In Search of Progressive America 9780812209099

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction Toward a Second Coming?
Chapter 1. Democrats and the World
Chapter 2. Cultivating Our Own Garden
Chapter 3. America’s Encounter with Immigrants
Chapter 4. The Media Obstacle
Chapter 5. Think Tanks and the War of Ideas in American Politics
Chapter 6. From Incremental to Transformative Change
Chapter 7. Rebuilding the Welfare State in the United States
Chapter 8. Families Valued
Chapter 9. How Labor Can Win
Chapter 10. The Once and Future Christian Left
Notes
Contributors

Citation preview

In Search of Progressive America

In Search of Progressive America Edited by Michael Kazin With Frans Becker and Menno Hurenkamp

University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

Copyright 䉷 2008 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data In search of progressive America / edited by Michael Kazin ; with Frans Becker and Menno Hurenkamp. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-8122-2038-4 (alk. paper) 1. United States—Politics and government—2001–. 2. Progressivism (United States politics). I. Kazin, Michael, 1948–. II. Becker, Frans. III. Hurenkamp, Menno, 1971–. JK275.I5 2008 320.5—dc22 2008012680

Contents

1

Introduction: Toward a Second Coming? Michael Kazin

1

6

Democrats and the World Matthew Yglesias

2

Cultivating Our Own Garden

23

Andrew J. Bacevich

3

America’s Encounter with Immigrants

37

Gary Gerstle

4

54

The Media Obstacle Todd Gitlin

5

Think Tanks and the War of Ideas in American Politics 73 Andrew Rich

6

From Incremental to Transformative Change

85

Ezra Klein

7

Rebuilding the Welfare State in the United States Dean Baker

8

Families Valued

117

Karen Kornbluh

9

How Labor Can Win Nelson Lichtenstein

130

101

vi

10

Contents The Once and Future Christian Left Michael Kazin

Notes

149

List of Contributors

159

140

Introduction

Toward a Second Coming? Michael Kazin

During the final year of the reign of Bush and Cheney, the era of conservative dominance also appears to be stumbling toward an end. No administration has been so unpopular since the early days of disco. And the fall of Richard Nixon in 1974 was due primarily to the Watergate scandal, not to the accumulation of disastrous policies stretching from the levees of New Orleans to the streets of Baghdad. When his Texas prote´ge´ campaigned for president in 2000, Karl Rove predicted the GOP would hold power for decades to come. Clever activists on the Right would weld a durable majority by keeping taxes down, turning Social Security into a private concern, welcoming immigrants who rejected unions, and returning abortionists to back alleys. But that brave new political world was strangled in its cradle in 2006 when the Democrats recaptured control of Congress. Behind the Right’s collapse lay a sea change in public opinion. Nearly every poll taken after the 2006 election found that most voters agreed with views liberals had long advocated. Solid majorities favored: a big hike in the minimum wage, government-mandated health insurance for every American, stronger gun control laws, sex education programs that talk about condoms as well as abstinence, laws that would make it easier for unions to organize, and using diplomacy instead of war to combat terrorism. Writing for the Nation, Rick Perlstein composed a little ditty about the polls: ‘‘You suspected it all along, Now it just might be true: Most Americans think like you.’’1 But it was far from clear that progressives, the mildly inclusive term now favored on the broad Left, were ready to take charge. The

2

Michael Kazin

New Deal era—those golden years of reform from the early 1930s into the mid-1960s—began with a similar collapse by a similarly dominant Right. President Herbert Hoover and the Republican majority in Congress did not foresee the Great Depression and failed to mitigate the suffering it caused. But Franklin D. Roosevelt and the crusading liberals who followed him to Washington did not change the nation simply by reminding Americans that their opponents were clumsy and callous. A few years after defeating the GOP, liberals accomplished two goals essential to birthing a new governing order in a democratic state: a compelling, easily understood program and a broad, dependable coalition. Neither Democratic politicians nor the activists who pressure them from the Left has demonstrated that they know how to repeat that performance. Until they do, there will be no second coming for progressive America. The pols need to turn the change in public opinion, which is hopeful but dormant, into a dynamic vision of how the government can help ordinary Americans lead more secure and more prosperous lives. The activists are long on righteous anger but short on the hard work of reaching people who neither attend protest marches nor routinely click around the blogosphere. Neither group has figured out how to tether optimistic talk about ‘‘an emerging Democratic majority’’ composed of young professionals and Hispanics as well as more traditional liberal groups to an agenda that could unite them all. And every domestic problem takes second billing to the unending ‘‘war on terrorism’’ that George Bush launched from Central Asia to Guantanamo Bay. As long as the globe seems full of people who want to kill you, progressives who argue for tolerance, negotiations, and fair trade will probably remain on the defensive. The ten essays in this book seek to address the current state of promise and discord in two profoundly simple ways: they explain the environment, at home and abroad, that confronts progressives, and they propose thoughtful ways to change it. The authors earn a living in a variety of ways: two are journalists, six are academics, one works on Capitol Hill, another helps run a think tank. They are not of one mind about the future. Some argue that a move to the left will gather speed; others are skeptical, pointing to continuing barriers thrown up by powerful ideas and structures. But each writer is a politically en-

Introduction

3

gaged intellectual who offers big ideas and meaty details that readers of any ideological stripe should take seriously. The collection begins with three sober evaluations of the United States in world affairs and the impact of the world on American minds, progressive and otherwise. Matthew Yglesias reflects on the tortured stances leading Democrats have taken since the attacks of 9/11 and wonders if any standard-bearer for the party will be capable of questioning the arrogant premise that led the United States into Iraq. Andrew Bacevich challenges the notion that U.S. power abroad has been guided by a liberating ideal. Living up to those ideals instead of simply mouthing them to justify expansion would be, he asserts, the best idea in the world. Gary Gerstle puts the current conflict over new immigrants in historical perspective. He shows that the present furor over ‘‘illegal aliens’’ is just the latest episode in a debate about labor, race, and citizenship that is as old as the nation itself—and only legislative reforms that are both humane and practical can quiet it. Next, Todd Gitlin and Andrew Rich examine the struggle to control the messages of politics. The mainstream media, Gitlin makes clear, lean neither left nor right. Like plants, they always stretch toward the flickering light of conventional wisdom. The much touted ‘‘netroots’’ can shift that wisdom to their purposes, but only if progressive bloggers adopt a cunning strategy. Rich examines the growing influence of think tanks and finds that most liberals in this world see themselves quite differently than do their counterparts on the Right. Conservatives gleefully fight a war for their ideas, while progressives only want to do responsible research. But the latter, Rich suggests, don’t have to choose between making strong arguments and thinking hard about the best solutions. The four essays that follow call for major changes in domestic policy grounded both in history and common sense. Ezra Klein lays bare the true costs of Bush’s reign: a stronger government for the rich and a weaker one for everyone else. Liberal Democrats, he maintains, have an excellent opportunity to point out the costs of that hypocrisy and to craft economic populist alternatives. Dean Baker outlines an ambitious agenda of such proposals—from decent retirement plans to paid leave to universal health insurance. The building of a welfare state as beneficent as those in Northern Europe may not be impossi-

4

Michael Kazin

ble after all. Karen Kornbluh offers a creative way to update the most popular and enduring achievement of the New Deal: social insurance for the aged and the unemployed. Why not provide ‘‘family insurance,’’ flexible benefits for the millions of one- and two-earner couples with children who are now left out of most social programs? This is not, she points out, just a matter of extending help to the young and those who rear them. It would also make for better parenting and a happier labor force. But such ambitious policies, Nelson Lichtenstein reminds us, are unlikely to be enacted unless the labor movement can revive its numbers and political clout. He explains how conservatives, in and out of government, have sabotaged the laws that once gave unions a fair chance to organize and argues that publicizing such outrages, ideally through congressional hearings, is essential to curbing them. Finally, I offer a brief history lesson about the time when Christian activists were found more often on the Left than on the Right. In the twenty-first century, the waning of antagonisms based on gender and race may allow progressive believers to gain a wider audience for issues about which they care deeply—from fighting poverty to protecting the earth. After a long era of secular liberalism, it would be ironic if William James’s yearning for ‘‘a moral equivalent of war’’ led back to ‘‘the Prince of Peace.’’ The impetus for this volume came from friends in the transatlantic Left. During the fall of 2007, the directors of the Wiardi Beckman Stichting—the think tank of the Dutch Labor Party (Partij van de Arbeid)—organized a large conference in Amsterdam, ‘‘In Search of Progressive America.’’ Speaking at the gathering were several of the contributors to this volume as well as leading intellectuals and politicians from the Netherlands. The Stichting also published a yearbook, in Dutch, to accompany the conference. I am grateful to Frans Becker, Rene Cuperus, Menno Hurenkamp, and Katherine Kirk for inspiring the dialogue and for giving us wise and stimulating advice about framing our ideas for a European audience. The Dutch Left faces some of the same problems—among them, hostility toward immigrants and a welfare state under attack—as do American progressives. But the Partij van de Arbeid has

Introduction

5

long been either the first or second leading force in the government of that nation, and so its partisans have much to teach us about the promise and perils of holding power. More than sixty years ago, in the midst of history’s bloodiest war, the New York daily PM declared its credo in the phrase: ‘‘We are against people who push other people around.’’ Twenty-first-century progressives would do well to keep that faith in mind and in their hearts. It remains the core of what it means to be on the liberal-Left. But they should also steel themselves to make the difficult choices that can lead to electoral triumph, if not a second New Deal. Only a countervailing power that is both visionary and pragmatic can end the dominance of the bullies of the Right.

