The Poverty of Progressivism
Isaac, Jeffrey C.
American democracy is at a watershed. The so-called "social contract" governing American politics since 1945 has broken down. Although the talk of a "Republican Revolution" is surely hyperbolic,...
...New forms of global investment have created a "lean and mean" economy in which relatively secure and high-paying employment increasingly has given way to insecure low-wage jobs...
...It outlines an elaborate set of policies designed to turn back the deterioration in middle-class living standards and to cement a strong reformist political coalition...
...In such a situation the social tensions...
...it is because the conditions that once supported "progressive" politics have been altered, and the prospects for a revitalization of progressivism are dim...
...In the decades between Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, the country floundered as badly as it has during the last few decades...
...Nothing is quite what it seems...
...In a way, it was modeled on the Contract With America, but it had more popular support than the Contract...
...In her recent book Reclaiming Democracy, Mehta Mendel-Reyes suggests that the Algebra Project represents an abandonment of Moses's earlier vision of "participatory democracy," and that its narrow focus on math education is inconsistent with broader themes of democratic empowerment...
...In April of 1995 Robert Reich published an op-ed piece in the New York Times entitled "Drowning in the Second Wave...
...Neither is localist democracy complacent...
...Surely something should be done to remedy the serious problems befallingAmerican society and to address the deteriorating legitimacy of its democratic politics...
...and] they exist only in the nooks and crannies of the capitalist edifice...
...Yet American politics today is mobilized to the right rather than the left...
...Progressivism is optimistic about the future, and about our ability to master it...
...Gitlin's closing injunction—"We ought to be building bridges"—is noble and compelling...
...Another would be the Workers' Rights Boards that have been formed by Jobs With Justice in Cleveland, Boston, Buffalo, and Vermont, which hear worker complaints and have instituted informal mediation processes involving local civic, religious, business, and labor leaders to resolve such grievances...
...and "How Divided Progressives Might Unite," New Left Review (1995...
...The prevailing forces in our society and in our world are damaging to democracy, both in the advantages they distribute to some and in the problems they distribute to most...
...They cannot help us to master our difficulties, and citizens who engage them are bound to be frustrated...
...Our party system is in disrepute, and public faith in and engagement with the political system has plummeted...
...These arguments converge on a number of claims: that the so-called "New Deal coalition" has been shattered...
...And yet it is impossible to share this optimism Think about the achievements it has produced—a robust if limited public sector...
...A localist democracy, then, is only localist in the metaphoric sense, not in the geographic one...
...This does not mean that responses to our current difficulties are impossible...
...Lind argues that we currently stand poised for economic and cultural renewal at the dawn of a "Fourth American Revolution...
...it is sociological...
...XVIII, no...
...Thus Jeff Faux maintains that the Republicans have succeeded in "diverting the economic question into a social one," and Vic Fingerhut insists that "if working and middleincome people can be conned by Republicans into thinking that this is a fight against the undeserving poor, then the Republicans can win...
...The Historical Fallacy...
...Acrimonious identity politics, racial antagonism, middle-class white resentment of affirmative action and "welfare," religious fundamentalism and the phenomenal mobilization of the Christian Coalition—these political formations are not distractions from what is truly real...
...Yet Reich's aspirations have come to naught...
...Such networks monitor national and transnational investment and the environmental impact of such investment, track wages and the human rights of workers, and provide solidarity and support across state and local boundaries...
...Instead . . . it distracts what must be the natural constituencies of a Left if there is to be one: the poor, those fearful of being poor, intellectuals with sympathies for the excluded...
...But it may well be that we ought to give up the hope of mastering our difficulties, and settle simply for resisting them as best we can...
...but they are treated as surface expressions of more profound issues...
...It is not out of allegiance to the rhetoric of Jefferson that localist democracy recommends itself, nor is it out of a hostility toward reform...
...A long, dreary, and dispiriting decline in all these areas is more likely than a dramatic crash...
...The Progressive movement, and the reforms that it instituted, was in large part an effort to co-opt these political forces...
...As Hilary Wainwright has argued: "They have been formed primarily as networks of resistance...
...My point is not epistemological...
...It is not Piore's prognosis that I question...
