FUTURE OF AMERICAN PROGRESSIVISM · 2017-01-18 · 2 THE FUTUREOFAMERICAN PROGRESSIVISM ment,austerity,andsacrifice.Therearemanyobstacles andsurprises alongtheway.However,the direction

THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN PROGRESSIVISM

RQB ERTO M ANGAyiRA

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BEACON PRESS BOSTON

Beacon Press25 Beacon StreetBoston, Massachusetts 02108-2892www.beacon.org

Beacon Press booksare published under the auspices ofthe Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

(C) 1998 by Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Cornel WestAll rights reservedPrinted in the United States of America

03 02 01 oo 99 6 4

This book is printed on recycled acid-free paper that contains at least 20 percentpostconsumer waste and meets the uncoated paper ANSI/NISO specifications forpermanence as revised in 1992.

Text design by Elizabeth Elsas

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Unger, Roberto Mangabeira.The future ofAmerican progressivism an initiative for political and economic

reform Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Cornel West.p. cm.

ISBN 0-8070-4326-5 (hardcover alk. paper)ISBN 0-8070-4327-3 (paper)i. United States-Politics and government-1993- 2. United States-Economicpolicy-1993- 3. Progressivism (United States politics) I. West, Cornel. II. Title.JK271.U533 1998320.973-dc2i 98-26791

CONTENTS

THE HUMANIZATION OF THE INEVITABLE

2 THE AMERICAN RELIGION OF POSSIBILITY 6

3 THE BURDEN OF AMERICAN HISTORY ON AMERICAN HOPES 14

4 INSTITUTIONAL EXPERIMENTS AND AMERICAN HOPES 23

5 THE FRUSTRATION OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 33

6 VANGUARDS AND REARGUARDS IN THE NEW WORLD ECONOMY 42

7 THE RECENT PAST OF AMERICAN PROGRESSIVISM 47

8 AMERICAN PROGRESSIVISM REORIENTED 56TaxesPensions, Saving, and InvestmentChildren and EducationRacial Discrimination and Class InjusticeEconomic Vanguardism outside the VanguardAn Organized Society and an Empowered Labor ForcePolitics, Money, and Media

TION OF

Open almost any mainstream newspaper or news mag-azine in the world today, and you will find the news ofthe world shaped by the same story line. The line goeslike this. After the collapse of communism, thinkingpeople all over the planet finally came to agree that thereis only one reliable road to freedom and prosperity. Toenter this road, every country must establish some ver-

sion ofthe political and economic institutions that havelong been secure in the United States and much ofWest-ern Europe. The move often requires painful adjust-

2 THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN PROGRESSIVISM

ment, austerity, and sacrifice. There are many obstaclesand surprises along the way. However, the direction ofthe path is not in doubt.

The social misery that may come, initially, with

conformity to the path triggers a populist backlash.People rebel against the increasing inequality, jobless-ness, or insecurity that taking the one true way some-

times causes. The rebellion is likely to be most vigorousin the societies that must travel furthest to reach thefork toward the right road: the developing countries

of Latin America and Africa or the postcommunistcountries of Eastern Europe and Asia. There, a ragtagassortment of neocommunists, nationalists, and dema-gogues try, usually without much success, to ride thewave of popular resentment. Even Western Europe,with its entrenched social-democratic traditions, needsadjustments. Inefficient industries, high unemploy-ment, and unsustainable deficits make European lead-ers of the center-left as well as the center-right anx-

ious to reconcile European-style social protections withAmerican-style market flexibility.

Their efforts speak to a universal concern. The doc-trine of the one true way claims to describe the in-

evitable in politics and economics. Insofar as possible,

however, the inevitable, according to those who tell this

story, should be humanized: the arrangements imple-menting the inevitable should compensate for individ-ual hardship. By combining adjustments to the freemarket with programs to help the poor and the jobless,without destroying their incentive to work, we ensure

decency and prevent the populist backlash from gettingout of hand. Thus, the humanization of the inevitable,the attempt to make the one true way less cruel to thosewho suffer on the road to freedom and prosperity, be-comes the watchword of chastened progressives every-where. Their program becomes the program oftheir ad-versaries-with a discount, and a falling one at that.

There is, however, at least one country in the worldwhere the doctrine of the one true way and its compan-ion, the humanization of the inevitable, remain inse-

cure. That country is the winner of the Cold War; it

enjoys unrivaled cultural, political, and economic lead-ership in the world; and is supposedly the very embod-iment of the one true way. That country is the United

States.

The oldest and most American element ofAmerican life

is the religion ofindividual and collective possibility: the

THE HUMANIZATION OF THE INEVITABLE 3


belief that Americans can make themselves and remaketheir society, that they can make everything new. TheAmerican dream includes a middle-class standard ofliving for everyone, with economic independence andsecurity, as well as opportunites for people’s children to

achieve what their parents failed to accomplish or ob-tain. It also relies upon a more intangible but immenselypowerful idea of freedom from being bossed around inone’s choice of life, tastes, and beliefs.

Today, however, at the apogee of its world powerand in the midst ofan economythriving as rarelybefore,most working Americans feel more squeezed than ever,and convinced that life will be harder for them than itwas for their parents. Even politically active and edu-cated elites feel incapable of addressing, much less solv-ing, many ofthe basic problems ofthe country, from in-adequate health care and education to the social andracial apartheid of inner-city poverty, from increasinginequality of wealth and income to abstention from thevote and indifference to politics. The practical conse-

quence ofthis national failure is that Americans despairof collective solutions to their collective problems, andalternate between resenting the incapable politics oftheir country and blaming themselves for failure to suc-

ceed at a game that so often seems rigged against them.

The young in the elite universities-the youth ofan im-perial power-feel the more disenchanted the more se-

rious they are, as if they had been born at the wrongplace and the wrong time, as if everything interesting in

the world were happening somewhere else. The size ofthe country, and the decentralization of power and in-

fluence within it, play a part in their frustration: almostany measure ofinfluence an individual can hope to gainseems dwarfed by the sheer bigness and variety of theUnited States. So does the absence from national life ofanything other than a politics of inconclusive bargain-ing among organized interests about minor fix-its. Inthis American circumstance the triumphalism of thedoctrine of the one true way rings hollow. National tri-

umph goes hand in hand with individual impotence.

THE HUMANIZATION OF THE INEVITABLE 5

CM RELIG ION

Speaking in Madison Square Garden during his unsuc-

cessful campaign for reelection as president of theUnited States, Herbert Hoover summarized the quin-tessential American self-conception when he said: "It is

by the maintenance of equality of opportunity andtherefore of a society absolutely fluid in freedom of themovement ofits human particles that our individualismdeparts from the individualism of Europe. We resent

class distinction because there can be no rise for the in-

dividual through the frozen strata of classes and no

stratification of class can take place in a mass livened bythe free rise of its particles Not even the people stand-ing in bread lines outside could impress upon Hooverthe incongruity of seeing the country as a collection offree-floating particles rising and falling in an unresistingsocial medium.

Hoover was describing a facet of the American reli-

gion of possibility. In America, men and women haveplaced hope above memory. They have believed that thefuture remains open to national renewal as well as to in-dividual self-transformation. They have refused to be-lieve that anything in their situation condemns them to

languish in permanent poverty, dependency, and weak-ness. They have rejected the idea that their country waslocked by its history into an orbit of familiar solutionsto recurrent problems. They have insisted that, both as

individuals and together, people can confront and de-feat the forces that prevent them from living more fullyand freely.

Hoover’s claims highlight the social side of this ideaof possibility. It is the belief that everyone can lift them-selves up from the bottom, and win power to shape theirimmediate circumstances. In their own lifetime and thelifetimes of their children, they can escape penury andsubjection, and achieve a measure of independence. A

THE AMERICAN RELIGION OF POSSIBILITY 7


family farm, a small independent business, or a stable,respectable job in an organization or profession, havebeen the most traditional bases of such an indepen-dence. According to this idea of social opportunity, classdistinctions in America have never become so rigid as toprevent the rise of the individual.

Individual effort remains the primary instrument

of self-empowerment. There may often be obstacles to

this free movement of the "human particles" that indi-vidual self-reliance is unable, unassisted, to overcome.

Collective action may then become necessary: peopleworking together in their communities, jobs, churches,and clubs. To be effective, according to the dominantversion of the American religion of possibility, such a

joint effort must be uncoerced. Above all, it must never

be commandeered and orchestrated by government ex-

cept in extreme situations or over a narrow, well-defined

range of problems.According to this view, voluntary association does

not suffice to make self-reliance effective for the broadmasses of ordinary Americans. Governmental action

may also be needed to make self-reliance work. Thereare many basic needs-like the requirement of univer-sal public education-that will always demand initiative

by government. Sometimes a great crisis, or the accu-

mulated effect of slow but profound changes in the or-

ganization of the society and the economy, may requirean expansion of governmental activism. In its form andscope, however, such an expansion should be careful to

respect the primacy of individual initiative and free as-

sociation.

There has almost always been just enough oppor-tunity in America to make this facet ofthe American re-

ligion of possibility plausible. Each epoch in American

history witnesses its own paradoxical developments,extending social mobility in some respects while limit-

ing it in others. Today, for example, there is evidence

that, while the differences between rich and poor havewidened, the role of inherited advantage, the hereditarytransmission ofproperty and inherited educational op-portunity, has diminished.

The admissions practices ofuniversities and the hir-

ing practices ofprofessional firms and big business haveslowly extended the reign of meritocracy. The merito-

cratic opening may be less significant for members ofthe working class, with the notable exception of thestrengthening of restraints on discrimination againstpeople defined by the physically inscribed characteris-tics of race, gender, or handicap. However, working-class men and women may find it harder than ever to



grasp the structure of privilege and inequality in thecountry. The institutional complexity and regional vari-ety of this structure, its wealth of manifestations andqualifications, keep it from being readily visible.

Faith in the power of the individual to better his or

her life is the most prominent element in the Americanreligion of possibility, but it is not the only or even themost important one. That religion also includes some-

thing more basic and something more ambitious: a

belief in the unlimited potential of practical problemsolving and a faith in democracy as a terrain on whichordinary men and women can become strongly definedpersonalities, in full possession of themselves.

The United States is a country of tinkerers. To holdthe American religion of possibility is to believe thateach ofthe problems that oppress, weaken, and frightenus as individuals can be confronted, problem by prob-lem, through human effort and ingenuity. Americansresist seeing particular problems as the manifestation ofhidden, hard constraints. They believe that the terrors

ofvast problems yield to the effects ofmany small solu-tions.

Use little things to break big things, says Saint Paul,describing an essential feature ofthe psychologyofhope.

For hope is more the consequence of action than itscause. As the experience ofthe spectator favors fatalism,so the experience of the agent produces hope. A prefer-ence for acting over watching has been the most impor-tant consequence ofthe problem-solving attitude.

