Responses
Wilentz, Sean
When Jeffrey Isaac calls for chastened political expectations, I can't help but agree. Given the political blockages and intellectual disarray of the moment, who wouldn't? As I write this,...
...None of which precludes Isaac's "localist" activism, much of which (as in groups like the Alinskyite Industrial Areas Foundation) has been around for a long time...
...But E.J...
...Dionne, Michael Lind, and others have said just the opposite— that it has been liberals' failure to comprehend just how potent and "real" those issues are that has proven so costly...
...Is the muckraking impulse gone (or is it limited now strictly to sex scandals...
...In Isaac's essay, the Democrats turn up as little more than carbon copies of the Republicans...
...Rather, I take the neoprogressive argument, in its various forms, to be that liberals and leftists have grown so invested in their own form of moralistic thinking about separate group rights that they have lost the ability to articulate much sense of the common good...
...Think of the United States at the time of the original Progressives— when formal segregation was the rule in much of the country...
...But in other respects things are at least as hopeful now as they were then—something Isaac suggests when he talks in passing of more recent liberal triumphs...
...At moments like these, the old spirit of Progressivism seems as dead as a doornail...
...and the labor movement, although full of spirit, was about to suffer a series of disastrous and bloody defeats that would leave it looking moribund by the 1920s...
...Which is exactly what I think most of the writers whom Isaac criticizes are attempting to do, at least implicitly—to redirect the thinking of the Democratic party, much as numerous conservative writers began redirecting the thinking of the Republican party in the 1950s...
...But such a movement hasn't existed in this country since the demise of the Debsian Socialist party—and yet the left, loosely conceived, has done a great deal to help improve the nation since then...
...Screw 'em all," became the widespread and worrisome, but understandable, popular response...
...Without the sort of modest movements that Isaac favors, national political reform would be doomed...
...academia and the so-called liberal professions were bulwarks of smug gentility...
...As I write this, in early July, the New York Times reports that federal cutbacks may necessitate the partial privatization of the National Park Service—one of the most successful and least controversial legacies of the original Progressives...
...Yet for better and worse, the party is still a prominent vehicle for social and political reform, well worth fighting in and fighting over...
...I am aware of the many arguments, some of them unanswerable, about the hopelessness of the Democrats, their ties to big money, their traitorous ways...
...FAIL • 1996 • 57 The Poverty of Progressivism I agree with Isaac that "current conditions make the recreation of a coherent, mass-based progressive movement of social reform highly unlikely...
...58 • DISSENT...
...right-wing fundamentalism was gathering strength...
...the Ku Klux Klan was on the rise...
...With some fairness, the left came to be seen as a preserve for elitists, with little to offer ordinary taxpayers—as much a part of the national shell game as their opponents...
...Isaac misreads the neoprogressives when he has them blaming the current situation on the right's ability to distract the attention of the electorate with "phony" social issues...
...If the mass media serve the interests of the powers-that-be so faithfully, why do conservatives loathe the media so...
...If the parks cannot be sustained in the name of the common good, what can...
...Partly, this is a legacy of the late 1960s, when liberals (and even some leftists), having wrongly persuaded themselves that economic growth or unionization had stifled the problems of class, turned to race- and gender-based formulas for social justice, and wound up alienating millions of their erstwhile supporters...
...the rise of communism and fascism was just around the corner...
...Of course, the political situation now is worse, in some respects, than it was in, say, 1910, when radicalism and reform crackled across the headlines...
...As for the present: hasn't the Christian Coalition, for all of its power, caused great difficulty inside the Republican party...
...If that were actually so, I would be as discouraged as he is about national politics...
...With writers like many of those whom Isaac cites—not to mention Theda Skocpol, Paul Starr, William Julius Wilson, and others—have the social sciences really become totally anesthetized, as Isaac claims...
...Equally, though, without some involvement and leverage at the national level—in the grand and imaginative terms that Isaac eschews—"localist" efforts will also be doomed...
...It has done so precisely by organizing in various "localist" ways—on everything from labor's rights to civil rights— and by applying national political pressure mainly through the Democratic party...
...women did not have the vote...
...But then again, I have my better moments, too—when I think about Newt Gingrich's astonishing fall from public grace or about the growing divisions within what once looked like an impregnable Republican coalition...
...Some writers for whom economics is everything may prefer to see things that way...
...But to see American politics in the either/or fashion that Isaac does is self-defeating...
...But I am not...
Vol. 43 • September 1996 • No. 4