Chapter 1

Democrats and the World Matthew Yglesias

When I was growing up in New York City, the view to the south of my parents’ apartment was dominated by the World Trade Center many blocks away. Towering above the rest of the landscape, they hogged the scene—as they did so many other views throughout the city—to such an extent that it was easy in some ways to forget they were there. On some level, they hardly seemed worth remarking upon; it was too obvious and they were too big. Now, of course, the buildings are gone, but their significance has grown enormously. And yet, they relate to the political scene in much the way they once related to the view, in such an obvious way that it hardly seems worth pointing to. Nevertheless, it is worth saying clearly that the factor underlying American politics in the twenty-first century has been the great trauma of September 11, 2001, and the attendant return of foreign policy and national security issues as major subjects of political debate after a decade-long absence. The importance of this issue’s return is hard to understate. Accusations that the Democratic Party was ‘‘soft’’ on Communism were a staple of Cold War politics, and a seemingly effective one. John Kennedy secured election despite this charge in 1960 primarily by attempting to shift to Richard Nixon’s right on the subject of U.S.Soviet relations, complete with bogus charges that Dwight Eisenhower’s administration had allowed a dangerous ‘‘missile gap’’ to emerge. Once in office, both Kennedy and his successor Lyndon Johnson appear to have successively deepened America’s military involvement in Vietnam in large part out of concern for political appearances. Jimmy Carter narrowly took the White House in 1976 at a period of

Democrats and the World

7

public disgust with Republican scandals, but then lost it four years later in no small part due to his perceived weakness in confronting the Islamic revolution in Iran, and a Soviet Union that was seen as on the march in Africa, Latin America, and even Central America. With the Cold War over, the situation radically changed. In theory, the fact that George H. W. Bush’s administration witnessed extraordinary foreign policy achievements should have been a major asset. Under his watch, Germany had been reunified as a NATO member, the Soviet Union had dissolved, and the United States had—in the face of opposition from most Democrats in Congress— successfully led a broad international coalition to defeat Saddam Hussein’s army and drove the Iraqi military out of Kuwait. Instead, the close of the Cold War proved to be an enormous problem for the Republican Party. Bush’s Democratic challenger, Bill Clinton, not only had a sign reading ‘‘It’s the Economy, Stupid’’ in his campaign headquarters, but his staff wasn’t shy about letting journalists know about it. With the country mired in a recession, Clinton folded Bush’s mastery of foreign affairs into a critique of him as an out-of-touch elitist, a leader too busy hobnobbing with Mikhail Gorbachev and Franc¸ois Mitterrand to understand the real facts on the ground in the United States. Thus began the politics of the 1990s, the period during which the majority of the most prominent political consultants on the Democratic side achieved their positions of prominence. The extent to which foreign affairs dropped off the political radar during that period has made it difficult for Democrats to respond effectively to the post-9/11 period. A generation of liberals who saw their greatest successes in the 1990s has convinced itself that that era—after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when foreign-policy questions were less important—was normal. During a period of postelection commiserations in 2006, three friends on the Hill outlined the Democrats’ path to resurgence, but they did so with a crucial qualification: It would happen only after the salience of the security issue declines. Rereading John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira’s popular book The Emerging Democratic Majority after the 2004 election, I noticed the same thing. The majority was repeatedly prophesied to emerge ‘‘when memories of 9/11 fade,’’ or equivalent formulations. But while memories of the at-

8

Matthew Yglesias

tacks are likely to fade (and indeed have to a reasonable extent), the salience of the issue isn’t going anywhere. A study by Democratic pollster Mark Penn has shown that public interest in world affairs reached a low point in the 1990s not seen since the Great Depression. Democrats can hope that it happens again, but hope is not a plan. Besides, history suggests that it will not. The Clinton years were highly unusual; foreign policy has consistently been a prominent element of presidential campaigns since America’s emergence as a major world power in the Spanish-American War and will probably continue to be for the foreseeable future. At a minimum, foreign policy is all but certain to play a large role in the 2008 elections, just as it did in the midterms of 2002 and 2006 and in Bush’s successful bid for reelection in 2004. To see what role this is likely to be, it is instructive to turn back the clock to the politics of the immediate aftermath of September 11, the fall and winter of 2001–2. In light of 9/11’s enormous significance, captured in the cliche´ that ‘‘9/11 changed everything,’’ it’s worth observing that there’s a sense in which very little actually changed that morning. Unlike the dawn or twilight of the Cold War or Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, the destruction of the World Trade Center did not signal an important change in the objective security environment faced by the United States. The loss of life, though horrifying, was not in and of itself nearly large enough to constitute a serious challenge to America’s stability or prosperity. Nor did anything that happened that day actually alter the risk of terrorist attacks directed at the United States. Rather than a change in the objective situation, 9/11 marked the beginning of an enormous psychological change on the part of the American people. The events of 9/11 created a situation in which the American public was receptive to listening to big ideas about America’s role in the world and the nature of the global security situation. Previously, people had largely tuned such debates out, but in late 2001 and early 2002 they were prepared to listen. What’s more, certain ideas expressed at the time swiftly became widely entrenched and difficult to dislodge down the road. The Right seized advantage of the opportunity to frame issues in a way that was highly favorable to its existing policy preferences, but spectacularly ill-suited to the actual

Democrats and the World

9

situation. The Left, by contrast, tended not to seriously challenge the Right’s view of events. As the country prepared to devise a strategy for combating Islamist terrorism, the sensible thing would have been for the nation to immerse itself in actual empirical information about the nature of the problem. Instead, early twenty-first-century America tended to take refuge in a series of shopworn and self-flattering cliche´s. Notably, there was massive resistance to any serious effort to understand what motivated people to wage jihad against the United States or applaud those who did so. Rather, in keeping with the idea of increased idealization of in-group values, elite and mass opinion swiftly reached the conclusion—without any serious evidentiary backing—that antiAmericanism in the world was caused primarily by hatred of ‘‘freedom’’ or some other totally abstract and utterly praiseworthy concept America was said to exemplify uniquely. Writers like Susan Sontag, who observed in her contribution to the New Yorker’s post-attack issue that the country had not witnessed an ‘‘attack on civilization or liberty or humanity or the Free World,’’ but rather ‘‘an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions,’’ found themselves viciously excoriated in the press.1 Efforts to understand al Qaeda’s goals and motives as partially grounded in past American actions were characterized as efforts to ‘‘blame America’’ for the attacks themselves. As part of this period’s mass reaffirmation of the conventional wisdom, there was a sudden obsessive level of interest in America’s marginal far-left. Typical of this period was the regular ‘‘Idiocy Watch’’ feature that ran from October 2001 to November 2002 in the New Republic. It consisted entirely of quotations—occasionally from the far-right, but overwhelmingly from the far-left—that the magazine’s editors deemed beyond the pale. No counterarguments were offered and the clear majority of figures quoted—including German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, Indian novelist Arundhati Roy, memoirist Elizabeth Wurtzel, and chess grandmaster turned lunatic recluse Bobby Fischer—were completely irrelevant to actual American policy debates. What was the point, at the end of the day, in bothering to highlight views deemed so absurd as to be unworthy of even rebutting? A hint is provided in moderate conservative Andrew Sulli-

10

Matthew Yglesias

van’s worry in the wake of the attacks that ‘‘the decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead—and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column.’’2 The very existence of far-left viewpoints was defined as a danger to the nation, quite apart from whether those views had influence over policymakers. The idea that, say, Noam Chomsky would team up with Stockhausen, Wurtzel, and perhaps Howard Zinn in order to take up arms against the United States in the name of Osama bin Laden’s holy war was, of course, a bit implausible. Hence the inclusion of the crucial weasel words ‘‘what amounts to.’’ But what could this mean? How could the mere expression of disagreement with policy choices—whether or not the disagreements were correct—‘‘amount to’’ acts of treason against the United States? The answer, most likely, can be found in the American Right’s valorization of willpower as the crucial variable in successful war-fighting. In particular, conservatives sought in the wake of the attack to put forward the proposition that the United States had invited the attack by adopting an insufficiently aggressive posture toward the world. The evidence for this proposition was remarkably flimsy. The two major Islamist terrorist organizations—Shiite Hezbollah and Sunni al Qaeda—were both formed in direct response to foreign invasions of Muslim territory, Israel’s incursion into Lebanon in the first instance and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the latter. What’s more, Islamist terrorist attacks had overwhelmingly been concentrated against countries like Israel, the United States, Russia, and India that were unusually aggressive by world standards. Were the principle that ‘‘weakness invites aggression’’ genuinely the appropriate dictum for understanding international terrorism, one would expect countries like Iceland and Portugal to become the main targets of freedom-hating terror-mongers. In fact, something close to the reverse is true. As the Defense Science Board’s 1997 Summer Task Force study of responses to transnational threats concluded, ‘‘Historical data show a strong correlation between U.S. involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States.’’3 The post-attack Right, however, would have none of it. On September 21, 2001, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer

