"Democrat Socialist:" Would a Party By Any Other Name Smell As Sweet?

In one further step toward political oblivion it seems likely that, when the Republican National Committee meets next week, they will approve a resolution to refer to the Democratic Party as the "Democrat Socialist Party" in all formal communications. Thus, Republicans have managed to combine their 5th-grader's taunt of refusing to use the proper suffix for our party and their ridiculous habit of labeling anything other than massive regressive tax cuts as socialist.

In even more amusing turn of events, Frank Llewellyn, the national director of the actual Democratic Socialists of America, is apparently offended by the change. According to Dave Weigel of the Washington Independent, Llewellyn said "“It’s objectionable..because they’re giving socialism a bad name by associating it with the Democrats, who are the second-most capitalist party in the world."

But rather than simply labeling this event as comedy and moving on, I think we should rather treat this as an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of our party and the future of American political thought.


What Does it Mean to Be a Democrat?

Part of what makes this event so ironic is that conservative elements in the Republican Party clearly believe that the Democratic Party has a much more coherent ideological posture, and a much more left-leaning ideological posture than we actually have. This isn't anything new: Republicans called the Democratic Party an agent of "creeping socialism" in the 1930s when the Party consisted of a tenuous alliance between urban liberals and southern reactionaries; Republicans considered Bill Clinton - who was, before, during, and after his presidency a moderate right-of-center Democrat - a dangerous radical, an unreconstructed McGovernite.

In reality, the Democratic Party is still an extremely ideologically diverse party, running from socialists (Bernie Sanders isn't in the party formally, but you could certainly find his ideological kin in parts of the Democratic Party) to conservatives like Ben Nelson. In some ways, we're more left-leaning than we were during the Clinton years - on the use of economic stimulus, the importance of public investments versus deficit spending, the public plan in health insurance reform, some elements of foreign policy and trade. In other ways, we've become more conservative - we don't talk about gun control much any more, I would argue we haven't significantly shifted on financial regulations yet, and so on.

And that's something I've always considered to be somewhat problematic. An open tent is a wonderful thing, but it does present certain problems. One of the largest is what overall direction we want to have as a party on the country. As one of my old mentors once said, one's politics should always begin with a vision of how you would want the world to look like if you were in charge, and then working how to get from where you are to where you want to go. Historically, political parties at their core are those visions. Communist parties had a vision of the end of capitalism and a new world to follow; in a different way, so socialist and social-democratic parties have a vision of a better world. Even conservative parties, like our own Republican parties, have a vision of an imagined past, a golden age they seek to return to, a sense of tradition they want to preserve.

At various times, the Democratic Party has had strong visions, although never uncontested. The New Deal vision was dominant, although challenged by the Southern Democrats, from 1932-1948; what has often been referred to as "Cold War Liberalism" was quite strong from '48 through to the collapse of the "Cold War consensus"; we've had "civil rights" Democrats and "New Left" Democrats, and so on. Yet for all the strum and drang that we hear about Progressive Democrats versus Establishment/DLC/DINO/whatever else you want to call them, it's more often been a conflict over policy or strategy, as opposed to ideology. Even within DailyKos, for example, there's a good amount of ideological diversity and fluidity, and a certain disagreement over what ideological terms even mean. Witness for example the lively debate in this thread over the difference between "progressive" and "liberal."

What Does "Socialist" Mean in 2009?

Of course, the irony of the Republican's newest rebranding exercise is compounded by the fact that it appears that socialism is becoming less and less of a negative label. While I take Rasmussen's results with a degree of skepticism, I'm less surprised that "adults under 30 are essentially evenly divided: 37% prefer capitalism, 33% socialism, and 30% are undecided."

After all, you would have to be older than 20 years old to have even been born at a time when the Cold War had any real meaning. I'm 25, and I only vaguely recall the feeling of a world divided between the Soviet Union and the United States. I was woken up as a child to witness the fall of the Berlin Wall - none of my undergraduate students were even born in 1989. For them, socialism (if it means anything) is something they associate with campus radicals (who are essentially harmless), Europe (which they tend to like), and attacks on Barack Obama. And while I'm not the first to say this, the relentless Republican association of any progressive policy or politics with socialism I think will have the long-term effect of eroding public fear of socialism, at least in so far as socialism is understood to mean broadly progressive public policy like progressive tax cuts and increases, universal health care, Keynesian fiscal policy, and so forth.

But the interesting thing is that even the Republicans seem to have given up the ghost when it comes to the Evil Empire. When Republicans accuse Democrats of being socialists, they tend to refer to the social democratic parties of Europe - Mitt Romney accuses the Democrats of trying to make the U.S look like Sweden, and Michael Steel believes that Democratic rule is "marching America toward European-style socialism." The problem is that "European-style socialism" isn't very scary - no secret police, no show trials, no one-party state, no gulags. It means higher taxes, more regulation, universal health care, more social spending, a bigger public sector, but that's not something that bothers most people.

