Cultural Dilemmas of Progressive Politics

...And is a living wage tenable or even possible without worker control of production...

...In addition to addressing bread-andbutter concerns, MICAH seeks to shape a public discussion that merges populism and religion...

...Moreover, does the pedagogy of the oppressed always ensure a more knowledgeable and effective politics...

...In What Does the Lord Require...

...Why is it "unprogressive" or "reactionary," as Hart seems to think it is, for Christian conservatives to protest against pornography, especially when the material depicts abuse of women and children...

...Other Gore supporters, usually upscale "liberals" and "progressives," considered me and my ilk a loopy pestilence...

...But because AI forgoes any philosophical justification of its causes and relies almost wholly on information, it has a hard time attracting and retaining recruits...

...At the same time, Harf s and MICAH's explication of "self-interest"—which could have offered a refreshing counter to critics of individualism like Alasdair Madntyre and Stanley Hauerwas—seems tortuously convoluted to me...

...Though Hart clearly admires and even envies Christian conservatives, he's just as clearly unwilling to attribute their solidarity and success to a coherent theological vision...

...Faith-based" or "congregation-based" organizers such as MICAH perform their cultural work more effectively and thus exemplify "a livelier set of cultural practices than most American social-justice movements...

...Commonweal 25 October 12,2001 Hart believes progressives have become lazy or inept at the work of linking their struggles for social justice and civil liberties to the most powerful currents in American culture: religion (or "faith" as Hart also calls it) and liberal individualism...

...It's a hard thing to write, given Hart's evident earnestness and experience, but his book tells us why the social gospel has become not just confused but boring...

...1992), he examined how American Christians variously translate the gospel into positions on economic issues, from "democratic capitalism" to "democratic Socialism...

...AI, on the other hand, provides a cautionary tale about the limits of secular activism...

...How dare you "give the country to Bush," went the refrain...

...In fact, Hart sees a "reasonably healthy" ensemble of institutions with whose fabric and language progressives can perform their cultural work...

...Though relatively jargon-free, Hart's opaque prose is squarely in the studies-have-shown school of sociological writing...

...That's a shame, since American activism has been graced, from Richard Allen and Jane Addams to Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King Jr., by writing that records the fusion of personal transformation and social change...

...Eugene McCarraher Isupported Ralph Nader and the Green Party last fall, and in the process attended a few fundraisers, rallied with other partisans at a Nader speech, and walked door-to-door peddling brochures, pamphlets, and an exhortation to anyone who engaged me in conversation...

...Besides, stocks are up, jobs are plentiful, "choice" is still safe— so what are you tree-hugging spoilers so sore about...

...While Gore's liberal faithful weren't "activists," for the most part, their combination of moral fervor and technocratic haughtiness pointed to some of the broader and deeper problems that bedevil American progressives...

...But his reluctance to develop a more sophisticated approach to differences leads him, as it does other religious progressives, both to evade the real conflicts entailed by theology—the abortion controversy being only one— and to stamp an uncritical imprimatur on an agenda drawn up mainly by the secular left...

...Sidney Callahan and Margaret O'Brien Steinfels have argued compellingly to the contrary...

...When organizing neighborhoods, activists—cultivated through "a kind of apostolic succession"—encourage residents to "define their concerns and needs, and the injustices they experience, themselves...

...The lack of a theology distinctive and imaginative enough to inform an alternative politics is the fundamental intellectual challenge to a new Christian left...

...Like Alan Wolfe (editor of the Morality and Society Series, which includes this book) and unlike Robert Bellah and Robert Putnam, Hart believes that American civil society is not a dry-boned desert of lonely bowlers and expressive individualists...

...In his new book, Hart addresses the larger issue of culture and politics...

...Hart concedes the difficulty of defining these terms but plows ahead anyway, rather than doing the more difficult but potentially more rewarding work of exploring new political categories...

...While most of its leaders appear to be Catholics, MICAH's practice is a model of ecumenism...

...and a more reformist Catholic social tradition currently embodied in the National Council of Catholic Bishops...

...MICAH's actions and its own gatherings become quasi-religious rituals that feature confrontations with the powers and principalities as well as personal testimonies that confirm the mission and devotion of the people...

...the "pedagogy of the oppressed" contained in liberation theology...

...It clarifies how a purely proceduralist— hence managerial and consumerist— conception of morality can inspire such passion...

...Newcomers seldom returned," Hart notes Commonweal 26 October 12,2001 curtly, because their commitments were understood to be "random and private...