Social opportunity as a condition and problemsolving as an attitude fail to describe the most potentand fundamental strand in the American religion ofpossibility: faith in the genius of ordinary men andwomen. Walt Whitman, in the secular bible of democ-racy, Democratic Vistas^ cited John Stuart Mill’s discus-sion of the twin attributes of a great nation living underliberty, redescribing them as central ambitions ofAmerican democracy: first, a large variety of characterand second, full play for human nature to expand itselfin numberless and even conflicting directions. The ca-

pacity for strong and original experience, rather thanbeing confined to a small number of geniuses, heroes,and eccentrics, should become widespread among or-

dinary people.This belief in the elevation of ordinary humanity

contrasts with the pressures to conformity that haveplayed so powerful a role in American life. Intoler-ance of actual difference-difference of experience and



vision-flourished amid the celebration of outwardgroup distinctions. Yet the idea persists that no closedelite enjoys a privileged hold upon the capacity for ex-

traordinary effort, experience, and achievement.The soul ofthe ordinary man andwoman hides vast

recesses of intensity. The sadness of much human lifelies in the disproportion between this intensity and theaccidental or unworthy objects on which people so of-ten lavish their intense commitments. That this reserve

capacity for devotion and obsession can be tapped pro-ductively, for the good of the community as well as theindividual, has always been a major tenet of the Ameri-can religion of possibility. Democracy, Americans un-

derstand, depends upon demophilia, love of the people.Here we encounter another subtle and paradoxical

element ofthe American faith in the possible. A distrustof collective enthusiasms, especially when they seek to

work through the power of government, has alwaysbeen an integral part of the American faith. Thus, thatfaith contains a basis for the "countermajoritarian re-

straints" so famously prized byAmerican constitutionaltradition.

Trouble forAmerican democracyand for theAmer-ican imagination of the possible arises when disap-pointment with the results of popular democracy leads

to a perversion to which American democracy has oftenbeen subject: the effort to use the countermajoritarianpower of a judicial elite to impose through judicial law-making what the people through their elected represen-tatives are unwilling to achieve themselves.

There then begins a self-reinforcing cycle of popu-lar political disempowerment. The oppressed minori-

ties or social victims are defined as the wards of a cadreof enlightened and benevolent notables. As politicsshrinks in scope and wanes in practical effect, the peo-ple lose interest in it and seek to cut their losses. They re-

sist, for example, the substantial tax take required to

fund the programs ofan activist government. The polit-ical incapacity of the people becomes a self-confirmingprophecy. What starts as a way to protect the many-sidedness ofthe future against the single-mindedness ofthe present ends as an outright expression of demopho-bia, fear of the people.

We shall later askwhether the present constitutional

arrangements of the country strike the right balancebetween demophilic hopes and demophobic anxieties,

and strike it in the way most faithful to the Americanreligion of possibility.


CHAPJ

The religion of individual and collective possibility in

the United States has always suffered under three greatburdens: the enduring power of hierarchies of class,race, and gender as well as the inhibiting effect of their

entanglement in each other; the sometimes narrow-

minded obsession with individual self-reliance and self-

improvement that obscures the dependence of individ-ual life chances upon collective arrangements; and the

failure to submit the country’s basic institutions to theexperimentalist impulse that is otherwise so strong inAmerica.

When asked to what social class they belong, Amer-icans in overwhelming numbers answer that they be-long to the middle class. The truth, however, is that theUnited States has a relatively well-defined class struc-

ture, if by class structure we mean the division of peo-ple into large social groups, shaped by the twin forcesof property and educational advantage transmitted

through families. There are four main social classes inthe United States: a class of high-power professionalsand big-business executives, a small-business class, a

working class (with both a blue-collar and a white-collar segment), and a racially stigmatized underclass.Each of these classes is marked by distinctive experi-ences of power and powerlessness at work, characteris-tic lifestyles and self-images, and access to different

types ofjobs and to the levels ofwealth and income thatgo along with them.

In American history, the greatest experience of so-

cial mobility has been the frequency with which thechildren of farmhands and industrial workers becamewhite-collar workers, moving from the blue-collar to

the white-collar segment of the working class. Recent

THE BURDEN OF AMERICAN HISTORY ON AMERICAN HOPES 15


studies suggest that in the last fifteen years the influenceof inherited advantage upon individual life chances hasdiminished (thanks in part to the more meritocratic se-lection procedures of universities, big business, and theprofessions), while economic inequality has increased.A large part of the population remains below the eco-nomic and educational threshold it must pass to profitfrom merit-based selection procedures. It is a benefit toAmericans that, like Herbert Hoover, they deny legiti-macy to class. It is a detriment that, also like him, theyhave usually been unwilling or unable to recognize itsforce in their national life. The basic design of the classsystem has remained as stable in American reality as ithas been clouded in American consciousness.

The most important complication of the Americanclass system is the unique way in which it has combinedwith racial oppression and prejudice. Race has alwaysbeen America’s rawest nerve and most explosive issue-as manifest in our Civil War and uncivil urban upris-ings. Indigenous peoples. Latinos, and Asians have beenintegral to the making ofthe country from the begining,yet the presence of black people often overshadows thistruth. The legacy ofwhite supremacy affects them all de-spite the centrality of black subordination in Americandiscourses of race.

The common problems ofwhite, black, brown, red,and yellow working people came to be hidden by theracial divisions that set them apart. Needless to say, thevicious legacies of male supremacy and homophobiacontinue to plague us. The historical weight ofclass andrace appears indirectly in stubborn divisions and

many-sided inhibitions. The progressive forces in thecountry have been faced at every turn with a paralyzingdilemma in which they remain caught to this day. Ifthey seek to redress racial injustice before class injus-tice, they risk helping the elites of the oppressed races

while leaving the rank and file sunk in poverty, igno-rance, and exclusion. At the same time, they excite re-

sentments that prevent the formation of a progressivemajority of working-class people of all races. If, on theother hand, they insist upon dealing with racial andclass injustices simultaneously, they risk sacrificing thefeasible good to the unreachable best: support for this

more ambitious program may fail to build while racial

oppression may go unchallenged.Black slavery, in particular, inflicted uponAmerican

democracy a wound from which it has never fully re-

covered. Two things have always seemed impossible in

America. One is to keep the descendants of the Africanslaves chained and resigned to their chains; the other is



to treat them as equals to white Americans. Even today,under the disguise of thick political pieties, blacks re-

main the "problem people" of which Du Bois spoke,their very existence in the United States a rebuke and a

threat. With the failure of the early attempt during Re-construction to liberate the freed slaves from the eco-nomic and educational consequences of their enslave-ment, blacks were abandoned to a subjugation fromwhich half ofthem have only recently emerged.

If the first constraint upon the American religion ofpossibility has been the poisonous mixture of race andclass, the second has been a narrow-minded conceptionof self-reliance and self-improvement as the popularpublic morality of the country. Americans have wantedand claimed to be men and women who invent andcrown themselves. Some of their most characteristicthinkers-from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Ralph WaldoEllison-have taught a doctrine of individual self-re-liance pushed to the point of denying connection andvulnerability. Thinking of themselves as having madean all but definitive escape from the old European his-tory of classes, privileges, and ideologies, Americanshave often found it hard to combine an ethic of per-sonal striving with practical insight into the collectiveand institutional limits to their efforts at lifting them-

selves up> individual by individual and family by family.In the absence of such insight they have regularly oscil-lated between blaming themselves for all their prob-lems and attributing them to the malevolent conspira-cies of the people who run the show in politics andbusiness.

The denial of need-of the raw neediness of everyhuman being-and the obsession with control-con-trol of whatever makes us vulnerable to others-haveinspired endless practices of physical and pyschologi-cal self-improvement, from bodybuilding to popularFreudianism, while sustaining a low-level hysteria aboutelementary human drives and weaknesses, as witnessedin our national obsession with sexual scandal. No won-

der that in the United States, violence, the rage of con-trol, has often seemed more acceptable than sex, a doorto vulnerability. No wonder the unequaled private gen-erosity ofAmericans, expressed in a willingness to givetime as well as money to those in need, has coexisted

with an unwillingness to acknowledge public obliga-tions of social solidarity.

The third taint upon the religion ofpossibility in theUnited States has been the reluctance of Americans to

subject their basic institutional arrangements to the ex-

perimentalist impulse so vital in so many aspects of



American life. Faith in the capacity of ordinary peopleto solve practical problems has been one of the most

striking characteristics ofthe country. The United Statesis rich and powerful because it is a country of experi-menters. Motivated, sustained, and cumulative tinker-

ing with institutional arrangements is an indispensabletool ofdemocratic experimentalism, ofimprovisationalreform, ofjazzlike public action.

Americans, however, have been willing to use thistool only under the extreme pressure of crisis and cata-

strophe. There have been three great periods of institu-tional innovation in American history: the foundationof the Republic, the Civil War and Reconstruction, andthe New Deal. In each, national leaders won support forinstitutional experiments from an energized majority.After the first of these three periods of collective cre-ation, however, the country has been attracted to theidea that, at the time of its independence, it came closeto the natural and necessary form of a free society.

According to this powerful strand in Americanideas, the United States was different less because of itsdevotion to the religion of possibility than because ithad early achieved a fix on the institutional form of afree society: Hoover’s natural space of the rising andfalling individuals. There were ordeals to undergo-the

terrible burden of slavery and its aftermath, a massive

economic failure, or the outbreak of war in Europe-and crisis might require adjustment. But such innova-

tions as were needed to improve society would resultmainly from the independent initiative of people in

their businesses or the voluntary association of individ-uals in their communities. Exceptions like the G.I. Bill orCivil Rights Bill, triggered by grassroots groups like theAmerican Legion or black churches, prove the rule.

A small number of major American thinkers, likeThomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Henry George,W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and John Dewey,tried to convince Americans to lift the exemption fromexperimentalism they accorded to their institutions,and to trade in some bad American exceptionalism forsome good American experimentalism. Their message,however, was only selectively heard, even by the pro-gressive movements in American history whose rigid,ideological grids often overlook the complexity and ex-

perimental impulse ofAmerican life.

IfAmerican progressivism is to be reborn today andto carry forward its work, if it is to keep the religion ofpossibility alive and loosen the constraints that racial

and gender oppression and class hierarchy impose uponAmerican democracy, if it is to go beyond the human-



ization of the inevitable to a better state of freedom andpossibility, it must hear that message of democratic ex-

perimentalism more clearly. Progressives must presentto the country a reform program that looks neitherbackward to the perpetuation of the liberal social pro-grams nor sideways to the softening of the conservative

free-market agenda but forward to a practical vision ofthe reenergizing of democratic politics and the democ-ratizing of the market economy in America.

OPES

A major contention of this book is that Americans

should use the tools of institutional experimentalism to

rethink and rebuild each strand in their religion of pos-sibility: the hope of social opportunity and mobility forthe individual; the hope that practical ingenuity can re-

solve, one by one, the problems people face; and thehope that under democracy individual men andwomencan achieve the largeness of vision and experience thatless democratic civilizations have reserved for the ex-


ceptional few. Our message is that unless Americans

prove themselves willing to be as open-minded aboutthe institutional arrangements of the country as theyhave been about almost everything else they will con-

tinue to find their hopes frustrated. It is not enough to

rebel against the lack of justice unless we also rebelagainst the lack of imagination.

The structure ofsociety matters to each ofthe defin-ing American hopes. Practices and institutions makethis structure what it is. It is not just the natural result ofthe many distinct practical constraints Americans havefaced in dealing with their problems. Nor is it the ex-

pression ofan overarching system that would need to bechanged, if it could be changed at all, in one fell swoop.