What Would It Mean For the Democratic Party to Become a Social Democratic (or Democratic Socialist) Party?

All of this makes the idea that the Democratic Party is a Social Democratic Party or a Democratic Socialist Party rather ironic, because those would be two very strong visions of the future to base a party around.

Democratic socialism broadly refers to an political philosophy that, unlike social democrats, does not accept the existence and continuation of capitalism as necessary but unlike Leninist communists abjures the idea of violent revolution as the means of achieving its end. You can think of Eugene V. Debs as an archetypal democratic socialist - someone who viewed capitalism as an inherently immoral and exploitative institution, but who sought to abolish poverty through the electoral victory of the Socialist Party and the passage of legislation. The modern Democratic Socialists of America - who might well have a trademark infringement case on their hands- are a group that emerged out of several factional disputes in the 1970s and 1980s, and have been closely associated with the American democratic socialist Michael Harrington. As their manifesto states, "we are socialists because we reject an international economic order sustained by private profit," which fulfills the first point of the description, while their statement that "our vision of socialism is a profoundly democratic one, rooted in the belief that individuals can only reach their full potential in a society that embodies the values of liberty, equality, and solidarity" fulfills the second.

Social Democrats historically diverged from their socialist colleagues over the question of the question both of political change versus violent revolution, but also over the question of whether socialism would be achieved in a sudden revolution or a gradual evolution,

The point of all of this is that if the Democratic Party would actually become a social-democratic party, it would be a massive ideological shift comparable to nothing since the dramatic transformation of the Democratic Party from the party of laissez-faire into the party of the New Deal in the 1930s, or the transformation of the Democratic Party from the party of the Segregated South to the party of Civil Rights in the 1960s.

Ultimately, it would involve the Democratic Party grappling with two issues we don't really deal with - first, our relation to capitalism, and second, our conception of class.

On the issue of capitalism, our party is badly divided between those who are pro-market (especially in regards to major questions about regulation, especially financial regulation, taxation of corporations, estates, and high-income earners, impact of climate change on corporate behavior, copyright, patents and other forms of intellectual property, and the nature of free trade) and those who are more pro-worker, or pro-consumer, or pro-environment. If the Democratic Party would become a social democratic party, we would have a single vision: that unregulated capitalism is an inhumane socio-economic system, that the economy should be reformed and regulated to gradually move towards a different economic order where basic necessities are a matter of human rights rather than ability to pay and where workers have a voice in their working conditions. .

On the issue of class, our party and indeed many if not most Americans have an extremely fuzzy conception of what class means. You can see this in Democratic messaging which frequently conflates "working families" with "middle class families" or "working poor" with "working families," which uses the term "middle class" to include people making $30k a year and people making $225k a year. If we were a Social Democratic Party, we would have a very clear idea, based on hundreds of years of thinking about what it means to be a worker, and a solid sense that we are on the side of the working class when it comes down to a clash between their interests and the interests of corporations or employers.

What Might We Become?

Ultimately, I don't think the Democratic Party will become a social democratic or democratic socialist party, even in the event that the country as a whole shifts substantially to the left. To be frank, I don't think the ideological foundations for a capitalism-and-class based political party. If I'm wrong, I'd love to hear it.

What I do think could happen is for the Democratic Party to become a genuine Progressive Party, in the sense of the Progressive Party of 1912 and 1924 (interesting historical note: in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt won 27% of the vote and 88 electoral votes as a Progressive; in 1924, Robert LaFollette won 17% of the vote and 13 electoral votes as a Progressive).

The major difference between socialist or even social-democratic parties and progressive parties is that while the former are focused on class conflict, the latter tend to believe in social organic-ism, a belief that society is organized around functional groups rather than individuals, that all groups play an important roll in contributing to the whole, and that all groups are part of a single "industrial commonwealth." As members of a commonwealth, all citizens are entitled to social and economic rights and protections against the "hazards of modern life," and are entitled to a seat at the table in the governance of industry. Rather than seeing class conflict as between the working class and the bourgeoisie, progressives see conflict in populist terms between "the people" and "the powerful" or "special interests" or the "trusts," or between the "producing classes" and the "parasites."

In my opinion, I think if universal health care, EFCA, and climate change pass, and if the broad turn from deficit reduction and balanced budgets to Keynesian stimulus and public investments continues, then we may, in time move to a political environment in which the Democratic Party can be a Progressive Party, while democratic socialists and social democrats can exist as a legitimate part of the political culture, the left-most edge of "mainstream" politics.

