The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics
By Ted Halstead andMichael Lind. Doubleday, 272 pages, $24.95
The Next Agenda: Blueprint for a New Progressive Movement
Edited byRobert L.Borosage and Roger Hickey. Westview, 386 pages, $18.00
How the Left Can Win Arguments and Influence People: A Tactical Manual forPragmatic Progressives
By John K. Wilson. New York University Press, 252pages,$15.95
A Visionary Nation: Four Centuries of American Dreams and What LiesAhead
ByZachary Karabell. HarperCollins, 246 pages, $26.00
In the conventional wisdom, patriotism in American politics is thought to be aconservative impulse while the desire for strong, activist government isassociated with liberals. But think of all those blue-collar heroes who respondedto the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September: thefirefighters, police officers, and construction workers who led rescue andrecovery efforts. Where do they fit in politically?
Perhaps in what some are calling the "radical center." Beyond the familiarcategories of left and right, untold numbers of Americans are somewhere in themiddle. They are centrist in the sense that they represent a broad part of theAmerican mainstream. But some are radical, too, in that they are deeplydisapproving of the untrammeled privilege and unbalanced power that mars Americandemocracy.
In fact, political scientists have been contending for more than three decadesnow that there are two distinct political centers: a "moderate middle" thatconsists of upscale, socially liberal, and fiscally conservative citizens and itsmirror opposite, a "radical center" made up of people who are downscale, sociallyconservative, and economically populist. This latter group has fascinated someprogressives and repelled others ever since it became evident that theconstituency could swing wildly from supporting Robert Kennedy to backing GeorgeWallace in a period of months. The events of September 11 gave newvisibility--new symbolic strength--to the radical center in American politics,and progressives ought to be thinking about how to respond to the concerns ofthis important group.
Ted Halstead and Michael Lind have devoted theirthink tank, the New AmericaFoundation, to the concerns of the radical center and now have a book out thatelaborates on the politics of "the alienated majority." In the authors' eyes, theradical center is not the equivalent of the so-called Reagan Democrats of the1980s; Halstead and Lind find radical centrists among all Americans who feeldisengaged from the Republican and Democratic Parties. As swing voters, thisgroup can be politically potent on election day, but they tend to be lessinfluential in affecting day-to-day public policy.
Halstead and Lind deride the "Squishy Center," which habitually splits thedifference on policy disputes. They advocate a set of policies that departsharply from the status quo. On affirmative action, for example, Halstead andLind support need-based rather than race-based preferences--an idea that, withits whiff of class politics, is anathema to the political elite. Evidence from aWashington Post poll this summer suggests that they may be onto something. The poll found that huge majorities of whites oppose racial preferences--not just those who believe that racial discrimination is a thing of the past but also those who think that discrimination has not been conquered. Americans do want to take steps to address inequality of opportunity: There is consistent support for providing a leg up to all economically disadvantaged students. But racial preferences are unpopular.
And yet elected bodies are strongly supportive of traditional race-basedprograms. Though some courts are skeptical, most elite opinion is steadfast.Virtually all university presidents support racial preferences, and with thebacking of a coalition of civil-rights groups and big business, congressionalattempts to curtail preferences have been defeated in recent years. The Bushadministration has come out in support of a minority-contractors' set-asideprogram that is being contested in the courts; and to speed privatization ofpublic services, it has proposed a new preference benefiting minority- andfemale-owned firms that compete for federal contracts. Many recognized thisproposal as a clever way to create a split between unions and civil-rightsgroups. But the great irony is that President Bush's decisions to support andexpand affirmative-action programs--and thus buck mainstream public opinion--istaken by the media as a sign that he is a "compassionate conservative," a"moderate," or a "centrist." (The Washington press corps is overwhelmingly"moderate middle," according to polls.)
Other parts of the domestic agenda presented in The Radical Center are equally provocative. On education, Halstead and Lind would provide for federal equalization of education spending and allow students to use government money to pay for public or private schools of their choice. Their tax-reform agenda includes replacing state sales taxes with a progressive national consumption tax, simplifying but retaining a progressive income tax, abolishing the corporate-income tax, restoring the inheritance tax, and reforming the charitable tax deduction to favor aid for the needy (soup kitchens) over cultural causes important to the elite (opera).
Halstead and Lind decry the lack of universal health-care coverage and callfor a Swiss-style system of mandatory medical self-insurance (the way we nowrequire auto insurance for drivers) supplemented by a safety net for those whoneed it. On pensions the authors favor abolishing the intergenerational system oftransfer payments under Social Security and replacing it with a system ofcompulsory savings at a 7 percent rate, combined with a means-tested safety net.This plan of "progressive privatization" would eliminate pension-tax breaks thatnow benefit the well-off and would provide government matches of savings on asliding scale.
To address wealth inequality, the authors support what they call atwenty-first-century equivalent to the Homestead Act: They would endow everychild, at birth, with a $6,000 nest egg that could be used for education,housing, health, business, or retirement. Their election-reform agenda emphasizesa system of voting that allows rank-ordering of preferences--a scheme that wouldmove us beyond domination by two parties.