Democrats and the World

11

slammed those who had the temerity to suggest that specific American policies led to terrorist attacks as ‘‘voices of moral obtuseness’’ when ‘‘in the wake of a massacre that killed more than 5,000 innocent Americans in a day, one might expect moral clarity.’’4 A week later, he proposed his countertheory: terrorism was provoked not by American intervention, but by American weakness. ‘‘Radical Islam,’’ on this theory, was ‘‘riding a wave of victories,’’ namely ‘‘the bombing of the Marine barracks in 1983 that drove the United States out of Lebanon; the killing of 18 American soldiers in Mogadishu in 1993 that drove the United States out of Somalia; and, in between, the war that drove the other superpower, the Soviet Union, out of Afghanistan.’’5 National Review’s Michael Ledeen added Vietnam to the list. The appeal of such statements in the wake of a monstrous calamity inflicted by vile men is easy enough to understand. The natural—indeed, appropriate—instinct in the wake of such an event is to strike back. And the ‘‘retreats causes terrorism’’ theory has the comforting implication that striking back very hard is all one needs to do. If it doesn’t work, one needs merely to strike even harder. Such an approach is not only well fitted to the postattack mindset, but ideally suited to the equally comforting notion that the United States could easily solve the whole terrorism problem once and for all. As an analysis of al Qaeda’s motives, however, the resolve-centric worldview suffered from serious deficiencies. What made it especially pernicious as an approach to national policy, however, is a point clarified by Ledeen’s formulation of the argument: resolve or lack thereof can be demonstrated in any number of contexts. The decision to retreat from Vietnam, for example, plainly had nothing in particular to do with Osama bin Laden or radical Islam. Nevertheless, by the Right’s standards, withdrawing from Southeast Asia, by demonstrating a lack of American willpower, gave encouragement to terrorists decades later. If this is true, then the converse also ought to hold: any demonstration of implacable will anywhere would serve as a useful counterterrorism measure simply by virtue of demonstrating resolve. Conveniently enough, this analysis led to the conclusion that the appropriate response to September 11 was simply to implement the very same hyperaggressive, hypernationalistic foreign policy that many on the Right had long advocated. That they had not earlier

12

Matthew Yglesias

framed this policy as a terrorism deterrent and, indeed, had disparaged the threat of international terrorism as less important than other challenges, was irrelevant. Arguing that we should combat al Qaeda by attacking a target chosen literally at random was not, of course, going to convince anyone. But the underlying focus on resolve did make it plausible to simply lump together a host of very loosely related issues—often linked only by the fact that Muslims and/or Arabs were in some way involved—and argue that they should all be tackled simultaneously and forcefully. In November 2001, Frederick Kagan explained to readers of the Weekly Standard that in combating terrorism, ‘‘above all, we must abandon fear and focus on our goals.’’ In this context, however, ‘‘focus’’ turned out to mean something like the reverse of actually focusing. ‘‘It is not enough,’’ he warned, ‘‘to eliminate al-Qaeda or overthrow the Taliban.’’6 Beyond these mere ‘‘immediate objectives’’ he proposed the following three-point plan: • Replace the Taliban with a stable Afghan regime committed to functioning as a respectable member of the international system and preventing the use of its territory and resources for the support of terrorism. • Eliminate to the best of our ability known terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad. • Replace Saddam Hussein’s criminal regime before he finds a way to use the chemical and biological weapons we know he is developing for a devastating attack on the United States. This was, to put it mildly, an ambitious agenda. Notably, however, the article evinces no understanding of exactly how ambitious it was. Indeed, the title, ‘‘Fear Not the Taliban,’’ and the rhetoric surrounding the proposals seem to imply that undue hesitancy was the only serious obstacle to accomplishing all this. Such sentiments were, as we now know, destined to lead the United States to an unhappy outcome in Iraq. They were not, however, vigorously contested at the time by the leading political figures of the progressive coalition. Instead, they were at first ignored, and then implicitly endorsed by a surprising number of people as the bulk of the Democratic Party’s leadership came to support the Bush ad-

Democrats and the World

13

ministration’s position that part of the response to 9/11 should include an invasion of Iraq. The roster of Democrats supporting this initiative included the then-leader of the Senate Democrats, the then-leader of their House caucus, the top Democrats on the House and Senate Foreign Affairs and Intelligence committees, and the top Democrat on the House Armed Services committee, along with all of the Democratic contenders for the 2004 nomination who held seats in the legislature, the most recent Democratic president, his wife (herself a U.S. Senator), and his Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. This large dose of support for the war on the part of Democratic Party political leaders served, naturally enough, to help bolster the war’s popularity. Citizens skeptical of the Bush administration might be less skeptical of Hillary Clinton or other pro-war Democrats like former United Nations Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, or Kenneth Pollack, who’d managed Iraq policy on the Clinton administration’s National Security Council. Ironically enough, however, it turns out that Democratic support for the war was, in no small part, driven by political cowardice rather than support on the merits for the invasion concept, an impulse that was very much encouraged by the media climate of the era. This was a time in American political life when favoring an invasion of Iraq was unquestionably a smart career move. Certainly, the reverse posture could be deadly, and not just for politicians. In February 2003, Phil Donohue was the host of the most popular prime-time program on the struggling MSNBC cable network. Ratings notwithstanding, his show—unlike those of his peers on the channel—was canceled. According to a leaked internal memo, the concern was that the program could become ‘‘a home for the liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.’’ Under the circumstances, Donohue was ‘‘a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war’’ who ‘‘seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.’’7 Other media outlets were no less vigilant in their efforts to avoid becoming home to the liberal antiwar agenda. According to an analysis by Paul Waldman, during the run-up to the war just 18 percent of the members of Congress to appear on the influential Sunday morn-

14

Matthew Yglesias

ing television political talk shows were opponents of the invasion. Under the circumstances, people with mixed opinions had every reason to emphasize their hawkish credentials and downplay their caveats, a process the explicitly conservative branches of the media were happy to facilitate. The resulting dynamic became tragically reenforcing. The more Democratic politicians supported the war, the easier it became to exclude antiwar views from consideration in the media—the ‘‘real’’ debate was between strong supporters of the president, and mild critics who favored war but questioned the details of Bush’s support. The more such views were excluded from the press and the wider debate, the more politically untenable it became to oppose the war. This simply encouraged more politicians to back the war. And with most of the leading politicians supporting an invasion, foreign policy experts with aspirations to serve in the next Democratic administration were encouraged either to loyally back the war or else to keep their doubts silent. The war itself came in March 2003, and the political calculation that underlay at least some Democratic support for the war swiftly began to look more questionable. Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, the only contender for the Democratic nomination to have opposed the war, was positioned to reap the benefits. It is difficult to overemphasize the extent to which he was, in spring 2003, an obscure figure viewed as having no shot at the nomination. The press coverage he did receive was generally positive, but also rather dismissive of his chances. Jonathan Cohn, a health policy specialist and admirer of Dean’s track record on this issue in Vermont, was the first national political journalist to profile Dean’s campaign back in June 2002. Making the case for why we should care, he more or less assumed that Dean—called the ‘‘Invisible Man’’ in the article’s headline—would lose but that ‘‘Dean might succeed in 2004 even if he doesn’t win the nomination’’ by pushing the party toward bolder ideas on health care. Democratic thinking during the 2002 congressional Iraq debate about the politics of national security was heavily influenced by a rather simple-minded reading of the lessons of the first Gulf War. Roughly speaking, most Democrats had opposed it, and many paid a price for it at the polls. That group included then-Senator Sam Nunn,

Democrats and the World

15

one of the country’s most respected thinkers on defense and foreign policy issues. This was the senator who, in light of his long and solid track record on national security, had been chosen to take the lead in explaining Democratic opposition to the war. He was also the senator who, despite his long and solid track record on national security, couldn’t save his job in the face of security-related attacks from an undistinguished Republican opponent. Many opponents of the first Gulf War, of course, didn’t lose their jobs. They did, however, wind up being shut out of national politics. Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Joe Lieberman all got spots on national tickets, and all came from the minority of the party that supported the war. The lesson, or so it was thought, was clear: opposing wars is a bad idea. A more nuanced take was always available. The Democrats’ political problem with the Gulf War wasn’t that they’d opposed it, but that they wrongly opposed it. They should have fully endorsed it as a necessary and practical step in strengthening global institutions and restoring international stability. Instead, the Democratic mainstream seriously underrated the ability of the American military to cripple Saddam Hussein’s armed forces and to coerce him into withdrawing from Kuwait. Had the war opponents’ warnings of a quagmire in the desert proved true, they would have been in a strong political position for years to come. In fact, however, such warnings were anything but prescient and the politicians who offered them quite reasonably suffered for it. The second Gulf War was, however, a rather different beast from the first. In January 2003, the United States was preparing to invade unilaterally, with the support of just a few allied governments, with virtually no support in international public opinion, and without the legitimacy provided by the backing of an international institution. The mission, meanwhile, was substantially more ambitious—to conquer and reconstruct the entire nation of Iraq. The relevant consideration, even in cynical political terms, was not how the war and its critics looked at the time of its launching, but how they would look in the months and years to come as events unfolded. By that standard, absolutely nobody would turn out to be perfectly prescient, but skeptics of the invasion eventually came off looking much better than their

