Ideas

From TPM Cafe's Book Club discussion of David Sirota's The Uprising, this is from a helpful post by Jefferson Smith on the intersection between populism and progressivism:

.....

Populism and Progressivism: Sirota aptly defines populism as politics that have popular support but get short shrift from elites. For purposes here, I'll define progressivism as forward-eyed championing of the public interest through common action (with a healthy recognition of the marginal utility of wealth—that is, a dollar for someone without is worth more than another person's millionth dollar). We can quibble on definitions; hopefully these'll work for now.

My hypothesis here—lacking sufficient data to call it a full-blown theory—and a theme for my posts this week, is that a new progressive era will arrive when populism and progressivism meet. (Whether to call this "crossing the streams" ala Ghostbusters or "the perfect storm" a la Clooney I haven't decided yet.) I read yesterday's comments suggesting that those twain shan't meet. But my own sense is that they can, perhaps must, and even have.

Some History of Populists and Progressives: At the end of the 1800's, a battle between the populists and progressives waged. The populists grew from working farm communities and "tended to hate Wall Street and bank interests." "Progressivism was a movement of the college-educated urban middle class, which valued expertise and efficiency and favored government regulation and foreign affairs." For people who like names: Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were progressives; William Jennings Bryan (earlier) and Huey Long (later) were populists.

Historical precedent: My own historical interpretation is that the Progressive Movement (~1900-1917) can be defined as an era where populism and progressivism merged—particularly around economic fairness, such as progressive taxation, trust-busting regulation (Sherman Act), and the estate tax. Progressive movements became popular movements; Women's Suffrage failed, failed, failed, then swept the nation. The anger of the working farmer and factory worker met the legal tinkering of Learned Hand. The voice for much of this became the sickly-patrician-turned-robust-rabble-rouser Teddy Roosevelt, who included environmentalism in this platform of popular progressivism.

Current government: My critique of the system now is not merely that elites aren't sufficiently paying attention to the will of the people, but that too many elites aren't paying sufficient attention to the best interests of the people either. Our current government is neither progressive nor populist. Not only are our betters not of the people, nor are they for the people. Either might be better. Both might be necessary.

This seems right to me. A weakness of many interest/issue groups and think tanks on the left and center is that they're all progressivism and no populism. The resurgence of a positive populism could be a helpful corrective.

TPM Cafe's Book Club is discussing Rick Perlstein's Nixonland this week. Here's an excerpt of Perlstein's kickoff post:

The Germans have a word, vergangenheitsbearbeitung, or "working through the past," to describe that nation's attempt to achieve something that, while not nearly as world-historic, dramatic, or portentous, is structurally similar to what has been happening on the American left over the last decade or so, apparently without many conservatives noticing: doing the hard work of reckoning with collective errs, facing up to them, unflinchingly staring them down, and restoring a community to balance by transcending them as best as we mortal humans can.

....

.... Liberals used to be really, really, really condescending [toward conservatives]. They're not anything like that degree of condescending any more. That so many conservatives find us precisely that condescending now is, to borrow, like conservatives these days are habitually doing, the antiquated argot of another age: it's a stone trip, man.

Dig it: they still think we're all August Hecksher and Abbie Hoffman. Just like in 1960 we still thought they were all wearing monocles and spats. As a custodian of the past and an advocate in the present, let me offer conservatives a historical observation: that kind of stubborn condescension--that kind of refusal to take the intellectual work of your ideological adversaries seriously--is not healthy for a movement's political future.

Inside the beltway, vergangenheitsbearbeitung has traditionally been a behind closed doors type of activity (to the extent it occured at all). What's particularly notable about today's vergangenheitsbearbeitung on the left is its transparency, a transparency largely due to the blogosphere and other forms of new digital media.

The Atlantic's Matt Yglesias has a revealing post up today responding to an article about the blogosphere's lead role in the new progressive movement.

Beyond that, I'll admit to not having much interest in socialist thought. I will say that I'm pretty much a believer in Marx-style base/superstructure theory to an extent that most of my friends and colleagues seem to find somewhat appalling. I don't, for example, believe that William F. Buckley, Jr. exercised any substantial real causal influence on American history not through any fault of his own but simply because I don't think intellectuals really impact the course of events. This is, needless to say, not a popular opinion among writers.

I love bloggers, but ideas can be their biggest blindspot. To many of them, ideas are less important than tactics, arguments, and facts. But I think we're right in the middle of an election that shows how relevant ideas still are. Marx-style theory, powerful as it may be, cannot account for a fiercely contested election where policy differences are so irrelevant. The primary's now being fought over symbols, ideas and frameworks. And we haven't come up with a framework that holds the centrist and the progressive wings together, as the sustained divide between Clinton and Obama shows.