But in order to get there, we will have to do a lot of political work to push our party to be more progressive, and eventually confront the more pro-corporate members of our party. As Frederick Douglass once said:

"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will."

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Re-Post Number 6: "Public Employment and Economic Planning: History, Theory, Implications" (September 19, 2007)

Note:
You'll note some similarities between this diary and the more recent diary on economic planning and the Apollo Alliance. Luckily, the older diary goes into what future economic planning should look like, providing enough new material to be of interest.
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History

Economic planning is probably the most obfuscated public policy in American history, bar none. The cries of socialized medicine, the Harry and Louise ads, the current struggles over SCHIP - all of these pale in comparison to the sound and fury raised over economic planning. Conservative Republicans and Democrats called it creeping socialism, Hayek called it creeping fascism, and the public imagination reeled before an onslaught of images of totalitarian control.

The reality was much less terrifying. The NRPB, the National Resources Planning Board, was probably the most influential of the New Deal planning institutions. Ostensibly an institution for rationalizing use of things like coal, oil, timber, etc., the NRPB instead became a place for people to re-think economic planning as an exercise in democracy, as a way of directing the guiding the economy towards goals that enhanced the quality of life for all citizens, as a way of putting the people in charge of their economic life.

Throughout the 1940's, the NRPB published a series of reports, laying out the blueprint for a new kind of American society that would come after the war, a society based on the principles of the Four Freedoms and the Second Bill of Rights proposed by President Roosevelt.

Now how does all of this tie in with public employment? In their reports, the staffers of the NRPB looked to programs like the Works Progress Administration as an example of how the government could provide services en masse to Americans in need. More importantly, the NRPB's reports, especially the 1942 Report titled "Security, Work, and Relief Policies," envisioned the provision of jobs by the Federal government as a permanent policy designed to push the country towards full employment, in conjunction with Keynesian economic policies.

The importance of this shift in economic planning, from the crude efforts to secure price and wage cooperation under the National Recovery Administration to a more sophisticated understanding of the possibilities of public action, was that it expanded the policy imagination of New Deal Democrats far beyond the narrow scope we see today. Moreover, New Deal Democrats had reason to believe that such actions were possible. The WPA had shown that the Federal government could fund and administer mass employment projects and that such projects had a substantial impact on the unemployment rare. The Office of Price Administration, a war-time agency that was given the power to regulate prices and wages, succeeded in holding inflation below 1% in a period of full employment.

Because of these advances, the NRPB believed that the national government could provide the trifecta of broad prosperity: low unemployment, low inflation, high economic growth. In essence, everything that the so-called "golden age" of the 1950-1960's was supposed to have achieved. However, there were two key differences between the golden age as envisioned by the economic planners and the golden age that transpired: first, public employment, price and wage controls, and more expansive social insurance programs would have ensured that prosperity would have flowed from public actions, such that the political will of the people, not the largess of corporate America, would have promoted economic growth. Second, it would have meant that the benefits of post-war growth would have been much more broadly distributed, both to the poor, and to minorities.

The end result, however, was that of political defeat - the de-funding of the NRPB, the watering-down of the Full Employment Act (as discussed in my previous diary), and the demonizing of both public employment and economic planning.

Theory

So what should this tell us about economic planning and public employment?

First, it should remind us that the belief that the government's actions do not influence the economy is historically inaccurate - public action can and has dramatically shaped the economy, altering employment levels and inflation rates for periods of several years at a time. Thus, our understanding of what is and is not possible in terms of economic policy should be expanded beyond the boundaries of the orthodox.

Second, it should make us think about the purposes behind economic policy. It is often a habit of Democrats to focus on particular economic indicators - economic growth, numbers of jobs created, and so forth - instead of picturing a vision of the kind of economy and society that we seek to achieve and then moving towards it.

Third, we must realize that victory begets victories and defeat, defeats - we cannot allow any push we make in the future to be stymied by Republican obstructionism. Just as the defeat of health care in 1994 robbed the Democrats of a major policy victory that would rally the base AND working class voters, so too will defeats on public employment, or any other initiative. More on this topic in my next diary.

In terms of economic planning, we need to shift our theoretical perspective to the global and the long-term. The United States stands at an uncertain point - we are still the world's largest economy, but long term trends in terms of debts, deficits, and balance of trade shows how vulnerable our position is. The American people stand at an even more perilous position - the poor, the working class, and the middle class are all facing stagnating and/or declining fortunes in terms of income, wealth, homeownership, health coverage, and no doubt higher education will be soon to follow.

What then should economic planning aim at?

1. Restore Income to Restore Savings/Balance of Trade/Rough Equality

The American economy has been shored up in recent years by the endless cycle of consumer debt that masks the decline in real incomes. Boosting the purchasing power of the ordinary American would help to restore our internal market- an essential goal, given the variability of the globalized economy. Moreover, it would put our consumer base on a much stronger basis regarding income v. debt, allowing savings, assets accumulation, and investment to increase, and redirecting more income towards the broader economy and away from finance payments, which fuel an over-saturated financial sector.