...This is not a cause for despair, for there are democratic energies, and there are vehicles for them...
...Groups such as these help to organize local community development through the promotion of political skills, and they furnish national networks of organizers and activists that share information and strategy...
...48 • DISSENT The Poverty of Progressivism cannot master...
...and the social sciences today are thoroughly specialized, anesthetized, and insulated from broader currents of political argument and social reform...
...But a meaningful democratic politics for the new century must be chastened in a way that the new progressive arguments are not...
...Thus Piore insists that Republican economic policy is "a prescription for a continuous decline in the standard of living . . . for a sizable portion of the lower end of the income distribution...
...The most thoughtful argument to this effect has been advanced by Joel Rogers.' Rogers echoes Lind in his insistence that the renewal of American democracy requires that the "social control of the economy" must be put "back on the table of American politics...
...The Rationalistic Fallacy...
...And the idea of unifying diverse constituencies around such a program is appealing...
...Lind supports campaign finance reform...
...The word optimism fails to do justice to the willfulness of such a will...
...6) Progressivism was made possible by the flourishing of a variety of radical movements in American society to the left of the Progressives, including the International Workers of the World, the remnants of turn of the century Populism, and a Socialist party that, under the leadership of Eugene V. Debs, had a significant electoral and an even more significant cultural presence...
...5) Progressive reforms were functionally compatible with, and in some sense required by, the form of corporate capitalism that was evolving at the turn of the last century...
...What, in other words, if there is a profound and irremediable disjuncture between our difficulties and the powers available to us for their remedy...
...The middle-class standard of living has declined...
...4) The age of Progressivism was the age of a growing labor movement, while the labor movement today is in serious and possibly terminal decline...
...We cannot turn back the clock on the past thirty years...
...and (2) that the principal cause of the conservative ascendancy has been the ability of the right to obscure these economic realities...
...And yet if we pause for but a sketchy comparison between the Progressive era and our own, it will be clear how different the next American century must be: (1) While Progressivism drew force from an ascendant liberal Protestantism, today the most politically mobilized religious force in America— the Christian Coalition—is on the far right...
...Lind's solution: a "liberal nationalism" inspired by Hamilton and Roosevelt, which deploys the powers of the federal government in "an egalitarian assault on the unjust and inequitable political institutions" of American society...
...I call this belief a voluntarist fallacy because it fails to acknowledge the irreversibility of history...
...It simply refuses to imagine that these organizations can or should be all-encompassing or that their projects will eventually converge on a common program of social change...
...Hannah Arendt once described democratic forms of praxis as "islands in a sea or as oases in a desert...
...television news magazines blend into entertainment programs, creating new teletabloids...
...Important, yes...
...One example of such a network is the coalition of groups, in the United States, Mexico, and Canada that recently developed to challenge the North American Free Trade Agreement...
...There are, to put it simply, a limited number of venues for the promotion of the kinds of values and strategies favored by progressives...
...But they are vital ways through which citizens can address specific difficulties, such as urban decay, affordable housing, or crime, by harnessing existing, albeit limited, community resources...
...The Historicist Fallacy...
...Let me briefly identify two of the principal sources of this divorce...
...and strong, national reform of health care, education, and welfare...
...Yet I do not believe that progressives have taken the full measure of this changing context, and I question whether a meaningful response to the current challenges to democracy can so easily invoke the names and missions of the past...
...The Progressives instituted a series of important reforms: they effected a transformation of American liberalism, away from a neo-Jeffersonian distrust of state power toward an active reformism based on a robust federal government...
...These factors are not denied...
...Criticizing the incoherence of the Clinton administration and the "primitive anti-statism" of Gingrichite Republicanism, Judis and Lind call for a "new nationalism," inspired by the examples of Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, and summed up in Herbert Croly's influential The Promise ofAmerican Life (1909...
...They are modest, but they are also potentially effective...
...This assault on liberal politics is the surface expression of deeper difficulties confronting American liberal democracy...
...is itself an anachronism of an earlier political era...
...FALL • 1996 • 41 The Poverty of Progressivism There are parallels between these new appropriations of liberal progressivism and arguments on the left about the need to revive class politics in America...
