Restoration

Conclusion: Tomorrow as Inheritance

Glossary · Selected Bibliography · About the Author · Colophon

The Epigraphs

"Society is a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born."

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist."

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)

What the Book Traces

Fifteen chapters tracking the politics of tribute across the contemporary cases where it currently operates. From the introduction in the Republic of Buryatia where Russian combat soldiers are drawn at per-capita rates that fall hardest on Mongolic ethnic minorities, through the Apollo 8 Earthrise photograph of Christmas Eve 1968 that captured the political future at its peak as a category of public imagination, through the 1970s economic dislocations and the 1989 collapse of the Soviet imaginary that killed the political future as a category, through the country case studies of Russia under Putin and the second Trump administration and the Orbán regime in Hungary and the Modi government in India and the long Erdoğan in Turkey, through the harder cases of Israel under the current coalition and Brazil under Bolsonaro and Argentina under Milei and Italy under Meloni and the rising French and German and Polish formations, through the mechanisms chapters on propaganda apparatus and institutional capture and tribute-paying coalitions, through the affirmative chapters on what a counter-future would require and how the long restoration would actually work in the historical record drawn from postwar West Germany and postwar Italy and post-Franco Spain and post-junta Greece, to the closing meditation on what each generation owes the next. The trade operates across all the cases. The damage is what the voters are paying. Naming the trade so that organizing against it can begin from accurate description is the work of the book.

A Note on the Free PDF

A book that argues the politics of tribute is producing catastrophic outcomes should be available to anyone willing to read the case it makes. The free PDF is a fully formatted six-by-nine inch reading edition with embedded fonts, color chapter heads, decorative part dividers, scene-break ornaments, running chapter titles, an internal bookmark tree for the PDF reader navigation panel, and the complete text including the introduction, the glossary, the selected bibliography, and a closing colophon. Download it, read it, argue with it.

Dedication

For Janna, who read every chapter and pushed back on every claim that needed pushing back on, and for those who refuse to accept tomorrow as tribute.