The hope of social mobility-the ability of the de-termined individual to climb the ladder of class distinc-

tions-depends upon the economic and educational re-

sources at the disposal ofeach individual as well as uponthe barriers of privilege, discrimination, and exclusionhe or she must face. For much of their history, Ameri-cans have been reluctant to guarantee individuals morethan the bare minimum of such resources. They havefeared that such an assurance would smother individual

responsibility and self-reliance under a heavy blanket ofgovernmental paternalism.

Theyhave sold themselves short. Theyhave failed tounderstand the manyways in which the bestowal ofthisbasic economic and cultural equipment can be recon-

ciled with a bias toward risk taking, a commitment to

competition, and an acknowledgment of the consider-able inequalities born of competition. The details ofthealternative approaches make all the difference.

The essence of the progressive idea today should liein the conviction that the advance of the economy to-

ward greater flexibility and decentralization can gohand in hand with a strengthening of individual initia-

tives and capabilities. Instead of trying to give peoplesomething close to tenure in their present jobs, we

should seek to assure them the means with which to

thrive in the midst of change. Instead ofgranting a vari-

ety of interests-workers, consumers, and local com-

munities as well as business owners-veto power over

what businesses do, we should broaden decentralizedaccess to productive resources and opportunities. Weshould recognize that such a marriage ofeconomic flex-ibility and individual empowerment can flourish onlyin the context of a more organized citizenry and a more

energized polity than Americans have yet built.The relation of the core rights and resources every

individual should enjoy to the restless experiments of a

INSTITUTIONAL EXPERIMENTS AND AMERICAN HOPES 25


more vibrant democracy and a more diversified marketeconomy is like the relation between the love a parentgives a child and the willingness ofthe child to run risksfor the sake of transformation and self-transformation.People must be economicallyand culturallyequipped to

act as effective citizens and workers. They must also beand feel secure in a haven of protected vital interests ifthey are to face instability and innovation without fear.

The belief that ordinary men and women can be-come extraordinary, and find light in the shadowyworldof the commonplace-this essential faith of Americandemocracy-depends for its vindication upon the prac-tical arrangements of life in America. We have alreadyremarked that this idea can readily be perverted into a

conception of self-salvation that is forgetful of solidar-

ity and intolerant ofthe raw neediness ofhuman beings,especially of their neediness for one another. That iswhen the drive for control, power, and distance takesover in the souls ofAmerican men and women.

The search for self-enhancement casts a longshadow in the desperate loneliness that has so oftenhaunted Americans in the midst of their unrivaled ca-

pacity for teamwork. Many observers of American life,from the early history of the country to today, havenoted the tendency of Americans to inhabit a middle

distance, bathing all social relations in a cheerful imper-sonal friendliness and standing aloof even while stand-

ing together.It would be foolish to put the sharp pain of human

disconnection entirely down to the practical arrange-ments of society: Democracy does better at destroying

our illusions about the most intractable causes of hu-

man suffering than at destroying those causes them-

selves. However, democracy also thrives on a moral psy-

chology recognizing that we are embodied spirits and

that the practical circumstances of social life touch even

the most intimate recesses of private experience.Much in the practical arrangements of American

society turns the social experience of an ordinary

American into a series of those encounters that, ac-

cording to Madame de Stael, rob us of solitude without

affording us company. In such an experience, peoplefeel alone even when they work together. They cannot

then achieve the union of self-development and soli-

darity that has been the great moral dream of their

democracy. By reforming their institutions to expandopportunities for small-scale social reconstruction, bymaking it easier for people to remake their contexts

while doing their jobs, Americans can have a better

chance to realize this dream.



Institutional innovation is equally important to theother element in the American religion of possibility:the habit ofproblem solving. Americans have tradition-ally gone about solving problems one at a time. Theyhave been distrustful of the idea that their problems at

any given moment fit together into a single scheme.Thus, the temper of American progressive movementshas been simple and sincere: majorities against minori-ties, poor against rich, powerless against powerful. Sucha sensibility is impatient with the idea of combined andcumulative institutional change. The obstacles it is will-ing to recognize are visible: forceful interests rather thanhidden assumptions or unchallenged arrangements.

The attitudes of practical progressives are mirroredin the self-image ofmany a practical politician. The ex-reformer, like the would-be reformer, distrusts, as ro-mantic or dangerous, talk of ideologies, institutionalalternatives, and citizens’ action. He may see politics asthe management of many discrete problems, to be ac-complished by patient negotiation with the organized,contradictory interests controlling the national agenda.He may be resigned to low-energy democracy as theonly democracy there really is.

The policy discussion permitted by such a mental-ity takes the established institutions of the country for

granted. It is, for that reason, almost incapable of ad-

dressing any real social problem. Without ideas aboutinstitutional alternatives and without the political mo-bilization of once passive majorities, politics degener-ates into inconclusive bargaining among organized in-

terest groups. Such a politics is incapable of addressing,much less solving, any of the major acknowledgedproblems of the country. Thus, the antipragmatic prag-matism of the anti-ideological, antimobilizational pol-iticians becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of the impo-tence of politics.

When American radicals have broken with the tra-

dition of the sincere progressives and the disillusioned

politicians, they have sometimes done so by embracinga view that is equally paralyzing. It is the belief, recom-

mended by European theories like Marxism, in the exis-

tence of a system out there-"capitalism," for exam-

ple-with its driving laws, its inner logic, and its

indivisible unity. Either you change the whole system, or

you merely try to soften its harsh effects through "re-formism." The simple and sincere progressive fails to

cross the threshold of questioning and reimaginingAmerican institutions, or crosses it only under pressureof extreme crisis and with the help ofthe collective anx-

ieties and enthusiasms crisis generates. The believer in



the idea of the "system" places the institutional arrange-ments of the country beyond the effective reach of de-liberate, piecemeal reconstruction.

We reject the choice between a view that would pro-mote popular interests without reimagining and re-

making institutional arrangements and a view that sees

such arrangements as pieces of a take-it-or-leave-it sys-tem. In the history of modern political ideas and atti-

tudes, the idea of fundamental social change has beenassociated with the picture of decisive crisis, triggeringthe total substitution ofoneway oforganizing societybyanother. The commitment to fragmentary and succes-

sive reform-to reform of the laws rather than subver-sion of the system-has been associated with a repudi-ation of the idea of discontinuous, structural change.

To understand the truth about political possibility,we need to jumble these categories up, combining theidea of step-by-step reform with the idea that institu-

tions matter. We have it in our power to reimagine andremake them. The institutions of a society are its fate.Transformative politics is, like art, an anti-fate, restoringto us a freedom we had renounced or forgotten.

Because we propose here many connected reformsin many areas ofsocial life, some readers mayfeel dispir-ited by the sense that nothing can be accomplished un-

less everything is achieved at once. It is a false impres-sion, a legacy of the old idea of the indivisible system,which exists on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. The path ofreform can begin from any ofthe starting points we de-scribe; circumstance and opportunitywill decide which.We can then advance along one of these fronts for a cer-

tain distance before we hit limits. We cannot then cross

those limits without advancing on some of the otherfronts.

Again, if we propose a reform that seems distantfrom present realities and debates, people may say: in-

teresting but Utopian. Ifwe propose a reform close to theestablished situation, people may respond: feasible buttrivial. Thus, all proposals may seem either trivial or

Utopian. Why bother? It is a false dilemma arising froma mistake about the nature of programmatic ideas.

A program such as ours is not a blueprint; it be-gins to map out a path. The steps along the way can andshould be described both at points close to present cir-

cumstances and at points further away. The direction-and its effect upon people’s understanding of their in-

terests and identities as well as upon their practicalproblems-is what matters. Only when we fail to holdin our minds a credible view of social change do we fallback on a fake, surrogate standard of political realism:



that a proposal is realistic according to its closeness to

what exists.

It is easy to be a realist when you accept everything.It is easy to be a visionary when you confront nothing.To accept little and confront much, and to do so on thebasis of an informed vision of piecemeal but cumula-tive change, is the way and the solution.

American progressives have fought to keep theAmerican religion of possibility alive by lifting the twinburdens of class and racial oppression upon Americandemocracy. Waves of progressivism have promoted therights and well-being of workers, people of color,women, the disabled, and others excluded from thebounty ofAmerican society. To a lesser extent, progres-sives have struggled against the narrow-minded ethic ofindividual self-improvement in the name of a largervision of the unbreakable ties between individual self-reliance and social solidarity. They have been least clear-sighted and successful in confronting and lifting thethird limit to the religion of possibility: the anti-experi-mentalist attitude toward the institutional arrange-ments of the United States. Such a confrontation is pre-cisely what American progressivism must achieve todayifit is to address the unresolved problems ofthe country.

There is broad consensus in the United States aboutwhat the basic problems of the country are. The econ-

omy has failed to achieve growth in productivity that iseither inclusive of all citizens or rapid enough (al-though there are signs that productivity has recentlybegun both to rise more quickly and to do so in moresectors of business). The innovative practices of thebest firms-the turning of production into permanentinnovation-have remained within a relatively iso-


lated, advanced part of the economy. Formidable levelsofpublic and private debt have amassed; the measure ofdomestic saving in the United States is low; and thecountry consequently depends upon the purchase of its

public debt and the use of its domestic currency by for-eigners. Vast wealth, privilege, and power have accumu-lated in the hands of a tiny and self-serving corporateelite, which pays itself proportionately more-and paysworkers proportionately less-than in any other indus-trial democracy. The present systems of education andhealth care impose a burden on growth and prosperityas well as upon social welfare. These systems are, at theirbest, preeminent in the world. They nevertheless aban-don a large part of the American people to inferior ed-ucation or deficient care. For what they omit as well asfor what they provide, they exact from the country a

terrible price.There is also wide agreement about the problems in

social policy and social life. The country has seen in-creasing inequalityofwealth and income, driving the lifechances of individuals apart (even though the influenceofinherited class advantage upon these life chances mayhave diminished in the top if not in the bottom half ofthe class system) The extraordinary hierarchy and seg-mentation of education and health care juxtaposes the

best and theworst in theworld ofindustrial democraciesand abandons millions to ignorance, incapacity, and

anxiety, when not to disease and death. The contrast be-tween the considerable entitlements of the old and the

defunding of the young is extreme and insane, with theresult that children swell the ranks of the poor in theUnited States. Racial injustice and racial resentment

continue to pervade many aspects of American life.

There seem to be flaws in both approaches-one thatseeks to deal with race now, the better to deal with classlater, and another that insists upon addressing both at

the same time, connecting them, for example, in the re-

design of affirmative action programs. Present arrange-ments perpetuate a predominantly black, Latino, andNative American underclass-poor, uneducated, and,save for their religious life, desperate and disorganized.Family life in this underclass is deranged, with children

depending upon single mothers and young males re-

signed in overwhelming numbers to a life of violence,

drugs, joblessness, and imprisonment, at war with a so-

ciety that has first abandoned and then condemnedthem rather than condemning itself for this abandon-ment. Theweakening throughoutAmerican life ofmanyof the forms of voluntary association-engagement in

families, unions, fraternal orders, parent-teacher associ-

THE FRUSTRATION OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 35


ations, churches, and clubs-upon which the country soheavily relied produces the sense ofisolation, loneliness,and powerlessness from which so manyAmericans suf-fer. (A large percentage of the American people declarein polls that theyhave no friends, and one in threeAmer-icans lives alone.) Millions of Americans surrender todrink and drugs or to a popular culture specializing infantasies ofempowerment that offer a temporaryescapefrom the boredom and humiliations ofhumdrum, dailylife.