2. Use Public Employment to Shield Against Globalization

If the reality of living in a globalized economy is that industries shift rapidly across borders, then it becomes essential for the U.S and other developed economies that are likely to lose industries to less developed region to increase, not decrease their social spending. Increasing public employment can keep unemployment rates low, preventing economic decay in areas that are losing jobs, maintaining consumption levels through fueling wages. Moreover, public employment provides a shield against the destabilizing effects of globalization, a safe haven against sudden ups and downs in world markets, by counter-cyclical actions.

3. Use Public Investment to Guide the Economy Forward

Public investment can act in a complementary fashion, to create new industries that take the place of old industries, to improve the national infrastructure upon which industries depend - not just roads, bridges, and levees, but also schools, wireless internet, and research and development into new technologies. This both creates new goods and services, adding to economic growth, but also provides jobs that are designed to be more "grounded" in the American economy than consumer-goods production.

4. Set A Comprehensive Target for Economic Policy

Although we don't admit it, and we don't approach it in as much of a conscious fashion as we need to, there are certain targets that government policy does aim at - inflation at less than 2% a year, economic growth of at least 3% a year have been fairly standard aims. However, they are not targets that particularly benefit ordinary Americans - they don't include wage growth, they don't include unemployment, and they don't include the distribution of wealth in American society.

So when we engage in economic planning, it should be to hit targets that represent the whole of the American economy and the whole of the American people as well.

Implications

I'm sure that many of you are familiar with the Apollo Initiative, a joint project of labor unions and environmental groups to achieve energy independence on a basis of green technology and green jobs.
http://www.apolloalliance.org/...

Now, on it's own, the Apollo Initiative is an impressive policy innovation, envisioning a 10-year, $300 billion push towards alternative energy that envisions a whole host of coordinated policies, subsidies, and tax reforms towards a single end. It's certainly much more innovative than anything we've seen in the last few years.

However, as a model for future policy, it suggests an intriguing possibility for American policy and economic planning. Here we have a model of coordinating economic and social objectives that aims to "do good and do well" at the same time, a way of economic planning without falling into the public relations traps.

Imagine, if you will, a host of Initiatives, all designed to boost economic performance, develop new industries, create jobs, improve the national infrastructure, and benefit the commonweal of the country:

• Athena Initiative - centered around education (building new schools, recruiting teachers by providing salary bonuses, developing new educational technologies, expanding access to higher education through expanding campuses of both public and private universities - think about it, Harvard rejects all but 7% of applicants, turning away thousands and thousands of superlative students - why not expand the undergraduate body beyond just 6-odd thousand?)
  
• Mercury Initiative - centered around telecommunications and information technology (providing free broadband internet, universally compatible cellular phone networks, expanding opportunities for startups in the music and movie business, and so forth).
• Asclepius Initiative - centered around health care industry (leveraging our current public investments in medicine such as the VA, NIH, etc. into creative new publically-owned generic drugs, providing incentives for healthier work environments, improving our public health systems, using health research to uncover "best methods" of health care, so that more money is put towards care instead of overcare, and so forth).

In this way, the federal government would essentially become the national venture capitalist, using its ability to sustain investments across decades before technologies prove themselves.

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Policy Round-Up: the Apollo Initiative as Democratic Planning

Policy wonks and other people who follow public policy issues are probably familiar with the Apollo Alliance, a blue-green alliance of environmentalists and labor unions that's become a stock part of the Democratic Party's platform on environmental and economic policy. Back in 2004, Kerry signed onto it; Obama basically did the same.

For those of you who aren't familiar with it, the basic idea is to fuse environmental policy - alternative energy, "green tech," energy-efficient building, mass transit - with labor and economic policy - creating new jobs that are well-paid, have good benefits, and are union-friendly, as a way to create new domestic industry and manufacturing. The Apollo Initiative, which they were promoting back in 2004, envisioned $30 billion a year for ten years as a public investment into " promoting new technology, improving manufacturing processes, and expanding markets [of "green tech"]...improving the performance of our existing energy system... construction of high performance, energy efficient buildings...[new sources of] renewable energy...new transit system starts, maintenance of the nation’s passenger train system, development of regional high speed rail networks, and improvements in the nation’s roads and highways." Their current Apollo Program calls for a $50 billion a year for ten year investment in energy-efficient buildings, renewable fuels, a new power grid, increasing efficiency of existing power plants, building mass transit, building fuel-efficient cars...the list goes on and on.

