Responses
Mansbridge, Jane
I agree with many parts of Jeff Isaac's argument, and particularly with his list of ways in which our current era differs from that of the Progressives. I agree too with the general thrust of...
...The nation's courts make decisions, like Roe v. Wade, that change the context of personal life at one swoop...
...Clinton has been deeply, deeply handicapped by never having—even in the first half of his term—a strong Democratic majority in Congress...
...20 (Winter 1995), pp...
...32-41...
...But he did also get through changes like these: a raise in the earned income tax credit, which helps every single one of the working poor FAIL • 1996 53 The Poverty of Progressivism every day...
...American Prospect No...
...This month is a time for giving money to the Democratic party, offering to help at party headquarters, working with any grassroots group you're involved in to get out the vote—and trying to bring some sense into the head of any friend who thinks that this election won't make a difference...
...Those who don't agree, read on...
...Why National or Local...
...In the long run I am more than mildly pessimistic...
...Local initiative is one of our most useful cultural specializations: let's exploit it...
...We don't have the discipline among our activists in the United States that we see in Europe...
...Every vote in Congress will count, on a lot of different bills...
...increased funding for school districts with many poor children, for Head Start, for WIC, for battered women's shelters, for the homeless, for housing, and for legal services...
...Out of the mix may come the partial, limiting, fractious, and unsatisfying, but practical, brew that is right for 2000 and beyond...
...Do You Still Need To Be Convinced...
...Another term of appointments subject to veto by the radical right would close the judicial route to progressive change for a generation...
...Like it or not, we are living in a world in which large numbers of issues are settled in the courts...
...Why not try out new ideas and visions even when they are unifying or national in scope...
...On several I was bitterly, deeply opposed...
...the Brady Bill for handguns and an assault weapons ban...
...But, as Isaac says, the policies they propose are typically good...
...And Clinton's electorate responded to that knowledge in 1992...
...And the PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN...
...the answer is: work your butt off in the election...
...And because fortune is fickle, out of it might even come the fragments we can weave into a vision that will appeal far beyond the readership of Dissent, but that will still unify some of us, sometimes...
...So let us keep reading Dick Flacks and Ronnie Dugger, Judis, Lind, Dionne, and Rogers, and keep supporting the New Party as well as the Coalition for New Priorities...
...this isn't the CP), what's best for the whole collective is swallowing your disagreements— and I mean major, heavy-duty disagreements— and working together to get one important thing done...
...increased AIDS public health services...
...This election is that one important thing...
...repeal of the ban on importing RU-486...
...After the civil rights revolution and the backlash of the Reagan revolution, which together politicized the Circuit Court level of the federal judiciary, it has become crucial who appoints the judges of this country...
...I can think of dozens of issues on which I opposed the policy President Clinton pushed through...
...There is a time for everything...
...They're wrong, undoubtedly, about some specifics of the Progressive analogy...
...How many immigrants we admit has to be a national-level decision...
...A lot of activists there—in Sweden, Germany, even Italy—know that at times (I'm talking episodic here...
...cally) local level, the programs that work, the incremental strategy—ought to apply as well to the (metaphorically) national level...
...The post-Progressive era Great Depression let everyone know that the economy, stupid, needs national direction...
...Although I don't like it, the nation has become, in the years since the Progressives, even more dependent on national-level decisions...
...This is Peter Swenson's argument, based on the experience of the U.S...
...the Family and Medical Leave Act, which guarantees employment on return from a medical- or family-related absence...
...Given that, he still made choices you and I thought were wrong...
...We just need to work for a Democratic victory, both in Congress and the presidency...
...Those who agree, or are reading this after the election, skip to "Why national or local...
...And they are also undoubtedly wrong when (which is not always) they look only nationally, or to a mass-based movement, for an answer...
...513-44, and "Arranged Alliance," Politics and Society (forthcoming early 1997...
...Isaac is right in saying we can't go back to the Progressives' moment...
...None of us can know what moment we're in...
...Let John Judis and Michael Lind, E.J...
...motor-voter" registration...
...The election over, the very experimental logic that inspires Jeff Isaac—to turn to the (metaphori*For these and more, see Richard Rothstein's "Friends of Bill...
...If progressive reform needs capitalist support, then progressives need to think hard about what policies can attract support from what kinds of capitalists, and what institutional mechanisms might help these capitalists discover that those reforms are in their interest...
...That is not what we need to focus on now...
...He is wrong in saying the only way to respond is partial, giving up the search for a unifying and purposive, symbolically accessible, common vision...
...Progressives can't ignore the hard decisions at the national level or the need for as much unity as we can muster at that level...
...We can't engage in mild pessimism, major pessimism— or any contemplation of our own moods—now...
...Yes, the old Democratic party...
...The thing that will make the next greatest difference is to bring in a Democratic Congress...
...I agree too with the general thrust of his presumptions—that we must invest ourselves in local initiatives that work...
...Compared to the most progressive countries in the world, the United States has often made its best, most innovative, longest lasting contributions through decentralization...
...This is not, as we know, what Kennedy or Johnson (or FDR, or even Carter) had to work with...
...Dionne and Joel Rogers cast their visions before us and everyone else...
...Now is the time to come to the aid of the DEMOCRATIC PARTY...
...In particular, I note Isaac's point that many Progressive-era reforms were instituted only because they helped corporate capitalism...
...54 • DISSENT The Poverty of Progressivism growth of international organizations, whose negotiations require representation from nations as nations...
...and more aggressive enforcement of the NLRA unfair labor practices prohibitions, OSHA violations of workplace safety, the Environmental Protection Act, and equal opportunity complaints.* Do you think any one of those policies would have been put through by a Republican president or a Republican Congress...
...So, if the question is, "What Is to Be Done...
...FALL • 1996 • 55...
...And if, improbable as it is, some vision and some set of spokespeople came together with some set of historical accidents to produce a movement that looked like a "unified 'left,'" many of us would carp and protest, but we would be buoyed by that moment in history and swept forward again as unpredictably as we were in the sixties...
...more progressive income tax rates...
...Some of their ideas might work...
...In the more recent half of his term he had a Republican Congress...
...But look, folks, it's an election year...
...Why not cast many visions upon the waters, and see which ones float...
...No matter what your level of cynicism about party politics, no matter what your disagreements with the president's attempts to out-Republican the Republicans, you have to recognize that in 1996 the thing that will make the greatest difference to working people all over the United States is to elect a Democratic rather than a Republican president...
...New Deal and the Swedish social democratic welfare state (including its core legislation and its original solidaristic wage policy, all supported by the export-oriented sectors of Swedish capital...
...Maybe on some matters progressives can't get anywhere without the support of important sectors of capital...
...Globalization has been accompanied by the **Peter Swenson, "Bringing Capital Back In," World Politics 43 (1991), pp...
...the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act...
...repeal of the abortion counseling "gag rule...
Vol. 43 • September 1996 • No. 4