In politics, where solutions must begin, there is lessagreement about the sources of trouble. Progressives, ifnot yet many of their fellow Americans, see the follow-ing problems. Money and monied interests exert an in-ordinate influence upon the outcome of elections andthe direction of policy. The judiciary has often sancti-fied this influence as if the ability of money to talk,magnifying the voices of a few and crowding out thevoices of the many, were a principle rather than a

wrong. Public campaign financing that would counter-balance the political power of money is lacking. Wehave failed to provide free access to television and tounderstand that almost all of the evils of television inpolitics can be reversed by simply guaranteeing moretelevision time to the views in contest. The political

parties and their capacity to serve as the authors and

agents of clearly defined alternatives have weakened,

encouraged by the pseudodemocratic system of pri-maries. Popular disinterest in politics is widespread,manifest in the refusal of half of the electorate to vote,

one of the lowest levels of civic engagement of anydemocracy, rich or poor. The most talented individuals

are unwilling even to consider the possibility of a polit-ical career, or, when they consider it, to face the hustlingfor money that all but the very rich must undertake.Those who have won elective office readily abandon it

for whatever more exciting or lucrative opportunitycomes up, while the country accepts this degraded viewof political office with equanimity. In an era of relative

world peace and skepticism about activist governmentthe American presidency has shrunk. The Congress ab-

sorbs itself in short-term service to constituents andfunders. Progressives make self-defeating attempts to

use judicial power to circumvent the consequences of

their setbacks in national politics. Recent conservative

administrations have succeeded in convincing Ameri-

cans that they have little to hope for from the govern-ment or from political work. The progressive forces, in

and outside the Democratic party, have willingly re-

signed themselves to the humanization of the Republi-



can agenda as the outer limit of their transformativeambitions. The politically active minority of the coun-

try generally agrees that this surrender is the straight-forward expression of political realism rather than the

self-fulfilling consequence of a failure of ideas and ofnerve.

Yet the country that suffers from all these problemsshows irresistible energy in its culture and social life. Itis a country with a thousand little Silicon Valleys, wherea new logic ofpractical collaboration and restless exper-imentalism is emerging in countless businesses andschools: a logic subordinating routine to innovation,

tearing down barriers between conception and execu-

tion, and combining individual initiative with team-

work. Though narrowly focused on economic gain andtainted by social exclusion, such islands of energetic ex-

perimentalism show a capability that needs to be madeavailable to many more people and applied to manymore problems. The public life of the United States failsto do justice to this astonishing vitality; its poverty ofpeople, practices, and ideas is a failure that seems bothunnecessary and undeserved.

The advanced forms of practical experimentalismmay have little need of government to flourish in a fa-vored and isolated sector of the economy. They cannot,

however, spread to broader segments ofAmerican soci-

ety without help. The task of American progressivismtoday is to create a public life supportive of this vitalitythat channels it in a democratic direction without sacri-

ficing independent initiative to a centralizing bureau-cracy. The first step in this direction is to understandbetter the unresolved and unrecognized dilemmas un-

derlying the admitted problems of the country.Throughout the history ofthe United States, Amer-

icans in general, and American progressives in particu-lar, have oscillated between two ideas of social progressthrough economic reform, without being able fully to

embrace either. From Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a

yeoman republic of small farmers, to Wendell Phillips’sforty acres and a mule for black ex-slaves, to small busi-

ness against big business, decentralized power resonates

in the American imagination. Carried far enough to

matter, such an approach has always seemed to manyAmericans, especially powerful ones, too restrictive ofboth economic efficiency and cultural complexity.

The alternative to the entrenchment of small busi-

ness has been a national scheme of redistribution im-

plemented by the federal government. Although Amer-icans have, since the establishment of the progressiveincome tax in 1913, accepted something of this alterna-


40 THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN PR06RESSIVISM

tive and clung to it even in periods of reaction againstprogressivism, they have never been willing to go as faras Europeans, who accept much heavier taxation. Theyhave feared the suppression of self-reliance and enter-

prise. They have been unwilling to jeopardize, even at

the cost ofgreater social inequality, social exclusion, andsocial cruelty, the bottom-up energy that has been the

strength ofAmerica.Breaking through this dilemma demands institu-

tional innovations. It requires the use of politics to

reshape governmental and economic arrangements in

ways that escape the stereotypes of entrenched ideolo-

gies. Here, however, another dilemma ofAmerican pol-itics emerges to cloud insight and inhibit action. Amer-icans have always wavered between the idea that theyhave to keep reinventing themselves and their arrange-ments to make good on the promises ofAmerican free-dom, and the contrary idea that they have already foundthe basic design of a free society. When faced with eco-

nomic disaster or militaryjeopardy, theyhave awakenedto the imperatives ofnational politics. When such perilshave seemed under control, they have derided national

politics as a barely respectable sideshow to their per-sonal responsibilities. Only in moments ofdeep crisis-

the Civil War, the Great Depression, the civil uprisings

in the 19605-have Americans pursued national politicswith democratic, innovative energy. Private enterpriseand charity may seem incapable of solving many prob-lems, but political action in the form of governmentalprograms has usually seemed to Americans to create as

many problems as it solves.Americans must resolve their ambivalence about

politics if they are to fashion the institutional improve-ments that would allow them to solve the admittedproblems of the country, and begin to address the ma-jor feature of the emerging world economy that hasmade many of these problems both more urgent andmore intractable.


OMY

People used to think that production was distributed

hierarchically in the world. Advanced production-with large-scale investment, fancy machines, and highlyskilled labor-takes place in the rich economies. Morebackward production-with less money invested perworker, more primitive technology, and low or moder-ately skilled labor-goes on in the poorer, developingcountries. This idea may seem almost self-evidently

true. It has nevertheless become increasingly false. Ad-vanced production takes place today throughout theworld: in Brazil, India, or Indonesia as well as in theUnited States, Germany, and Japan. The driving force ofthe world economy has become a worldwide network ofproductive vanguards, exchanging people, practices,and ideas as well as goods, services, and capital. Thevaunted and exaggerated mobility of capital works inthe service of this worldwide network when it does not

amount to a speculative sideshow to the main action.

The kernel of the new economic vanguardism thathas spread throughout the world lies less in deep in-

vestment and pioneering technology than in turningproduction into a practice of continuous learning andpermanent innovation. Such a practice depends uponskills. However, the most important of these skills con-cerns society rather than technology: skill at coopera-tive innovation, loosening the restraints that any estab-lished set of roles and relations imposes upon experi-mental novelty.

In each country, rich or poor, the vanguard remainsseparated from the rearguard. This separation has be-come the fundamental source of social inequality andexclusion. In rich countries like the Scandinavian social

democracies, a comprehensive, redistributive welfare

VANGUARDS AND REARGUARDS IN THE NEW WORLD ECONOMY 43


state muffles the unequalizing consequences ofthe divi-

sion between vanguard and rearguard. In rich countrieslike the United States, the weaker and more selectivecharacter of redistributive social programs lets the divi-sion between vanguard and rearguard operate more un-

restrictedly. In poor countries like India, the effects ofthegap between vanguard and rearguard are moderated lessby redistributive social programs than by the politicallysupported diffusion of small-scale property, especiallyfamily agriculture. In poor countries like Brazil, theweakness ofboth small propertyand social programs al-lows the contrast between vanguard and rearguard to

work unchecked.The two devices available for softening the social

consequences ofthe contrast-redistributive social pol-icy and the support for traditional small business-suf-fer from the same defect. They lack an intimate connec-

tion with the central logic of economic innovation andgrowth in a world where the network ofproductive van-guards plays the commanding role.

The fateful programmatic question is whether we

can hope to overcome, however gradually, the contrast

between vanguard and rearguard, or whether we must

resign ourselves merely to moderate its consequences.The chastened and disoriented progressives who have

surrendered to the humanization ofthe inevitable-like

the American Democrats whose program has become a

softened version ofthe program oftheir Republican ad-

versaries-have answered this question one way. Amer-ican progressives must answer it another way, if they are

to keep the American religion ofpossibility alive and be-

gin solving the practical problems of the country.The extension of vanguardist practices beyond the

favored sectors of society where they now flourish and

the consequent lifting of the backward sectors require

help, including help from the government. The rear-

guard will not be able to lift itself by its bootstraps. The

task is to give this help in a way respecting the economic

discipline and the decentralized insight of a market

rather than imposing a bureaucratic scheme of favors

and privileges.In at least one area of the American economy, in

historical perspective, this goal was carried out to tre-

mendous effect. American agriculture, from the nine-

teenth-century Homestead Acts up to the NewDeal-era

agricultural extension services and credit unions, was

organized as a partnership between the federal govern-ment and the family farmer. The Homestead Act of 1862

promised 160 acres of relatively free land to citizens who

intended to make it productive. The New Deal provided

VANGUARDS AND REARGUARDS IN THE NEW WORLD ECONOMY 45


support to protect and encourage farmers to yield highlevels ofproductivity. Ifnowmuch ofthe traditional ap-paratus of this partnership seems archaic, restrictive,and ridden with unjustifiable concessions to powerfulinterests, we must not forget that it worked for much ofthe history of the country. It laid the basis for an agri-culture combining remarkable efficiency with wide-spread decentralization of economic power and initia-tive. The domination of big business over industryfound a partial counterweight in an economy of familyfarms and small towns. What theAmerican progressivesnever discovered was an effective counterpart to this

agrarian alliance between the little guy and the govern-ment that could work beyond agriculture, for the rest ofthe economy. Nor did they envisage the political reformsthat would sustain and organize the high-energy popu-lar politics needed to support such a project over time.

t PAST

iRli51VISM

With what resources today can American progressivismconfront the admitted problems of the country and re-new the American religion of possibility? The last greatmoment of progressive inspiration and renovation wasRoosevelt's New Deal. The lasting legacy of the NewDeal, beyond the particular federal programs it pro-duced, was an idea of social citizenship . Confrontedwith the economic crisis of the 193os, Americans wouldnot allow themselves to be abandoned to the supposedly

48


spontaneousworkings of amarket that had ceased ade-quately to function . They would demand that the gov-ernment rescue them from an economic disablementthat denied them themeans of self-reliance . They wouldnot content themselves with Hoover's invocation of afree economic and political, order. They would use thepowers of government to ensure the effectiveness of in-dividual and collective self-determination . Nor wouldthey count solely on private charity-glorified as "vol-untarism"-to change a condition of widespread de-spair. They were citizens of ademocracy, and they wouldinsist upon giving their citizenship a content that wasreal because it was social. As the business interests werebroughtto accept the practical consequences of the ideaof social citizenship, the government, for all the rhetor-ical thundering of the progressives, renounced any at-tack on the essentials of corporate power in America. Inthis compromise laythebasicterms ofthe NewDeal set-tlement, the American counterpart to what social de-mocrats had begun to achieve in Europe .

