The Conscience of a Liberal

13 THE CONSCIENCE OF A LIBERAL

One of the seeming paradoxes of America in the early twenty-first century is that those of us who call ourselves liberal are, in an important sense, conservative, while those who call themselves conservative are for the most part deeply radical. Liberals want to restore the middle-class society I grew up in; those who call themselves conservative want to take us back to the Gilded Age, undoing a century of history. Liberals defend long-standing institutions like Social Security and Medicare; those who call themselves conservative want to privatize or undermine those institutions. Liberals want to honor our democratic principles and the rule of law; those who call themselves conservative want the president to have dictatorial powers and have applauded the Bush administration as it imprisons people without charges and subjects them to torture.

The key to understanding this paradox is the history I described in this book. As early as 1952—and, it turned out, somewhat prematurely—Adlai Stevenson declared that

What he meant was that the Democrats had become the defenders of Social Security, unemployment insurance, a strong union movement—the New Deal institutions, which created and sustained a middle-class society—while the Republicans were trying to tear those institutions down.

Stevenson’s characterization of the Republicans was off by a few years. In the years that followed his speech Eisenhower’s “modern” Republicans took control of their party away from the old guard that was still fighting the New Deal, and for the next two decades the GOP was mostly led by men who accepted the New Deal’s achievements. With the rise of movement conservatism, however, the assault on those achievements resumed. The great domestic policy struggles of the last fifteen years—Newt Gingrich’s attempt to strangle Medicare, George W. Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security—were exactly what Stevenson described: the party of the reckless and embittered trying to dismantle institutions that are essential parts of modern America’s social fabric.

And the struggle has been about preserving our democracy as well as our social fabric. The New Deal did more than create a middle-class society. It also brought America closer to its democratic ideals, by giving working Americans real political power and ending the dominant position of the wealthy elite. True, the New Deal relied on an alliance of convenience with Southern segregationists—but in the end, inevitably, the New Deal ethos turned the Democrats into the party of civil rights and political rights. The Social Security Act of 1935 led, by a natural progression, to the Voting Rights Act thirty years later. Liberalism, in other words, isn’t just about the welfare state: It’s also about democracy and the rule of law. And those who call themselves conservative are on the other side, with a political strategy that rests, at its core, on exploiting the unwillingness of some Americans to grant equal rights to their fellow citizens—to those who don’t share their skin color, don’t share their faith, don’t share their sexual preferences.

As I’ve documented in this book, movement conservatism has been antidemocratic, with an attraction to authoritarianism, from the beginning, when the National Review praised Francisco Franco and defended the right of white Southerners to disenfranchise blacks. That antidemocratic, authoritarian attitude has never gone away. When liberals and conservatives clash over voter rights in America today, liberals are always trying to enfranchise citizens, while conservatives are always trying to block some citizens from voting. When they clash over government prerogatives, liberals are always the defenders of due process, while conservatives insist that those in power have the right to do as they please. After 9/11 the Bush administration tried to foster a deeply un-American political climate in which any criticism of the president was considered unpatriotic—and with few exceptions, American conservatives cheered.

I believe in a relatively equal society, supported by institutions that limit extremes of wealth and poverty. I believe in democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law. That makes me a liberal, and I’m proud of it.

Many people deeply involved in actual politics share the beliefs I’ve just described, yet prefer to describe themselves as progressives rather than liberals. To some extent that’s a response to the decades-long propaganda campaign conducted by movement conservatives, which has been quite successful in making Americans disdain the word “liberal” but much less successful in reducing support for liberal policies. Polls generally show that relatively few Americans, usually less than 30 percent, identify themselves as liberals. On the other hand, large majorities of Americans favor policy positions we would normally call liberal, such as a guarantee of health insurance for every American.

Yet “progressive” isn’t simply a new word for what “liberal” used to mean. The real distinction between the terms, at least as I and many others use them, is between philosophy and action. Liberals are those who believe in institutions that limit inequality and injustice. Progressives are those who participate, explicitly or implicitly, in a political coalition that defends and tries to enlarge those institutions. You’re a liberal, whether you know it or not, if you believe that the United States should have universal health care. You’re a progressive if you participate in the effort to bring universal health care into being.

One of the important changes in the U.S. political scene during the Bush years has been the coalescence of a progressive movement that in some—but only some—respects resembles movement conservatism. Like movement conservatism it’s a collection of institutions that is associated with, but not the same as, a major political party: Many Democrats are progressives, and most progressives support Democrats, but the movement extends well beyond the party. It includes parts of the old New Deal coalition, notably organized labor, a variety of think tanks, and novel entities like the “netroots,” the virtual community held together by bloggers and progressive Web sites like Daily Kos, which now attracts regular postings from leading Democratic politicians. In other respects, however, there are sharp differences between the progressive movement and movement conservatism. There’s far less centralization: Although right-wingers see the hidden hand of George Soros behind everything, the reality is that there’s nothing comparable on the left to the coordinated funding of movement conservatism. Correspondingly, there’s nothing like the monolithic unity of views enforced by the funders, the implicit oath of loyalty sworn by movement conservatives.