...These problems are accumulating just as the capacity to master them in a coherent way is diminishing...
...In Levinson's account: "Candidates signed on to it, and unions and cornmunity organizations ran grassroots campaigns of support...
...These networks do not constitute a wholesale alternative to corporate power...
...They are the legacies of postwar liberalism...
...Current conditions make the recreation of a coherent, mass-based progressive movement of social reform highly unlikely...
...1) The Algebra Project...
...This theme is frequently sounded in the pages of important liberal journals of opinion *A list of new progressives would include such writers as Robert Bellah, Alan Brinkley, Thomas Byrne Edsall, Eldon Eisenach, Jeff Faux, Stanley Greenberg, Robert Kuttner, Michael Piore, Michael Sandel, Cass Sunstein, Michael Tomasky, and Jacob Weisberg...
...As he writes: "distinctions of every kind are fudged: ABC places its news and sports departments under a single corporate division...
...The scenario he imagines is the scenario imagined by most current progressives, who reason that the status quo can only produce unhappiness and resistance, and that only a progressive movement can remedy the political crisis bound to follow...
...The form of "flexible accumulation" that is ascendant requires neither a strong collective bargaining agent—a union movement—nor the same kinds of social and economic regulation...
...The progressive vision of social intelligence and social policy is simply too ambitious...
...I do not think that we can in good faith confront the next century with the same optimism, and ambition, with which Progressives confronted the one that is now ending...
...There is difficulty, and there is disorientation aplenty, but there is also a dearth of constructive political energy and a surplus of ill-will and resentment...
...The environmental justice movement has not transformed American capitalism or effected an overarching vision of progressive reform...
...Only then, Reich insists, will Americans be poised to ride the rising tide of "third wave" technologies and the opportunities they present...
...It is simply to say that there are no good reasons to believe that it is possible to recreate a current day analogue of earlier progressive movements...
...Add to this the ethically anesthetizing effect of hours of television watching, for adults and, even more fatefully, for their children...
...This history is a record of heady triumphs—a civil rights revolution, profound and beneficial changes in gender and sexual attitudes, an inflationary discourse of rights that has protected previously marginalized groups but that has also produced its own hypocrisies, injustices, and resentments...
...Such media subject individuals to a range of contradictory images, impulses, and desires...
...Yet a powerful liberal response has recently emerged...
...40 • DISSENT The Poverty of Progressivism The New Progressivism Emanating from the center and the center-left of the Democratic party, the new progressivism wishes to revive the project of social reform initiated by the turn-of-the-century Progressives.* John Judis and Michael Lind's manifesto "For a New American Nationalism," the centerpiece of a March 1995 issue of the New Republic, helped to bring these arguments to the fore...
...The conditions that made previous reform efforts possible no longer obtain, and the political world that we inhabit can support neither the policies contemporary progressives envision nor the confidence in political agency that these policies presuppose...
...And the spirit of progressive reform has given way to a spirit of cynicism not simply about the power but about the very meaning of collective purpose...
...Consider the Progressive era itself, the touchstone for most of these writers...
...2) Sustainable America, a high-wage industrial strategy based on a social tariff, full employment, and a shortened work week...
...But his argument is even more ambitious, for it seeks to support an organized mass movement "challenging corporate power and mobilizing outside the state...
...Liberal democrats, it is argued, need to revive a "progressive" politics that is modeled heavily on the Progressive movement of the last century...
...As a result there does not exist anything remotely resembling the kind of political pressure that gave impetus to earlier efforts at social reform...
...a pragmatic and flexible trade policy to replace indiscriminate free trade...
...And the general debasement of public discourse abetted by the rise of talk-radio and Geraldo-type live television "talk shows...
...To insist that democratic responses to our problems must be partial is perfectly consistent with a general, "global" understanding of how things fit together...
...As Michael Piore acknowledges: "The context in which we are resurrecting social policy today is new and different from the context in which it was pursued in the past, and the institutions through which it is implemented must be different as well, even if we call them by names borrowed from the past and charge them with functionally equivalent missions...
...American liberalism, then, is politically adrift...
...On the first two points it is impossible to dissent...
...Progressives are realists...