16

Matthew Yglesias

opponents. This, ultimately, would prove to be the strength of Howard Dean’s campaign. While most of the American press was gushing over Colin Powell’s presentation of evidence of the need for war to the UN Security Council, for example, Dean was skeptical. ‘‘Secretary Powell’s recent presentation at the UN showed the extent to which we have Iraq under an audio and visual microscope,’’ he told an audience gathered on February 17, 2003, at Iowa’s Drake University. ‘‘Given that, I was impressed not by the vastness of evidence presented by the Secretary, but rather by its sketchiness.’’8 This was, at the time, an unpopular opinion to voice. Within months, however, it would be a clear political asset. Powell’s evidence was, in fact, remarkably sketchy, and, after the invasion, it was exposed as almost entirely bogus. The Dean speech was part of the longstanding campaign tradition of candidates stepping back from the hurlyburly of the campaign trail to offer a more high-minded address on foreign policy so as to demonstrate presidential gravitas. Given the timing, the focus of the speech was naturally on Iraq. ‘‘We have been told little about what the risks will be if we do go to war,’’ Dean warned. ‘‘Iraq,’’ he noted, ‘‘is a divided country, with Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish factions that share both bitter rivalries and access to large quantities of arms’’ while ‘‘Iran and Turkey each have interests in Iraq they will be tempted to protect with or without our approval.’’ Most of all, ‘‘there is a very real danger that war in Iraq will fuel the fires of international terror.’’ Such a message would have looked prescient by fall 2004. It was not, however, to be a message that was prominently displayed in the general election campaign. Instead, Democratic primary voters chose John Kerry on the basis of the idea that a war supporter and decorated Vietnam veteran would be more ‘‘electable.’’ He sold himself to the party’s base as not the candidate you agree with, but the candidate who could win in November. And then, in an irony that should have been predictable, the candidate who’d sold himself to the primary voters as the choice of political expediency came to be haunted by charges that he was merely the candidate of political expediency, a man lacking in convictions and principles, a man who was, therefore, unfit for the White House. In particular, Kerry was said to be a ‘‘flipflopper,’’ a charge primarily focused on his decision to vote ‘‘no’’ on

Democrats and the World

17

an $86 billion supplemental Defense Department appropriation bill aimed at funding the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The specific charge was unfair, but the larger sense that Kerry wasn’t taking a clear position on the leading issue of the day was accurate and the image of Kerry as an unprincipled flip-flopper was a consistent drag on his campaign throughout the election. The gravest damage, however, was that the need to combat the charge boxed Kerry in and made it difficult for him to do what all smart politicians do: engage in the occasional flip-flop. Committed to demonstrating his consistency, Kerry was unable to seize advantage of developments on the ground in Iraq since the October 2002 vote to authorize the use of force. In particular, he was unable to articulate the simple point appreciated by a growing body of the political center—that the factual underpinning of Bush’s argument that the war was necessary for American national security was mistaken, and that absent stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, an advanced nuclear program, or significant ties to terrorism, the invasion made no sense. But instead of making the straightforward case that the war was a mistake, Kerry mostly stuck to criticizing the conduct of the war, rather than the war itself. This strategy failed for Kerry but arguably succeeded during the 2006 midterms, by which time two additional years of unsuccessful warfare managed to further erode the Republicans’ popularity. The question for the future is whether the Democratic Party will stick with this strategy of biting at the edges of conservative foreign policy rather than attacking the broad approach that Bush has implemented and all of his would-be successors have adopted. Even as the 2008 Democratic presidential primary heated up and politicians had the maximum incentive to tack to the left, there was a clear tendency to prefer criticisms of the Bush administration’s tactics in dealing with the world rather than his strategy. Democrats emphasized that Bush had unduly downplayed diplomacy and that direct talks would play a larger role in a new administration, but critiquing the president’s negotiating strategy is different from critiquing his negotiating goals. Most broadly, though Democrats clearly hope to enjoy a better working relationship with other countries, there was little public indication that any leading figures in the opposition party were

18

Matthew Yglesias

interested in seeing the United States either play a more restrained role in world affairs or one more formally limited by the dictates of the UN and international law. At times, this seems to reflect political timidity as in the odd reality that the party’s leading candidates all endorsed a bold proposal for the United States to rededicate itself to the total abolition of nuclear weapons worldwide, but none of the campaigns saw fit to make a big deal out of it, ensuring essentially no press coverage for the proposal. In part, however, it is probably the reality that campaign statements are made by people, from the candidate on down, who imagine themselves actually running the country and who are therefore especially prone to overrate the extent to which more competent management (i.e., putting them in power) will improve the situation even without any structural changes. What’s more, the significance of tactical disagreements shouldn’t be discounted. The Bush administration has engaged in some colossal blunders, and more effective methods would be welcome, even if more fundamental change is needed. Even further, it’s entirely possible that when push comes to shove, a pragmatic Bush successor faced with the conflict between a desire for better relationships with allies and the structural realities of international politics would, in fact, be willing to exercise restraint as the price that needs to be paid to secure cooperation. Beyond that, Democrats have consistently voiced a desire to elevate issues of climate change and global poverty to a higher priority in American foreign policy, which would be no small change. Still, on another level, the Democratic critique of the reigning approach to world affairs has remained strikingly modest, and powerful forces are at work who want to essentially continue the same disastrous policies of the past several years but with slightly different tactics. In a January 31, 2007, Los Angeles Times column, for example, neoconservative Max Boot denounced the Bush administration for underfunding the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Stability and Reconstruction and suggested this be reversed. He also fretted that the administration’s newly proposed Civilian Reserve Corps would receive inadequate funding. He deemed Bush’s plan to add 92,000 soldiers and Marines to the military over five years inadequate and called for ‘‘a larger and faster increase.’’ In order to sustain

Democrats and the World

19

such an increase, Boot called for the military to ‘‘open the ranks of the armed forces to recruits who are not citizens or green card holders.’’ Conceding that there might be ‘‘concerns about turning over the defense of our nation to foreigners,’’ Boot did propose that foreign mercenaries be capped at ‘‘20% of the total’’ force. All this would, obviously, cost money. But Boot felt that even without these increases the Pentagon budget was still inadequate: ‘‘even though the defense budget has grown from $302 billion in 2001 to $432 billion this year, the armed forces are facing major equipment shortfalls that need to be addressed.’’ How much did Boot want to spend? He wouldn’t say, but he did note that ‘‘we’re still spending only 3.3 % of GDP on defense—a very low figure by historical standards,’’ implying that he had in mind increases of hundreds of billions of dollars. He also called for the creation or revitalization of a whole series of institutions of neocolonial governance, including ‘‘a Department of Peace, perhaps built out of a revamped Agency for International Development, so that we can be better prepared for the aftermath of future military operations than we were in Iraq,’’ a revived U.S. Information Agency, and ‘‘a federal police force . . . that can be dispatched to enforce the law in lawless lands.’’ Last but not least, Boot called on Bush to ‘‘beef up the ‘expeditionary’ capacity in other civilian branches of government, ranging from the Treasury to the Agriculture Department, so that they can augment the efforts of our soldiers.’’9 This is, at its core, a chilling vision of an imperial America complete with giving the proposed Colonial Office (the term Boot had given it in an earlier column) the Orwellian name ‘‘Department of Peace,’’ reliance on late Roman–style foreign legions, and the militarization of the entire government as civilian agencies are told to spend their time better equipping themselves to serve as support for unnamed projected military adventures. Most chillingly of all, however, Boot’s suggestion that these ideas might serve as the basis for ‘‘bipartisan cooperation’’ under the slogan ‘‘No More Iraqs’’ is actually somewhat plausible. The idea of a large increase in the end-strength of America’s ground military had, in fact, for years been championed by Democrats looking for a way to look tough on national defense. Back in May 2005, Third Way, a strategy group for moderate Democrats,

20

Matthew Yglesias

called for a permanent increase of 100,000 troops and a bill to that effect was introduced by Democratic Senators Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman, Jack Reed, Bill Nelson, and Ken Salazar. Senator Barack Obama later endorsed the idea, and while former Senator John Edwards hasn’t endorsed it, his advisers say he’s open to the possibility of an increase but objects (correctly) to the seemingly arbitrary selection of numbers. The idea behind the Office of the Coordinator for Stability and Reconstruction was, initially, a progressive idea, and Boot has been joined mostly by progressives in bemoaning the Bush administration’s lack of interest in funding it. Similarly, the Civilian Reserve Corps concept draws on ideas about national service that have long been pushed by elements of the Democratic Party, especially in its more centrist wing. In part, some of these ideas have progressive support because they have some merits. Or, at least, they have some merit in the right form. Adding additional ground troops to the army and Marine Corps, for example, seems to be a smart idea. It would, however, be extremely costly. One good way to achieve this useful but expensive goal would be to follow the Center for American Progress’s suggestion to economize on other areas of defense expenditure, in particular by cutting back on new weapons systems planned for a Cold War– style confrontation with another major power. Boot’s proposal to simply add money to America’s already enormous Pentagon budget—we currently account for about half of all world defense spending—is a much worse proposal. Nevertheless, it is the Boot-style version of this idea that is endorsed by liberal hawks Michael O’Hanlon and Kurt Campbell in their book on progressive national security policy and one that many Democratic politicians seem to have in mind when they embrace the concept of a bigger army. Similarly, it’s hard to deny that an office aimed at better coordinating stability and reconstruction projects could be a good idea, or that making USAID work better would be useful (renaming it the ‘‘Department of Peace’’ we can probably do without), but context is extremely important here. Improving our ability to execute missions abroad is much less important than improving our strategy for when and why to intervene. Better techniques are always welcome, but what

