To continue the conversation here, Digby has an extraordinarily provocative response to Mike Tomasky's Prospect cover story on the need for Democrats to rediscover the language of the common good. Mike sets that philosophy, which animated the New Deal and JFK, up in tension to the New Left, with their politics of empowerment for disempowered identity groups. The implication, overt as much as implicit, is that the splintering of the 60's chopped up the Democratic Party, leaving it scared of its own component elements and unable to speak to the whole lest the parts rebel. Democrats, Mike says, need to rediscover their foundation belief in the common good.
Would that it were so easy. What Digby brings to the discussion is a reminder that the common good, while a simple concept, is operatively problematic. Namely, what is the common good? Who fits into it? The left splintered in the 60's because quite a few segments of American society erupted over their exclusion from this common good. Blacks hadn't been part of it, nor women. Young men being drafted didn't think their lives were being factored into the common good, and the anti-war movement was damn certain that no one had added the Vietcong into the colculus.
And then there was Reagan. Mike argues that he rediscovered the concept of the common good and skillfully applied it to white males, but I'd submit we've got that backwards: Reagan reversed the concept. What he understood was that the common good is never as animating as the individual bad. Looked at in a certain way, affirmative action hurts white males, as does immigration, and business regulations, and high taxation, and feminism, and gun control. If the common good requires sacrifice, enterprising politicians will always find resonance amongst those forced to do the sacrificing. That's because government, in many ways, has to play a near-zero sum game: all it can really do is redistribute. And while those being redistributed to will find themselves rather enamored of this common good, those being redistributed from may prove a bit less confident in the concept.
