Like many since the election, I’ve been somewhat silent in the blogosphere. This is partly because I had to get my life back, and rid myself of late night blogging addictions, but also because I could see the big blogs reverting to type. The necessary unity of the campaign then fell into the predictable outpourings of repressed dissent, much of it a reversion to past battles. But a provocative piece in UK’s prospect Magazine by Michael Lind has got me thinking about where we go from here.
The American centre-left has gone through several phases in the last century, some more successful than others: the Progressive and Populist movements in the early 1900s; the bold and successful New Deal synthesis of 1932-68; the defensive, cautious neoliberalism of the late 20th century. The next reinvention of the centre-left may begin during Obama’s term in office.
Is this true? And if the centre left needs to reinvent itself, where do we go for inspiration?
Though there’s a lot I disagree with in his piece, Lind has fairly much nailed us Moosers with this description:
Obama won the Democratic party nomination partly because he appealed to the two major wings of the post-Clinton Democrats: the single-issue left, and pro-business New Democrats based in the financial, IT and media industries.
To take the demographic issue head on, it is obvious that the blogosphere is in danger of being a self selecting elite. But let’s not get into some kind of inverted snobbery about it. A a majority of us are college educated, with professional or managerial backgrounds but here we are not departing from normality, but actually reflecting it.
In the UK the professional or managerial classes have gone from being 10 per cent of the workforce in the 1930s to 40 per cent now. The change, according to Lind, is also pronounced in the US.
Today more than a quarter of the population earns a bachelor’s degree and roughly one tenth has a graduate or professional degree. The college-educated social stratum that was already the base for the Progressive movement a century ago has vastly expanded. Meanwhile, the traditional working class has not only shrunk, but is also increasingly divided along class and caste lines.
So rather than feeling guilt about our backgrounds – in most cases due to the liberal advances and innovations of post war education – can we actually celebrate it, and then turn those intellectual resources which our parents and grand parents sacrificed so much of their lives to give us, to some concerted effect?
So what are the principles that a New Progressive movement could rally around?
At the moment, according to Lind, there are glaring contradictions:
The right wing of the Democratic party is more libertarian than conservative. Its members tend to be fiscal conservatives who favour racial integration and gay rights, but also (at least until recently) favoured free markets, free trade, and deregulation, and looked with suspicion on trade unions… This raises an interesting question. If the left stands for equality, in what sense are the Democrats a party of the left?
To me the Moose admirably combines a diverse group of bloggers, who can debate their differences without (most of the time) without resorting to name calling or fixed positions. But, to talk bluntly, I sometimes do fear that our diaries, like these issues, tend to break down to fractions that are less than the whole.
Think of our post election diaries on Proposition 8, Sexism in the Media, or the role of Labor Unions. The danger is that these diaries only address, and are only responded to, by sections of the Moose. NBW did a grand job trying to frame the question LGBT rights outside Republican culture wars rhetoric. But its harder to animate people on general principles than on personal issues.
We are a MOTLEY Moose, and all have things which we care about passionately as individuals, or sub groups, but how do we rally round together?
According to Lind we are too Motley for our own good:
Brilliant, unorthodox thinkers like James K Galbraith are outnumbered by conformist Democratic economists who have internalised free market ideas about trade and labour markets. Elsewhere on the university campuses and in think tanks, it is hard to find any coherent progressive philosophy at all, as opposed to a miscellany of identity-politics “communities” based on race and gender.
I don’t agree with this caricature – it’s name calling and identity politics of its own kind. But Lind does identify the intellectual impasse that could follow.
When it comes to the current economic crisis the challenge is not so much political as intellectual. The good news for Democrats is that they have become the party of government because the voters perceive that the Republican party’s free-market ideology is discredited by events. The problem is that the Democratic establishment, with very bad timing, has adopted much of that ideology in the last generation.
Perhaps then the debate over what Progressive means has been made more urgent by the credit crunch, and the effective collapse of the unregulated chaos of the banking, insurance and mortgage markets. The Third Way of Neo liberal deregulation seems to be have failed along with the Reagan Thatcher laissez economics it was hitched to. What can replace it?
With the nationalisation of many financial institutions we are witnessing the practical resurgence of government intervention on a scale not seen for forty years.
Do we fight to keep government out of other areas of our life? Where does it leave the wider principles of free trade? And if national governments protect employment and wealth within their own borders, what happens to the other great issues – oil dependency, climate change, global poverty – which require an international response?
Can we define some common social, philosophical or economic threads of a new progressive movement, beyond the boxes of gender, class, ethnic background, profession or indeed – dare I say it – national boundaries?
One diary and thread is not going to pose all the questions, let alone provide all the answers but is there a way we can synthesise some common principles from Canadian Gal’s rallying call “Progress through Politics” and somehow unify this debate?
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