Democrats and the World

21

the country needs to replace Bush’s current failed strategy is a different strategy, not just another way to implement the same strategy. That would mean challenging several of Bush’s core premises— rejecting the idea of a ‘‘war’’ against a vaguely defined and everexpanding set of Islamist political movements to be won by using American power to thoroughly remake the political and social order of Muslim societies in favor of a more focused effort to isolate al Qaeda through a combination of security measures and good-faith efforts to resolve the concrete political grievances in Palestine, Kashmir, and elsewhere that drive discontent in Muslim communities around the world. Next, it would recognize that with the problem defined in appropriately modest terms, transnational terrorism joins existing Democratic priorities such as climate change in having the interesting property of uniting rather than dividing the interests of the overwhelming majority of the world’s countries. The Bush administration’s drive for hegemony has obscured that fact by worsening America’s relations with key allies, dramatically exacerbating hostilities with unfriendly nations in the Middle East, and prompting new tensions with Russia, China, and various regional powers. A sound approach would seek to reverse these trends by taking the interests of other countries and their citizens seriously and gaining their cooperation and accession to key American priorities not through fear and intimidation, but by adjusting America’s role in the world to one compatible with the needs of others. In practice, this will require greater restraint in the use of military force, but it shouldn’t be understood as a call for an American retreat from the world. Rather, what’s needed is a recognition that American power is most effective when used to enforce international law and norms against aggression rather than to subvert or ignore them. That would mean a return to arms control treaties as the main tool for halting the spread of nuclear weapons, specifically a willingness on the part of the United States to abide by our own commitments under various treaties (rather than building space-based weapons, new ‘‘bunker buster’’ nukes, exempting ourselves from treaties on land mines, test bans, and the International Criminal Court, and so on). In exchange we would see greater international coopera-

22

Matthew Yglesias

tion in pressuring Iran and other potential bad actors to abide by their commitments. Evolution in this direction was clearly discernable during the 1990s, and the course was deliberately reversed by the Bush administration from its first moments in office. Later, this sort of multilateralism came to be seen by large swathes of the public—and even many analysts to the left of center—as somehow discredited by the events of 9/11. But horrific as those attacks were, the terrible reality is that America’s response to the attacks has been even more harmful and the disastrous consequences of that response reflect its basis in a fundamentally unsound worldview. Democratic Party politicians have been reluctant to directly challenge that worldview in its entirety in part out of political caution, but even if they are correct about the need to exercise prudence on this front while in the opposition, the fact remains that in office a president has an extraordinary amount of leeway in terms of the foreign policies he or she can pursue. Policies that work should be politically sustainable whether or not they appeal to focus groups, whereas policies that lead to disaster eventually drag their architects’ ratings into the sewer. Consequently, an undue focus on politics makes little sense in the midst of a generally favorable political climate; the most important thing is to come into office with new ideas that can actually avoid repetitions of the disasters that have brought us to where we are, and only a clean break with Bush’s hegemonist aspirations can achieve that.

Chapter 2

Cultivating Our Own Garden Andrew J. Bacevich

In his 2005 inaugural address, President George W. Bush declared the promulgation of freedom to be ‘‘the mission that created our nation.’’ Fulfilling what he described as America’s ‘‘great liberating tradition’’ now requires that the United States devote itself to ‘‘ending tyranny in our world.’’ Many Americans find such sentiments compelling. Yet to credit the United States with possessing a liberating tradition is equivalent to saying that Hollywood has a tradition of artistic excellence. The movie business is just that—a business. Its purpose is to make money. If once in a while the studios produce a film of aesthetic value, that may be cause for celebration, but profit, not revealing truth and beauty, defines the purpose of the enterprise. Something of the same can be said of the enterprise launched on July 4, 1776. The hard-headed lawyers, merchants, farmers, and slaveholding plantation owners gathered in Philadelphia that summer did not set out to create a church. They founded a republic. Their purpose was not to save mankind. It was to guarantee for people like themselves ‘‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’’ In the years and decades that followed, the United States achieved remarkable success in making good on those aims. Yet never during America’s rise to power did the United States exert itself to liberate others absent an overriding perception that the nation itself had large security or economic interests at stake. From time to time, although not nearly as frequently as we like to imagine, some of the world’s unfortunates managed as a consequence to escape from bondage. The Civil War did produce emancipation. Yet to explain the conflagration of 1861–65 as a response to the plight of enslaved Afri-

24

Andrew J. Bacevich

can Americans is to engage in vast oversimplification. Near the end of World War II, GIs did liberate the surviving inmates of Nazi death camps. Yet for those who directed the American war effort of 1941–45, the fate of European Jews never figured as more than an afterthought. Crediting America with a ‘‘great liberating tradition’’ sanitizes the past and obscures the actual motive force behind American politics and U.S. foreign policy. It transforms history into a morality tale and thereby provides a rationale for dodging serious moral analysis. To insist that the liberation of others has never been more than an ancillary motive of U.S. policy is not cynicism; it is a prerequisite to self-understanding.

America Ascendant If the young United States had a mission, it was not to liberate but to expand. ‘‘Of course,’’ declared Theodore Roosevelt in 1899, as if explaining the self-evident to the obtuse, ‘‘our whole national history has been one of expansion.’’1 TR spoke truthfully. The Founders viewed stasis as tantamount to suicide. From the outset, Americans evinced a compulsion to acquire territory and to extend their commercial reach abroad. How was expansion achieved? On this point, the historical record leaves no room for debate: by any means necessary. Depending on the circumstances, the United States relied on diplomacy, hard bargaining, bluster, chicanery, intimidation, or naked coercion. We infiltrated land belonging to our neighbors and then brazenly proclaimed it our own. We harassed, filibustered, and, when the situation called for it, launched full-scale invasions. We engaged in ethnic cleansing. At times we insisted that treaties be considered sacrosanct. On other occasions, we blithely jettisoned agreements that had outlived their usefulness. As the methods employed varied, so too did the rationale offered to justify action. We touted our status as God’s new chosen people, erecting a ‘‘city upon a hill’’ destined to illuminate the world. We acted at the behest of providential guidance and responded to the urgings of our ‘‘manifest destiny.’’ We declared our obligation to spread

Cultivating Our Own Garden

25

the gospel of Jesus Christ and to uplift Little Brown Brother. With Woodrow Wilson as our tutor, we shouldered our responsibility to ‘‘show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty.’’ Critics who derided these claims as bunkum—the young Lincoln during the war with Mexico, Mark Twain after 1898, Robert La Follette in 1917—scored points but lost the argument. Periodically revised and refurbished, the concept of American exceptionalism (which implied exceptional American prerogatives) persisted. Meanwhile, when it came to action rather than talk, the architects of U.S. policy, even those viewed as most idealistic, remained fixated on one overriding aim: enhancing American influence, wealth, and power. The narrative of American foreign relations from the earliest colonial encounters with Native Americans until, say, the end of the Cold War reveals a record that is neither uniquely high-minded nor uniquely hypocritical and exploitive. In this sense, the interpretations of America’s past offered by George W. Bush and by Osama bin Laden fall equally wide of the mark. As a rising power, the United States adhered to the iron laws of international politics, which allow little space for altruism. If the tale contains a moral theme, that theme is necessarily one of ambiguity. To be sure, America’s ascent did not occur without missteps: opera bouffe incursions into Canada; William McKinley’s ill-advised annexation of the Philippines; complicity in China’s ‘‘century of humiliation’’; disastrous interwar economic policies that paved the way for the Depression; Harry Truman’s decision in 1950 to send U.S. forces north of Korea’s 38th Parallel, to name only a few. Most of these mistakes Americans have long since shrugged off. A few, like Vietnam, we find impossible to forget even as we persistently disregard their implications. Yet however embarrassing, these missteps pale in significance when compared to the masterstrokes of American statecraft. In purchasing Louisiana from the French, Thomas Jefferson may have overstepped the bounds of his authority, and in seizing California from Mexico, James Polk may have perpetrated a war of conquest, but their actions ensured that the United States would one day become a great power. To secure the isthmus of Panama, Theodore Roosevelt orchestrated an outrageous swindle. The result affirmed America’s hemi-

26

Andrew J. Bacevich

spheric dominion. In collaborating with Josef Stalin, FDR made common cause with an indisputably evil figure. In doing so he destroyed the murderous Hitler while simultaneously vaulting the United States to a position of unquestioned economic supremacy. A similar collaboration forged by Richard Nixon with the murderous Mao Zedong helped bring down the Soviet empire, thereby elevating the United States to the self-proclaimed position of sole superpower. The achievements of these preeminent American statesmen derived not from their common devotion to a liberating tradition but from boldness unburdened by excessive scruples. Notwithstanding the high-sounding pronouncements that are routinely emitted by the White House and the State Department, the defining characteristic of U.S. foreign policy is not idealism. It is pragmatism, sometimes laced with pragmatism’s first cousin, opportunism. This remains true today even when President Bush has declared without qualification that ‘‘America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.’’ In practice, this dictum allows the Bush administration to hector Iran or North Korea about their undemocratic ways while giving a pass to Egypt and Pakistan. It provides a rationale for military intervention in energy-rich Iraq, but finds no application in Darfur, Burma, and Zimbabwe. (On a flight shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, my seatmate was a retired Zimbabwean supreme court justice. Lamenting the dire situation in his country, he remarked, ‘‘Ah, if only we had oil. Then you would come rescue us.’’) Bush’s critics charge him with abandoning principles that long governed American statecraft. A fairer judgment would credit him with having seized on 9/11 to reinterpret those principles, thereby claiming for the United States new prerogatives (such as waging preventive war) while shedding constraints (such as respect for the sensibilities of key allies) that had seemingly lost their utility. In this regard, the president was adhering to a well-established tradition. In the annals of history, the rise of the United States to the pinnacle of world power is an epic story worthy of Thucydides or Tacitus. It represents a stunning achievement. Yet those who see America’s ascent as an affirmation of virtue are indulging in self-deluding sentimentality. A great nation that, having reached that summit, finds itself beset with challenges can ill-afford to indulge in sentiment.