...At the heart of the progressive revival are two beliefs: (1) that the most significant fact about American life today is the deterioration of economic conditions for the majority of citizens...
...Yet it is, I fear, in large part mistaken, an anachronistic residue of another, more optimistic, and more genuinely "progressive," era...
...As we prepare to enter the next century, we believe that we are on the verge of a similar era of national renewal...
...Where, then, does Gitlin leave us...
...4) The new economic networks that have recently been organized—largely by unions—in response to the globalization of capital and the new system of "flexible accumulation...
...like the New Republic and the American Prospect...
...It is, in other words, in many ways destructive of progressive types of social and economic policy...
...This does not mean that there is no reality...
...1 (January/February 1993), pp...
...But it has profoundly shaped public discourse and provided outlets for civic responsibility...
...It is no exaggeration to say that this vision represents a repudiation of the spirit of progressive social reform that has prevailed in the United States for the past century...
...Yet they represent important forms of collective action and democratic empowerment...
...If Republican policies are adopted—and there is a good chance that in some version they will be adopted, though perhaps by Democrats—then the standard of living of many Americans will decline...
...Such an assault will require "a genuine democratization of our money-dominated political system and a commitment to the kind of socialdemocratic reforms" supported by the New Deal alliance before its demise under the weight of inflationary racial and cultural demands...
...But the most emphatic endorsement of such a politics is found in Michael Lind's The Next American Nation...
...It presumes that there is a unified political subject to whom this question can be posed...
...And it is even harder to build a single bridge on such fractious moorings, no matter how ecumenical and flexible such a bridge might be...
...The real wage of the average American worker has stagnated, and inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth have grown...
...Rieux, the heroic leader of the resistance, is asked what gives him the confidence to persist in his action...
...But the economy is not the only issue of concern to Americans, and there is no reason to think 42 • DISSENT The Poverty of Progressivism that the declining middle class is the central fact of life in America today...
...an extraordinary physical infrastructure of railways, roads, sewers, and public utilities...
...They are truly an impressive legacy, even if they did not "solve" the social problem 46 • DISSENT The Poverty of Progressivism in America...
...3) The movement for environmental justice, which began as a series of local responses to toxic waste disposal problems and blossomed into a broad-based movement organized around issues of class, gender, and race, has heightened public awareness about environmental concerns, raised the cost of corporate negligence, and created an extensive network of organizing and informationsharing...
...Levinson presents an imaginary dialogue between a reporter and a Dissent editor sometime in the early twenty-first century...
...Yet the rhetorical effect of Piore's formulation is to suggest that current trends can only result in two possibilities, either discontent and repression or progressive social reform...
...In an article forDissent written after the 1994 elections (Spring 1995), I wrote that "the weakness of genuinely democratic agencies should lead us indeed to a pessimism of the intellect, but also to a tempering of the will...
...Like the citizens of the 1890s, it is argued, we are poised at the dawn of a new century, confronting severe challenges that demand a new spirit of reform and a new "activist public policy," centered around the problems of a postindustrial economy and the decline of middle-class living standards...
...Accompanying the growth of alienation and resentment is a breakdown of the conditions of economic growth that helped to sustain postwar liberalism...
...What, then, does this view of localist democracy mean in practice...
...Yet it is difficult to imagine a mass politics organized around such concerns...
...The new progressives are voluntarists because they give no account of how these divisions can be transcended, how the legacies of the past thirty years can be gotten beyond...
...This theme is echoed in E.J...
...they are what is real in American life...
...Yet neither science nor the university today has this kind of credibility or this kind of reformist ambition...
...This, I think, is an apt metaphor for the future of democracy in America...
...The progressive argument, then, recapitulates a common refrain that can be traced back to Marx and to Hegel before him—that there is a dynamic of change built into the current order of things, that the unresolved difficulties of the present give history a progressive tendency or directionality...
...But the project of marshalling a new hegemony is anachronistic, and is not likely to succeed in constructing a new regime of public policy or in mastering the problems confronting us...
...Local elections can be won by "progressives...
...American democracy faces severe challenges...
...But they are all in various stages of decomposition, increasingly the sources of our problems rather than the means of their solution...