In and of itself, it looks like nothing special - basic, Democratic Party boilerplate, the kind of buzzword-driven wonkery that gets tossed around in primaries and never amounts to nothing. I'm going to argue that it's actually a way to recover a missing part of progressive politics and policy that was lost to us during the Cold War.

Ever since the Progressive Era (1880s-1910s), one of the major political and policy divides has been between the advocates of economic planning and the advocates of the free market. To our modern ears, this sounds a little bit ridiculous - planning recalls the Soviet Five Year Plans, the forced industrializations, lousy steel being made to fit Communist Party quotas that couldn't be used, the whole panoply of anti-communist imagery that people who were born after the start of the Cold War have in our heads. But once, there were great thinkers like Thorstein Veblen, Henry Carter Adams, Richard Ely, and John Bates Clark debated whether the free market was an inevitable facet of economic life, or whether rational planning could replace it.

Enter the New Deal. With the free market in total collapse, economic planning entered into the mainstream of American politics and public policy, and the government for the first time in a non-war situation attempted to direct the course o economic activity. Roughly speaking, three kinds of economic planning were attempted during the New Deal:

Tennessee Valley Authority - founded on May 18th, 1933, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was an experiment in regional democratic planning. Supported by activist-bureaucrats like David Lilienthal, and Arthur Morgan, the idea behind the TVA was to attack the economic problems of the Tennessee Valley from multiple directions - producing fertilizers and promoting modern farming techniques to raise production, hiring the unemployed to do conservation work, generating electricity and irrigation through the construction of hydro-electric dams, flood-control, reforestation, the development of industry (especially through the provision of cheap hydro-electic power), and so on. The TVA also recognized labor unions, and less successfully sought to find jobs for unemployed African-Americans and women.

However, the idea behind the TVA went far beyond that. In the vision of Arthur Morgan, the key element of the TVA were local democratic planning boards, in which farmers, aided by experts from the TVA, would decide the future of their areas and work to develop their way out of poverty. In the vision of David Lilienthal, the key element of the TVA was the creation of public power utilities which could restore competition, lower the price of electricity and water, and extend services to the underserved - with the ultimate aim being to challenge the monopolistic private utilities on behalf of consumers. While the two bitterly fought, the ultimate vision, of a public intervention into the economy, the creation of public economic power used on behalf of the poor, of attacking every aspect of regional poverty and underdevelopment was a powerful one.

And in a nation supposedly devoted to the free market, the TVA exists to this day as a massive publically-owned industry, a living legacy of economic planning, and one that is politically beloved by Americans of all stripes of political opinion.

National Recovery Administration - founded on June 16th, 1933, the National Recovery Administration (NRA) was an experiment in tripartite economic planning. Promoted by expert-administrators like Don Richberg, Rexford Tugwell, and Raymond Moley, the basic concept of the NRA was that American industry could recover through an increase in prices, production, employment, and wages if government, business, labor worked together. The normal anti-trust laws would be suspended, and Codes would be set up for each industry, establishing codes of "fair competition," setting prices, wages, and hours, abolishing child labor and recognizing labor unions. The idea would be that by reducing competitive pressure and restoring profitability, production and employment would increase and the economy would recover.

The experiment has widely been seen as an utter disaster - codes were widely ignored, especially in regards to minimum wages, maximum hours, and the recognition of unions, red tape and arbitary regulation were blamed for strangling recovery and extneding the Great Depression. It was declared unconstitutional in 1935, and even many New Dealers saw the program's terminationa as a relief from an embarrasment. Economists especially hate the NRA and point to it as the prime example of why interfering with the free market never, ever works.

Myself, I'm a little bit more skeptical. After all, unemployment dropped from 22.9% in 1932 to 14.4% in 1935 (personally, I think that the New Deal's job programs had more to do with this). Prices went from dropping about 10% the year before, to increasing by an average of 3% in 1934 and 1935. Industrial production, which dropped by 25% in the first six months of the NRA, was up by 22% from its May 1933 levels when the NRA was terminated in 1935. If the NRA was so economically damaging, it didn't seem to prevent a recovery from taking place; perhaps the worst that could be said against it is that it was ineffective but benign.

While I wouldn't bet the farm on it, I think the case against the NRA might be worth re-opening.

National Resources Planning Board - the NRPB was founded in 1933, as a modest agency within the Interior Department, with a mandate to plan public works projects so that the Public Works Administration and the Works Progress Administration could have a "shelf" of "shovel-ready projects" to build in the future. In 1939, however, this little policy shop was transferred into the Executive Office of the President, and was given an expanded brief as the central agency for national economic planning. Under the direction of FDR's uncle, Frederick Delano, and the research expertise of Eveline Burns (a Columbia University economist who had consulted for the Committee on Economic Security that established the system we know today as Social Security, and had worked closely with the WPA), the NRPB was tasked with envisioning the future direction of America, in every aspect of life.

