Features » October 19, 2007

The Left’s Identity Crisis

What does it mean to be a progressive in 2007? What do we stand for? What do we believe in?

By Ken Brociner

Bai uses the term 'progressive' loosely, not only because of his own lack of an ideological framework, but also because he is reporting on a movement that itself is similarly confused.

“Love me, love me, I’m a liberal” was one of the most memorable protest songs of the ’60s. Written, recorded and performed by the late, great Phil Ochs, the song expressed the widespread anger that ’60s radicals felt toward mainstream liberalism during that tumultuous era.

Today, in the eyes of many progressive activists, a similar divide exists within the Democratic Party. According to this view, the Democrats’ intra-party struggle either pits the insider vs. outsider, grassroots activists vs. elites or sellouts vs. those willing to fight for what they believe in (or all of the above).

By setting up these misleading dichotomies, too many activists have contributed to the dilution of what was widely meant by the word “progressive” when it became the adjective of choice for the left sometime in the mid-to-late ’70s. The fact is, over the past 10 to 15 years, the label “progressive” has come to be used so loosely that it has lost much of the substance that it had in the ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s.

So what does it mean to be a progressive in 2007? What do we stand for? What do we believe in?

The extraordinary buzz surrounding Matt Bai’s new book, The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics, has brought these issues to the surface in a way that almost nothing else has in recent years. Yet, rather than help bring clarity to the debates within the movement, Bai only adds to the confusion.

By any measure, Bai, The New York Times Magazine’s leading political journalist, has written an entertaining narrative that combines serious analysis with an often rollicking mix of humor and political gossip. In doing so, he provides readers with a rare and fascinating inside view into some of the key players in the blogosphere, the leadership of the Democratic Party and the secretive world of the multimillionaires and billionaires who are bankrolling many of the left’s most important organizations.

The author tells us that over the past three years, he “set out across the country to find the places where this nascent [progressive] movement was coalescing and to trace its arc.” He then goes on to explain the significance of the book’s title: “The movement that dominates the next generation of American politics will be the one … that articulates some new and persuasive argument for how we meet the future.”

Bai’s quest to see if anyone or any organization has come up with “the argument” (or as he also characterizes it, “new ideas” and/or “one big idea”), seems to be based on a silver-bullet theory of social change. As such, many readers will find Bai’s near-obsessive search for “the argument” to be a one-dimensional way of analyzing what is a complex, multilayered process.

He focuses almost exclusively on the newly formed Democracy Alliance (a small group of mega-rich liberals), the netroots, including MoveOn.org, and a handful of Democratic politicians, such as Bill Clinton, Howard Dean, Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), Rep. Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.). As a result, Bai nearly ignores most of the mass organizations that define so much of the progressive movement.

For example, the AFL-CIO receives scant attention. Same with the National Organization for Women (NOW), the NAACP, the Human Rights Campaign, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), USAction, the Sierra Club and a host of other significant groups on the liberal-left.

While Bai can be overly cynical, he does offer some valid criticism of progressives. At the same time, however, he also takes more than a few cheap shots at MoveOn.org, a number of leading bloggers and John Edwards, among others.

Furthermore, for a savvy political writer, Bai exhibits a poor understanding of the historical and contemporary nature of political ideology. He strangely refers to Simon Rosenberg as “an early progressive visionary.” Yet Rosenberg is nothing more than a former Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) staffer, who now heads the New Democrat Network, and who, in the past few years, has moved a few millimeters to the left of dead center. Bai also characterizes former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo as being a voice from “the old left”—a label long used to describe the communist and socialist movements of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s.

Bai uses the term “progressive” loosely, not only because of his own lack of an ideological framework, it seems, but also because he is reporting on a movement that itself is similarly confused about just who and what is really “progressive.”

Howard Dean, for example, has become one of the progressive movement’s leading heroes. Although he took a more critical stance toward the war in Iraq than did other major Democratic candidates in 2004, he was not any further to the left than John Kerry, John Edwards or Dick Gephardt were on a whole range of issues, including the basic one of economic inequality. So, aren’t we just kidding ourselves when we make Dean out to be a champion of progressive causes?

A similar ideological incoherence can be found among the netroots. In Crashing the Gate, a book co-written by Jerome Armstrong (sometimes known as the “Blogfather” for the pioneering role he played in the early years of the netroots) and Markos Moulitsas, the founder of Daily Kos, the authors vociferously denounce the DLC for being too timid and centrist. Yet at the same time, they suggest that a return to the good old days of the DLC-aligned Clinton administration would be close to political paradise.

More recently, Armstrong became a leading consultant in the short-lived presidential campaign of Mark Warner, the former governor of Virginia, who is widely seen as one of the DLC’s shining stars. While Moulitsas didn’t go as far as endorsing Warner, his public comments about the Virginian made it clear that “Kos” is also a fan.

