What’s A Progressive?
(January of 2004)
Part One
Lemme be blunt. The single most important question facing America and the world today is the power of corporations over the lives of ordinary people, and whether ordinary people are going to prevail. All else flows from that.
Imagine a world that has done away with all laws governing the conduct of corporations in the countries in which they operate, but kept in place their current legal obligation to maximize the profits to their shareholders. They would still, of course, be legally obligated to get away with as much as they can get away with, to be as rapacious as they can be. Without taxes levied on them, without environmental laws and anti-trust laws, without a system of laws to protect the workers in their employ, of course, there would be no benefits at all that would accrue to the society at large, and none to their workforce either. It’d be something close to a state of nature.
As corporations are released from the restraints of social legislation that have meekly been placed on them over the last hundred years or so, as they gleefully cast off the social obligations that had become a part of a general consensus as to what constitutes civilized behavior, the price we pay in democracy is high.
This is where we are heading. This is the logical future to which current trends are pointing. Socializing the risk and privatizing the profit, as the poet said. And it is only ordinary people pushing back at that, all over the world, that is slowing the process down.
With me so far?
Democracy and capitalism are antithetical. You can further one or the other but not both.
Where does that leave us? What do we do about it? Having come to that conclusion, what kind of world are we then under a moral obligation to try and help build?
~ ~ ~
I’m going to try in this article to sketch out broadly for the country at large what it means to be progressively-minded on some of the great questions of our time. To distil down to its essence what it means to me to be a Progressive today.
A tall order, for sure, not least because there are as many strands of belief in the Progressive movement as within any other, so using the “we” is fraught with danger. I have little doubt that many of my best friends and most cherished allies will find much to disagree with me on.
It’s a tall order, too, because any movement that tries to raise questions about a society’s underpinnings is going to have an even more daunting task than those concerned mainly with tinkering around the edges, and a couple of hundred words will never be enough.
Comparisons are unavoidable, and though I’m loath to try to characterize American Liberalism in the pages of a Liberal publication, I’ll do so. This being a Liberal publication and so, by definition, tolerant to a fault, I will of course try to be polite.*
On so many things, of course, Liberals and Progressives stand shoulder to shoulder on common ground. On the brutish nastiness of today’s Republican Party, for example.
Fiery language uttered while trying to hold that ground is another matter. And it may be that one big difference between us is in the tone of the words that come out of us, even our ways of being. Liberals may be more gentle and polite, at least towards “Conservatives”; some Progressives are tired of being polite to the rabid Right. We are angry. It’s not in our genes, the Right has made us livid.
I get the feeling, too, from many of my liberal friends, that they are genuinely offended by our anger, though I suspect there are some for whom the truths that we utter, and the ramifications of those truths, are deeply disturbing.
Liberals are excited by the possibilities that inhere in a healthy debate in the marketplace of ideas, argue valiantly and admirably for giving more airtime to the Right in the name of balance. Many are eager to believe that in fair debate, where more light is shed than heat, that Good will triumph. We’re more worried about who owns the stalls in the marketplace and who holds the megaphones and the power that gives them. (Megaphones? More like foghorns. Foghorns versus piccolos…)
And that may be the crux of it. That might be at the heart of the differences between us. I dare say that the brightest of Liberal lights are doing a heroic job arguing the great civil questions of our time, the great questions of liberty. It is harder to get my Liberal friends to talk economics, except around the margins. To talk about the economic foundations of our market system. To talk about who owns the bulk of the world’s wealth and whether they actually should.
Maybe we accept capitalism out of a sort of sad pessimism, out of a belief that despite what we see as the observable fact that market forces work against democracy, we ain’t gonna see a popular, peaceful, democratic overthrow of the people who hold all the power any time soon. Liberals, sweetly, sometimes seem to still harbor the hope that the best in human beings can be elicited without a big change in the world’s economy.
A big change of our outlook and our country and our world is not even on the radar screens of our national conversation. And it should be.
*This article was first published in the pages of the Liberal Daily Beacon
Part Two
It may be that the irreconcilability of capitalism and democracy is okay with some people: Life itself, after all, is about balancing and trade-offs. Others might say that a bit of comfort and a bit of stability and a bit of what we’ve learned to call freedom is worth the price we pay in diminished democracy. Or that what we’ve got is the best we can do, that it’s a lousy system but it’s a damn sight better than all the others we could ever come up with
But if you were building a civilization from scratch, where would you begin? If you were drawing up a charter for the founding of a society (and were interested in something a bit more democratic than kleptocracy), wouldn’t you first ask yourself “How do we do this in such a way as to benefit the largest number of people?” Would you not put people first on the list of priorities? Rather than pick a system that purports to bring sizeable but incidental benefits to the great majority?
