My old Nation colleague Mike Tomasky (we were interns there a few years apart) has written a long and thoughtful essay in the American Prospect that is getting a lot of well-deserved attention, including in today's New York Times. Mike's now the editor of the Prospect, and this essay will certainly mark his putting his stamp on that magazine.
Leaving aside a few unnecessary swipes at the left (who actually believes "the Democratic left wants it to be 1968 in perpetuity"?), Mike makes one central point very well: the interest-group politics at the heart of the Democratic party has failed. You can't build a majority by cobbling together different groups along their disparate identities--women, labor, blacks, Hispanics, gays, environmentalists, etc. A larger uniting theme is needed. His answer: We're all in this together.
That's exactly what I wrote in a piece for TomPaine back in June 2003:
If American progressives hope to counter the Right, we're going to need more than a laundry list of grievances and a souped-up infrastructure for projecting our message. We're going to need to articulate a counter-vision to the Right's drumbeat themes. Greater competence in placing our talking heads on TV or feeding our policy proposals to legislators won't be enough: we need a common world-view, or what used to be called an ideology.
I pointed out how well Grover Norquist's ideology of "Leave Us Alone" had worked in knitting together the disparate elements of the Republican right. And then I suggested:
To counter "Leave Us Alone" I suggest "We're All In This Together." Its rationale might go like this:
We must protect the environment because its degradation threatens us all. We must invest in universal health care because disease observes no boundaries -- gated communities won't protect you from SARS, AIDS, asthma or anthrax. The benefits of democracy are not reserved for the wealthy, they belong to everyone -- we fight for an equal voice for all Americans and to protect politics from the distortions of big money. We are only as well off as the poor, elderly and disabled among us, and there but for the grace of God go I -- we need a viable social safety net. We believe every person has the same intrinsic worth, that society's health depends on everyone having an equal stake, and that there is strength in diversity -- we want an inclusive society that values everyone regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation or religion. Money is not the measure of all worthwhile things -- markets left to their own devices will not care for the poor, educate our children, create public parks or seek justice for all. Those who benefit most from what democratic society provides have a greater obligation to give back to it -- we believe in progressive taxation. The multiple crises facing the world require multilateral cooperation, not go-it-alone imperialism.
On reading Mike's essay, I think he's done a terrific job of fleshing out this picture in a number of ways. He calls this politics of the common good "a new civic republicanism" (nice appropriation of the GOP brand) and says it:
can justify collective action far more powerfully and persuasively than anything the Democrats have done or said in a long time. Such arguments can be constructed on behalf of almost every single thing the party purports to stand for: health-care coverage for those without it, the need to protect the planet and take global warming seriously, energy independence, asset-building for African Americans and other disproportionately poor groups, a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and more. Such rhetoric can surely be wedded effectively to core economic matters. Last month in these pages, my colleague Harold Meyerson wrote brilliantly about the crisis of the American economy [see “Not Your Father’s Detroit,” The American Prospect, April 2006] -- about the need for an industrial policy that addresses the flight of jobs, the health-care and pension crises, and the rest. If the Democrats, when addressing these concerns, sound like they’re offering one more sop to big labor, they will inaugurate the same old round of embittered cat-calling; if their proposals are rooted in notions of communal sacrifice toward a greater good in which all citizens will have a stake and a share, the terms of the debate are changed.
I still have huge doubts about whether the Democrats in office are the ones who can enact anything like this vision. They seem far too corrupted by power and money, and I suspect the best you can say about some of them is they might respond to Mike's ideas mainly out of opportunism.
But even though Mike has pitched his argument at Democrats, there's no reason it can't be applied from below, by small-d democrats. It would be a very good thing if progressives starting asking each other, whenever we're faced with particularistic interest-group demands, how does this advance the common good? I think we have plenty of good answers, and none of those groups I mentioned above--women, labor, blacks, Hispanics, gays, environmentalists, etc.--need fear a politics of the common good.
Posted by msifry at May 9, 2006 09:09 AM