So as the newly-annointed leaders of the intellectual left, they could do us all a big favor by putting some effort into coming up with a framework for both the left and center-left to coexist peacefully in.

I wanted to highlight this section of the Obama speech that Shawn made some interesting points about.

In the end, this economic agenda won't just require new money. It will require a new spirit of cooperation and innovation on behalf of the American people. We will have to learn more, and study more, and work harder. We'll be called upon to take part in shared sacrifice and shared prosperity. And we'll have to remind ourselves that we rise and fall as one nation; that a country in which only a few prosper is antithetical to our ideals and our democracy; and that those of us who have benefited greatly from the blessings of this country have a solemn obligation to open the doors of opportunity, not just for our children, but to all of America's children.

In addition to what Shawn said about poverty, I think Obama's getting close to some potentially powerful rhetoric about inequality. Typically, the conversation around inequality is framed in oppositional terms (the corporations versus the people, etc) and focuses more on economic outcomes than inputs. When this rhetoric doesn't catch on, observers tend to conclude that Americans don't really care about inequality, and they're supported by the documented public preference for equalizing economic opportunity over outcomes.

Yet Americans do care about inequality, and rises in real inequality are modestly correlated with public concern. It's just that, as some cutting-edge public opinion research has suggested, Americans understand inequality in a unique way. Inequality of result is probably being interpretted as inequality of opportunity. Consequently, much of the public believes elites are obliged to ensure that opportunities (loosely defined) are distributed widely enough to grow all incomes at the same pace.

What Obama's doing here is stressing social solidarity, opportunity and shared prosperity as a frame for understanding inequality- almost exactly what the research recommends. If Obama keeps using this frame, it'll be very interesting to see how the public responds.

Today's Krugman op-ed on poverty is a good example of what I think of as the dominant anti-poverty paradigm, a way of talking and thinking about economic insecurity and deprivation that dates back to the mid-1960s and has its genesis in Michael Harrington's The Other America: Poverty in the United States. Harrington's book provided much of the impetus for modern-day anti-poverty movement and inspired the War on Poverty. In review of Harrington's biography, Victor Navasky notes:

Until [the publication of The Other America], thinking about the poor within the Kennedy administration had been ''piecemeal.'' Harrington's book supplied the organizing concept, the target, the word, and thus was the idea for the War on Poverty born. It can indeed be argued that what Betty Friedan's ''Feminine Mystique'' did for feminism, Rachel Carson's ''Silent Spring'' for the environment and Ralph Nader's ''Unsafe at Any Speed'' for the public interest movement, ''The Other America'' did for the poor.

I reread The Other America recently, and noted three arguments that Harrington made, arguments that continue to be a part of the dominant anti-poverty paradigm to this day (quotes are from The Other America):

• The Poor are Fundamentally Different than Other People: "The poor are not like everyone else. They are a different kind of people. They think and feel differently ...."
• The New Deal Did Little to Help the Poor: "The welfare state was designed during the great burst of social creativity that took place in the 1930s. ... its structure corresponds to the needs of those who played the most important role in building it: the middle third, the organized workers, the forces of urban liberalism, and so on. .... So there is the fundamental paradox of the welfare state: that it is not build for the desperate, but for those who are already capable of helping themselves.”
• Poverty is Invisible: "The other America, the America of poverty, is hidden today in a way that it never was before. Its millions are socially invisible to us."

Krugman's op-ed includes arguments that are related to each of these assumptions. For example, he notes that: "L. B. J. declared his “War on Poverty” 44 years ago. Contrary to cynical legend, there actually was a large reduction in poverty over the next few years, especially among children, who saw their poverty rate fall from 23 percent in 1963 to 14 percent in 1969."

This is correct, but it leaves out an important part of the story, namely that even larger reductions in poverty took place in the decades before the War on Poverty, during a period some have called "The Great Compression", when inequality fell and working class families saw their incomes grow at a greater pace than better-off families. Poverty fell rapidly during this period as a direct result of New Deal and post-New Deal era progressive policies, including Social Security, the minimum wage, laws strengthening and formalizing the right to collective bargaining, that were much more ambitious and universal than the more targeted policies adopted during the War on Poverty.

Krugman knows this story well—it's the story that essentially frames his recent book Conscience of a Liberal—so it's seems strange that he doesn't mention it. I think the reason is that when the topic turns to poverty, he ends up, probably unconsciously, adopting the assumptions of the anti-poverty paradigm, which includes the (mistaken) assumption that the New Deal and related policies did little to help people experiencing poverty.

