Responses

...As to how to do that work, Isaac believes "new progressives" don't have much to say—or that what they have to say is too ambitious or totalizing...

...Of course we're divided at present...

...Any progressive strategy should aim to close off the low road of "downsizing" and "restructuring" and help pave the high road, a two-step strategy that requires holding economic practice to higher standards than at present and building the range of public goods—training, modernization, new regulatory regimes, more competent worker organization—needed to enable firms to meet them under competitive conditions...

...To begin with our common problem...

...Not understood geographically, mind you, much less as Jeffersonian ideology, but as a "chastening" of democratic ambition...

...Fact is, relevant scale and accessibility require organization, pooling of resources, some breaking with present routines—preeminently in progressive strategies, or the lack thereof, regarding electoral politics...

...Some problems are tractable to stand-alone or partial solutions, others require coordination across diverse issue areas or more radical effort...

...Or maybe the list is wrong...

...Any successful political project creates conditions of its own advance—often by creating a new social subject through declaration of that presumptive subject's aims...

...Localist democracy...

...Take economic development...

...56 • DISSENT...

...a recognition that we will never all agree on everything we think it important to have agreement on, and therefore never on any ambitious common project...

...where traditional productivist politics is qualified by concern about such "non-economic" issues as the environment or gender...

...As nobody knows just what those new policies and organizational forms are, moreover, finding them will require social experiment and learning—so we also need to build the organizational routines and supports for that...

...But on these terms, democratic forces also would have been doomed in the 1960s, 1930s, 1890s, and 1860s, not to mention 1776...

...the task is to get them to act together, to join those resources, to become more rather than less than the sum of their divided parts...

...We could also use some new technique— for example, to support governance strategies more nuanced and diverse than the "live free or die" choice between markets and public hierarchies on which public debate remains transfixed...

...But that division is not just cause, but consequence, of the absence of an articulate mass program...

...But leaving Isaac's characterization of others aside, what's he got to offer...

...As to the proposition—offered in the face of titanic corporate mobilization, the Christian Right, and all the rest—that the chief problem of American progressives is that they strive too insistently for unity and scale . . . well, words fail me...

...Isaac recommends no new organizational strategy or program, but attitude adjustment: a forsaking of big-think and especially big-organization think...

...We could use some distinctions here...

...You make it, in part by declaring that politics...

...Such institutional and policy innovation is higher on my list than attitude adjustment...

...And we can always use some new ideas—on finding the money to support needed public goods, or restructuring the welfare state to enhance popular support, or modernizing our industrial base, or making government accountable...

...You don't just find an agent of new politics: a working class, a civil rights constituency, a cosmopolitan public...

...Finally, on the feasibility and attraction of large progressive projects, I flatly disagree...

...We need to figure out policies and organizational forms appropriate to a changed world: where the nation state is less capable of directing the economy within its borders...

...Sharing these values with Isaac, I agree with him that we need a new strategy to realize them...

...On program, if Isaac thinks of "chastening" as something like reformism or muddling through—well, that's an old mixed bag that he doesn't help sort...

...We disagree on what that strategy should be...

...that all late nineties, whether eighteen or nineteen, are basically the same...

...that speaking truth to power will make power roll over...

...that social differences don't create problems of political will...

...Jeff Isaac believes contemporary progressives face serious new problems of program and agency: identifying "what is to be done" to advance egalitarian democratic values under present economic and social conditions, and finding someone to do it...

...But at a time when additional local capacity is needed to solve problems beyond the reach of FALL • 1996 • 55 The Poverty of Progressivism the nation state, and when the dangers of economic inequality and political particularism and inequality are growing, this seems exactly the wrong approach...

...Steady work indeed...

...So the organizational beginnings of an alternative here would aim both to build relevant local capacity (the "localism" in which Isaac places so little hope) and guard against issue and interest factionalism within and across those locales (the "common program" he rejects as well...

...where solving supply-side and regulatory problems is essential to citizen wellbeing...

...Not suffering from the "moral fallacy" that because this should be done it will be done, I think we'd be crazy not to try...

...Fact is, the groups and individuals who agree on all this separately have among them the resources needed to make that happen...

...The fact is, that to be seen and supported by the public in this media-distracted and organizationally divided culture, that offer needs to be made at some enduring scale...

...Doing this requires developing institutions both highly attuned to local economic practice and its variation and able—consider the "tradeoffs" commonly alleged between environmentally sustainable development and job growth—to overcome traditional issue divisions through practices reconciling their respective concerns...

...The fact is, large and overlapping portions of our currently disorganized public regularly declare themselves willing to support a new progressive program—yes, a program recognizing this world's difference from the 1930s— if currently divided progressives united to offer them one...

...On social organization, Isaac abjures both localism in economic governance and broad agreement on public accountability and program...

...He thinks that I and others suffer many fallacies of belief: that the only thing people care about is cash...

...A natural place to begin such a strategy is in our neglected metropolitan regions, which already hold within them the key ingredients of a high-wage, low-waste, more democraticallyordered economy...

...But without some framework of national standards and coordination, one region's economic success is another's loss...

...that things are sure to get better since they have to...

...Of course we're doomed if we make agreement on everything a condition of moving together on anything, or if we require that everyone agree on something before we try to do it...

...I don't believe any of these things, so I guess I'm on the wrong list...

...where "the working class" and "the family" and "black people" and other building blocks of progressive agency are not unambiguous, homogeneous, or stable terms...

...I find this either uselessly abstract or simply wrong—in any case not promising as political strategy...