Cultivating Our Own Garden

27

Land of the Free For those fortunate enough to be Americans, this rise to global power yielded rich rewards. Expansion made the United States the land of opportunity. From expansion came abundance. Out of abundance came substantive freedom. Documents drafted in Philadelphia promised liberty. Making good on those promises required a political economy that facilitated the creation of wealth on an enormous scale. Writing over a century ago, Frederick Jackson Turner made the essential point. ‘‘Not the Constitution, but free land and an abundance of natural resources open to a fit people,’’ he argued, made American democracy possible.2 A half-century later, the historian David Potter discovered a similar symbiosis between affluence and liberty. Potter credited ‘‘a politics of abundance’’ with creating the American way of life, ‘‘a politics which smiled both on those who valued abundance as a means to safeguard freedom and those who valued freedom as an aid in securing abundance.’’3 In short, American prosperity underwrote American freedom. The relationship between the two was reciprocal. Especially as the Industrial Revolution took hold, Americans looked to material abundance to ameliorate domestic tensions and to anesthetize the unruly. Money became the preferred lubricant for keeping social and political friction within tolerable limits. As Reinhold Niebuhr once observed, ‘‘we seek a solution for practically every problem of life in quantitative terms,’’ certain that more is better.4 Over time, prosperity also recast freedom, modifying the criteria for eligibility and broadening its claims. Running in tandem with the chronicle of American expansion abroad is another account of expansion. The theme of this second narrative relates to the transformation of freedom at home. It too is a story of epic achievement overlaid with ambiguity. Who merits the privileges of citizenship? The answer prevailing in 1776—white male freeholders—was never satisfactory. By the stroke of a Jeffersonian pen, the Declaration of Independence had rendered such a definition untenable. Pressures to amend that restricted conception of citizenship emerged almost immediately. Until World War II, progress achieved on this front was real but

28

Andrew J. Bacevich

fitful. During the years of the postwar economic boom, and especially during the 1960s, the floodgates opened. Barriers fell. The circle of freedom widened appreciably. The percentage of Americans marginalized as second-class citizens dwindled. Political credit for this achievement lies squarely with the Left. Abundance sustained in no small measure by a postwar presumption of American global leadership made possible the expansion of freedom at home. Possibility became reality thanks to progressive political activism. Pick the group: blacks, Jews, women, Asians, Hispanics, working stiffs, gays, the disabled—in every case, the impetus for providing equal access to the rights guaranteed by the Constitution originated among radicals, pinks, liberals, and bleeding-heart fellow-travelers. When it comes to ensuring that every American should get a fair shake, the contribution of modern conservatism has been essentially nil. Had Martin Luther King, Jr., in the 1950s and 1960s counted on William F. Buckley and the National Review to take up the fight against racial segregation, Jim Crow would still be alive and well. Granting the traditionally marginalized access to freedom constitutes the central theme of American politics since World War II. It does not diminish the credit due to those who engineered this achievement to note that their success stemmed in part from the fact that the United States was simultaneously asserting its claim to unquestioned global leadership. The reformers who pushed and prodded for racial equality and women’s rights did so in tacit alliance with the officials presiding over the postwar rehabilitation of Germany and Japan, with oil executives pressing to bring the Persian Gulf into America’s sphere of influence, and with defense contractors promoting expensive new weapons programs. The creation of what became, by the 1950s, an informal American empire of global proportions was not a conspiracy designed to benefit the few. Postwar foreign policy derived its legitimacy from the widely shared perception that the exercise of power abroad was making possible a more perfect union at home. In this sense, a proper understanding of contemporary history requires that we acknowledge an ironic kinship linking Cold Warriors like Curtis LeMay to feminists like Betty Friedan. General LeMay’s Strategic Air Command—both as

Cultivating Our Own Garden

29

manifestation of American might and as central component of the postwar military-industrial complex—helped to foster the conditions from which Freidan’s National Organization for Women emerged.

Cultural Revolution During this same postwar period, but especially since the 1960s, the nation’s abiding cultural preoccupation focused on reassessing what freedom actually means. The political project was long the exclusive preserve of the Left (although belatedly endorsed by the Right). From the outset, the cultural project has been a collaborative one to which both Left and Right contributed, albeit in different ways. The very real success of the political project lies at the heart of the Bush administration’s insistence that the United States today offers a proper model for other nations—notably those in the Islamic world—to follow. The largely catastrophic results of the cultural project belie that claim. The postwar political project sought to end discrimination. The postwar cultural project focused on dismantling constraints, especially on matters touching however remotely on sexuality and selfgratification. ‘‘Men are qualified for civil liberty,’’ Edmund Burke once observed, ‘‘in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their appetites.’’5 In the aftermath of World War II, Americans rejected that counsel and set out to throw off their manacles. Freedom came increasingly to imply unfettered self-indulgence. The Left contributed to this effort by promoting a radical new ethic of human sexuality. Removing chains in this regard meant normalizing behavior once viewed as immoral, unnatural, or inconsistent with the common good. On the cutting edge of American culture, removing impediments to the satisfaction of sexual desire emerged as an imperative. Laws, traditions, and social arrangements blocking the fulfillment of this imperative became obsolete. As a direct consequence, homosexuality, abortion, divorce, out-of-wedlock pregnancies, and children raised in single-parent homes—all once viewed as problematic—lost much of their stigma. Pornography—including child por-

30

Andrew J. Bacevich

nography—reached epidemic proportions. Pop culture became a titillating arena for promoting sexual license and celebrating sexual perversity. As for popular music, it became, in the words of Martha Bayles, a ‘‘masturbatory fantasy.’’6 Some Americans lament this revolution. Many others view it as inevitable or necessary or positively swell. Regardless, the foreign policy implications of the sexual revolution loom large. The ideals that President Bush eagerly hopes to propagate throughout the Islamic world—those contained in Jefferson’s Declaration and in the Bill of Rights—today come packaged with the vulgar exhibitionism of Madonna and the debased sensibility of Robert Mapplethorpe. Note, however, that the metamorphosis of freedom has had a second aspect, one that has proceeded in harmony with and even reinforced the sexual revolution. Here the effect has been to foster a radical new conception of the freedom’s economic dimension. Increasingly, during the decades of the postwar boom, citizens came to see personal liberty as linked inextricably to the accumulation of ‘‘stuff.’’ Here, the enthusiasm for throwing off moral chains came from the Right. The forces of corporate capitalism relentlessly promoted the notion that liberty correlates with choice and that the key to human fulfillment (not to mention sexual allure and sexual opportunity) is to be found in conspicuous consumption—acquiring a bigger house, a fancier car, the latest fashions, the niftiest gadgets. By the end of the twentieth century many Americans had concluded, in the words of the historian Gary Cross, that ‘‘To consume was to be free.’’7 The events of 9/11 did not dislodge that perception. In early 2006—with the nation locked in what President Bush insisted was an epic confrontation with ‘‘Islamofascism’’—an article in the New York Times Magazine posed the question, ‘‘Is Freedom Just Another Word for Many Things to Buy?’’ In the conduct of their daily affairs, countless Americans, most of them oblivious to Bush’s war, answer that question in the affirmative. Along the way, consumption eclipsed voting or military service as the nearest thing to an acknowledged civic obligation. If citizenship today endows ‘‘the sovereign shopper with the right to select from store shelves,’’ Cross comments, it also imposes ‘‘the duty to spend

Cultivating Our Own Garden

31

for the ‘good of the economy.’ ’’ Americans once assessed the nation’s economic health by tallying up the output of the nation’s steel mills or the tons of bullion locked away in Fort Knox. Today consumer demand has emerged as the favored metric of overall economic wellbeing. In recent years ‘‘Black Friday’’ has taken its place among notable dates on the national calendar—the willingness of consumers to open their pocketbooks on the day after Thanksgiving having become a key indicator of economic vigor. Woe betide the nation should holiday shoppers spend less this year than last. American globalism did little to foster this radical change in American culture. But the cultural revolution—both the sexual liberation demanded by the Left and the conspicuous consumption promoted by the Right—massively complicates our relations with those beyond our borders to whom our reigning conceptions of freedom seem shallow and corrosive.