Another part of the anti-poverty paradigm involves distinguishing poverty as an issue that is categorically distinct from other issues, including health care, and economic security more generally. Krugman does this near the end of his op-ed:

.... To their credit — and to the credit of John Edwards, who goaded them into it — both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are proposing new initiatives against poverty. But their proposals are modest in scope and far from central to their campaigns.

I’m not blaming them for that; if a progressive wins this election, it will be by promising to ease the anxiety of the middle class rather than aiding the poor. And for a variety of reasons, health care, not poverty, should be the first priority of a Democratic administration.

Calling Clinton's and Obama's anti-poverty initiatives "modest in scope" only makes sense if one thinks that calling for say, universal health care, has little do with reducing poverty and isn't part of an anti-poverty initiative. Given that Krugman says health care not poverty should be the first priority, it appears that he does think of them as distinct issues. This is a distinction that even Michael Harrington would have found absurd. In fact, the primary anti-poverty proposal in The Other America is ... universal health care. Even now, it's hard to think of a policy that would do more to fight poverty than extending health care to all workers in low-paid jobs, something that is only likely to be done nationally as part of universal health care.

While Obama has a specific "anti-poverty initiative", the best statement of what he'll do to reduce poverty is found in a speech that only mentions poverty twice, his recent economic policy speech at the Janesville GM plant. Instead of talking about poverty as a special interest issue, Obama integrates anti-poverty policies into a more encompassing progressive narrative about not just the middle class, but "those struggling to join it". The following excerpts from the speech illustrate how Obama's economic agenda isn't simply a "middle class agenda":

So today, I’m laying out a comprehensive agenda to reclaim our dream and restore our prosperity. It’s an agenda that focuses on three broad economic challenges that the next President must address – the current housing crisis; the cost crisis facing the middle-class and those struggling to join it; and the need to create millions of good jobs right here in America– jobs that can’t be outsourced and won’t disappear.

....

Since the Earned Income Tax Credit lifts nearly 5 million Americans out of poverty each year, I’ll double the number of workers who receive it and triple the benefit for minimum wage workers. And I won’t wait another ten years to raise the minimum wage – I’ll guarantee that it keeps pace with inflation every single year so that it’s not just a minimum wage, but a living wage. Because that’s the change that working Americans need.

My universal health care plan brings down the cost of health care more than any other candidate in this race, and will save the typical family up to $2500 a year on their premiums. Every American would be able to get the same kind of health care that members of Congress get for themselves, and we’d ban insurance companies from denying you coverage because of a pre-existing condition. ....

....

We’ll also expand the Family Medical Leave Act to include more businesses and millions more workers; and we’ll change a system that’s stacked against working women by requiring every employer to provide seven paid sick days a year, so that you can be home with your child if they’re sick.

....

In the end, this economic agenda won’t just require new money. It will require a new spirit of cooperation and innovation on behalf of the American people. We will have to learn more, and study more, and work harder. We’ll be called upon to take part in shared sacrifice and shared prosperity. And we’ll have to remind ourselves that we rise and fall as one nation; that a country in which only a few prosper is antithetical to our ideals and our democracy; and that those of us who have benefited greatly from the blessings of this country have a solemn obligation to open the doors of opportunity, not just for our children, but to all of America’s children.

....

All of these proposals will help working-class families (including families experiencing poverty as officially defined) more than middle- and upper-class families. I'm not going hold it against Obama (or Clinton, whose economic plan is similar) that he isn't calling this plan an anti-poverty plan; the more important matter is that he's made these proposals central to his campaign.

The Obama speech is a good example of the new paradigm on economic insecurity and deprivation that has developed over the last decade or so. I think of this new paradigm as having the following elements:

• Multidimensional Understanding of Economic Deprivation: In addition to income poverty, the new paradigm is concerned about disparities in wealth, health, time, and opportunities for civic participation.
• Inequality-Based: Focus is on the impact of inequality/relative differences in income, goods, and status, not just absolute lack.
• Solidarity as a Motivating Value: Leading value is solidarity rather than charity. The paradigm sees the working class and the middle class as being "in this together". The "other America" is the very rich, what Robert Frank calls "Richistan."
• Positive Economic Vision: The new paradigm puts forward a long-term, positive vision; it's "for" a stronger, more inclusive America, not just against poverty.
• Preference for Universal Policies: Policies that are designed to help the working class and middle class in the same system are preferable to ones that "target" very-low-income families.

I'll have more to say about this new paradigm in a forthcoming paper.