Because of course those who argue for keeping things as they are ask us to believe that by giving first priority to the interests of big business, the benefits will necessarily flow to all the rest of us. That the way to “put people first” is to liberate the efficiency of the markets. To let those who own most of the wealth keep it all so they can make even more money. That what’s good for the big moneymakers is good for everybody. That “what’s good for business is good for America”. And all that.
How nice for them and their consciences. Convenient. What’s good for them is good for the world. They’ll be sure to go to heaven, then, and make a killing on the way.
Gallows humor aside, let’s concede that one point for just a moment. On the surface, at least, the markets do seem to be pretty good at delivering goods and services to those consumers that have the means to buy them.
But that way of doing things has proven, pretty definitively, to be spectacularly incapable, on its own, of providing even adequate education and health care to all Americans.
So let’s start by saying “Alright, Health. Education. These should belong to all of us.” Maybe throw in the broadcast airwaves so an honest conversation can be had without the corrupting clutter of vested interests battering at the walls of our spirits.
I can’t begin to do justice to all this now, but check it out:
· It’s cheaper for us as Americans to send a kid to college for a year than to put him in jail. It has been proven that investment in education pays for itself and more by the money saved in jailing people.
· We pay more per capita for health than just about anybody in the world and have higher infant mortality rates than fifteen countries in the European Union. Our life expectancy is lower than most of them too. There are few -- if any -- developed countries that spend less public money on the health of their people than we do, and our way is the most costly. The other way is the smart way to go, fiscally and every other way.
Suppose tuberculosis starts to rear its head in a big way in America once again because people can’t afford to be treated? Does anybody really think that neighbors won’t catch it? Neighbors that earn a living cleaning rich folks’ homes? Will wealthy people stay healthy for long?
Of course not.
Suppose your home catches fire? Should fire fighters be dispatched only after a determination has been made that the inhabitants can pay for them to drop by, some time between 8 and 5? Presumably it has long been understood that if a poor working family’s abode next door to yours is allowed to burn, your own home might catch fire too.
Think about our business relations with the rest of the world. Supporters of corporate globalization argue that given current economic circumstance, a race to the bottom in paying for labor is necessary because we’re competing with labor elsewhere in the world that is much cheaper. And to a degree it’s true (though less true than we’ve been led to believe) that a country that places its social obligations in higher priority than we do may operate at a disadvantage when competing in the “markets” with us and those other countries that don’t.
But would we stomach someone arguing for the formal reintroduction of slavery just because we’re competing against countries that produce goods using slave labor? I think not. (And yet. In this country our use of prison labor and workfare can come pretty damn close.)
And ultimately the point of all this is an even more fundamental question: Where on the spectrum do we draw the line and still get to call ourselves civilized? We draw lines every day between what’s right and what’s not. What should belong to all of us and what should be geared to making a profit?
That is the big question of our time. The answers will be difficult to utter. Or even contemplate. But the words have to be spoken. And the journey begun. It’s not about charity or compassion. It really is a matter of enlightened self-interest.
So now what?
Start back down the road of using the public treasure for the public good. Throw money, for a start. Big money.
~ ~ ~
The best arguments against “big gummint” (by which the Right always means everything but the martial plans of what, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, is easily the largest command economy in the world) are the ones that charge inaccessible and unresponsive bureaucracy.
The access question first. Bankrolling political campaigns with private money has meant that unconditional and disproportionate access is granted to the bankrollers. Public campaign financing and mandated access to broadcast airtime are obvious policy responses to the undemocratic access to those who govern us, and have proven track records.
The quandary presented by big, clunky, unresponsive bureaucracy is no small thing. There are no easy solutions, and like everything else, these solutions will require detailed blueprints drawn up by very smart people, but it’s my sense that the answer lies in a careful balancing of local, democratic decision-making with universal national standards.
The efficient delivery of goods and services that we touched on before is also basic, and would be no small matter either, in any society that has decided upon a strong public sector to serve the needs of its people.