...Moreover, AI cannot speak religious languages that might have a broader and more powerful resonance...

...Its ideology and agenda stem from an array of sources: Saul Alinsky's "back-of-theyards" mobilizing...

...Commonweal 27 October 12, 2001 And what is "liberal" or "progressive," anyway...

...Consisting of congregations rather than individuals, MICAH's membership organizes poor and working-class inhabitants of Milwaukee to fight for better housing, schools, and other social services...

...The triumph of "choice" and proceduralism in American life as well as American progressivism favors bureaucracy, expertise, and technical prowess, all of which are ever more concentrated in the corporation...

...Hart, like many on the liberal left, seems entranced by bromides about "the grass roots" that obscure the need for historical and political knowledge that isn't acquired through one's own limited experience...

...Hart, a sociologist at SUNY-Buffalo and an experienced activist, has explored the terrain of progressive politics before...

...In the spring, he will be a visiting lecturer in the religion department at Princeton...

...It's no coincidence that "choice" is a keyword in the lexicon of abortion rights and corporate advertising, for in both cases the substantive issue of the goods (or evils) chosen might restrict the "lifestyle" market...

...Thanks, useful idiot, I could hear them thinking...

...Add the obligatory nods to "diversity," "tolerance," and "pluralism," and Hart's progressivism looks pretty much like the Democratic Party at prayer...

...Interestingly, the organization employs a similar dramaturgy and symbolic practice: vigils, letter and petition writing, a memorable logo (a candle wrapped in barbed wire...

...MICAH also reinterprets the language of individualism by defining "self-interest" as the pursuit of health care, education, and other requirements of human flourishing...

...I'm not so sure about this, or about much else in a book so leavened with righteous passion yet so lamed by flaws of exposition, analysis, and vision...

...Hart's theological tepidness reflects the consumerism—wholly unmentioned in this book—that forms the chief cultural obstacle to any sort of popular democratic left...

...Buoyed by his work on MICAH, Hart seems optimistic about the prospects for a culturally vigorous progressivism...

...This pervasive commodification of consciousness indicates why Bellah and Putnam are more reliable guides than Wolfe is to the dilapidated state of American civil society...

...The banality of Hart's progressivism is related to the conceptual fatigue of what he calls "faith" or "religion...

...They admired Nader and supported many Green positions— especially a living wage and national health insurance—but were candid enough to admit that they were voting for Gore out of fear...

...Is "reproductive freedom" necessarily "progressive" for women...

...Progressives, Hart contends, have adopted a wonkish public style—a "constrained" one that puts "process over substance"—and eschewed more popular, forceful, expansive approaches of ritual and narrative...

...The reactions of "liberals" taught me a lot about what Stephen Hart calls "the cultural dilemmas of progressive politics...

...Unlike MICAH, AI focuses on individual rights rather than social justice and proscribes discursive reliance on religion, appealing instead to the secularized human-rights tradition of the Enlightenment...

...Obviously, Hart's laudable desire to encourage ecumenical activism depends on refraining from claims of "exclusiveness...

...Commonweal 28 October 12,2001...

...The conviction of AI activists about the transparent "obviousness" of their causes demonstrates to Hart their crippling (not to mention arrogant) inattention to the cultural work of educating public opinion...

...Most of the Gore people (working-class Democrats whose support for Al was tepid and tactical) bemoaned the lack of a genuine alternative...

...Overall, MICAH's conscious attention to the cultural form of public discussion—to "political action as dramaturgy"—explains its considerable clout in city politics...

...That "cultural work" involves balancing the competing claims of "expansive" modes of public discourse that cast particular struggles in the broadest moral and religious terms, and "constrained" styles that emphasize information and neutrality...

...Relying extensively on histories and interviews with members of two organizations— the Milwaukee Innercity Congregations Allied for Hope (MICAH) and Amnesty International (AI)—he attempts to identify the "cultural work" that promotes or inhibits progressive politics...

...This explains, I think, why Gore's liberal supporters could be adamant about "choice" and unconcerned about corporate power...

...The Bush people were polite and occasionally bemused...

...And it illuminates how a "democratic" (and not always "progressive") party can appear so elitist: because it is...

...Eugene McCarraher is an assistant professor of humanities at Villanova University...

...Worse, though, the problem with MICAH's "selfinterest" is the same problem endemic to the Alinsky approach: the lack of a systemic analysis and politics that looks beyond the locality...