The point was not merely to "regulate" the marketor to strike a "balance" between markets and rights, asthe unimaginative and unconscious conservatism of alater era wouldhave it . It was to change the institutionalarrangements defining a market economy. It was to

democratize the market economy. Similarly, when inearlier periods the federal and state governments hadformed a partnership with the family farmer to estab-lish the most successful and efficient agriculture in theworld, while giving millions of people the tools forpractical independence, the result hadnotbeen the dis-placementof themarket by governmental command. Ithad been a different kind of market economy in agri-culture than would otherwise have emerged: one moresupportive of both decentralized economic initiativeandvigorous democratic life .

As the New Deal years went on, the early tinkeringwith the arrangements that defined the market econ-omyand shaped thedealings betweenbusiness andgovernment gave way to an emphasis upon minimal guar-antees against extreme economic insecurity, especiallyfor the elderly; the more equal diffusion of opportuni-ties for consumption; and the moderation of the busi-ness cycle. Wartimeexperiments with economic reorga-nization came to be seen as the requirement of apassingemergency. In peacetime, deviance from conventionalforms of the market economy would be confined toquarantined sectors of economic life, like the defenseprocurements industry, where a mixed form of public-private planning of production has continued to thrive

THE RECENT PAST OF AMERICAN PROGRESSIVISM

49

50


to this very day. Only a residue of the early institutionalambitions remained, in the form of a halfhearted com-mitment to defend against big business the rights of or-ganized labor and of theAmerican worker.

The decline and confinement of tinkering with themarket economy to make it more democratic presagedthe later history ofthe NewDeal settlement in Americanpolitics . There were retreats and advances. Whereas theretreats seem, from today's disillusioned perspective, tohave been inescapable, the advances appear either pre-carious or ineffective.

The Democratic party-ever the party of the pro-gressives-has withdrawn from anyattempt to treat thepresent distribution of economic power and advantagein the country as an alterable circumstance rather thanan inexorable fate . It has abandoned the effort to in-crease, through strengthened labor rights, the take ofwages from national income. Many factors have con-tributed to the retreat: the demoralizing experience ofthe stagflation of the 1970s, the embarrassments of Eu-ropean social democracy with its high levels of unem-ployment, the newfound freedom of capital to crossborders, the comparatively low tax yield in the UnitedStates as well as the dependence of American public fi-nance upon thepurchase ofTreasury obligations by for-

eigners, and the unchallenged intellectual authority ofreactionary economic ideas-taking as dogma the self-defeating character of policies intended to trump thecapital markets or to make wages grow more rapidlythan productivity gains.

Remember the pundits and gurus of the Democra-tic party. Twenty years ago, they spoke of "industrialpolicy" and the defense of organized labor. Then theyswitched to talking vaguely about governmental invest-ment in people and in the transport and communica-tion networkof the country. Then,with Clinton's acces-sion to power, they discarded that timid refrain, andresigned themselves to balancing the books, curryingfavor with the bond market, and promoting good feel-ings, as opposed to substantive justice, amongthe races.

Despite the currentretreat, two great advances tookplace in the generations following the New Deal. Thefirst advance was the launching, during Johnson's presidency, of a second wave of entitlement programs ad-dressed to the poor, superimposed upon Roosevelt'sprograms, directed to the broad working majority ofthe country (the "middle class") . The second advancewas the development, by an alliance among the civilrights movement, the Democratic party in power, andthe federal judiciary, of a far-reaching body of civil


51

52

THE

FUTURE OF AMERICAN PROGRESSIVISM

rights

law, written to stamp out the evils of racial and

sexual

discrimination and racist segregation

.

The trou-

ble

is that, disconnected from any broader effort to pro-

mote

democratization of the market, curtail corporate

power,

and energize democratic politics, each of these

two

advances has proved fragile to the point of being

reversible.

Each has turned out inadequate to its pro-

fessed

objectives

.

Those

who proposed to wage war against poverty

found

themselves reduced to helping the poor, without

having

the tools that would make such help effective

.

They

lacked both the wit and the power to challenge any

of

the economicand educational arrangements that im-

posed

deep divisions between advanced and backward

sectors

of the economy and between the life paths that

led

to each

.

With middle-class entitlement programs

like

Social Security and Medicare so cleanly separated,

by

the accident of their historical evolution and legisla-

tive

design, from poverty assistance programs, and with

a

country in which the federal government seemed in-

creasingly

powerless to relieve the problems of ordinary

working

families, many lost patience with policies that

at

best alleviated some consequences of poverty rather

than

addressing its causes

.

They believed those schemes

to

be funded at the expense of the working majority

rather than of the sanctimonious elite and the moniedinterests.

Those who saw the struggle against racial discrimi-nation as the first step in a longer and larger campaignagainst racial injustice discovered that antidiscrimination and antisegregation laws, rigidlyseparated from theproblems of economic opportunity and inequality, pro-duce effects that are real but limited. In some keyways,these effects are as dangerous as they are useful. Racialdiscrimination has diminished in everyrealm ofAmer-ican life and every region of the United States since theage of Jim Crow, especially the South. Blacks have beenjoined by Latinos and other marginalized groups intheir struggle and their advancement. A black bour-geoisie has grown and begun to prosper.

However, the benefits of the antidiscriminationprograms have been enjoyed in inverse proportion toneed, reaching the black professional and business classmore than the blackworking class, and the blackwork-ing class more than the black underclass . The situationof this underclass remains catastrophic, and no antidis-crimination piety will improve it . The majority of poorblacks has become increasingly alienated from its lead-ers, the educated black minority, which has for themostpart been accommodated, coopted, and even feted by


53

54


the elite institutions of the country. This process threat-ens to repeat itself among Latinos and others.

The present form of affirmative action, sitting un-easily between aggressive antidiscrimation and race-based preferment in employment and education, hasfueled resentments in the white small-business andworkingclasses. Theseresentments in turn help preventthe emergence ofa transracial progressive majority. Theabsence of such amajority makesthe present limitationsof policy for the redress of racial injustice seem in-escapable, thus closing a circle that squeezes Americandemocracy dry. A balkanized citizenry cannot reach aprogressive consensus on this issue, especially whenawareness of class is buried in the fray.

The Democratic party and the progressive move-ment forged by this sequence of striking retreats andprecarious advances has two factions . One, smaller faction looks back nostalgically to the New Deal. Thisgroup clings to a cause in whosefurther advance it givesno real sign ofbelieving. The other, larger faction, whichincludes Clinton and Gore, as it included Carter beforethem, looks sideways to the Republican party. It hopesto humanize what it no longer seeks to rival or replace.It finds its view of the world confirmed in the story lineof the most prestigious newspapers and magazines and

in the myopic pronouncements of the academic econo-mists and policy experts.

This is a rump and a residue rather than a party ora movement. Its leaders pridethemselves on being man-agers rather than ideologists. They speakandactas ifthegovernment of a countrywere like themanagement of abusiness-and an old-fashioned business at that, onesatisfied with balancing the books, keeping theworkersdisciplined, and animating them with pep talks. How-ever, theparadoxical result of their antipragmatic prag-matism is to make politics seem largely irrelevant to thesolution of anyofthe recognized problems of the coun-try. Such a pragmatism will backfire soon.

Our politicians deny themselves and their fellowcitizens the ability to experiment with the institutionalarrangements of the American economy andAmericandemocracy. They resign themselves to brokering legisla-tive deals amongthepowerful organized interests whilecalling upon voluntary social action to save the countryfrom the incapacity of the government over which theypreside . They claim to be practical, yet seem forever un-able to deliver thegoods. Thus arises, intheUnited Statestoday, an oppressive contrast between the vitality andgreatness of the country and the littleness and deadnessof its public life .


55

CH

REORIENSSIVISM

The work of American progressivism today is to de-mocratize the market economy and energize represen-tative democracy. Progressives should build the linkbetween economic reforms designed to challenge thestark divisions between vanguards and rearguards, andpolitical reforms intended to quicken democratic poli-tics in America .

The program we outline opposes dualism, the divi-sion of the economy into a rigid contrast of advancedand backward sectors, and proposes a deepening ofdemocracy: strengthening thetools forthecollective dis-cussion and solution of collective problems. It is, there-fore, aproductivist program, rootingabias towardmoreequality of income and wealth in a set of economic ar-rangements and a strategy of economic growth, ratherthan merely attempting, through retrospective andcompensatory tax-and-transfer, to undo part of whatthe economy has wrought. It rejects the simple contrastbetween governmental activism and free enterprise, notbecause it wants to have a little ofeach, butbecause it in-sists upon having more ofboth. To this end, ourprogramoffers to renovate the institutional machinery for a de-centralized and experimental partnership between gov-ernment and business . It seeks to extend therights of la-bor, increasing thewage take from national income. Thepoint is to do so in ways that serve the interests of theworking people of the country as a whole rather thanbenefit the relatively privileged and organized workersin capital- and technology-rich industries . It goes be-yond the fight against racial discrimination to the re-dress of racial injustice while recognizing that the prob-

AMERICAN PROGRESSIVISM REORIENTED

57

58


lems of racial injustice are inseparable from the prob-lems of class injustice. Our program defends a refinanc-ing of the government on a basis that reconciles a hightaxyield-and therefore a more effective governmentalability to invest in people's capabilities-with the needto preserve, indeed to strengthen, incentives to work,save, and invest. It both exemplifies and encourages themaster practice of democratic experimentalism : moti-vated, sustained, and cumulative tinkering with the in-stitutional arrangements of the government and theeconomy. It relies on a more engaged and informed citi-zenry rather than on a more enlightened technocraticelite . And it maps out the steps that make possible thegradual emergence of a lasting transracial progressivemajority in American politics as both the condition andthe consequence of the democratizing changes it pro-poses. It is not the humanization of the inevitable; it isthe alternative to an unnecessary and unacceptable fate.It is theAmerican religion ofpossibilitytranslated into aplan forthenext step .

A key assumption of this proposal is that the focus ofideological controversy and institutional innovationthroughout the world has shifted. The old conflict be-tween market and command, progovernment and anti-

government, is dead or dying. The days of pitting stateplanning against laissez-faire policies are over. They aregiving way to a new contest between the alternative in-stitutional forms of representative democracies, marketeconomies, and free civil societies. The institutional ar-rangements for political, economic, and social plural-ism now established in the North Atlantic world willturn out to be a subset of alarger set of institutional andsocial possibilities. We must now look to a democraticcivilization that embraces new ways of organizing anddeepening political, economic, and social freedom.

Institutions house civilizations . Ideals live in prac-tices. By pursuing divergent institutional pathways, ac-cording to their own needs and strivings, countries willreveal the vital role of national distinctions in aworld ofdemocracies: to develop the powers and possibilities ofhumanity in different directions . The United States-the most experimentalist of modern nations-has themost to gain, spiritually as well as practically, from thisrebirth of its religion of human possibility on a globalscale. The doctrine ofthe one true wayflatters the coun-try, and betrays it .

Here are some of the planks in a progressive plat-form faithful to these ambitions. They are meant tomark a path rather than to define a blueprint. Each of


59

60


their elements is controversial. Each element could bereplaced by equivalent devices. Taken together, theynevertheless indicate a way to begin from where we arenow. From this point close by, the path can lead, bysmall, incremental steps, into a society that is both moredemocratic and more innovative . In that society the gridof class, gender, and race weighs less heavily upon ourlife in common.