By 1939, the New Deal had begun to adopt the theories of Keynesian economics, and many of the economic planners in the NRPB and other agencies thought that they now had the tools to ensure permanent prosperity and full employment, through government activism in the economy. The NRPB's main contribution to this body of thought were a series of reports laying out plans for economic development, government organization, the use of natural resources, and so on. The most important of these reports was Work, Security, and Relief Policies. In this report, the NRPB outlined a vision for a "cradle to grave" welfare state that would cover all Americans who were unable to work, and the "right to a job" for all Americans who wanted to work. In this manner, the government would ensure full employment, and the full production and rapid economic growth that would follow - and the expanded revenues would pay the cost of the welfare state. It was a total economic vision of a new economic order defined by universal rights and characterized by economic security - a world in which no American would ever have to fear poverty.

In the 1940s, the principles of the NRPB's report were introduced into Congress as the Wagner-Murray-Dingell Bill (combining the nationalization of unemployment insurance and disability insurance and the expansion of Social Security with a universal health insurance system), and the Full Employment Act (mandating full employment through Keynesian planning and a public employment program as employer of last resort). It was probably the most left-leaning moment in American history. And the result was total defeat - the Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill went down to defeat every year between 1945 and the present day (John Dingell introduced the bill every year between 1945 and his retirement, his son John Dingell Jr. has continued this tradition); the Full Employment Act was eviscerated in committee and was passed in a toothless, watered-down version; and the NRPB itself was disassembled by a hostile Congress. Once the Cold War had set in, anything that smacked of state planning was demonized as Communistic, socialistic, and red.

Ok, so what's the relation between the Apollo Alliance and the New Deal's economic planning? Because when I look at the Apollo Alliance, I see something that looks like a cross between the NRPB (national forward planning) and the TVA (focused public investment in particular industrial developments). What animates the Apollo Alliance is a vision of a new kind of economy, one that has lower emissions, uses less carbon, is more energy-efficient and self-sufficient with alternative fuels, that has more of a manufacturing base, and develops towards high-density urban development along mass-transit corridors instead of massive sprawl.

What excites me about them is that what we have here are the first glimmerings of an idea, one not seen in seventy years, that the economic future of this country should ultimately be in the hands of a democratically-elected government, and not the whims of the casino we call the free market. Ultimately, if the Apollo Alliance is about anything, it's the idea that through a direct public investment, we can shift ourself from one economic model to another. While this might sound inconsequential to some, I would argue that the lifework of dozens, if not hundred and thousands of activists throughout the twentieth century, so long denied by the forces of fear and anti-communism, testify otherwise.

If we think of the economy and economic forces as similar to the great oceans and the natural laws that govern the winds and the tides, the hope of democratic planning is that we can build a ship and learn to tack into the wind, to guide ourselves with compass and sextant and marine chronometer, and that human reason, rather than the blind workings of fate, shall determine the course of our lives.

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Ideology Matters - What's In a Name?

One of the absolute truisms of political opinion polling for a long, long time has been that American political ideology has been relatively static for a long, long time. The graph to the left is based on the Harris poll of ideological self-identification that's been conducted over the last forty years, and the data's been almost constant - about 35% of the country identifies as conservative, about 40% identifies as moderate, and about 18% of the country identifies as liberal.

Now, I've long held the belief that this artificial stasis in ideology, given the dramatic upheavals in political fortunes from the Watergate revolt and the election of Jimmy Carter in 1974-1976 to the dominance of Reaganism from 1980-1992 and the rise of Clintonian Third Way-ism from 1992-2000 and the epic crash and burn of Bushian conservatism from 2000-2008, is the result of using the stale terminology of liberal, conservative, and moderate as the only ideological terms of note.

Now look at the second poll there, done by the Center for American Progress. If you give people more options, lo and behold, the pciture gets a lot less static. The number of liberals doesn't change much, but all of the sudden there's a whole 16% of the population who's calling themselves progressives, and there's even some libertarians and people who don't know what the heck they are. If you push the squishy moderates to pick sides, it turns out that about 47% percent of the country considers themselves Progressives or Liberals, 48% call themselves Conservative or Libertarian, and another 5% remain...well, very confused people

The closeness of all this actually makes a lot of sense, considering the tight elections we had in 2000 and 2004, and the differential mobilization in 2002 (when the Right really mobilized pro-war sentiment) and 2006 (when the Left really mobilized anti-war and and anti-party-in-power sentiment). I imagine the 2008 election might have shifted the boundaries somewhat, as Americans experienced both a conservtive campaign that was unusually open about what it was (no hiding those Palin rallies) and a liberal campaign that was actually willing to talk about why it thought the liberal philosophy of government was better than the conservative philosophy of government. Whether that will last, I imagine we'll find out in 2010 and 2012.

