Responses
Dionne, E.J.
In his fine book on Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus, Jeffrey Isaac makes an entirely convincing case that one can respect the tragic aspect of political action without losing hope in its...
...Isaac speaks of the ways in which "mass communications . . . dull political sensibilities, and help to create mass social irrealism...
...It's quite clear, for example, that parents worry about the messages the culture is sending their children and about their children's safety in school and on the streets...
...Similarly, Isaac is right in saying that it's not enough for neoprogressives to declare that the wars over race, gender, and sexuality are over and to assume that the country will miraculously "get back on track" with class politics...
...In fact, many of the "local" efforts Isaac describes grew out of national movements...
...He is right to see the decline of popular confidence in "experts" as making this time very different from the original Progressive Era...
...It's true that some on the left try to reduce everything to economics and pretend that other questions—race, culture, crime, welfare—are "distractions...
...Isaac says, "It's hard to build solid bridges on shifting soil...
...It's hard work, but people such as Gitlin are trying to get it done...
...And are not the "localist" initiatives Isaac describes signs that our time may not be as "inhospitable to democratic awareness, agency and empowerment" as Isaac asserts...
...His emphasis...
...For example, he argues that "the new progressive literature consistently fails to attend to the cultural and symbolic sources of politics...
...Right-wing Leninism turns out to be as flawed as its left-wing variant...
...Perhaps it's because Jeff Isaac has so influenced my view that I now find myself considerably less pessimistic than he is about our current situation...
...Well, sure, sometimes...
...The left is foolish if it ignores the first set of worries, but the right often ignores the second...
...Progressives have finally started to notice that there are links between the two...
...It is a belief that democratic political action can lead to gradual social improvement through steady work...
...I see no reason to give up on that...
...But if anyone should be disappointed by history at this juncture, it is those conservatives who thought only eighteen months ago that they had arrived at the Finland Station destined to lead a successful revolution to demolish the "liberal welfare state" and push the center-left into oblivion...
...I might point to the signs of revival in both spheres, but won't risk looking Panglossian by pushing the point too hard...
...But I think he misses the extent to which progressives, liberals, and social democrats may already have begun to move away from some of the errors he ascribes to them...
...But Gitlin's book is itself a sign that neoprogressives are not pretending that the culture wars have suddenly ended, but instead are working actively to find a settlement that roots pluralism in universal values...
...He is especially right in warning against the hubris of assuming that politics can offer any person or any movement total mastery...
...And reform is in the air even within the mass media...
...In his fine book on Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus, Jeffrey Isaac makes an entirely convincing case that one can respect the tragic aspect of political action without losing hope in its possibilities...
...But it's simply not true that Americans have been anesthetized by this "mass social irrealism...
...I do believe that the pressures created by global economic competition and a popular desire for a greater sense of social fairness and personal opportunity point more toward progressive politics rather than to50 • DISSENT The Poverty of Progressivism ward a rendezvous with radicallaissez-faire...
...FALL • 1996 • 51...
...But that is no longer the rule...
...But that is a view rooted in a particular analysis, not in a historicist faith...
...Why is it not reasonable to ask national political institutions and the broader culture to lend them support...
...Of course that's true...
...Those who claim to be on the side of history are usually disappointed...
...On the contrary, it's quite clear that there is widespread worry about declining living standards, and that this worry had a political effect even in this year's Republican primaries...
...And nobody can argue with Isaac's criticism of the idea that history is inexorably on the side of a progressive transformation...
...At the very least, it can now be said that the progressive idea and the basic underpinnings of the social insurance state enjoy much deeper support than either optimistic conservatives or dispirited liberals and social democrats once believed...
...So it was with the original Progressive movement, which grew nationally and locally at the same time...
...But reformist politics is not about mastery...
...The debate stirred by the "civic journalism" movement and the substantial response to James Fallows's recent book on journalism are signs of at least a modest effort to reassert the civic and democratic responsibilities of those engaged in "mass communications...
...Isaac is right in pointing to the problems raised for progressive politics by the decline of the progressive churches and the problems of the trade union movement...
...outlook...
...Isaac goes on to cite Todd Gitlin's fine book The Twilight of Common Dreams and notes Gitlin's noble call to build bridges instead of digging cultural trenches...
...But they also worry at the same time about whether they will earn enough to support their families...
...Why should such initiatives be purely local phenomena...
...Isaac is right to warn progressives of the dangers involved in seeing everything in economic terms, in pretending that their victory is ineluctable, in highlighting national action to the exclusion of local and decentralized initiative...
...If anything, the tendency among progressives (especially those running for public office) is to highlight the connections between economic questions and social and moral questions—connections I tried to make in my book They Only Look Dead—while also accepting that, for most citizens, the moral and cultural spheres have both autonomy and integrity...
...The reformer's faith is more modest...
...He is broadly right in a number of his criticisms of the progressive (or is it neoprogressive...
Vol. 43 • September 1996 • No. 4