Activists in the netroots seem to pride themselves on being leaderless. But when two of its most prominent figures display such inconsistency (or hypocrisy, take your pick), this can only further weaken the general understanding of what it means to be progressive for the countless new activists in the movement.

Over the next year, as we mobilize for the election, this kind of confusion probably won’t matter much. Operating under the Big Tent organizational model may be the most effective way to remain united for the showdown on Nov. 4, 2008.

But if the Democrats recapture the presidency, we will need to create a much more visible, left-oriented wing of the progressive movement than exists today. A government of the center-left—which is all we can reasonably hope for, no matter who is elected president—simply won’t be capable of bringing about the kinds of fundamental changes that are so desperately needed here at home as well as throughout the rest of the world.

What’s more, with a Democrat in the White House, a watered-down progressive movement would run the real risk of becoming complacent or co-opted. Regardless of the results on Election Day, we will need to sharpen our understanding of what kind of progressive movement is required in the years ahead.

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• Reader Comments

  Brociner seems to have settled on “Progressive” as the proper term for term our Leftists. 

  May I suggest “Neocommunist” as a more appropriate label. 

  In the early years of the Twentieth Century, a new Collectivist philosophy, originating in Europe in the 1800s, arose in the United States.  Known first as “Communism”, it attracted few followers among the American electorate, who had extensive reports on the horrific death and destruction that accompanied the imposition of Communism in Russia.

  Communism in the United States did not not thrive, but neither did it go away.  Communists changed their name to “Socialists”, but Socialism also failed to attract many followers. 

  When Communism and Socialism were repudiated by the American people, they began to call themselves, fraudulently, “Progressives”.  The Progressive movement in the United States had developed in the early Twentieth Century, and Republican President Theodore Roosevelt was its most notable proponent.  When the Collectivists failed to etablish themselves under the Communist and Socialist labels, they stole the Progressive title.  Henry Wallace, businessman/mystic/Communist, ran for President on the Progressive Party ticket in 1948.  He lost.  Badly.

  Shortly thereafter the Collectivists began calling themselves “Liberals”.  If the expropriation of the Progressive label was fraudulent, the expropriation of the Liberal label was bizarre. Collectivists are the polar opposite of the values originally enshrined in the liberalism of the founding of the Republic.

  Now I note that some Collectivists (Hillary, most notably) are again calling themselves Progressives.  I suppose they are running out of labels with which to mislead people.

  Posted by scorp on Oct 19, 2007 at 1:30 PM

  The I.D. crisis is a universal political problem in the U.S. and has been for some time. It once was a given the Democrats were for labor and the Republicans for business — no more.

  The labels have become blurred as both parties have sold out to the biggest donors and biggest potential client for whom to lobby when leaving congress.

  The dollar is following the economy down the drain. The last couple of decades has seen the number of D.C. lobbyists triple. The best jobs have been exported and the foreign goods which consumers are blamed for “wanting” will soon be rising in price. (Just try and find a truly U.S. Made product.)

  We are now at a point where we could see either hyperinflation, or worse, deflation similar to what Japan has suffered for the last decade. Chances are we cold get both with U.S. made goods forced to lower prices and all foreign products spiraling upwards.

  Liberal, conservative, progressive, socialist, communist ? How about Elitist? — The billionaires with a 15 percent capital gains tax, stock options and off-shore tax dodges are in a bipartisan driver’s seat.

  The squeeze on the U.S. middle and lower classes will be more painful whoever takes office next year. The folks at the top are a force without any competition.

  American voters are divided into so may special interest groups who only care about their own particular segment that we should drop the “United” from our name.

  Posted by whattheheck on Oct 20, 2007 at 6:35 PM

  CORRECTIONS: (For some reason the edit feature didn’t show up.)

  3rd para — Chances are we could get…

  Lastr para — ....so many special iinterest…

  Posted by whattheheck on Oct 21, 2007 at 11:08 AM

  WTH -

  You have a charmingly naive and thought-free view of the world.  Everything you don’t like, you find something or someone to blame it on, even if there is no correlation whatsoever.  And you don’t let facts get in your way. 

  The I.D. crisis is a universal political problem in the U.S. and has been for some time.

  Oh, come now.  The American Revolution and the War Between the States are examples of true ID crises, when Americans fought against Americans over who they were and what kind of country they wanted.  Far from being a “universal political problem”, this is the normal state of affairs world-wide.  We are actually in a quite benign period.  Such problems as we have are exacerbated by the Neocommunists, who pretend to support liberal American values while pusuing a totalitarian agenda. 

  The dollar is following the economy down the drain.