Whatever the viability and advisability of these reforms individually, theirstrength lies in the authors' abiding concern about equity. They want to exposeand root out the often hidden subsidies for the wealthy. Will the wealthy evergive up these advantages? Halstead and Lind take the long view: "Our goal is notto predict the policies of the next administration but to propose the policies ofthe next generation." And they point to history to show the possibility ofchange. They remind us, for example, that while a national consumption tax mightseem unlikely today, an income tax probably did too in the days when the bulk offederal revenues derived from tariffs on imports. All in all, Halstead and Lindhave done a superb job of outlining a provocative starting point for the radicalcenter.
The three other books under review here provide a more traditional andpredictably liberal set of policies, but each offers important amendments toHalstead and Lind's programs--especially when it comes to campaign finance,organized labor, and the role of markets in American life.
Halstead and Lind largely dismiss the importance of campaign finance reformand spend little time on the topic other than to endorse, in passing, free mediatime for candidates. This seems odd, since our current system of financingcampaigns goes a long way toward explaining why the political preferences of theradical center are not translated into public policy--why, for instance, Congresspicks eliminating the inheritance tax, not expanding health coverage, as itspriority.
According to Ellen S. Miller and Micah L. Sifry's excellent chapter in TheNext Agenda: Blueprint for a New Progressive Movement (edited by Robert L. Borosage and Roger Hickey), 81 percent of campaign contributions come from the top 6 percent of Americans ranked by income. Surveys of donors find that they are the opposite of the radical center--more socially liberal and economically conservative than the American public. Miller and Sifry note that "no other single factor explains as well the upward redistribution of wealth engineered by both parties in the past twenty years."
Campaign finance, says John Wilson, author of How the Left Can WinArguments and Influence People, explains the central paradox of American politics: As voters have become more progressive--on civil rights, the environment, gender equality, and a host of other issues--both the Republican and Democratic Parties have shifted to the right. Wilson observes wryly that "America is a capitalist country, and nothing is more capitalist than its elections." Campaign finance reform, he persuasively argues, "isn't just another important issue; it's the foundation for changing how every progressive issue gets heard in Washington and around the country." According to Wilson, the problem is not merely that Republicans outraise Democrats, for even when Democrats keep pace with Republicans in raising money, the cost of doing so is enormous: "While most Republicans are simply getting paid to vote their consciences, many Democrats are actively selling out in order to get the money they need for reelection."
The Radical Center is also curiously silent about the importance of organizedlabor in the fight for a fairer society. Halstead and Lind do identify thedecline in union influence as one of the sources of growing wealth and incomeinequality; but they outline no program for strengthening the labor movement andnormally speak of labor as just another special interest.
But if there is a radical center in America, organized labor is at its center. Writing in The Next Agenda, David Moberg explains that unions are crucial to making democracy work well in at least two respects: (1) they help to address wage distribution and ameliorate the large economic chasms that can eat away at democracy, and (2) they provide the main counterweight to large corporate interests in the political process.
Moberg notes that organized labor's decline--to its lowest share of theworkforce since the early 1930s (just 13.9 percent in 1999)--cannot be explainedby worker indifference alone. Surveys find that at least one-third of nonunionworkers would like to join unions. The central problem is that current penaltiesfor firing workers who try to create a union are so weak that companies routinelyflout the law in order to kill organizing efforts. According to a National LaborRelations Board study, between 1992 and 1997, employers fired or punished 125,000American workers for supporting a union.
Moberg notes the irony that although important advances have been made tooutlaw discrimination based on race, gender, age, disability, and sexualorientation, "at the same time it has become easier and less costly for employersto discriminate against workers for acting collectively and forming a union."Illegal firings by private companies help to explain why the private sector isabout four times less likely to be unionized than the public sector is (9.4percent in the private sector as opposed to 37.3 percent in the public sector,where employers abide by the law).
Halstead and Lind are ardent fans of market mechanisms; they say that the onedesign criterion that guides their proposals above all else is choice. But asZachary Karabell notes in A Visionary Nation, markets have their limitations as well as their strengths. Karabell argues that each era in American history has been guided by a reigning theory (from the Puritan vision of a "City upon the Hill" to the New Deal and the Great Society) and that today's dominant idea is the preeminence of the market. During the 2000 election, Karabell notes, "dips in the stock market were the focus of more cultural concern than who would be the next president of the United States." The GTE Airfone embedded on the back of airline seats displays the latest Dow figure, while the billboard screen at baseball games flashes the Nasdaq report between innings.
Halstead and Lind's devotion to markets leads them to support school vouchersand Social Security privatization. To their credit, both proposals try to addressissues of equity often ignored by conservative proponents of these types ofmarket-based reforms. But the authors ultimately collide with the problem thatmarkets are built to promote inequality. On school vouchers, for example, whileHalstead and Lind are right to say that the current system of schooling is unfairbecause it gives choice only to those who can afford certain neighborhoods orprivate-school tuition, there's a good deal of evidence to suggest that voucherswould make things worse, not better. School-voucher plans provide choice not toparents but to schools. Schools generally take those children who are easiest toeducate--disproportionately, those who are wealthy and white. The lesson ofchoice plans in Chile, Sweden, and New Zealand is that unregulated choicepromotes greater segregation and deprives low-income children of a vitaleducational resource: well-motivated peers and their parents. Greater choicewithin the public sphere can be helpful in cutting the cord between residentialsegregation and student assignment that underlies much public-school inequality.But public-school choice must be regulated or it will further stratify schoolsand leave the poor worse off than ever.