TAXES: FROM LIBERAL PIETIES TO REDISTRIBUTIVE REALITIESThe United States has the lowest aggregate tax take ofany of the major industrial countries: the revenues ofthe federal government amount to ao percent of GDPand the revenues of all three levels of American govern-ment to 36 percent GDP (as contrasted, for example,with 47 percent of GDP in France in a recent year). Aconsiderable body of evidence shows that people inmany countries support a high tax base tenaciously aslong as its improved social, educational, andhealth ben-efits are palpable . To be sure, we must notkill the goosethat lays the golden eggs,dampening incentives to work,save, andinvest. Onesolution maybe to reform taxationso that it falls on consumption rather than on income.

Progressives regularly oppose consumption taxes,

particularly when they apply to transactions (as in asales tax) rather than to individuals . Such taxes are ad-mittedly regressive because they hit the poor propor-tionately more than the rich . Business interests, for thesame reason, favor them. The business interests and theprogressives areboth mistaken. The most important les-sonofcomparativetax experience offirst-world nationsis that redistribution takes place much more on thespending side of the budget than on its revenue-raisingside . In other words, it matters less how fair the rais-ing of revenue is than how much the government takesif it can use what it takes to help the people who mostneed help . The United States has on paper one of themost progressive tax systems in the industrializedworld, and the greatest levels ofsocial and economic in-equality. Despairing of a political economy that wouldachieve real redistribution, American progressives to-day prefer to genuflect to progressive pieties than toachieve progressive results.

Broad-based taxation of consumption (as throughthe so-called comprehensive, flat-rate, value-added tax)can make it possible to increase revenues while easingthe burden of taxation upon saving and investment. It isa moneymachine. In a second stage, once taxreform hassecured the basis of a strong revenue flow, friendly to


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economic growth, we can begin to give a larger role totwo sets of redistributive taxes. One wouldbe the directtaxation, on a steeply progressive scale, ofwhat an indi-vidual spends on his ownconsumptionwith abasic levelof spending left untaxed-like an income tax with anexemption for saving . The other would be taxes on theaccumulation ofwealth and on its transmission throughfamily inheritance and family gifts .

American democracy should work toward the gen-eralization of aprinciple of social inheritance. Everyoneshould be able to count on a minimum of resources.These resources are the tools of self-reliance, not an al-ternative to self-reliance . People should have a social-endowment account so that society can do for everyonea little bit of what family inheritance does for a few. Atmajor moments in their lives--when they go to college,make a down payment on ahouse, or open a business-they should be able to draw on this account. The mini-mum account should increase according to two coun-tervailing principles : compensation for special need orhandicap according to predefined criteria, and rewardfor special capacity, competitively demonstrated .

PENSIONS, SAVING, AND INVESTMENT:THE RESOURCES FOR GROWTHCapital is now supposed to be globalized. It is not : Thetruth is that only a small portion of investment fundscrosses national frontiers, and in doing so sometimesmakes a big ruckus. The architects ofthe new, neoliberalworld economy are building, in the name of economicfreedom, an order that allows capital to roam all over theglobe, and imprisons labor in the nation-state. Mostcapital nevertheless stays at home.

For a long time, the United States has fallen into thehabit of depending upon other people's money: for-eigners put their money in the United States, buy thepublic debt of the American government, and evenhold---abroad--most of the paper currency. Like manypieces of undeserved good fortune, this one has its darkside. It helps keep the United States from facing the fullconsequences, or recognizing the full dimensions, of itslow saving level . Gross domestic saving in the UnitedStates is 15 percent of GDP, well below what it is in manyother rich economies . Dependence upon foreign savinglimits the freedom of maneuver in American economicpolicy and makes economic growth in America hostageto events in other parts of the world.


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The need to raise the level of saving in order to en-sure sustained economic progress is an opportunity aswell as a problem. For it can help push the country in adirection in which it has other reasons to travel. It pro-vides a context in which to reconcile faster economicgrowth with a more equal distribution of nationalwealth.

A shift to consumption-based taxation may helpraise the saving level by exempting saving from taxationas well as by helpingthefederalgovernment avoid futuredeficits. However, the greatest, because most direct,boost to saving is likely to come from a system for thepublic organization of compulsory private saving . Themost importantsetting in whichto introducesuch asys-tem is Social Security and private-pension reform. TheUnited States hardly needs the astronomical saving rate(51 percent) that tiny Singapore has achieved under anunnecessarily bureaucratic and centralized version ofsuch a system of required private saving . All it needs isto do better, socially as well as economically, than it has.

The law would require everyone to save in specialpension funds a certain percentage oftheir incomes, de-fined on a progressive scale according to income levels .Middle-level income earners would keep what they get.

High earners would have some of what they save redis-tributed away from them into the accounts of lowearn-ers. Lowearners, demonstrating either that they work orthat they suffer from a problemthat prevents them fromworking, would have money distributed into their ac-counts (simply an extension of the principal of theearned-income tax credit, which long enjoyed biparti-san support).

The moneywouldbe paid into abroad range of in-dependently managedand competitive funds-not justconventional mutual funds, investing in the establishedequity andbond markets, butmixedpublic-private ven-ture-capital funds, investing in new business. Many ofthese venture-capital fundswouldbe chartered to investin a diversified mix of start-up firms, and some wouldget matching or contributory funds, or credit enhance-ments, from government to invest in the small andmedium-sized businesses of the economic rearguard.Once fully developed, such a system would replace bothsocial security and private pensions.

Is this proposal a pay-as-you-go redistributive pen-sion scheme like Social Security? Or a get-what-you-saved saving scheme like private pensions? It combinesthe market orientation of the latter with the equalizing


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commitments of the former. Is it a marginal improve-ment to the existing conduit between saving and pro-ductive investment offered by banksandstockmarkets?Or is it the beginning of an attempt to build, alongsidebanks and stock markets, an additional bridge betweensaving and productive investment? We cannot tell be-forehand, and it hardly matters.

In the United States, as in other industrial econ-omies, an average of 8o percent of investment in pro-duction by businesses of all sizes comes from "retainedearnings," what companies save from profits. Most ofwhat individuals save disappears into a financial casino,a money-filled black hole with haphazard, uneven rele-vance to the funding of production and innovation .Venture capital-the financing of new enterprise byoutsideinvestors--remains a tiny sideshow to the oper-ations of this casino. In the spirit of democratic experi-mentalism, we should try to find a way to tap more ofthe productive potential of saving by innovating in theeconomic arrangements that make saving available toenterprise .We should do so in ways that help anchor, inthe core institutions of the economy, a bias towardgreater equality of access and greater freedom of initia-tive .

CHILDREN AND EDUCATION: THE FUTURE FIRSTThe top priority of social legislation in the United Statestoday, and the greatest justification for a high tax take,should be child protectionL The law must ensure food,medical, and dental support through families or neigh-borhoods to every child who needs them.

Thirty-eight percent of poor people in the UnitedStates are children . The contrast between the relativegenerosity for the old--through Social Security andMedicare-and the cruel and stupid abandonment ofthe young is one of the great injustices ofAmerican life .Frustration with the results of programs like Aid toFamilies with Dependent Children has now promptedDemocrats tojoin with Republicans in broadening whatwas already a tremendous gap.

Experience throughout theworld hastaught us thatsuch support is more effective when families and com-munity groups share in the formulation as well as theimplementation of programs, turning public-resourcetransfers into devices of social solidarity and triggers forsocial organization. A parent movement that enablesthe nurturers of our society to come through for theirchildren is a good start. The partnership of a weakenedfamily with a welfare bureaucracy falls short. It must bebacked up, and transformed, by the action of neighbor-


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hood associations and family networks. Cooperative,supervised preschooling and after-school care can formpart of their job.

Social supports for children can serve as the frontline in the development of social rights for everyone.For example, the sensible and characteristically American way to introduce universal, publicly backed healthinsurance would be to begin by guaranteeing health in-surance to all children. In the setting of child support,we could try out different mixes of public funding andprivate payment, of public oversight and private man-agement. The successful models in universal health in-surance for children couldthen be extended, by incre-mental steps, to the adult population .

The child crisis converges with the failure of theAmerican public school system to accomplish a centralpart of the mission of schools in a democracy: to rescuethe child from the limitations of its class and family sit-uation, giving it access to a world of longer memory,broader imagination, and stronger ambition. The pro-fessional and business class avoids this failure either byliving in upscale neighborhoods, with better than aver-agepublic schools, or bysendingtheir children to privateschools. The majority of public schools become both asource and a mirror of social apartheid in America. This

crisis is nottheinevitable priceofpolitical andeconomicfreedom; it is simplytheresult ofbadarrangements,badideas, andbad politics.

With thestrengthening of a national focus upon thefuture, and therefore upon children, we can addressanew the reform of public education. Three principlesshould guide our efforts.

The first principle is that, in a democracy, the childmust be available to the school ; it is not enough for theschool to be available to the child. To exercise effectivelythe right to a public education, children need amplesupport, if necessary, from the government, and, if pos-sible, in their families.

The second principle is that everyone should mas-ter a core set of generic conceptual and practical skills,getting ready for alife ofinstability, learning, and innovation . Specialized studyandvocational training shouldsupplement rather than replace education in these ba-sic, multipurpose skills . What begins in childhoodshould extend throughout life in the form of continuingadult education.

The third principle is that, if democracy is to tri-umph, localism in education should be contained.Schools should be able to rely upon stateand national aswell as local finance so that they do not reproduce the


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economic advantages and disadvantages of their com-munities. Nor should their curricula passively reflectcommunity attitudes. If parent participation is impor-tant, so is the role ofthe school as acounterweight to thelimitations oflocal opinion and family circumstance.

The school in a democracy should take no part indelivering to the child the ancient message ofthe familyor the local community: Become like me. It has a biggerjob: to equip the child with the means to think and tostand on his or her own feet, bringing the ideas and ex-periences of far away or long ago to bear upon the un-derstanding and the criticism of the here and now. Theschool should examine possibilities of imagination andof life that the surrounding society is unable or unwill-ing to countenance. It should be the voice of the fu-ture-of alternative futures-within the present, and itshould recognize in the child, thefuture worker and cit-izen, a little prophet.

Thus, we need to prevent any one level of govern-ment, and any one form of connection among school,community, and family, from having the definitive sayover what goes on in the classroom. A system of multi-ple accountability, multiple guidance, and multiplefunding-from federal, state, and municipal levels ofgovernmentwill help liberate the public schools from

exclusive dependence upon local control and give themtheeconomic andcultural resources with whichto formfree people .

RACIAL DISCRIMINATION AND CLASS INJUSTICE: HOW NOT TOFORGET ABOUT ONE WHILE DEALING WITH THE OTHERRacial antagonisms hurt American democracy twice:first by the evils of racial discrimination and segrega-tion; and, second, by the obstacles they create to the re-dress of class injustice. Working Americans remain di-vided by race, struggling under the injustices of racialoppression and resentful of what often seem to be theunjust effectsofpolicies designed to right racial wrongs.These divisions have helped keep them from uniting,around leaders, organizations, policies, and programscommitted to loosen the constraints that class statusimposes on the life chances of individuals . The presentbody of antidiscrimination law and policy-includingaffirmative action-has become both part of the solu-tion and part of the problem.