In this excellent article in the Prospect (UK), Michael Lind shows why three commonly talked about crises are merely mythical, and describes one of the real challenges we face as a nation:

... even in more normal times there are three ubiquitous myths about America that make the country seem weaker and more chaotic than it really is. The first myth, which is mainly a conservative one, is that racial and ethnic rivalries are tearing America apart. The second myth, which is mainly a liberal one, is that America will soon be overwhelmed by religious fundamentalists. The third myth, an economic one beloved of centrists, is that the retirement of the baby boomers will bankrupt the country because of runaway social security entitlement costs.

America does, of course, have many problems, such as spiralling healthcare costs and a decline in social mobility. Yet the truth is that apart from the temporary frictions caused by current immigration from Latin America, the US is more integrated than ever. Racial and cultural diversity is in long-term decline, as a result of the success of the melting pot in merging groups through assimilation and intermarriage—and many of the country's infamous social pathologies, from violent crime to teenage drug use, are also seeing improvements. Americans are far more religious than Europeans, but the "religious right" is concentrated among white southern Protestants. And there is no genuine long-term entitlement problem in the US. The US suffers from healthcare cost inflation, a problem that will be solved one way or another in the near future, long before it cripples the economy as a whole. And the long-term costs of social security, America's public pension programme, could be met by moderate benefit cuts or a moderate growth in the US government share of GDP. With a linguistically united, increasingly racially mixed supermajority and a solvent system of middle-class entitlements, the US will remain first among equals for generations to come, even in a multipolar world with several great powers.

....

The US is facing major challenges—but they are not the ones usually identified. Long-term racial and linguistic balkanisation may not be a problem, but class lines in the US are hardening; there is now less social mobility in the US than in Europe. The US is not in danger of becoming a theocracy, but it is in danger of becoming a plutocracy. Social security does not threaten to bankrupt America, but healthcare cost inflation does. The US is not going to be eclipsed any time soon by another superpower, but it may exhaust itself by allowing its commitments to exceed the resources that the public is willing to allot to foreign policy. The sooner the mythical problems can be dismissed, the sooner the genuine challenges to America's future can be identified and addressed.

My only slight dissent is that one crisis Lind doesn't discuss—global warming—really is one, and has become one in part because of the trend here toward plutocracy.

In CQ, a very interesting piece by Georgetown philosophy prof and ethicist Madison Powers on why poverty isn't resonating as a issue:

....

The post-Reagan Democratic consensus largely abandoned poverty as a major issue in favor of the concerns of the middle class, and, with it, they abandoned their historic emphasis on social structural forces that government can address. To the extent that poverty is seen largely as a sign of a personal failing, then the case for governmental action withers.

The rhetoric of the 1992 Clinton campaign reveals just how consequential the Democratic Party's shift in political emphasis and rhetoric was to become. They discovered the voting bloc made up of those "who work hard and play by the rules." The new "third way" Democrats struggled to win back the so-called Reagan Democrats. These Reagan defectors had complained that the interests of the poor had displaced concern for middle-income voters, but the very language chosen to frame the party's renewed commitments to the middle class had profound and lasting implications for the anti-poverty movement.

In effect, the change in language represented a wholesale capitulation to the Reaganites' favored explanation of poverty as primarily a consequence of morally culpable personal failings and a lack of personal responsibility among the poor.

When Clinton emphasized the need to "end welfare as we know it," his clever slogan was meant to signal a greater moral and intellectual affinity to the personal responsibility explanation championed by the right, and, most importantly, the shift in rhetoric was unaccompanied by any real program for ending poverty as we know it.

....

The legacy of the Democrats' strategic political shift away from poverty as a focal concern shapes the options the Democrats have for going forward. To the extent that Democrats once again want to mount a serious anti-poverty agenda, they have to do battle hobbled by the intellectually truncated rhetoric bequeathed to them. Once again, the case must be made for the comparable importance of social structural explanations of poverty.

As long as so many Americans are in the grip of the pernicious idea—validated by Democrats themselves—that it's largely the fault of the poor that they are poor, then no new consensus on the need to fight poverty can emerge.

Edwards seems to think that recitation of the stark facts of economic inequality or reminding voters of the harsh burdens faced by the poor are enough to effect change. However, sufficient numbers of voters can be moved to embrace political action against poverty only when they first move beyond the seriously deficient causal story that both parties have embraced for the last 15 years. A battle of ideas that was suspended for a time must be re-engaged if poverty as a viable political issue can be revived.

