Where Progressives Go Now

Progressives have to make sense of confronting a radical opponent, because the American Right is now radical, and the president is their standard-bearer. How else to describe an administration committed to changing taxation and social insurance root and branch, revising the basic rules of international order, and remaking faraway societies by force? And, not to forget, an administration willing -- indeed, seemingly delighted -- to bankrupt the country and jeopardize our authority in global currency markets in pursuit of these visionary schemes.

In the face of an extremist program, the first response of the decent and sensible is to fall into a small-c conservative posture, raising doubts that used to belong to the skeptical, anti-utopian right, the students of Michael Oakeshott and heirs of Edmund Burke. Is it wise, or even acceptable, to shatter policies that make people's lives more decent and tolerable? Is it not reckless to take control of other people's governments and presume to set them on the road to reason and freedom? Don't we have to put -- and keep -- our house in order before we do anything else? Is any policy more irresponsible than eating our fiscal seed corn? And, for God's sake, can our leaders not tell the truth? John Kerry's campaign was in many ways a vehicle of just this sort of protest.

Right on, as far as it goes. This is, as prudent conservatives might say, entirely right and proper. Preserving what's good -- and sometimes what's merely tolerable -- against what promises to be worse is a major part of the work of politics. So is guarding against the perennial mistakes of arrogance, especially the arrogance of power. To this point, we should be upset not because we are on the prudent defensive, but because we might lose.

This leads to what I guess is the purpose of the Principles Project: recognizing that we're at risk of losing partly because we have trouble saying what we're for, rather than what we're against. I begin with more-than-faint praise of the prudent, preservationist strand of today's progressive politics because I think it doesn't deserve to become a whipping boy for anyone who would prefer a more robust program, and I fear it might. To state the ought-to-be obvious, what we want to preserve, and what we need to resist, should be consequences of what we want to bring about, and (to some extent) vice-versa. (I think, by the way, that this also means John Kerry doesn't deserve to be our whipping boy. I say this having shouted "He's going to lose" upon hearing various statements in the campaign, and -- more saliently -- having admired Andrei Cherny's diagnosis of the campaign's troubles in the NYT op-ed page. That said, the candidate's weaknesses were also the party's, and blaming the candidate the primary voters picked would be too convenient and unhelpful.)

There came a moment in the debates of both the 2000 and the 2004 presidential campaigns when the Democratic candidate suddenly looked like a white-collar guy in a blue-collar bar, caught with his eyes in the wrong place, trying to explain why he shouldn't get whipped. For Al Gore, it was on a question about gun control. For Kerry, it was abortion. On substance, Kerry did better with a hard issue. Kerry was probably closer to speaking his mind, with his careful account of how he doesn't like abortion, but opposes outlawing it. The trouble is, on these heartland issues, with their roots in the moral attitudes and cultural identities of a big swath of voters, the Democrats are in a bind, and they know it. They look scared, they backpedal like crabs fleeing to the sea, and they give the impression that they must be hiding something.

"The impression that they must be hiding something"? Yes. To overstate the case a little, people don't understand policy or know much about the platforms of the parties. In other words, most people don't understand "politics" in the way students and practitioners of politics do. Instead, they make their judgments using the same shorthand judgments that most of us are more or less expert at using in other areas of life: judging whether people seem comfortable, whether they appear to be telling the truth, whether they seem trustworthy. Issues like gun control are also, to some extent, shorthand signals. Like the way a colleague dresses or the car a neighbor drives, they answer the question, "Is this someone like me," or, more important and more salient, "Is this someone who is likely to respect me?" All the talk of which candidate voters would like to share a beer with goes to these shorthand signals. The signals, in turn, mainly carry messages on two themes: trustworthiness, and respect or disrespect for people like the voter. (There is, by the way, no overestimating the importance of respect, even a symbolic, gestural sort that doesn't cash out at all in policies. Bush understands this, and expresses it in symbolic ways that his father and John Kerry -- in one of those many similarities to Bush I that gave the last campaign its eerily Oedipal quality -- completely miss.)

Let me come clean: I hate this stuff. This way of talking about politics drains it of everything distinctly political, and makes it just another room in the mansion of marketing, entertainment, and social life. Trouble is, it seems to be accurate. Hate it or not, I'm sure I'll say it again. But it's not the only way: there are other kinds of political shorthand that are in fact political. They are signals people learn by belonging to social groups with specifically political purposes, like certain evangelical churches, and labor unions. The churches teach their members to line up politicians along a few bellwether issues, particularly abortion and prayer. The unions teach -- increasingly, taught -- their members to vote pocketbook issues that made economic class salient in American politics, even if most people didn't call it class.

If all this is more or less right, then there are two (stylized) ways for progressive candidates to get across to voters. One is what Andrei recommended in his excellent NYT piece: let them see who you are, and make it good. The other is to build movement organizations, like unions, in which people teach each other a political shorthand that stands in for progressive commitments. Ideally, the second leads -- as churches and unions sometimes do -- to deeper engagement with and understanding of the issues. In the mercenary-minded medium term, though, it also leads to victory.

