For a New Social Contract and a Hopeful Populism
Michael Kazin and Julian Zelizer, argue in today's WaPo that "the party faithful agree on the basic outlines of a new social contract" for a post-industrial society:
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The new agenda focuses on protecting middle-class families from the insecurities of the global economy. In their primary campaigns, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton advocated proposals to help citizens whose economic welfare has been threatened by the rising costs of health care and education, the slide in the housing and stock markets, the challenges of retirement, and global warming.
Obama speaks of strengthening families by putting "the rungs back on that ladder to the middle class," giving "every family the chance that so many of our parents and grandparents had." He calls for a tax credit to offset the Social Security tax and expanding the earned-income tax credit and the Family and Medical Leave Act. Obama also favors two big programs that no Democrat before him could realize: a national health plan that would cut costs and cover every citizen; and a sizable tuition grant to college students who sign up for national service.
The emphasis on protecting middle-class families reflects a major historical shift. During the 1930s and '40s, liberals struggled to create a vibrant middle class out of the industrial wage-earners who had immigrated to the United States and rural people of all races who lacked electricity and jobs. New Deal programs focused on workingmen and depressed regions. The National Labor Relations Act legitimized unions and boosted the purchasing power of the working class. The Rural Electrification Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority enabled Southern communities to participate fully in the modern manufacturing economy. Social Security gave support to the elderly, lessening the burden on their children. The GI Bill gave a generation the ability to purchase a home and get a college education.
In the 1960s, Democrats turned to expanding the middle class. John F. Kennedy and LBJ sought to increase the number of Americans who could enjoy the economic and social benefits of a booming economy. The rights revolution made it possible for African Americans, Latinos and women from all backgrounds to compete for most of the same jobs as white men. Medicare and Medicaid provided new health benefits for the elderly and the poor.
Now, Democrats are grappling with insecurities faced by entire families, that institution conservatives always claim to represent. The past three decades have produced growing economic inequality and a shrinking middle class. Younger Americans no longer expect to enjoy as good a life as their parents did. Wage-earners fear for the future of their jobs and incomes. No family is secure.
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Kazin, a historian at Georgetown, wrote a great history of the language of populism, The Populist Persuasion, back in the 1990s. His nuanced conclusion in that book is worth revisiting:
.... [Populism's] assertion of resentments based on class and status may be a barrier to constructing a new type of universalism—what the eco-anarchist Murray Bookchin calls "the ability to voice broadly human concerns." .... Yet the desire to transcend populism is also shortsighted. It ignores the very persistence of the language, rooted in the gap between American ideals and those institutions and authorities whose performance betrays them. That continuity occurs for a good reason. At the core of the populist tradition is an insight of great democratic and moral significance. No major problem can be seriously addressed, much less nudged on a path toward solution, unless what an antebellum politician called the "productive and burden-bearing classes"—Americans of all races who work for a living, knit neighborhoods together, and cherish what the nation is supposed to stand for—participate in the task ....
To move any closer toward redistributing wealth and revitalizing mass democracy, intellectuals have to take part in social movements that knit such people together. Without silencing the spirited voices of gender and racial community that emerged from the 1960s, we have to help chisel away the hardened self-righteousness that has grown up around such identities. Otherwise we risk spending the future as spectators to the endless competition between spindoctors and copywriters, captives to anyone who seems to make the old rhetoric sing again, if only for one acceptance speech or third-second spot. Such passivity is a cultural disease, and some form of populism is needed to cure it.
When a new breed of inclusive grassroots movements does arise, intellectuals should contribute their time, their money, and their passion for justice. They should work to stress the harmonious, hopeful, and pragmatic aspects of populist language and to disparage the meaner ones—without forgetting that evangelical zeal cannot be expunged from our culture. Like the American dream itself, populism lives too deeply in the fears and expectations of American citizens to be trivialized or replaced. We should not speak solely within its terms, but, without it, we are lost.