"Tell me some good news," said my old friend Mike Miller, an indefatigable progressive and source of wise counsel. We were having a late afternoon coffee, talking politics and commiserating about the general state of political disengagement. It was the day the story would break about the pre-September 11 intelligence warnings.
Before I could collect my thoughts, Mike said, "Well, I'll give youthree pieces of good news. First, the living-wage campaign. It's making a realdifference, bubbling up from communities and students."
Second, Mike went on, the challenge to the conventional wisdom aboutglobalization is finally getting some traction. And third, the broad acceptance ofgays and lesbians is a heartening form of social progress that nobody would havepredicted two decades ago.
Where did this come from? Mike wondered. Are these trends related? And how dowe build on them?
Good questions. I said I'd sleep on them. After a fitful night, I can offersome tentative answers.
The advance of gay rights, I think, is the easiest to explain though thetrickiest politically. Millions of gay and lesbian Americans had the courage tocome out of the closet. Almost every straight American, we all discovered, had acolleague, family member, or friend who turned out to be gay. Lesbians and gayswere to be found even in the most uptight Republican families. The AIDS epidemic,on balance, engendered more compassion, not less. Gender politics became deeplypersonal: It was no longer possible, personally or politically, to demonizehomosexuals. Gay rights also comported with the deeply libertarian strain in theAmerican character.
But the political implications are largely disconnected from other recentgains for liberal values. Though it boggles the mind, there are plenty of gayRepublicans -- this despite the right's gay bashing and its hostility to domesticpartnership legislation, to hate-crimes laws, to expansions of civil rights,and to comprehensive, nondiscriminatory health coverage. If the right had itsway, lifesaving medicines for people with AIDS would lie beyond financial reachfor many, because insurance companies could dump people with the temerity to getsick. I have only good wishes for gay conservatives such as Andrew Sullivan asfellow citizens with full civil rights, but I confess bewilderment at theirpolitics.
The living-wage campaign and the redefinition of the trade warshave yielded an upsurge of organizing, the re-entry of class into politics, andthe reframing of what the globalism controversy is all about. This year,astonishingly, 45 of 50 Senate Democrats voted to open the president's tradenegotiating authority to floor amendments, a move that derails the entire premiseof fasttrack legislation. [See Harold Meyerson, "Senatorial Heresy"]
Though editorialists at The New York Times and The Washington Post still don't get it, most Democrats in Congress finally do: Today's trade disputes are no longer mostly about tariffs, quotas, or free entry of goods. They are about the ground rules for capitalism. Are there to be only property rights? What about the other rights that liberal democracies have fought for since the 1880s? This is also a debate about class, as it's a thin elite that benefits from laissez-faire globalism.
And though gay rights don't have much to do with global protest and theliving-wage campaign, these three issues do have one important thing in common:All were forced into mainstream politics by the determination and passion ofoutsiders, and all seemed to be impossible fringe issues until suddenly they wererespectable. That's probably the best news of all: Politics, despite appearances,is not an entirely closed club.
I went home from my afternoon coffee and turned on the news. The Bushadministration, I learned, had covered up the fact that it had received detailedwarnings about potential terrorist attacks. The Democrats were declaring thattheir commander in chief was no longer beyond accountability for his repeatedbungling. There would be investigations and hard questions.
This is still a democracy, after all. Good news, indeed.