  Horse shit.  You, of all people on this thread, have complained, with no reason but your own sorry experience, about loss of jobs.  The United States economy is the strongest in the world, with 65 months of growth and increased jobs.  The lower dollar has made American goods more competitive, and the trade figures are already reflecting this. 

  The best jobs have been exported ...

  Ummm, no.  The cheap manufacturing jobs have been moved to cheap suppliers, and high paying technical and service jobs have replaced them, with substantial growth in the number of jobs and in the economy.  We have produced net 1.41 million new jobs in the last year, most of them paying more than the manufacturing jobs which were eliminated. 

  http://www.optimist123.com/optimist/2007/10/where-the-jobs-.html

  We are now at a point where we could see either hyperinflation, or worse, deflation similar to what Japan has suffered for the last decade.

  Well, which will it be?  You do not have a clue, do you?  The deflation that Japan experienced starting in 1991 was a direct result of the Japanese asset bubble, when the price of prime Tokyo real estate was $40,000 per square meter, and the 400 acres of the Japanese Imperial Palace was valued higher than the state of California.  Well, yes, bubbles always burst, and always cause economic disruption when they burst, such as Japan has experienced and from which it is now slowly recovering. 

  You probably did not notice, but the USA was in quite a hefty dot.com bubble during the last four years of the Clinton Administration.  The Bubba Bubble had a very large potential for economic devastation, but fortunately George Bush and Alan Greenspan applied the proper corrective action, minimizing the bad effects and leading to the unparalleled growth and prosperity we have experienced since then. 

  Let me tell you how you can become rich and famous.  You always claim that the government is lying about jobs and prosperity.  If the government is producing fictional numbers, this is the world’s largest conspiracy.  Not only do the government figures have to be fictional, but a lot of other evidence must be fictional as well.  For example, when Clinton left office, virtually all the states had terrible problems with their finances and budgets.  But Bush’s tax cuts produced jobs, and jobs produced tax revenues, and tax revenues brought revenue surpluses to most states.  So if the government is producing fictional job and prosperity data, the states could not possibly have revenue surpluses, now could they?  So all the states must be lying, as well.  A conspiracy that large cannot be concealed.  By revealing this conspiracy to the world, you will earn everlasting fame and fortune.  Go for it.

  American voters are divided into so may special interest groups ...

  It was always thus.

  Posted by scorp on Oct 21, 2007 at 4:00 PM

  Scorp,

  Sorry, The Revolutionary and Civil wars were before my time. Let’s look at more recent history.

  The disunity obvious to anyone willing to remove his rose-colored glasses is on the increase in the U.S.

  We now have a combination of a mishandled war in Iraq

  (look up “Gen. Sanchez’s Scream” this week at opinionjournal.com)

  and an economic calamity much like the early 1970s (I was around then.) We could get the same kind of inflation or deflation.  I won’t attempt to predict just to be prepared for either.

  As I recall the last time we had this is agreement about the current state of the economy I said wait a year and see if you still think I’m off the mark. You may not need to wait that long.

  You believe the U.S. economy is the strongest, the new jobs are better than the ones we gave away, the trade deficit is improving, over a million jobs have been created and the lower dollar is good for exports. You correctly described the Japanese asset bubble, but apparently missed our housing bubble, the credit pyramid scheme and the reality of inflation (including food and energy).

  The tech meltdown during Clinton’s administration is in part what I meant by I.D. crisis. Clinton was no real Democrat just as neither Bush is a genuine conservative. They both serve the same small faction — the wealthy elitists.

  Tax cuts for the rich are supposed to help because they will spend and the poor will save. THINK! The rich already can always spend on everything they want.  That’s what being RICH is all about. The poor MUST spend on necessities like food and energy.

  The weak dollar good for business exports? Their raw materials will be bought with weaker dollars cutting profit margins and sold to countries with stronger currencies another cut. Stop listening to the CNBC baloney and reason it out for yourself.

  I think I also recommended buying gold and energy. You might also go for a shorting the dollar fund — regardless of what Paulson says about wanting a strong dollar — it is a given that the Fed is trying to inflate away our huge debts, but the 10 yr bond has held in a narrow range. China and Japan are already unloading Treasuries which may take care of raising the rates for the Fed.

  As for government numbers —  good example is the recent announcement of a 4,000 job loss was revised to a plus 85,000 for August. Whoops, excuuuse me!

  States with surpluses? A conspiracy of any size can be concealed from people as complacent as you. As an example keep watching the global angst as the credit kiting and rating incompetence continues to unfold.  Have you checked the financial earnings reports lately?  You could profit on it with an inverse financials ETF (SKF).

  Posted by whattheheck on Oct 21, 2007 at 6:01 PM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

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