In the post-September 11 world, these four books,taken as a group, can helpdefine a new progressivism that is tougher and more credible than orthodoxliberalism yet rejects the business-based centrism of such groups as theDemocratic Leadership Council. This progressivism would nurture the best elementsof radical centrism, which is likely to constitute a growing force in the newworld that we find ourselves in. Drawing on a synthesis of views not reallychampioned since the death of Albert Shanker, the legendary teachers' unionleader, this new progressivism would emphasize democratic values more than marketvalues and would seek to reach working-class people of all racial and ethnicbackgrounds about concerns that for too long have been ignored by both majorpolitical parties.
Moberg's argument on behalf of organized labor looks good these days.Americans were exposed to a different view of unions in the hours and daysfollowing the attacks. Organized labor's stereotype as selfish, overpaid, andunwilling to do dangerous but necessary work as a violation of "union rules" wasupended not only by the police and other rescue officials who gave their livesbut also the unionized hard-hat construction workers--electricians and carpentersand ironworkers--who lined up to volunteer under hazardous conditions.
The special appeal to "solidarity" that unions made in the wake of theterrorist attacks had less resonance with nonunion workers. The language aboutneeding to help because their "brothers and sisters" were trapped in thebuildings may have sounded odd to many Americans, but it is central to theidentity of union members. The ability of union officials to rally and organizemembers on short notice was a reminder that unions are more than economiccartels: They are vital civic associations. That these workers quickly fell intoan orderly process for searching, clearing, and removing debris, bucket bybucket, is also no accident: This was organized labor. Just as America welcomed home veterans after World War II with a GI Bill to show appreciation for their sacrifice, so Americans might want to give something to police, firefighters, construction workers, and their unions beyond tribute ceremonies and public accolades. Maybe steps will be taken to improve the wages of average workers, who now make 531 times less than what the average CEO makes.
Karabell's critique of a culture that worships individualism, the market, andCEOs also looks good now that solidarity, volunteerism, and blue-collar workersare back in favor. Markets can't fight the war on terrorism or provide securityfor airlines. School-voucher plans that divide us now look dangerous as we'rereminded that schools are not just instruments of academic achievement but alsoplay a crucial role in binding the nation together.
Halstead and Lind's unfashionable commitment to colorblind policies holds upwell, too. The New York Times noted after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center that many people of color in New York have started thinking of themselves as just plain American. And the general tolerance of Americans toward Arab citizens marks a stark contrast to the response after the Pearl Harbor attack. Even as the nation is gripped by a war mentality, a southern Republican president has taken laudable steps to denounce prejudice toward Islamic Americans. He has done so not just for obvious geopolitical reasons but because fighting discrimination is now part of America's mainstream credo.
None of these books says much about foreign policy, but it is here--and on theissue of affirmative action--that progressives may mistakenly spurn the radicalcenter. As Michael Kazin has pointed out, recent years have seen a comingtogether of labor (plus other elements of the radical center) and students (plusother elements of the activist left) on issues like fair trade and the livingwage. But the current debate about war and patriotism after September 11 mayspell the end of that collaboration as some on the left search for reasons why somany people hate America. Efforts to understand legitimate grievances about U.S.policies are wholly appropriate. But progressives will lose the radical center,perhaps for years to come, unless they acknowledge that the war on terrorism isfundamentally just--or at least avoid a retreat into a reflexive position thatAmerica is somehow to blame for everything that goes wrong in the world.
At the end of the day, concerns about democracy are what binds together thedisparate planks of the radical center's domestic agenda: a strong labormovement, a commitment to public education, a defense of the universalantidiscrimination principle. The promotion of human rights and democracy abroadwill displease the right when it threatens access to markets in China and theleft when it means imposing an "ethnocentric" set of values in the third world.But it is a powerful and important principle that the radical center takesseriously--as does much of the left.
While the three planes that slammed into the Pentagon and the twin towers ofthe World Trade Center wreaked havoc on those symbols of our military might andour powerful capitalist economy, there was perhaps even more poignant symbolismin the failure of the fourth plane to reach its target, which was believed to beone of the icons of our democracy in Washington, D.C. That plane appears to havebeen thwarted by the collective action of ordinary American citizens, who,according to news reports, actually voted on their plan to subdue the hijackersbefore they executed it in flight over Pennsylvania.
A progressive appeal to the radical center that is based on something asradical and centrist as implementing democracy will mix up traditional politicalalliances but honor enduring values. A tough liberalism aimed at the radicalcenter beats compassionate conservatism directed at the moderate middle. And itdeserves to.
