ANOTHER SOOPER TOOSDAY has come and gone, the party nominations are decided, and damned if I don’t remember a single one of the major Presidential candidates talk about anything like that onetime pie-in-the-sky official goal of Presidential candidates–progress.
These days, the politicians seem to propose nothing more ambitious than cleaning up various perceived governmental messes (soft-money campaign financing, gun-show regulatory loopholes) or restoring a supposed past golden age of integrity and authority in high places.
All our other problems are apparently supposed to be taken care of by that boomin’ private-sector wealth.
It’s a pleasant thought that ignores the extent to which that same boomin’ private-sector wealth is causing or at least exacerbating many of our problems (the money-corruption of elective politics, the rich/poor divide, the affordable-housing crisis, the affordable-health-care crisis, the stagnation in real wages for the non-rich, wrenching consolidations in industry after industry, etc.).
A few folks unconnected with any Presidnetial campaign are thinking about some of these things. Two of them are Harvard profs and prolific essayists Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Cornel West. They recently issued a little manifesto-book, The Future of American Progressivism.
The term “Progressive” sometimes denotes a pretty specific strain of the American political tradition. It was strongest in the upper Midwest and here in the Northwest, from the turn of the century until the rise of “pro-business Democrats.”
It emphasized not just a governmental but a social, even an aesthetic, ideal of clean, rational leadership by a well-educated, well-groomed caste of dedicated public servants. Its various “reform” mechanisms (such as at-large city council races), however, often served to consolidate power among WASP farmers and homeowners at the expense of German or Irish Catholic urban-factory workers.
But Unger and West have a different idea of “Progressive” in mind. Theirs is essentially any and all political factions to the left of the corporate Democrats, but more practical than the separatist or ideologically-obsessed far-left cliques.
What’s more, their inclusive attitude extends to their agenda. They don’t have a single “magic bullet” economic or social scheme. Instead, they’re willing to try a lot of different programs in order to advance their general goals–social justice, economic opportunity, minority rights, environmental stewardship, etc.
America’s overriding current problem, as Unger and West (and many other left-O-center observers) see it, is that the old New Deal coalition devolved long ago. Big business rules the whole political agenda, across the board; all liberals seem willing to do these days is propose slightly more humane variations on corporate rule (a tax credit here, a land-use regulation there).
Unger and West want to re-popularize the notion that pro-active work for social progress is both good and possible. Within that framework, they offer up a lot of policy ideas (a value-added tax, job-retraining programs, venture-capital funds for small businesses, mandatory voting, labor-law reforms).
But they’re not firmly committed to any one of those. It’s the results they want, not necessarily any of these specific mechanisms. If one program doesn’t work, try another. They’d put up different pilot programs in different jurisdictions to speed up the process of finding which ones work best.
And that, in itself, might be their most radical idea.
U.S. society has become awfully project-oriented during this Age of Global Business. That Internet “stock bubble” is pouring investment into companies not on the basis of how much money they’re making but on the size of the organizations they’re building. Governmental programs often become entrenched entities most concerned with their own self-preservation, in spite of “sunset laws” devised to stem this.
A neo-prog movement organized around goals, not around organizations or specific projects, could provide just the worldview-shiftin’ kick this world really needs if it’s gonna make any real progress.
MONDAY: It’s an X-treme world.
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