...They produce a general cynicism about and indifference to "reality"— we can always switch the channel by remote control, can't we?—and an affinity for episodic, fragmented modes of communication, like the video image-frame (infinitely erasable), and the thirty-second sound bite...
...A revitalized progressivism, it is held, requires us to get back on track, to put the sources of cultural division behind us, and to move forward with a class-based politics...
...Lind proposes a virtual cultural revolution in American society, whereby Americans come to see themselves as part of a "trans-racial" nation committed to social justice, and the polarities of identity politics give way before a new sense of American national identity...
...Yet I believe that the conclusion that is drawn from them is mistaken...
...At its heart the progressive vision suffers from a typically modernist faith in the powers of collective action, a faith shared by liberal progressives like Croly and Marxist progressives like Gramsci...
...Only a more modest, localist democracy now makes sense in America...
...2) Progressive public discourse was supFALL • 1996 • 45 The Poverty of Progressivism ported by an active, reformist, muckraking journalism for which there is simply no current analogue, much though people like Dionne try...
...Indeed, what seem like two possibilities are in fact a single one, since both scenarios involve an escalation of class conflict and a pressure for social change that can only be abated by the triumph of a progressive agenda...
...It is not clear that there is any way beyond this state of affairs, and there is surely no reason for optimism of any sort...
...The kinds of democratic responses that are likely to be effective are bound to be partial, limiting, fractious, and in many ways unsatisfying...
...As Benjamin Barber points out, recent developments in mass communicationsadvertorials, infomercials, docudramas, soapoperastyle commercials, MTV and Nickelodeon "worlds," corporate advertising, and the licensing of spin-off merchandising—work together to "blur the lines between domains once thought to be distinct," so that "the distinction between reality and virtual reality vanishes...
...Suffering may or may not lead to protest, but there is an enormous gulf separating discrete acts of protest from an accumulation of protests sufficient to provoke "legislative restrictions...
...This is a noble belief...
...What if the tidal wave of change that is currently taking place is overwhelming...
...The reforms, and the movement-building strategy to which they are connected, are anachronistic...
...Such policies, he avers, can only succeed as part of a "war on oligarchy" that seeks to make the accumulation of private wealth compatible with overall national interests...
...Progressives face adversity but they insist that adversity cannot last and that it must eventually give way to good fortune...
...The project has been adopted by over one hundred schools across the country...
...While they recognize the global economic sources of many pressing problems, and while they abjure parochial solutions, they represent partial ways of addressing these problems, ways of resisting adversity withmit seeking fully to conquer it...
...The progressive vision rests on a number of fallacies: • The Materialist Fallacy...
...As Croly insisted: "In this country the solution of the social problem demands the substitution of conscious social ideal for the earlier instinctive homogeneity of the American nation," and "a vigorous and conscious assertion of the public as opposed to private and special interests...
...By localist democracy I meant the opposite of a totalizing strategy of social reform or transformation, of a new "hegemony," whether this be the hegemony of Lind's "progressive liberal nationalism" or Rogers's "progressive left...
...The prob*See Joel Rogers, "Why America Needs the New Party,"Boston Review, vol...
...The Voluntarist Fallacy...
...This is not to say that social movements are impossible or that specific reform efforts are futile...
...These triumphs and tragedies are two sides of the same coin...
...It is also a record of disturbing and sometimes devastating setbacks—the dramatic decline in the organized labor movement, the emergence of new forms of white racism, the rise of anti-intellectualism and religious fundamentalism, and the prodigious ascent of the New Right...
...I can only furnish some examples...
...In a social world inhospitable to democratic awareness, agency, and empowerment, forms of civic engagement that do promote awareness, agency, and empowerment are like oases—rare, isolated phenomena, perpetually threatened by the encroachment of the desert, in danger of being drained of life, or simply of being overwhelmed by the heat...
...What these various weaknesses in the new progressivism add up to is a seriously questionable reading of the historical moment...
...This is an ambitious policy agenda, linked to an even more ambitious vision of national renewal...
...What I have called initiatives in "localist democracy" are surely insufficient to this task...
...They are likely to disappoint our modernist quest for mastery and our progressive faith in the future...
...The progressive vision of conscious purpose, in short, seems to have reached its tragic denouement...
