Hopes springs eternal in left-of-center American circles that the nation is poised for a comeback of bold, progressive solutions to the country's ills. Hope, however, appears to be springing unusually strongly of late.
Hopes springs eternal in left-of-center American circles that the nation is poised for a comeback of bold, progressive solutions to the country's ills. Hope, however, appears to be springing unusually strongly of late.
Take health care. I remember the 2004 presidential campaign quite clearly, and how there was a lot of admiration for John Kerry's technocratically clever yet distinctly modest scheme to implement a federal reinsurance program to backstop existing insurance plans, bring down prices, and perhaps lay the institutional groundwork for something bigger in the future. But nowadays it seems like everyone and his sister has a universal health care plan, and even those who don't, like Barack Obama, are promising they soon will.
And on the economic front, not only are the Prospect's ideological fellow travelers at the Economic Policy Institute working on their Agenda for Shared Prosperity, but even Robert Rubin's Hamilton Project, though much-derided in our hallways, is proposing a much more ambitious economic agenda than anything the Democratic leadership put forward in the 1999-2005 period.
The time is right, wonkish Washington seems to feel, for ambitious new thinking, for new grand bargains, for new initiatives and big ideas. I'm just wondering why.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but: Don't you know there's a war on? Or, rather, two -- one in Iraq, one in Afghanistan -- and the United States is losing both. This fact does boost the cause of progressive reform in the sense that it makes liberals more likely to win elections, but the fact remains that the next president -- no matter how worthy his or her instincts on matters at home -- is going to need, as a practical matter, to deal with these issues first and foremost. He or she will need to extricate us from our military involvement in Iraq and cope with the regional fallout from the disaster there, while somehow putting us on a sounder footing in Afghanistan. Liberals should, meanwhile, be under no illusions that the troops, once brought home from Iraq, will serenade us with thanks for removing them from the war zone. Some will, of course, but as many -- and probably more -- will see themselves as having been betrayed by a home front that claimed to support them but refused to support the mission; those eager to make that argument will, of course, find a vast right-wing noise machine eager to amplify the message.
This is also the context in which progressives across the board are expecting the next president -- who, absent an improbable Bill Richardson victory, is certain to be a diplomatic novice -- to strike a deal of some kind with Tehran and/or Damascus and then sell it to the same Congress that, even under Democratic management, won't even demand that Bush get congressional authorization before launching an unprovoked unilateral war with Iran.
This, I think, is where progressive politicians are going to find that they need to apply their political capital. Nobody wants to delay much-needed domestic reforms. Realistically, however, such reforms have been waiting a long time. It's in the nature of foreign crises, by contrast, that they simply can't be ignored.
Of course, given the right political moment, major domestic change might happen anyway. Here, however, I fear that progressives have misjudged the mood of the country. Or, rather, they judge it correctly but mistake the significance of the judgment. "The nation is ready for change," writes the EPI in introducing its agenda. "The American people reject the failed economic policies that reversed the gains of the late 1990s and left the great majority of people more insecure about their jobs, their incomes, their health insurance, their children's futures, and their own prospects for a dignified retirement." This is all true, and as Jacob Hacker explains in his widely-touted book, it is precisely this feeling of economic insecurity that leaves voters feeling tepid about the economy despite reasonably robust GDP growth.
The problem is in the assumption that this sort of pervasive but moderate level of economic discontent lays the foundation for progressive change. Liberals may have become so accustomed during the 1980s to arguing (correctly) that the economy was not doing nearly so well as the stock-addled press tended to suggest that many got into the habit of simply equating economic pessimism with progressive politics. But as Benjamin Friedman showed in his book on The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, there's little reason to believe in this connection. Outside of a genuine economic catastrophe like the Great Depression, poor economic performance is good for the electoral prospects of the opposition party, but by no means good for economic reform. Besides the New Deal, the other major era of progressive change in recent American history was the booming postwar years, the same period during which the vast welfare states of Western Europe were created.
By contrast, in Ann Crittenden's words, "economic stagnation is a major breeding ground of intolerance, mean-spiritedness, and political ugliness." Feelings of risk and insecurity will, yes, make voters more skeptical about the losses they may face from Washington Consensus trade deals, but it makes them more fearful of everything else, too. The same sense of besiegement that makes people worry about losing their health insurance will become a powerful tool in the hands of opponents of health reform telling scare stories about socialized medicine. People who feel they aren't getting what the world owes to them aren't going to be interested in grand schemes to end poverty in New Orleans or New Guinea or in ways that America can spend billions of dollars to save Bangladesh from catastrophic flooding in 2018.
The time for that sort of campaign, sadly, was 2000, when Al Gore could have leveraged long years of peace and prosperity delivered by Democrats into an argument that now was the time for ambitious plans to tackle long-festering problems. But he squandered the opportunity, and subsequently George W. Bush squandered the nation's fiscal capabilities along with the public's faith in the ability of the government to be competently managed, all while plunging the nation's foreign policy into deep crisis. It's by no means fair that a progressive Bush successor will need to make cleaning up his messes, rather than pursuing exciting new initiatives, his or her primary task. Life, however, isn't fair.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to The American Prospect here.
Support independent media with a tax-deductible donation here.