Empire of Red Ink This consumer’s paradise still retains considerable appeal for outsiders looking in. The many millions from south of the border or across the seas seeking entry testify to this fact. In the eyes of the typical Third Worlder, to be American is to be rich, pampered, and profligate. Entrance into the United States implies the prospect of being well-fed, well-housed, and well-clothed—to walk where streets are paved with gold. But how real are our riches? In a recent book Among Empires, Charles Maier, professor of history at Harvard, has chronicled the shift from what he calls America’s postwar ‘‘empire of production’’— when we made the steel, the cars, and the TVs—to today’s empire of consumption—when goods pour in from Japan and China. The implications of this shift for foreign policy are profound. If we are still paving our streets with gold, we’re doing so with someone else’s money. In paradise, it turns out, the books don’t balance. The federal budget is perpetually in the red. The current account deficit mounts from one year to the next, now topping $800 billion per annum. The

32

Andrew J. Bacevich

national debt is closing in on $9 trillion. The Republican-controlled Congress of the past decade has dealt with this troubling problem precisely as Congress did back when Democrats called the shots: it has routinely raised the ceiling to allow the debt to balloon ever upward. Despite these alarming trends, Americans refuse to live within their means. We have discarded old-fashioned notions of thrift, deferred gratification, and putting up for a rainy day. We have forgotten how to save. We won’t trim entitlements. We adamantly ignore what President Bush himself refers to our ‘‘addiction’’ to foreign oil. To sustain the empire of consumption we are acquiring a mountain of debt, increasingly owed to foreign countries. The unspoken assumption is that our credit line is endless and that the bills won’t ever come due. Once upon a time, Americans would have dismissed such thinking as twaddle. No more. Having made a fetish of freedom-asconsumption, we have become beholden to others. Dependence, wrote Jefferson two centuries ago, ‘‘begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue and prepares fit tools for the design of ambition.’’8 As our dependence has deepened, the autonomy that from 1776 through the 1950s ranked as the nation’s greatest strategic asset has withered away. Although periodically bemoaning this slide toward dependence, the nation’s political leaders have done little to restore our economic house to order. In practice, ensuring the uninterrupted flow of foreign oil and borrowing from abroad to feed the consumer’s insatiable appetite for cheap imports have become categorical imperatives. Back in 1992, when the immediate issue related to curbing greenhouse gases, President George Herbert Walker Bush cut to the heart of the matter: ‘‘The American way of life is not up for negotiation.’’ Compromise, accommodation, trimming back the expectations implied by that way of life: none of these is to be countenanced. Dependence has large foreign policy consequences. It circumscribes freedom of action. A week after 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld spelled out the implications. In formulating a response to the terrorist attack, United States had only two options. ‘‘We have a choice,’’ Rumsfeld remarked, ‘‘either to change the way we live, which is unacceptable, or to change the way that they live, and we chose the latter.’’9

Cultivating Our Own Garden

33

More Than a Comma The global ‘‘war on terror’’ represents the Bush administration’s effort to do just that—to change the way that they live. ‘‘They,’’ of course, are the 1.4 billion Muslims who inhabit an arc stretching from North Africa to Southeast Asia. The overarching strategic aim of that war is to eliminate the Islamist threat by pacifying the Islamic world, with particular attention given to the energy-rich Persian Gulf. Pacification not only implies bringing Muslims into compliance with American norms. It also requires the establishment of unassailable American hegemony, affirming beyond the shadow of doubt the superiority of U.S. power and thereby deterring attempts to defy those norms. Hegemony means presence, evidenced by the proliferation of U.S. military bases throughout strategically critical regions of the Islamic world. Seen in relation to our own history, the global war on terror signifies the latest phase in an expansionist project that is now three centuries old. This effort to pacify Islam has foundered in Iraq. The Bush administration’s determination to change the way Iraqis live has landed us in a quagmire. Today the debate over how to salvage something positive out of the Iraq debacle consumes the foreign policy apparatus. Just beyond lie concerns about how events in Iraq are affecting the overall war on terror. Expressing confidence that all will come out well, President Bush insists that historians will eventually see the controversies surrounding his Iraq policy as little more than a comma. Rather than seeing Iraq as a comma, we ought to view it as a question mark. The question posed, incorporating but also transcending the larger war on terror, is this: are ongoing efforts to ‘‘change the way that they live’’ securing or further distorting the American way of life? To put it another way, will the further expansion of American dominion abroad enhance the freedom we profess to value? Or have we now reached a point where expansion merely postpones and even exacerbates an inevitable reckoning with the cultural and economic contradictions to which our pursuit of freedom has given rise? If the survival of American freedom does require pacification of the Islamic world, as adherents of the old expansionist tradition be-

34

Andrew J. Bacevich

lieve, then this must be said: exertions made up to this point have been laughably inadequate. Changing the way they live presumes a seriousness hitherto lacking on the part of the American people or their elected representatives, including the president himself. If we intend to transform not only Iraq but also Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, prudence dictates that we stop kidding ourselves that the intended beneficiaries of our ministrations will welcome us with open arms. Why bamboozle ourselves with claims of righteousness that few others believe? Better to acknowledge, as the hawkish military analyst Ralph Peters has done, that we are actually engaged ‘‘in an effort to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault.’’10 Doing so will prevent us from being surprised by the intensity of resistance that awaits us as we enforce President Bush’s so-called freedom agenda across the broad expanse of Islam. Mounting such a campaign implies mobilization, commitment, and sacrifice, reordering national priorities with the prerequisites of victory rising to first place. It will necessarily require the allocation of additional resources to satisfy the mushrooming requirements of national security. We will have to hire many more soldiers. A serious attempt to pacify the Islamic world means the permanent militarization of U.S. policy. Almost inevitably, it will further concentrate authority in the hands of an imperial presidency. This describes the program of the ‘‘faster, please’’ ideologues keen to enlarge the scope of U.S. military action. To paraphrase Che Guevara, it is a program that calls for ‘‘one, two, many Iraqs,’’ ignoring the verdict already rendered by the actually existing Iraq. The fact is that events there have definitively exposed the very real limits of American hard power, financial reserves, and will. Leviathan has shot his wad. Seeking an escape from our predicament through further expansion points toward bankruptcy and the dismantling of what remains of the American republic. Genuine pragmatism—and the beginning of wisdom—lies in paying less attention to ‘‘the way that they live’’ and more attention to the way we do. Ultimately, conditions within American society determine the prospects of American liberty. As Randolph Bourne observed nearly a century ago, ensuring that au-

Cultivating Our Own Garden

35

thentic freedom will flourish at home demands that we attend in the first instance to the ‘‘strern and intensive cultivation of our garden.’’11 This does not imply assuming a posture of isolationism, although neoconservative and neoliberal proponents of the global war on terror will be quick to level this charge. Let us by all means spare no effort to track down those who attacked us on 9/11, beginning with Osama bin Laden, still at large seven years later. But let us give up once and for all any pretensions about an ‘‘indispensable nation’’ summoned to exercise ‘‘benign global hegemony’’ in the midst of a uniquely opportune ‘‘unipolar moment.’’ For too long now these narcissistic and fallacious claims, the source of the pretensions expressed by President Bush since September 2001, have polluted our discussion of foreign policy and thereby prevented us from seeing ourselves as we are. Cultivating our own garden begins with taking stock of ourselves. Thoughtful critics have for decades been calling for just such a critical self-examination. Among the very first canaries to venture into the deteriorating mineshaft of postwar American culture was the writer Flannery O’Connor. ‘‘If you live today,’’ she observed with characteristic bluntness a half-century ago, ‘‘you breathe in nihilism.’’ O’Connor correctly diagnosed the disease. Other observers bore witness to its implications. O’Connor’s fellow southerner Walker Percy wondered if freedom American-style was not simply becoming the ‘‘last and inalienable possession in a sick society.’’ The social critic Christopher Lasch derided ‘‘the ideology of progress’’ manipulated by elites contemptuous of the ethnic, social, and religious traditions to which ordinary folk subscribed. Lasch foresaw an impending ‘‘dark night of the soul.’’ From his vantage point, Robert Nisbet detected the onset of what he called ‘‘a twilight age,’’ marked by ‘‘a sense of cultural decay, erosion of institutions, . . . and constantly increasing centralization—and militarization—of power.’’ In such an age, he warned, ‘‘representative and liberal institutions of government slip into patterns ever more imperial in character. . . . Over everything hangs the specter of war.’’ Towering above them all was Pope John Paul II who, in a message clearly directed toward Americans, pointedly cautioned that a democracy bereft of values ‘‘easily turns into a thinly disguised totalitarianism.’’12

36

Andrew J. Bacevich

Our own self-induced confusion about freedom, reflected in our debased culture and our disordered economy, increases our susceptibility to this totalitarian temptation even as it has deadens our awareness of the danger that it poses. Escaping its clutches will require something more than presidents intoning cliche´s about America’s historic mission while launching crusades against oil-rich tyrants on the other side of the globe. We are in difficult straits and neither arms (already fully committed) nor treasure (just about used up) will get us out. Our corrupt age requires reformation. Shedding or at least discrediting the spurious conceptions of freedom to which Americans have lately fallen prey qualifies as a large task. Still, when compared to the megalomania of those who, under the guise of ‘‘eliminating tyranny,’’ are intent on remaking the entire Islamic world, the restoration of our own culture appears to be a positively modest goal. At the end of the day, as William Pfaff has observed, ‘‘The only thing we can remake is ourselves.’’13 And who knows? If we, as a consequence of such a reformation, actually live up to our professed ideals, restoring to American freedom something of the respect that it once commanded, we may yet become, in some small way, a model worthy of emulation.