...3) The New Party, "a natural electoral vehicle for a more consolidated progressive movement—a movement that itself should be built in part through greater national coordination and presence, and in larger part, in terms of organizational strategy, from the ground up...
...and that the only way to defend them and to address our social and economic problems is to rebuild a coherent liberal-left movement, and to fashion a partisan vehicle for this movement...
...But equally important is the historical narrative from which they draw their sustenance...
...Rogers proposes a three-pronged strategy: (1) Democracy Now, a movement for citizen, worker, consumer, and taxpayer bills of rights...
...But neither do I think that there is any single strategy that might encompass the range of practical responses to these problems...
...Although the talk of a "Republican Revolution" is surely hyperbolic, the conservative Republican agenda has significant political momentum, and it seeks to effect a serious transformation of the infrastructure of postwar liberal democracy—a drastic retrenchment of federal social policy, a reduction of the fiscal and policy resources of the federal government, and a devolution of political power to state and local governments...
...It expresses an infectious optimism, and offers a powerful antidote to the conservative Jeffersonianism that held back reform in the late nineteenth century, and that today threatens the reforms of the twentieth...
...Faux's language is typical— these concerns are "distractions" from what is really important, the class issue...
...and it is equally consistent with all kinds of regional, national, and even transnational forms of organization...
...that the social democratic reforms of the postwar period are under siege...
...The new progressive literature consistently fails to attend to the cultural and symbolic sources of politics...
...Yet they view the sixties as a historical diversion...
...and their sense of political paralysis even more profound...
...Yet this "is no reason," he maintains, "for giving up the struggle...
...more progressive taxation...
...Indeed, the rehabilitation of Croly among liberals is mirrored among radicals by the revival of a Gramscian project of developing a new emergent "progressive" hegemony...
...On some level most progressives know this.Yet the pessimism of their intellects does not chasten their wills...
...It is surely possible, and desirable, to organize citizens around many of the issues promoted by progressives...
...What ifAmerican society is not drowning in the second wave but drowning in the third wave...
...and our victories on behalf of life are always temporary, always fragile...
...Workers are not threatening to man the barricades against capitalists, but society is divided into mutually hostile camps . . . the goal of a new nationalism today is to forestall these looming divisions in American society . . . . Can we meet these challenges...
...and an equally impressive cultural infrastructure of schools, museums, and public parks...
...For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing...
...Founded in 1982 by Bob Moses, a former leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the project seeks to help poor, at-risk students acquire math literacy and basic learning skills by creating a supportive network of parents, teachers, administrators, and community leaders...
...FALL • 1996 • 49...
...But it does not follow from this that the immiseration that might occur would lead to widespread rebellion that could only be forestalled by coercive means...
...What Is To Be Done...
...lem with the new progressivism is not principally its desirability but its practicality...
...Levinson presents this, of course, as a utopian fantasy, but he does so in all earnestness...
...Yet in many ways the social world itself defies realism...
...As they write: America today faces a situation roughly analogous to the one Roosevelt and the progressives faced...
...films parade corporate logos (for a price), presidents play themselves in films . . . while dethroned governors (Cuomo and Richards) do Super Bowl commercials for snack food in which they joke about their electoral defeat, Hollywood stars run for office .. . and television pundits become practicing politicians...
...The Promise of American Life presents a powerful vision of a strong, national government exercising public power for public purposes...
...Reich is one of the few remaining "progressives" in the Clinton White House, and his argument epitomizes the progressive vision...
...They cannot be dismissed, nor is there any self-evident way in which they can be transcended...
...This is a common re44 • DISSENT The Poverty of Progressivism frain...
...Yet each represents a viable form of democratic response to contemporary challenges...
...The social world, to use a phrase coined by Jean Baudrillard, is hyperreal...
...Mass communications, in other words, dull political sensibilities, and help to create a mass social irrealism...
...Still, they were able to think and act anew...
...Their mountebanks were no different from ours...
...Yet it is the great virtue of democracy as a form of politics that it prizes contingency, for politics is nothing else but the Sisyphean task of constructing provisional solutions to our unmasterable difficulties...