I think Powers is exactly right about the importance of "social structural explanations of poverty." I'd amend his formulation, however, by substituting the word "inequality" for "poverty." "Structural explanations" are needed to explain not only the fact that many American families have income under $25K a year (poverty as defined in the US), but also that all families with incomes under roughly $50K a year have experienced stagnant living standards, despite working more and producing more per hour of work than ever before. Inequality is no longer a matter of the rich pulling away from the poor, but rather the very rich leaving everybody else behind in the dust. What's needed aren't separate structural explanations—one for poverty and a different one for the middle-class squeeze and Gilded Age inequality—but a single overarching one that points among other things to the decline of labor market institutions like unions and employer-provided health care and retirement plans. In this sense, the vision should be an updated version of the universalism of New Deal (a truly universal version this time), rather than the targeting of the 1960's War on Poverty.

According to its mission statement, the DLC's Ideas Primary site "will strive to spark the battle of ideas and inject new solutions into the debate." One such new solution proposed on the site is Paul Weinstein's bold proposal that the federal government cut back on travel as part of an effort to reduce the budget deficit:

One of the first things companies cut when faced with budget imbalances is travel. Yet, despite record federal deficits in recent years, government expenditures for travel have grown by leaps and bounds.

....

The federal government should create a hard cap on travel expenditures by civilian employees (travel by military personnel would be exempt) and cut the expected rate of growth in half. To ensure that emergency travel needs are met, agencies should be required to hold a percentage of their travel budget (10 to 20 percent) in reserve until the last month of each fiscal year. This cap could be put into place by a Presidential Executive Order and enforced by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)

By holding the expected rate of growth in half, the federal government could save $12.68 billion over the next ten years.

$12.68 billion certainly sounds like a big number, but over 10 years, it amounts to a mere .04 percent of the budget. My primary objection, however, doesn't lie with the smallness of the DLC's travel cap proposal, but with the wrongheaded—and frankly conservative— philosophy that underlies it.

Weinstein starts with a conservative frame, analogizing the federal government to a business. But government isn't a business, ie, a private institution established to produce profits, it's a public institution established to promote the common good. Moreover, the government as a business analogy reinforces people's tendency to evaluate government from a consumer rather than a citizen perspective. As the important work of the Demos Center for the Public Sector has shown:

The significant pitfall here is that a consumer stance distances the public from government's overarching role and frequently results in a dissatisfaction with the way government delivers services and a determination that it is wasteful and inefficient.

If the goal is promoting a government of, for, and by the people, federal goverment employees should be traveling considerably more, rather than less. In 2006, non-military travel amounted to only .2 percent of the federal budget, or $16.40 per-capita. I'm not sure what the typical Fortune 500 business spends on travel, but I'm confident that it amounts to considerably more as a share of their budget than .2 percent. The United States, being a constitutional democracy and all, should promote activities that bring the employees of the federal government into frequent contact with its diverse and far-flung citizenry. And if this entails, say, doubling expenditures on travel from .2 percent to .4 percent of the federal budget, so be it.

A very right-on post by Mark Schmitt:

When I say something like, "the Republicans (or conservatives) have been the party of ideas in recent years," which I probably have said, what I mean by it is not that they have good ideas, or new ideas, but that since about 1978 or so, and especially under Reagan, they organized their approach to politics around ideas: big concepts, ambitious goals, principles, a real public philosophy.

Liberals and Democrats, on the other hand, often spoke in a language of government programs, as if the name and material benefits of a government program are sufficient justification.

So when Barack Obama says that, "Republicans were the party of ideas for the last 10 or 15 years" and that Reagan changed the ideological landscape in ways that Nixon or Clinton did not,

and Rep. Barney Frank responds with indignation, listing,

Medicaid, Medicare, the Environmental Protection Agency, Community Development Block Grants

I think the point is proved. A federal funding stream, like Community Development Block Grants, is not an idea. (Even as a funding stream, it's not much to be proud of, scattering benefits to poor and well-off communities alike.)

Liberals don't lack ideas. The problem is that we forget that policies and programs are means to implement ideas, to achieve certain principles. Unless you can articulate the goal itself (and I'm not even sure what the principle of CDBG is, other than, every city and town should have a little more money), you can't construct a winning politics.

That noted, while I haven't really followed the Obama-Clinton debate about Reagan, it does seem like Obama could pick somebody better than Reagan to make his point about transformational presidents. The best choice would be FDR.

PS: The objective of CDBG—"the development of viable urban communities, by providing decent housing and a suitable living environment and expanding economic opportunities"—is a generally sound and progressive one. But it could definitely use a new, less technocratic sounding name and other improvements.