I suppose that anyone who is involved in this project has certain goals in common: greater equality of opportunity, safety nets (such as universal access to health care) that would make economic sorting less merciless, and the preservation of civil and personal liberties. Past that consensus, I'd imagine that some run more in the egalitarian-libertarian direction, with a strong emphasis on personal freedoms such as abortion rights and a willingness to tolerate inequality (above the level of actual deprivation, anyway) while others as long as it arises from fair opportunity. Others, I'd imagine, take what a friend of mine self-mockingly calls a paleo-liberal line, committed to the welfare state, hostile to inequality, and with a premium on solidarity. (I have enough feeling for both that my sorting is a matter of mood and the weather, and comes up mostly when I imagine, for instance, whether I would trade Roe v. Wade for universal health care.)

If that's more or less right, then I'd think part of our aim would be to think about how to make some concatenation of these commitments more politically effective on one of the two templates I sketched earlier: candidate communication or movement building. Of course, the division is artificial as a matter of strategy. George W. Bush couldn't have won without (among other things, including the war in Iraq) both a communication style that convinces many people he's a straight-up guy and a movement of voters behind him. Moreover, the two reinforce each other in a more substantial way than just adding up to the sum of their parts: I'd imagine Bush is more confident speaking the language of evangelical morality because he knows that audience is out there, understanding and applauding him. By contrast, if you speak the language of social solidarity and egalitarianism on a national platform, it must be easy to feel like a voice in the wilderness. (Actually, this has been my experience writing on these themes in a personal voice.)

What are our prospects for a movement? We had a campaign movement for about a year, but it was basically an anti-Bush movement, which by the happenstance of the primaries morphed into a pro-Kerry movement. If it had legs, it would right now be turning into pro-Social Security movement. To tell the truth, I am close enough to it (if there is a single "it" to approach) to know whether this is true; but I have not yet had the impression it is.

If I were to sketch a movement trajectory over the next ten years, in an ideal world it would include the following: (1) a mass mobilization to save Social Security from privatization, funded by the Democrats, the AARP, and the same people who paid for the election drive, which would perforce involve meaningful education about the purposes of the program, the value of sharing risk, the power of basic forms of social solidarity, and the like; (2) a joint campaign by the major unions to organize Wal-Mart, that mother of all anti-worker employers, which would assert the relevance of organized labor and throw down the gauntlet before the old new economy of low wages and no benefits (transiently eclipsed by the new new economy of Silicon Valley wealth); (3) on the strength of these, renewed pressure for universal health care and repeal of the Bush tax cuts; and (4) partly as a result of the rest, an increase in civic self-confidence that would enable people to say, in response to the campaigns of fear and disinformation that are this administration's specialty, essentially what Howard Dean said in his primary campaign: "You haven't made the case to me, and I don't owe you anything until you do." That's how citizens should address elected leaders. Without a movement, though, it seems a majority of us won't.

What about the candidate part of the story? As I said, I think movements help candidates in all sorts of non-obvious ways, as well the obvious ones. Just let me echo about five million other progressives and say, Bring us someone who can do every night for a year what Barack Obama did in his keynote address to the DNC. That was a reminder that "revival" is a word with meaning: he reminded us what we believed, and why, and he made it fresh and immediate. Wesley Clark had some of those moments in the campaign, when he was at the top of his game, laying out the importance of progressive taxation with the authority of a man who has made money, saved lives, and ordered assaults. Needless to say, John Edwards did it sometimes, too, particularly mostly when he gave That Speech. Bush has shown that if you know your core beliefs and don't feel the need to run away from them -- or appear to feel that need -- people don't need to agree with you about everything. Give me a liberal candidate who knows his core beliefs and can explain them, and I'll put him up against Bush III and go door-to-door for him (or her) as well.

None of this has touched much on foreign policy or national security, where progressives badly need to find a voice that has so far evaded them, something that outdoes the Bush program in both its pragmatic and its visionary dimensions. In brief, I think progressive aims would include these: (1) To understand that terrorism and Islamic extremism, although indeed alarming and dangerous, cannot be allowed to structure our foreign policy to the exclusion of everything else; (2) to shift attention to engagement with India and China, where in two decades perhaps three billion people will live in polities that, at this point, could be either fascist-nationalist or semi-liberal and semi-democratic: these are pivot points for the next century of world history in a way that Islamic extremism almost certainly will not be unless by shifting the rudder of American policy; (3) to promote liberal and democratic standards for both domestic government and international relations, toward weaving a web of institutions and norms that will channel Chinese and Indian power -- quite the opposite of the space for untrammeled superpower self-assertion that we have been clearing recently, and will leave open for our successor; (4) to direct massive resources to women's education and empowerment, in the recognition that nothing drives a country's liberal trajectory further or faster; (5) to contain the ex-Soviet nuclear arsenal and move against the channels of nuclear proliferation; and (6) naturally, to lay the groundwork for international cooperation around global warming, the preservation of fisheries, and other transnational environmental threats.

The political difficulty is that none of these is exactly "war," and once war has been declared it is hard to trump politically, particularly in foreign affairs. Odds are it would take a candidate with moral and, quite possibly, martial authority to press the country in these directions while we are still entangled in the Bush adventures and the language of perpetual wartime -- the candidate some of us hoped Wesley Clark would turn out to be. These, too, though, can also be movement issues, particularly environmental protection and women's empowerment -- and the second redounds to all issues, inasmuch as it is the catalyst for liberalization generally.

I have been writing quickly for a couple of hours and, feeling I've gotten my points across, won't reach for a peroration. I think this is an important project, and I'm glad to have been invited to participate. I look forward to seeing other people's thoughts, and devoutly hope we make some contribution to the action that has hardly ever been more necessary than now.