Last night, the Prospect celebrated its 30th anniversary with a gala dinner at D.C.’s Hyatt Regency Hotel on Capitol Hill. At a time when newspapers and magazines are fast disappearing, the Prospect’s survival—and its continued and future importance to the progressive cause—was celebrated by more than 300 of our fellow journalists (including dozens of Prospect alums), movement leaders, policy wonks, union activists, and, bless them, the donors who keep us in business. They heard from Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, who extolled the Prospect’s long history of championing working people’s causes; from California Representative Katie Porter, who praised new Prospect editor David Dayen’s excavations of banks’ systemic abuses; from New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie on his time as a Prospect writing fellow; from founding co-editor Paul Starr on the magazine’s birth pangs and mission; from yours truly on our commitment to labor’s cause; and from the evening’s moderator, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr., who spoke of the Prospect’s importance to the liberal ecosystem. They heard from publisher Ellen Meany and executive editor David Dayen on what the Prospect’s future holds—with a new website that enables us to post half a dozen new pieces every day and a print magazine whose frequency of publication is going from four times a year to six.
Above all, though, they came to salute Prospect co-founder and guiding spirit Bob Kuttner, who, while continuing to write and edit pieces for us, is stepping down from three decades of running the show. Following a host of speakers testifying to Bob’s immense contributions to American progressivism and to nurturing generations of left-liberal journalists (Harvard Law’s Randall Kennedy said that far from sounding an uncertain trumpet, Bob’s was as clear as Miles Davis’s), Bob came to the podium and responded with a moving, eloquent reflection on both the Prospect and, intertwined with that, his life’s work, from which I excerpt (and run together) a few passages below.
The Prospect has been all about connecting dots—between the structural corruptions of capitalism, the deep analysis of how that operates politically, the narrative story of how regular people experience it, the related corruption of our democracy, and the movement politics of taking America back.
There’s another special thing about this magazine. It covers a stretch of political spectrum that goes from left-liberal to further left, rather like the New Deal coalition.
One of the things that fascinates me is the uneasy relationship and necessary symbiosis between liberals and radicals. Liberal democracy, at its core, is about the rule of law, democratic representation, the concept of loyal opposition, free inquiry, and due process. It’s polite. But sometimes, power relations become so out of kilter that radicalism has to violate well-mannered liberalism. The industrial union movement could not have succeeded without sit-down strikes that violated property rights. The civil rights movement required sit-ins, and marches, and other forms of civil disobedience. Lyndon Johnson, when he allied himself with Martin Luther King, understood that people had to break the law as it was then understood to redeem the Constitution. And of course the anti-war movement of the 1960s had to break a lot of china.
Just as liberals, however queasily, need radicals, it’s also the case that radicals need liberals. Because drastic change ultimately needs to be enshrined as law.
Unlike some lefties of my generation, I never had a Marxist phase. I’ve always been a Roosevelt Democrat. When I was in graduate school, at the apex of the great postwar social settlement, Marxist concepts seemed silly. The proletariat was happily working within the system through powerful trade unions and the Democratic Party. The middle class was not immiserated; it was growing. Capitalism seemed to have been harnessed in a broad public interest.
But the postwar system of managed capitalism, that my generation assumed was the new normal, was in fact an anomaly. Since the 1980s, I haven’t become more Marxian, the world has become more Marxian. Concepts like the global reserve army of the unemployed, and the idea of hegemony of neoliberalism, no longer seem like stilted language, they describe reality.
It takes enduring continuous political struggle to keep enriching and expanding democracy, both for its own sake and to housebreak capitalism. That is a labor of Sisyphus. You roll the rock up the hill; and the rock tumbles back down the hill. But in Albert Camus’s celebrated essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, the last line is: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy. The work, and the joy, is in the struggle.”
If I had a credo, it would be “Sisyphus is happy.”