The flaw in the conventional approach to racial dis-crimination and affirmative action today is that it sitsuncomfortably between two missions, accomplishingneither fully and making the execution of the one seem


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a hindrance to the achievement of the other. One goalis the struggle against racial discrimination; the otheris the improvement of the circumstances of a raciallymarked underclass .

The legal and political triumphs of the civil rightsmovement, in and outside government, have succeededin diminishing the force of racial discriminationthroughout American life . It would be perverse to belit-tle this achievement. Nevertheless, the antidiscrimina-tion law we now have may be too little to combat thehardened, substantial forms of racial prejudice that re-main. In some areas-affirmative action first amongthem-established law and practice go beyond antidis-crimination to some element of active preferment injobs and education in favor of blacks and other groupsthat continue to suffer from racial oppression. How-ever, lawand practice move toward this goal without ei-ther reaching or acknowledging it ; the majority of thecountry and its jurists reject a policy of race-basedcompensatory privileges. In the meantime, however,this confused, halfhearted policy produces some bene-fits-captured disproportionately by the elites of thefavored groups (the black professional and businessclass, for example)-and countless resentments-feltby the white losers, real or imagined. These resentments

help prevent the development of the transracial pro-gressive majority we need.

The solution is to cut boldly through this tangleof inhibiting confusions, clearlydistinguishing antidis-crimination from the larger effort to redress the difficult mixture of racial and class injustice-and devisingmeans suited to each of these two objectives .

Progressives should confront racial discriminationas a distinct evil . They should persuade Americans tofollow the exampleofsome other countries, criminaliz-ing its most serious instances. At the same time weshould insist upon creating many more situations inAmerican life where people of different races work,study, and live together, discovering in their human in-dividualities likenesses and differences that cut acrossracial divisions. Now that there is disappointment withthe cause of racial desegregation, the case for pressingit as a tonic to American democracy has never beenstronger.

The suffering of a black and Latino underclass thatcombines racial stigma with class subjugation presentsadifferent problem, requiring differentsolutions. We doneed a policy of active preferment in education andjobsin favor of those caught in entrenched situations of so-cial disadvantage andexclusion from whichthey cannot


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escape, readily or at all, by their own initiative . How-ever, we should not base this preferment solely on race,for race is typically just one element, although often amajor one, of the social disablementwe seek to repair.

The law should develop standards to give a specialpush in schooling and employment--andtherefore alsoin admissions andhirings--to thosewho suffer from anaccumulation offormsof disadvantage from whichtheycannot be expected to escape on their own. Prominentamong these sources of subjugation are class, race, gen-der, and handicap. We know for a fact that it is the con-vergence of some of these factors in the life situation ofan individual that mayprevent him or her from seizingupon the opportunities of American society. Placed inthis context, the offer of preferment loses its invidious,narrowly racial character. We can defend it, as a matterof the law and the Constitution (although it wouldsurely require achange of present constitutional under-standings), because it helps make feasible the demandfor individual self-reliance . It helps keep the promise ofequal opportunity for all.

Such an effort is useful and even necessary. It is,however, no substitute for the broader attempt to de-mocratize the market economy in America, narrowingthe gap betweenvanguard andrearguard.We must take

it

for what it is

:

a subsidiary tool of social policy but a

major

vindication of justice for the individual

.

ECONOMIC

VANGUARDISM OUTSIDE THE VANGUARD

:

NARROWING

THE GAP BETWEEN THE ADVANCED AND BACKWARD

SECTORS

OF THE ECONOMY

The

most important issue of political economy today

in

the United States, as throughout the world, is not

deficits,

taxes, saving, or even, in the conventional sense,

jobs.

It is the social form that will be taken by a way of

working

together and producing goodsand services that

is

beginning to reconstruct economies all over the globe

.

A

method of collaboration rather than a technology of

production

lies at the heart of this advanced economy,

although

technologies of information and communica-

tion

have helped equip it

.

It is a method of flattened hi-

erarchies

and permanent innovation, of fluid job defin-

itions

and constant reshaping ofproducts, services, and

practices .

It combines teamwork with competition

.

It is

production

as learning

.

It can be carried out by decen-

tralized

big businesses, or by cooperative-competitive

networks

of small and medium-sized businesses

.

It

thrives

under particular conditions

:

a background of

community

life and good government, especially good

AMERICAN

PROGRESSIVISM REORIENTED

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local government-able to ensure high-quality basiceducation, opportunities for continuous reskilling,dense networks of association, and the high trust suchnetworks breed-as well as first-rate transport andcommunication facilities . It is not just for making com-puters and software or for supplying highly paid profes-sional services; it is for doing anything . Flexible, high-technology, and knowledge-rich production is here tostay.

Where such conditions are largely present, nationalgovernment can take a back seat . Without intervention,economic vanguardism flourishes in an isolated, advantaged part of the economy. That is the situation we seeemerging in America as elsewhere: a world of advancedsectors and regions connected with one another andweakly linked to the backward sectors and regions oftheir own societies .

The reordering of production as learning will hap-pen one way or another. The crucial issue is whether itwill happen in forms that are more or less socially inclusive . The work of progressives must be to steer it inan inclusive direction . To that end, we need to fashionthe instruments for decentralized, participatory, and ex-perimentalist styles ofpartnership between governmentand business . To push economic vanguardism beyond

the social and geographic frontiers of the conventionalvanguards, we need national andlocalgovernmentsableto help create the missing conditions and to help formthe missing agents.

We should reject the false choice between theidea ofarms'-length government (embracedby free-market or-thodoxy) and the contrasting practice (exemplified bysome of thenortheastAsian "tiger economies") of a cen-tralized economic bureaucracy, formulating industrialand trade strategy, subsidizing credit, and rewardingpromise or success with favor. Instead, we should de-velop abroad-basedandmarket-friendly effort to lift upthe rearguard.

Such an effort would have four elements. The firstelementis the focus on child protection andeducationalrenewal, and the use of child-centered support programs to encourage the development of communitygroups . Without an organized local society, able to takecare of its children, vanguardism outside the vanguardhas no chance.Asecond element is the creation of tech-nical support centers, reskilling services, and small-business incubators to assist private initative outside theadvanced sectors of the economy. A major responsibil-ity of such centerswould be to help identify and propa-gate successful work and business practices as they


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emerged. A third element is the organization of associ-ations among firms. The associated businesses wouldpool financial, commercial, and technical resources insome areaswhile competingwith one another in others.A fourth element is the broadening of access to financeand technology, through the establishment ofindepen-dently administered venture-capital funds, chartered toinvest in the rearguard and to conserve and grow the re-sources with which they wouldbe endowed. Experiencesuggests that, with accountable but independent man-agementandproperly diversified investment portfolios,such funds can achieve high rates of return on their en-dowments.

Different kinds of property relations between thefunds and their client firms would develop over time.Some funds would keep a distance from their clients,auctioning capital offto a diversified group of entrepre-neurswith the best prospects of making good on the in-vestment, and taking equity stakes in the firms theyhelped start, as anyventure capitalistwould. Otherfundswouldnurture closeandlasting relations with agroupofsimilar small businesses, becoming the financial andtechnicalbrain andarm ofalittle confederation offirms.Propertywould be dividedup in differentways betweenfunds andfirms, anddifferent regimes ofprivate and so-

cial property and decentralized initiative would begin tocoexist experimentally within the economy.

The outcome of such experiments is not the sup-pression of the market; it is the democratizing and di-versification of the market. It is the road to closing thegap betweenvanguard andrearguard. It is the refusal tolet theglobal reshapingofproduction continue on an ex-clusive and divisive course.

AN ORGANIZED SOCIETY AND AN EMPOWERED LABOR FORCE:THE TOOLS AND RESOURCES OF ASSOCIATIONA disorganized society cannot generate conceptions ofits alternative futures or act upon them. Organization ispower, a power essential to a vigorous democracy. Dis-organization is surrender to drift, to accident, to fate .America has always been famous for its wealth of vol-untary associations . Today, however, Americans aremore disassociated than ever before: living alone, oftenwithout friends, and less engaged in unions, clubs, fra-ternal orders, and even local government or parent-teacher associations . Only in church, synagogue, andmosque attendance do the numbers seem to hold up,faith in Godhaving outlived, formanyAmericans, hopein society.


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It is not enough to call for a rebirth of the spirit ofvoluntary association, for although we may call thespirit, it may not come. Instead, we need to reexamineand reconstruct the institutional setting in which asso-ciation thrives. Reforms in labor law, local governmentlaw, and federal tax law canhelp renewthe force and de-mocratize thescope of associational activity inAmerica.

Such reforms can also diminish the force of a strik-ing and troubling feature of associational life in allcontemporary industrial democracies. The associationswith a message for society at large-clubs and churchesas well as political parties-remain detached from theeveryday world of workandproduction . Practical asso-ciations involved in this everyday world-firms andunions-lack such a message; their job is to makemoney and defend the interests of their members. Ifthe established rules of contract and corporate law thatpeople use to create and maintain practical associationsare indeed like a language, capable of expressing anythought, then the problem is that those who speak thislanguage may have little to say, while those who havesomething to sayare unable to speak it .

Society should be independently organized outsidethe government: a simple idea with complicated andcontroversial implications. One major site of organiza-

tion is work. Labor laws need to be strengthened, not todeepen divisions between a minority of relatively privi-legedworkers in traditional industry and everyone else,but to facilitate unionization everywhere . As temporarywork increases in many sectors of the economy, weneedto reform the labor laws to encourage the unionizationof temporary workers and to ensure the blend of legalregulation of the employment relation and collectivebargaining with theemployer that is appropriate to theircircumstances . More generally, we have to create astruc-ture in which union representation of workers and col-laborative profit sharingwith workers come tobe seen ascomplementary rather than incompatible approaches .Otherwise, we shall have allowed a contest between co-operation at work andassociation amongworkers to de-velop at the heart of industry, threatening the project ofgreater economic democracyin America.

An emphasis on early and continuing educationand reskilling rather than on job tenure, the develop-ment of varied forms of worker protection suited to thecircumstances of a segmented labor force, and a com-mitment to generalize the principle of worker partici-pation in companyprofits cancombineto reverse oneofthe most antidemocratic trends in recent American life :the decrease of the wage take from national income.


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Moreover, this trend can be reversed without threaten-ing the high employment levels the United States hashappily achieved . The ability to raise the real value ofwages, without threatening jobs and economic growthor risking inflation, will be futher strengthened if wesucceed in replacing all payroll taxes by the consump-tion-oriented taxation we advocate.

Whatwemust resist at any cost is the entrenchmentof stark divisions between insiders-relatively privi-leged, organized workers with jobs in the capital- andknowledge-rich sectors of the economy-and out-siders-workers with unstable, dead-end jobs in thecapital- andknowledge-poor sectors. It is adivision thathas helped bring European social democracyto grief.