What makes progressive institutions into a movement isn’t money, it’s self-perception. Many Americans with more or less liberal beliefs now consider themselves members of a common movement, with the shared goals of limiting inequality and defending democratic principles. The movement reserves its greatest scorn for Democrats who won’t make a stand against the right, who give in on Social Security privatization or escalation in Iraq.

During the Clinton years there wasn’t a progressive movement in this sense—and the nation paid a price. Looking back, it’s clear that Bill Clinton never had a well-defined agenda. In a fundamental sense he didn’t know what he was supposed to do. When he arrived in office, his advisers were obsessed with the idea of a trade confrontation with Japan, something that never made much sense, was never thought through, and had no real base behind it. There were many reasons Hillary Clinton’s health care plan failed, but a key weakness was that it wasn’t an attempt to give substance to the goals of a broad movement—it was a personal venture, developed in isolation and without a supporting coalition. And after the Republican victory in 1994, Bill Clinton was reduced to making marginal policy changes. He ran the government well, but he didn’t advance a larger agenda, and he didn’t build a movement. This could happen again, but if it does, progressives will rightly feel betrayed.

To be liberal is in a sense to be a conservative—it means, to a large extent, wanting us to go back to being a middle-class society. To be a progressive, however, clearly implies wanting to move forward. This may sound like a contradiction, but it isn’t. Advancing the traditional goals of liberalism requires new policies.

Take the case of adding prescription drugs to Medicare, which was arguably a conservative policy that maintained the program’s original mission. Medicare was always supposed to cover major health expenses. Drugs weren’t included in the original program, because at the time they weren’t a big expense. When drug treatment for chronic diseases became a huge cost for many of the elderly, Medicare’s original focus on hospital coverage was out of step with its mission—and adding prescription drugs became necessary to maintain the program’s original intent.

You can say something similar, with a little less force, about universal health care. The Social Security Act of 1935 established retirement benefits and a federal-state system of unemployment insurance, but its larger purpose, says the Social Security Administration’s official history, was “to meet some of the serious problems of economic insecurity arising in an industrial society.”[2] Protecting families against severe health care costs fits in very well with that purpose. In fact, FDR considered including health insurance in the act but backed off for political reasons. Achieving universal care would, then, be a completion of FDR’s legacy. Furthermore, health care is to social insurance as drugs are to Medicare: It was once a relatively small expense, but today insecurity over medical expenses is arguably the single biggest financial risk working Americans face. And if we consider our goal to be sustaining a middle-class society, guaranteed health insurance is essential: Employment-based insurance may have been good enough for most people thirty years ago, but it’s woefully inadequate today. A society in which 40 percent of the population either has no insurance or has inadequate insurance that forces them to postpone medical care because of its cost isn’t middle-class.[3]

A progressive agenda, then, would require major changes in public policy, but it would be anything but radical. Its goal would be to complete the work of the New Deal, including expansion of social insurance to cover avoidable risks that have become vastly more important in recent decades. And as an economic matter, achieving that agenda would be eminently doable. It would amount to giving U.S. citizens no more than the level of protection from financial risk and personal misfortune that citizens of other advanced countries already have.

In fact, to survey the current political scene is to be struck by just how well formulated the progressive agenda is—and how intellectually decrepit movement conservatism has become. As this book was being written, Democratic presidential candidates were discussing plans for universal health care, new approaches to poverty, options for helping troubled home buyers, and more. Meanwhile, Republican contenders offered no concrete proposals at all—they seemed to be competing over who sounded most like Ronald Reagan, and who was most enthusiastic about torture. To the extent that the Democratic Party represents the progressive movement, the Democrats have become the party of ideas.

The progressive agenda is clear and achievable, but it will face fierce opposition. The central fact of modern American political life is the control of the Republican Party by movement conservatives, whose vision of what America should be is completely antithetical to that of the progressive movement. Because of that control, the notion, beloved of political pundits, that we can make progress through bipartisan consensus is simply foolish. On health care reform, which is the first domestic priority for progressives, there’s no way to achieve a bipartisan compromise between Republicans who want to strangle Medicare and Democrats who want guaranteed health insurance for all. When a health care reform plan is actually presented to Congress, the leaders of movement conservatism will do what they did in 1993—urge Republicans to oppose the plan in any form, lest successful health reform undermine the movement conservative agenda. And most Republicans will probably go along.

To be a progressive, then, means being a partisan—at least for now. The only way a progressive agenda can be enacted is if Democrats have both the presidency and a large enough majority in Congress to overcome Republican opposition. And achieving that kind of political preponderance will require leadership that makes opponents of the progressive agenda pay a political price for their obstructionism—leadership that, like FDR, welcomes the hatred of the interest groups trying to prevent us from making our society better.

If the new progressive movement succeeds, the need for partisanship will eventually diminish. In the 1950s you could support Social Security and unions and yet still vote for Eisenhower in good conscience, because the Republican Party had eventually (and temporarily) accepted the New Deal’s achievements. In the long run we can hope for a return to that kind of politics: two reasonable parties that accept all that is best in our country but compete over their ability to deliver a decent life to all Americans, and keep each other honest.

For now, being an active liberal means being a progressive, and being a progressive means being partisan. But the end goal isn’t one-party rule. It’s the reestablishment of a truly vital, competitive democracy. Because in the end, democracy is what being a liberal is all about.