These arguments, cogent as they are, just can’t be seen as dealbreakers. If a civilization decides upon a great shift in priorities towards a public sector that's as big as its population, these challenges have to be seen not as insuperable obstacles that should quash that shift in priorities, but problems to be addressed once founding principles have been established.
~ ~ ~
There is no scarcity of financial resources. It’s a question of who owns those resources. There are fabulous riches in the world and in this country. The top 1% of households in America in 2001 held 33.4% of all net worth. Mind boggling. Think they need more of it? Been the trend for years. While we slept.
Here are just a few obvious examples of where throwing a bit of money at the problem would do some good:
· There are schools all over the place that have 35:1 ratios of student to teacher. Does anyone really think that if we reduced the ratio to 11:1 or 1:1 that we wouldn't have children that were better educated? And does anyone imagine that if teachers were paid like CEOs it’d be hard to entice the brightest lights in our country’s firmament into the classroom to teach our children?
· Housing? Public housing wouldn’t be so abhorrent if instead of tower blocks with people piled on top of each other like rats we had 3-family homes in their stead…
Oh, do it your own self. The list of things that can be made better by investing big money stretches to near infinity. It’s a matter of having the national will to do it.
~ ~ ~
So at the very least, Liberals and Progressives should be able to agree that the question then becomes: “What economic and political models do we see in our dreams?” And there are some really smart people out there, people with big hearts and hard heads, who are dreaming up answers to that very question, answers based on founding, grounding principles, and with practical solutions attached. +
I can imagine the 3 pillars of American political democracy, the Executive, the Legislative and the Judiciary, living alongside new economic models, models that will wrest a bit of wealth and power and power over wealth from some people, and put more power into the hands of a greater number of ordinary people. Isn’t that what democracy is by definition?
Tall order? Fer shurr. No-one said it would be easy.
~ ~ ~
Okay. Definitions.
We know for a fact that there has been a concerted effort by the Right, a thirty-three year project, founded on an expenditure of some three billion dollars, to frame the terms of the national conversation and then to seize power and hold on to it. Call it a “vast right-wing conspiracy”. The strategy has been stunningly successful, and it has been helped along by capitalism’s natural inclinations.
There was a good word around way back when. Radical. Sounds nasty. Sounds like a good word for the Extreme Right, and it’s sometimes used that way these days.
It comes from the Latin word radix, though, meaning root. And in one sense, at least, there’s nothing especially radical about the Right-Wing project, as it really just wants to allow capitalism to grow to its natural jungle thickness, not alter its nature in any fundamental way.
I think Progressives pay close attention to the health of the roots. And to the other subterranean goings-on beneath the topsoil, the connections and processes that underpin the economy and power politics.
Milton Mayer, an American who spent a lot of time interviewing German Jewish survivors of the Nazis, quoted a friend of his in a recent book:
“One must foresee the ends in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings”
which, if you think about it, is an even more profound statement than might first appear, if we take the word “ends” to mean the end purpose as well as the end result.
We are no longer in the beginnings. The dark clouds are already gathering. We must embark on fundamental change.
~ ~ ~
For a few weeks now it has been impossible for me to look at the world without thinking about the unbearably sad loss of so many lives in the Earthquake Tsunami. The magnitude of the catastrophe just beggars understanding.
I don’t know if something like this has the capacity to change us all for ever. I don’t hear too many people talking about leaving the rebuilding to market forces though. The world is responding for the common good.
Jeremy Seabrook has said it better than I ever could:
"Assertions of our common humanity [seem to] occur only at times of great loss. To retrieve and hold on to it at all other times - that would be something of worth to salvage from these scenes of desolation."
That is what the Progressive vision is about. Imagining other ways of doing things. Like how to make our dreams actual. And legislate them.
The challenge is as big as the world, and so is the importance of meeting it. We need a Marshall Plan for the world. The martial plans we’ve grown accustomed to always cost a whole lot more and won’t cut it, and neither will defensive tinkering around the edges. We can afford to do no less.
~ ~ ~
I sometimes hear Beethoven’s Ninth being played on New Year’s Day. Can you hear the distant strains of another Ninth Symphony beginning to swell in the early days of this New Year? Or are we stuck inside a Radetsky March?
No harm in dreaming. Let’s get good at it.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
+ See for example two great articles in the November/December issue of Dollars and Sense:
http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2004/1104barnes.html
http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2004/1104alper.html
© January 2004
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