...Where they lack the support of some public institution or independent foundation they have a very precarious existence...
...The concerns that are central to progressives must compete with myriad other concerns that are no less pressing, and that are often more pressing, to most Americans...
...The world, he avers, is shaped by death...
...The progressive belief that it is possible to erase this legacy rests in large part on another fallacy...
...While I find this argument in some ways compelling, I believe it is anachronistic, and that democrats who wish to address the serious problems confronting American liberal democracy should think about these questions in a different way...
...Fallacies of Progressivism The new progressives acknowledge that today's politics cannot simply recapitulate the progressivism of the past...
...Such organizations do not constitute a "backyard revolution" if we mean by this that they represent the seeds of a general and dramatic transformation of American society...
...This belief is simply wrong...
...Like most of the other "progressives," Lind views the impasse of liberalism as the result of two reinforcing processes— the domination of American politics by an economic elite and the cultural and racial polarization that has fragmented the traditional constituencies of liberal democratic governance and abetted the rise of the New Right...
...For the facts, theories, and moral sensibilities to which progressives typically appeal necessarily fight a steeply uphill battle against the indifference, cynicism, and attention deficit disorder of American mass culture...
...Such activities address practical concerns, they resist the deteriorating conditions besetting the poor, and they promote loose networks of common concern and commitment...
...their corruption was even more pervasive...
...In a "hyperreal" world there is economic suffering, and it is surely important to call attention to it, and to fight against it...
...morally troubling, certainly...
...The conservative vision rests on a rhetoric of pseudodemocratic populism that counterposes a mythic America to an unsavory cast of characters—variously called "liberal elites," "the Washington establishment," and "the counterculture"—who are purported to rule America and to be responsible for the corruption of its economy and its soul...
...It thus vastly overstates the possibilities for the general public enlightenment that its political project presupposes...
...In Albert Camus's novel The Plague, Dr...
...To speak of progressivism is to invoke a philosophy of history, according to which the passage of time and the development of technological and organizational capacity is associated with human betterment...
...The progressive clarion is the call to summon up the will to erase the legacy of these decades, and to move forward...
...The new progressives understand that the class-based politics of the postwar period broke down under a complex set of pressures—the rise of the New Left, and of new social movements centered around race, gender, and sexuality, the partial co-optation of these movements by federal affirmative action policies, the crisis of cold war liberalism presented by the Vietnam War...
...This judgment, I would suggest, falls in the realm of prophecy...
...This idea of localist democracy is not parochial...
...I have no idea what's awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends...
...Democrats facing the twenty-first century confront, to use the language of Walter Lippmann, a world of drift that they • Hilary Wainwright, Arguments for a New Left: Answering the Free Market Right (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1994), p. 153...
...They do not converge on an overarching vision of social change...
...It does not organize to reduce the sickening inequality between rich and poor...
...Yet the more important cause of this divorce does not have to do with progressive intellectuals per se, but with the broader world in which they live and that they seek to affect...
...This theme is sounded again and again in the progressive literature—public disaffection with liberalism is due to the "cleverness" of conservatives, who have "diverted attention" from the real issues of concern toAmericans, and "conned" their way into power...
...Yet, as Michael Walzer suggested in the Winter 1996 Dissent: "the various social catastrophes looming in the mind of the left—millions of men and women begging in the streets, the destruction of the black middle-class and the disappearance of black students from elite universities, massive environmental pollution, a surge in industrial accidents, and so on—are probably not going to happen, at least not on the expected scale...
...A critique of the Republican Contract With America, the essay calls for a renewed federal commitment to rebuild the "human capital" of American workers so that they can compete in the global marketplace...
...Neither do they constitute an exhaustive sampling of the possible forms "localist democracy" might take...
...immigration reform...
...2) Community organizations, such as the Association of Communities Organized for Reform (ACORN), the Industrial Areas Foundation, and the Citizen Action Coalition...
...American political culture is fractured along racial lines and riven by "culture wars" that have badly damaged the social consensus on which postwar liberalism rested, and these fractures have helped to fuel the emergence of a potent, if small, movement of rightwing extremists...
...Dionne, Jr.'s They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era...