This doesn't actually surprise me, and it in fact it absolutely makes sense to me that - given the concerted demonization of liberalism by conservatives from the Great Society onwards - a good number of people were actually left-of-center but wouldn't call themselves liberals. But it does raise a good question - what does it mean to be a liberal, and what does it mean to be a progressive.

This is something that I've discussed and debated a lot with my friends and colleagues over the past couple of years. Daraka Larimore-Hall, whose political thinking I deeply respect, basically argues that, A. there is theoretically a difference between the two, and B. the differences have been blurred by people who are really liberals but won't call themselves liberals, and by people who are actually New Democrats who don't want to admit they're conservatives, and other weird political chameleons. (See also here). I think he's broadly right, although I wish he weren't.

I'd like to make the case that these two things actually do (or at least should) mean different things. If the two have been blurred, I believe that political space should be made for liberalism to stand on its own two feet, and for progressives to have their own turf. To say nothing of social democrats, democratic socialists, socialists, and other ideological formations further to the Left.

So, to explain what the difference between Liberalism and Progressiveism, I'm re-posting something I wrote in response to Matthew Yglesias' post here, which argued that:

But while the historically Progressives did stand for some good things, and are a part of the backstory of contemporary American liberalism, they also stood for some very bad things. Certainly, whatever sins liberalism may have committed in the 1970s as it fell into disrepute were distinctly minor compared to the problems with the Progressives. "Liberal," by contrast, is an important term with a noble history and a contested legacy.

My response was this:

"While the question of "progressive" vs. "liberal" is not the most pressing of debates, in is an important one. How we identify ourselves goes further than issues of terminology; it speaks to who we are as activists and who we think we are, it asks major questions about what it is we seek to achieve and what it means to be on the left in modern America. Moreover, it begs the question as to what use activists should make of history in guiding our thought and action.

On one level, Matt raises a good point. In current political discourse, "progressive" can be a vague term than can be applied equally to the left-most Green Party activist or to the right-most New Democrat. Indeed, the term’s prominence in recent years owes as much to the efforts of New Democrats to elide the differences between themselves and traditional liberals as it does the efforts of liberals to reclaim a right to exist in the political mainstream. It is not by accident that the major New Democrat think-tank chose the name "Progressive" Policy Institute, or that Hillary Clinton described herself as a "progressive" in Democratic debates to muddy the ideological waters between herself, Barack Obama, and John Edwards, as if to say "we’re all progressives now, so let’s not compare agendas."

Historically, it is also true that in the Progressive Era, self-identified progressives supported some vile endeavors: they could be quite elitist, disdaining "ignorant" voters and preferring government-by-experts. Many were ethnocentric or outright racist, thinking of immigrants and blacks as lesser races in need of guidance from the Civilized West. Certainly, Woodrow Wilson thought so when he segregated the federal government and Theodore Roosevelt largely agreed when it came to the invasion of the Philippines or military interventions into Latin America. The Progressive Era was also the era when Jim Crow was established in law through the active disenfranchisement of blacks and poor whites, and the era of race riots. Certainly it is true that a conservative like Jonah Goldberg could take this history, sift out all contrary facts, and present progressivism as the authoritarian forebear of modern liberalism.

However, I would argue that liberalism would not fare much better under the same selective scrutiny. Liberals like FDR accepted and subsidized segregation in the South (and in the North) as the devil’s bargain for southern votes for the New Deal. As Ira Katznelson notes in his book When Affirmative Action Was White, the New Deal’s exclusion of blacks (and women) from Social Security, minimum wage and maximum hours laws, and the Wagner Act, while simultaneously boosting the economic position of whites through New Deal programs and the GI Bill, had a huge impact on racial inequality in America. It is also true that liberals like FDR carried out the policy of Japanese internment during WWII, and that Truman was responsible for dropping the first (and only) atomic bombs, giving official license to Cold War red-baiting, instituting loyalty oaths and purges, and creating the national-security and military-industrial complexes we live with today. The same liberals who gave us the Great Society, the War on Poverty, and the Civil Rights Act also gave us the war in Vietnam. The ultimate point here is not that liberalism is historically illegitimate; but that the study of history admits few pure heroes or pure villains and that a study of conservatism would lead to far more skeletons in the closet than Mr. Goldberg would care to remember.

So what now? Are we to decide who we are and what we stand for by a game of historical hot potato? Absolutely not. More serious issues are at stake, and the difference between "progressivism" and "liberalism" have deeper significances and broader importance than the brand value of a label.