Traditional social democrats often fight for some-thing close to job tenure for workers with the good jobsand promote, under the slogan of stakeholding, a miniconstitutionalism ofthe firm: consumer groups and lo-cal communities as well as workers would have a say oreven a veto over management decisions. It is a formulathat sets up atensionbetween defending workers' rightsand promoting economic flexibility and innovation .Moreover, it is predicated on adivision between insidersand outsiders and can help reinforce it . Instead of en-shrining job tenure, wewant to enhance the capabilities

of workers through devices such as government-sup-ported continuous reskilling and social-endowment ac-counts . Instead of arigidscheme of checks andbalancesin corporate governance, we propose radically to decen-tralize and democratize access to productive resourcesand opportunities through means such as the public-private venture-capital funds and technical supportcenters we earlier described.

If work is one site of voluntary association, com-munity life is another. We could, for example, create le-gal mechanisms for the selection of community councils or neighborhood associations outside the structureof local government. Such councils could be elected ona neighborhood basis to engage individual citizens aswell as communitygroups in thesolution ofthe social-not the physical or financial--problems of the neigh-borhood: for example, workingwith thepolice to set upcommunity policing, identifying children in troubleand referring them or their families to the right sourcesof public or private assistance, and intervening withhospitals, insurers, andbureaucracies when the old andthe sick need help. This work wouldbe neither continu-ous nor paid. It would be a form of social leadership,somewhere in between private charity and public office .Those who performed it would have, as a matter of law,


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only advisory power but, as. a matter of practical effect,as much influence as their organizing efforts allowedthem to exert.

Private philanthropy has been a powerful engine ofvoluntary action in the United States . It survives, how-ever, on a tax favor. Thus, its consequence is to magnifythe voice of the rich, allowing them to ride their socialand cultural hobbyhorses. Thanks to the tax laws, theirpoorer fellow citizens co-sign these gifts whether theywant to or notandwhether theyknow it or not.Whynotdemocratize the tax favor? For every tax-deducted dol-lar that the donor were allowed to use as he wished, acertain portion of the donor's dollars would have to gointo a common fund, with the percentage calculated topreserve the force of the tax incentive. That fund, withdecentralized governance and independent trusteesdrawn from everywalk of American life, would financesocial groups who applied to it for help-through, forexample, matching funds or matching commitments offree labor time-to carryout their own charitable activ-ities. The disincentive to private contributions wouldbelimited; the impact upon the resource base of voluntaryaction in America, immense.

POLITICS, MONEY, AND MEDIA:QUICKENING THE TEMPO OF DEMOCRACYFor better andworse, Americans revere their Constitu-tion . They early rejected Thomas Jefferson's advice toreplace the Constitution completely every few genera-tions. As a result, they hesitate to fiddle with the set-upof the government, and they often prefer to revise (orrather to let Supreme Court justices revise) their Con-stitution by reinterpreting it rather than by changing itoutright .

There are many constitutional reforms that wouldbe worth discussing if the American antipathy to con-stitutional redesign were less severe . Consider one suchexample. Admittedly outside theagenda offeasible con-temporary concerns, it nevertheless suggests both thepriceofconstitutional conservatism andthepossible di-rection of political reform. Morever, it clarifies the vi-sion underlying the here-and-now political innovationswe do propose further ahead.

Madison's scheme for the Constitution combinedtwo principles : an insistence upon the dispersal of polit-ical power and a plan to slow politics down, by establishing a rough correspondence between the transfor-mative reach of apolitical project and the severity of theconstitutional obstacles it hasto overcome in the course


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of its execution. Both principles combine in the systemof "checks and balances" among branches of govern-ment: Franklin Roosevelt, for example, had to wage atremendous struggle until he got the Supreme Court aswell as the Congress on his side,andhe had aneconomicand social disaster working for him.

These two principles-the fragmentation of politi-cal power and the slowing down of political change--could, however, be disconnected, in the interests of adeepened democracy. We might want to keep the firstprinciple and rid ourselves of the second . For example,thinkof the followingwayto combine characteristics ofthe presidential and parliamentary systems of govern-ment. If thepresidentandthe Congress disagree aboutaprogram of reform for the country, either of the twoelected branches of government can call early elections,butthen both branches have to run. Theidea is to resolvetheimpasse quickly, through theprompt engagement ofthe electorate in its resolution, rather than to perpetuateit in divided government until the next regular election .

To follow the logic of the remedy, we might makevoting mandatory, as it is in many contemporary de-mocracies, with thepenaltyof a fine for theviolation ofthe duty. Failure to vote would, therefore, be sanctioned

less severely than, for example, refusal to do jury duty.The obligation to come to the polling station, however,is intended to achieve a good that is at least as great asservingon juries : to preventthegovernment from beingelected by a minority, given that over half the adult citi-zenry now fails to vote in the United States . That a citi-zen should have to turn his mind for a few moments,everynowandthen, to the affairs of theRepublic-withthe privilege ofabstaining in thevoting booth-seems atiny measure of intrusion to accept in exchange for ahuge advancein civic engagement . Comparative experi-ence suggests that, once the law directs people to vote,they get into the habit. In no democracy that hasadopted such a rule has there ever been a majority in fa-vor of its revocation.

The combined effect of these changes would be toquicken the tempo and raise the energy level of Ameri-can democracy, while maintaining or even strengthening the fundamental mechanism for making govern-mentalpower decentralized andaccountable . It will nothappen, at least not anytime soon, but it points in a di-rection. We offer four connected proposals to moveAmerican democracy in this direction.

First, establish public financing of political cam-


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paigns. Public financing is more effective than the at-tempt to tighten the policing of private money, espe-cially when combined with our next suggestion, ex-tended free access to television time. It is a minorexpense, with vast equalizing and limit-breaking poten-tial forAmerican politics . The best criterion for the dis-tribution of such public funding is a standard interme-diate betweenthepresent representation ofthepoliticalparties at the level of goverment-federal, state, or lo-cal-at which they are running and a standard of arith-metical equality-the same for all.

Second, give the political parties and their candi-dates ample free time on television. Fight in the legisla-tures and the courts to get this time freely given by thenetworks and channels, as a condition of their licenserather than as a service to be paid by the taxpayers.Americans need a public space in which to discuss theirshared problems, and television has become the spacethat matters most. In Brazil, for example, fifty minutes aday of television and radio on all channels are blockedout for the parties and candidates forty-five days beforean election . The primitive technology and the indiffer-ent content of many of the political talks have notprevented the campaign piograms from maintaining asubstantial audience. The voters learn, and so do the

politicians . The perversity of the sound bite is reversedwhen candidates for major national office are requiredto spend many hours on the air; in the surprisingly inti-mate medium of television, it is hard to disguise your-self for long.

Third, lower the legal, constitutional, and ideologi-cal barriers to experimental, localized, and temporaryreversals and combinations of governmental and private responsibilities . If, for example, municipal sanita-tion services can be contracted out to private business,research and development can also be conducted byjoint ventures of governmental agencies, nonprofit or-ganizations such as universities, and private businesses .Venture capital-investment in start-up firms-can bearranged by decentralized funds and support centers,with independent management, a mixed public-privatecharacter, and special responsibility for the develop-ment of the economic rearguard.

Many such reversals and combinations of functionshould be tried out locally and temporarily. Differenttrial solutions to the same problems should be allowedto coexist. How else can we find out what works? Muchmore is at stake here than efficiency of public adminis-tration. The point is to tap the repressed potential fordecentralized partnership among individuals, govern-


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ment, andbusiness, rejecting the model of arms'-lengthregulation as the only acceptable way in which govern-ment can relate to society. One project will lead to an-other. Small successes will give impulse to larger ambi-tions. American federalism-far from being apretext tostop social experiments in the name of "states'rights"-will turn out to be a special case of the larger idea of"manylaboratories ."

Fourth, change theattitudes andthe practices aboutparty politics so that the political parties-the two bigparties as well as emerging third parties-can becomethe authors and agents of real alternatives.We need notchoose between the political party as the disciplined in-strument of a purist ideology and the political party asa syndicate of professional office-seekers catering to anamorphous assortment of special interests. Americansare unlikely ever to adopt proportional representa-tion-the electoral system that distributes legislativeseats in proportion to votes for parties. They are evenless likely to embrace the closed-list version of such sys-tems-where the voter votes only for a party and theparties determine the priority of the candidates on itsslate. However, thepresent scheme of election primariesin the United States makes sense only ifAmericanshavegiven up on political parties and the coherent options

that it would be the task of the parties to forge and im-plement. Adopted in thename of grassroots democracy,this scheme robs theparties of anyprospect of strong in-ternal organization and programmatic definition .

Whoknowsthename ofthe chairman ofeither ma-jor political party in the United States? He or she is in-variablyacreature ofthepresident in office or acaretakeruntil the next presidential candidate shows up, and, ineither event, a hapless hustler for money. Members ofCongress areroutinely reelected, although the electorateprofesses disgust with the political class, because thepublic expects from them little more than service to lo-cal interests and conformity to certain minimum ideo-logical tests in theirvotingbehavior. The resultis that, al-though Americans are able to discuss, for example, anisolated issue like whetherto allowphysicians to help theterminally ill commit suicide, they lack the political in-struments with which to define, collectively, differentroads for their country to take . Should such a demarca-tion of national possibilities be just the work of a cleverpolitician, sensingachange in national moodandgrasp-ing at the latestfashions from theuniversities? Or shouldit result from a more inclusive and sustained conversa-tion in the country?

The political parties should assert greater authority


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over slates, candidates, candidate selection, and partyplatforms. At the same time, however, they should openthemselves up to internal democracy, organizing na-tional elections among their members to choose theirleaders and directions. The shiftfrom an emphasisuponcandidate-by-candidate choice through primaries to anemphasis upon party democracy and party leadershipwould trigger the organization of movements and fac-tions within each party to contest such party elections.The defeated groups would clamor for minority repre-sentation in the party councils or establish third parties.Thetemperature ofAmerican politics wouldrise, and itsrepertory of programmatic alternatives broaden.

In this great country every privilege is suspect, andordinary men and women are known to be not so or-dinary after all. Tinkering is both a habit and a creed,and experimentalism joins hands with democracy. AnAmerica triumphant in the world nevertheless seemsunable to solve its own problems. Class injustice, racialhatred, and rationalized selfishness thrive today in aclimate of disillusionment and feed on an experienceof disengagement and disconnection. In this circum-stance, the work of the progressives is to speak, withinand outside the Democratic party, for aclear alternative.

Not for some impossible, romantic dream of a different"system." Not for the last-ditch defense of every part ofthe NewDeal compromise in American politics . Not forthe Republican agenda-or the doctrine of the one trueway-with a human face. Not for the humanization ofthe inevitable. But for a practical view of how, step bystep, and piece by piece, to democratize the Americaneconomy and reenergize American democracy.

To understand your country you must love it . Tolove it you must, in a sense, accept it . To accept it as itis, however, is to betray it . To accept your country without betraying it, you must love it for that in it whichshows what it might become. America-this monu-ment to the genius of ordinary men and women, thisplace where hope becomes capacity, this long, haltingturn of the no into the yes-needs citizens who love itenough to reimagine and remake it .


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FUTURE OF AMERICAN PROGRESSIVISM · 2017-01-18 · 2 THE FUTUREOFAMERICAN PROGRESSIVISM ment,austerity,andsacrifice.Therearemanyobstacles andsurprises alongtheway.However,the direction