...Opening with an epigraph from Theodore Roosevelt, Dionne endorses a "New Progressivism," also inspired by Croly, whose "task is to restore the legitimacy of public life by renewing the effectiveness of government and reforming the workings of politics...
...I've no more," he responds, "than the pride that's needed to keep me going...
...The editor explains to the reporter why the Republican Revolution of the mid-1990s was a passing phenomenon that grew increasingly unpopular as the years passed by, and he recounts how a growing mass movement, centered around a revitalized AFL-CIO, emerged to contest Republican policy and advance a program called Democracy 2000...
...Politicians can do no right, celebrities can do no wrong—homicide included...
...Yet the interests once served by the national-corporate form of regulation have now transcended the boundaries of the nation-state...
...But it means that the modes of communication and experience increasingly prevalent in American society efface this reality, by juxtaposing it with other "realities," and by creating new "realities" that necessarily detract from it, and perhaps deny it...
...They constitute an effort to revive a politics of a unified "left" under conditions when this politics is no longer symbolically compelling or politically feasible...
...Yet I would suggest that the question of "what is to be done...
...While the critics of identity politics are looting society," he concludes, "the politics of identity is silent on the deepest sources of social misery: the devastation of cities, the draining of resources away from the public and into the private hands of the few...
...Perhaps the best exploration of the difficulties new progressives have on this score is Todd Gitlin's The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked By Culture Wars...
...And there is no way that the many problems confronting American society can be remedied through a single democratic agency...
...And local initiatives can have an accumulating impact on public awareness and public policy...
...Think of the cities that owe their phenomenal growth in the twentieth century to this progressivism...
...A longer version of this essay discusses this broader literature...
...But there is no core issue around which a mass progressive constituency might readily be forged...
...3) Progressive reforms were supported by a growing faith in the power of science—scientific management, administrative science, educational science—connected to the emergence and ascendancy of the modern research university...
...a high-wage, technology-intensive growth industrial policy based upon tight labor markets...
...and the mass media today function to deaden serious ethical conviction rather than to nourish it...
...But these energies, and their vehicles, offer little hope for large-scale, progressive social reform...
...They believe that they can accurately depict the world, and that their depictions can help them to alter the world...
...This is due in part to a sincere commitment to egalitarian values...
...There is much to admire here...
...Further, the reasons for localist democracy are pragmatic rather than dogmatic...
...The first has been widely acknowledged— the insulation, professionalization, and political irrelevance of the liberal professions and of intellectuals in particular...
...would only be the beginning of a series of upheavals that would eventually lead to revolt and rebellion, if not forestalled by legislative restrictions...
...1-4...
...Lind's book is the most programmatic expression of the new progressive revival...
...The reason, it seems to me, is simple...
...The program of Levinson's imaginary "Democracy 2000" is the program of current progressives...
...The policies typically supported by progressives—labor law reform, a corporatist industrial policy, a shortened work week, health care reform, welfare reform, a social tariff, public investment—are good ones...
...Gitlin offers the best account of how a fractious identity politics represents both a perversion and a natural outgrowth of the New Left...
...The new progressivism fails to take the full FALL • 1996 • 43 The Poverty of Progressivism measure of the divorce of critical reason and effective political power...
...The fragmentation of the left is the natural history of the past three decades...
...But it is hard to build solid bridges on shifting soil, especially when the ground is fracturing in so many directions, and the builders weather a veritable tidal wave of opposition...
...The most explicit statement of this theme is provided by Mark Levinson in a Dissent essay (Fall 1995) entitled "Looking Backward: The Republican Revolution...
...Yet it is also possible to view the project as an eminently pragmatic approach to democratic empowerment, which attacks a specific problem of math illiteracy FALL • 1996 • 47 The Poverty of Progressivism through specific pedagogic solutions, involving local communities in a way that seeks to promote a sense of efficacy and to make a difference in childrens' lives...
...We cannot afford to throw up our hands and do nothing in response to the pressing problems before us...
...I call this the rationalistic fallacy because progressive strategies presume that the active promotion of the "truth" about the causes of our problems will, in time, lead to "progressive," forward-looking, remedial change...
...but politically central, no...
Vol. 43 • September 1996 • No. 4