As historians of the Progressive Era like Mary Furner, Daniel Rodgers, Robert Johnson, Eldon Eisenach, John Recchiuti, Martin Sklar, and others have explored, there was something special to the progressives. They were the first generation of Americans to live in an age of corporate capitalism, and they were perhaps the last generation of Americans whose minds were not limited by the acceptance of the resulting social order as natural. Progressives like Theodore Roosevelt or Robert LaFollette proposed far-sighted policies such as universal health insurance, the right to vote for women, the right to an eight hour day, the minimum wage, old age insurance, unemployment insurance, and disability insurance, the right to join a union, industrial health and safety regulations, and the abolition of child labor. In many ways, they defined the agenda that liberalism would pursue.

However, the scope of progressive imaginations was larger than just this. Progressives looked beyond the world they lived in to advocate for a new economic order, something different from either capitalism or communism. In bold, confident terms, Progressivism argued that an activist government should exercise economic sovereignty and engage in economic planning, and regulate, nationalize, or abolish the great industrial corporations of the day. Their vision was a way of life in which cooperation replaced competition as the guiding impulse of economic life, in which human values would be privileged above market values, and in which sweeping inequality would be replaced by a rough equality of wealth, a fair share in national prosperity, something they called "an American standard of living." Their rationale for this vision was not grounded in traditional liberal concerns about the individual or in Marxist ideology that the worker should own the means of production.

Rather, Progressives were animated by a faith in collective action, and a belief that the flaws in society created by humans could be fixed by humans. In a very real sense, the Progressives were the heirs of a rich tradition of American republicanism, a philosophy that saw the sovereign people as the only legitimate source of political and economic power, that believed in the defense of the common-wealth against private privilege, and that demanded the great concentrations of wealth be redistributed to create a "rough equality" among equal citizens, lest inequalities of wealth become inequalities of political power. Ultimately, the vision put forward was that economic sovereignty - the right to decide how each one of us lives our lives in the workplace, in the marketplace, and in the public square - must be taken from the hands of monopolistic corporations and restored to popular government. As Theodore Roosevelt put it:

"The Constitution guarantees protections to property, and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation. The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man's making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being."

Alan Brinkley and other historians have noted that the political vision of post-war liberalism shied from such challenges to capitalism. After a vigorous and diverse flowering of progressive experimentation in the New Deal – all the way from the economic planning enshrined by the National Recovery Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority to the provision of public jobs in the WPA and the vision of a right to a job, and the price-setting powers of the OPA – post-war liberals were tired of struggle. Abandoning even the modest progressivism of social Keynesianism, liberals looked to accommodate capitalism and capitalists, to use social programs to compensate (not prevent or replace) the shortcomings of the economy, of using interest rates and military spending to manage the economy, rather than expansive investments in housing and infrastructure. Above all, liberals sought safer waters than the issue of reconstructing capitalism. Ironically, liberals looked to civil rights, environmentalism, education, and other "quality of life" issues as safer targets for reform.

In the long run, it is to our great advantage that liberals took the cause of reform in new directions. On another level, it is important that we recognize that a price was paid: a narrow horizon of imagination, a smaller vision of what could be accomplished, and a certain complacency with the status quo. And when the foundations that underwrote that complacency – close to full employment, steady economic growth, a strong union movement, and favorable trade conditions – cracked apart in the 1970s, even liberalism became too radical for American politics.

And here we are today, in what I believe is the beginning of the post-post liberal era. Eight years of the Bush Administration have catastrophically delegitimized and exhausted modern conservativism, conservatives no longer have anything new to offer to each other or anyone else in terms of ideas, and the American electorate is increasingly comfortable and desirous of a more active government presence in their lives. Part of that desire comes from the fact that we are living in a precarious time: deregulation and free trade agreements have diminished the power of government to modulate the shocks of the global market, yet the promised results of a more risk-intensive world order have yet to arrive. Our economic system is badly imbalanced between our means and our salaries, between productivity and income, and between wages and profits. The world economic system seems no better, and instability and uncertainty are the order of the day.

Two things become clear. First, there is a space that will open in American politics for new agendas, new approaches, and new thinking. Second, the consequences of which ideas we will choose are very high. Will we take up the banner of liberalism, and strive valiantly to repair the damage that has been done, and to try once more to make the system we have more livable for the American people, all the while accepting the fact that we live in an age of international finance and globalized production that constrains our options? Or will we instead take up the banner of progressivism, and attempt to construct a new way of life, a political economy that is better suited to the current time and the human condition, knowing as we do that the one we have now is dangerously blind to human need?

For my own part, I would call myself a progressive, and call upon others to take up the label, and the cause. As a historian, I have never felt the kind of doubt that liberals post-1968 have felt – the creeping fear, after McGovern, Mondale, and Dukakis, that maybe we’re wrong, that maybe Americans really hate us and what we stand for. For as Theodore Roosevelt once said, "we stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord."

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