Anyone who has hung around progressive circles for the past two decades has invariably logged a small chunk of their lives in frustrating “vision” conversations. The problem, always, was coming up with the elevator pitch for a Balkanized liberalism that was more a grab bag of specific causes than a movement guided by a few simple values. Progressives spent many long years envying the parsimony of a conservative ideology built around the mantra of small government, traditional values, and a strong defense.
Well, those envy years are over. Progressives now have a clearer vision, one that has been repeated often by speakers at the DNC — most notably by Bill Clinton and Sister Simone Campbell last night: We’re all in this together.
PBS Newshour
The idea of a common good — that Americans have a mutual obligation to one another and that we all do better when we cooperate — is hardly new to progressive ideology, of course. It’s been a recurrent theme for over a century and, at times, a dominant theme. Yet it fell away from liberalism starting in the 1960s, amid important fights for individual and group rights, and only recently has the common good moved back front and center in progressive political rhetoric and started to feel like a cohesive vision.
