BELIEFS MATTER. Sam's certainly right that George Scialabba's multi-book review has some hilarious bad passages, not to mention my nominee for oddest extended metaphor of 2007 (you see, Republicans are like factory-produced meat, and Democrats are like tofu in tamari, and The Weekly Standard is like a slaughter farm, and cliches are like growth hormone, and civic culture is polluted groundwater, and -- oh, sod it!). That said, I'm a little less convinced by Sam's dismissal of the idea that the "New Deal reforms, or those brought by the Civil Rights Movement or during the Great Society came about because Americans of those periods happened to be better informed than today." If by "better informed" we mean whether they were more capable of carrying out multivariate regressions or reading The Partisan Review for pleasure, then no. But in some fundamental ways, progressives should believe that Americans were somewhat better informed at those points, before the right wing's decades-long demonization of unions, and government action, and risk-pooling, and all the rest took effect. Progressives have an underlying belief system that looks favorably on the capacity of government regulation and communal action and countervailing powers to positively influence the nation. They should indeed believe that a public better informed on, say, the efficacy of many government programs would be more amenable to their solutions. As it is, a public misinformed to believe tax cuts can occur without consequences and Social Security is going to dry up and blow away in 2012 isn't particularly ready to construct a classless socialist utopia a decent social safety net. "[E]ffecting beneficial political change," Sam writes, "has a good deal more to do with manning and strengthening particular institutions and engaging directly in raw political struggle than it does with sprinkling enlightenment across the land." But that's not either/or, it's both/and. When unions are strengthened, they educate their members about the need for more worker power and economic protection. And when Americans cease imagining the government as the underfunded DMV, and begin seeing it as Medicare and Social Security, they'll become tougher targets for the propaganda campaigns of insurers and pharmaceutical companies. To enact the progressive agenda, progressives will have to convince Americans of its worth. We will, indeed, have to spread a little Galbraithian enlightenment throughout the land, even as we strengthen our political institutions and engage in bare-knuckle brawls for political power.
--Ezra Klein