Chapter 3

America’s Encounter with Immigrants Gary Gerstle

Immigration has convulsed and confounded American domestic politics these last few years, producing deeply divergent views about how to control America’s borders and how to treat immigrants, both legal and illegal, in the nation’s midst. That immigration has become so controversial is, in some respects, hardly surprising. In absolute terms, the number of immigrants residing in the United States—approximately 35 million—is at an all-time high. In relative terms, the density of the foreign-born population is approaching the peaks reached in the two previous waves of immigration, the 1830s to the 1850s and the 1880s to the 1920s. Moreover, the current wave, which began in the late 1960s, has spread far beyond the two areas of the country—the Northeast quadrant and the West Coast—in which most immigrants of earlier times had concentrated. Florida, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Arizona, and Colorado are among the states in other regions that now have large immigrant populations. In these states and, indeed, throughout the country, immigrants have distributed themselves to second-tier cities and even small towns to a far greater degree than they ever had before. For this reason, immigration, in demographic terms, is arguably more of a national phenomenon today than at any other point in U.S. history. Current immigrants also constitute the most diverse group of foreign-born ever to come to the United States and they are the first to be majority nonwhite, most coming from Latin America, the Caribbean, East and South Asia, and, to a lesser extent, Africa. Finally, it is the most ‘‘illegal’’ wave of immigration in the country’s history, in the sense that as many as 12 million immigrants, representing about

38

Gary Gerstle

15 to 25 percent of the total immigrant population, have entered the United States without a valid passport, visa, or green card. Given these circumstances, it would be surprising if Americans, both nativeborn and foreign-born, were not thinking about the immigrant presence and about the opportunities and problems that it presents. Yet the timing of the immigration controversy seems surprising. It did not erupt after September 11, 2001, in retrospect a logical moment for an anti-immigrant coalition to have coalesced, but in fallwinter 2005–2006. The spur seems to have been events that had little if anything to do with immigrants per se—Hurricane Katrina and the outbreak of civil war in Iraq—and everything to do with the desperation of a Republican Party worried about the eclipse of its power in the wake of the demonstrated incompetence of the Bush administration to cope with natural disasters and overseas military reversals. In other words, the elevation of this issue into a paramount one in American politics looks in the first instance to have been opportunistic. Nevertheless, the Republican Right’s embrace of this issue has succeeded in bringing the GOP the kind of law and order and values issue it craves, at a time when its other hot-button issues—abortion and right to life, school prayer, creationism—seem to be in decline. But even as the Republican Right has succeeded in putting its stamp on debates about immigration, it has also discovered how hard an issue immigration is to control, how it tends to fragment any political party that takes it on, and how assembling a winning legislative coalition is a Herculean task. To this point, conservative Republicans have been only slightly more successful than a bipartisan group of centrists have been in bending the national legislature to their will. This essay offers a historical perspective on U.S. immigration policy, in the hope that such a perspective will help us to understand the current debate and how it might be resolved. In its first century (1776–1876), the United States established itself as one of the most, if not the most, immigrant-friendly nation in the world. In its second century (1876–1976), the United States became much more like other nations, concerned about controlling its borders and limiting the number of immigrants in its midst. This shift from open to closely controlled borders, however, took a long period of time to achieve, largely because of the difficulty of pushing through Congress compre-

America’s Encounter with Immigrants

39

hensive immigration legislation. Immigration issues have almost always caused deep internal splits within each of the two dominant American parties. Comprehensive legislation, as a result, has required assembling coalitions from groups in each of the parties that have similar interests in regard to immigration but in most other respects are ideologically far apart (and often don’t like each other). The inherent difficulty of fashioning and holding together such alliances has led to long periods of policy frustration and paralysis, sometimes lasting twenty to thirty years. The United States is currently caught in such a moment of frustration and paralysis. Emerging from this stalemate in the current political climate, I suggest, is likely to lead to legislation governed more by conservative than by progressive impulses. Nevertheless, one needs to remain optimistic that a progressive politics may prevail, especially if the Democrats are victorious in 2008. In that spirit, I offer in my concluding remarks a discussion of principles that ought to inform a progressive approach to immigration reform. Through the first hundred-plus years of its existence, the United States was far more welcoming of immigrants than most European societies. This was not an accident of history but the consequence of political design: the new nation that emerged from the British North American colonies in 1776 deliberately created a radically different approach to immigration and citizenship than what then prevailed in Europe. By the terms of the Westphalian state system and mercantilist economic doctrine that dominated eighteenth-century Europe, states claimed complete and permanent sovereignty over their subjects, reserving the right to control their movement within state territory and their freedom to move beyond it. Because the strength of a state or monarchy was measured in numbers—the more people a sovereign could claim as subjects, the mightier the realm—European rulers were reluctant to permit their subjects to emigrate, unless the latter were paupers, criminals, or some other class of undesirables. Subjects who did move to another state were still expected to give allegiance to their original state or monarch. The British colonists in North America increasingly challenged this European state system, in part for pragmatic reasons: the North

40

Gary Gerstle

American appetite for settlers from Europe had become insatiable. But the colonists made this materialist demand for labor into a political principle. Even prior to the 1770s, they had begun to develop rules for membership that were based on residence, consent, and voluntary loyalty rather than on birth, descent, and perpetual subjecthood. When these colonists brought an independent United States into being, they established two principles governing freedom of movement and ease of obtaining citizenship that, in the context of the eighteenth century, were revolutionary. The first principle was that people would be free to enter and leave the new nation as they desired; the second was that any free European male immigrant—regardless of nationality, language, or religion—could elect to become a citizen after a very brief period of residence (two years) in the United States. This second principle, embodied in the naturalization law of 1790, made that statute the most radically inclusive measure of its kind in the eighteenth-century world—a judgment that holds even if we take into account, as we must, the racial restriction for which this law has recently become so well known (making nonwhite immigrants ineligible for citizenship). And even as subsequent Congresses made naturalization tougher to achieve, by mandating waiting periods stretching to five years and, at some points, longer, America continued to distinguish itself by the ease with which European immigrants could gain U.S. citizenship for themselves. Both the ease of joining the American polity and the ease of leaving it were part of the revolutionary settlement. So, too, was a willingness to accept into the polity religious groups who, in Europe, were excluded from public life. Thus the United States extended full citizenship to Catholics a half century before Great Britain and to Jews before the French revolutionaries had done so. The ease of entry into America and the ease of becoming citizens made the United States a magnet for Europeans and established America’s reputation early on for being a nation of immigrants. The racial barriers to membership were also part of the revolutionary settlement, the beginning of a systematic effort to render certain kinds of immigrants ineligible for citizenship: first Africans (a prohibition that ended in 1870) and then East and South Asians, the latter formally barred from citizenship until 1952. Not until 1965 were formal racial barriers eliminated altogether from U.S. immigration

America’s Encounter with Immigrants

41

law, revealing how much Americans through the middle of the twentieth century wanted to remain what they had imagined themselves to be at their founding—a nation of Western Europeans. That a nation consecrated to freedom and liberty maintained racial restrictions on naturalization for more than a hundred and fifty years of its existence reveals how profoundly race shaped (and misshaped) the American republic. The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1868, mitigated some of the worst effects of those racial barriers. The amendment’s first clause granted U.S. citizenship to every child born on U.S. territory, even if that child’s parents were illegal immigrants or barred by race from becoming citizens themselves. No Congressional majority has ever sought to repeal this portion of the Amendment, nor has any plaintiff since 1898 successfully challenged in U.S. courts what has become known as ‘‘birthright citizenship.’’ The Fourteenth Amendment grants citizenship to children of illegal Mexican immigrants born in the United States today much as one hundred years ago it bestowed citizenship on the children of Chinese and Japanese immigrants who were themselves ineligible. This amendment has spared America the predicament that arose in several post–World War II European societies where laws barred not only various groups of immigrants from becoming citizens but also those immigrants’ children and grandchildren. Legal alienage persisting across generations usually causes deep cultural alienation and weakens, and sometimes undermines altogether, efforts at integration. The eighteenth-century revolutionary settlement that set a racial test for citizenship initially established no limitation, racial or numerical, on the number of immigrants allowed to enter the United States. In principle, all immigrants, from every part of the world, were welcome, with the exception of a few categories of immigrants who because of pauperism or disease were turned away. In practice, America was eager, often desperate, for a large flow of human labor that would populate a sparsely populated land, till its soil, extract its minerals, and build its canals, railroads, cities, and industries. Principle and practice converged to yield, until the 1880s, a remarkably liberal immigration policy. By the 1830s, laborers were coming by the millions, a large majority of them from Ireland and Germany. In the years im-

42

Gary Gerstle

mediately after the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of Scandinavians and Chinese began joining the still growing German and Irish ranks. The period from the 1790s to the 1880s was the heyday of what historians have called the ‘‘open door’’ period of U.S. immigration. The Statue of Liberty, France’s gift to the United States on the occasion of its sister republic’s centenary, was a fitting tribute to a country that had made open borders a hallmark of its social and political life. But, by the time the Statue of Liberty had actually assumed its place in New York Harbor in 1886, the openness of America to the world had already begun to narrow. The United States had prohibited Chinese immigration in 1882. It then prohibited Japanese immigration in 1907, most East and South Asian immigration in 1917, and most Eastern and Southern European and African immigration in 1924. In that latter year, the United States also imposed a numerical limitation— approximately 150,000—on the overall number of immigrants allowed to enter the United States in any year, regardless of their country of origin. This decreased the flow of immigrants from Europe by about 85 percent. Immigrants from the Western Hemisphere were initially exempted from this annual quota, but they were brought under its umbrella in 1965. If we take a long view, we might say that the United States marked its centenary by turning away from its historic and revolutionary commitment to the open door and by declaring (when it barred Chinese immigration in 1882) that its second century of immigration policy would be characterized by restriction. Certainly most milestones of immigration policy between 1882 and 1965 partake of the logic of restriction in one form or another. This is true even of the 1965 Immigration Act, which is most famous for eliminating all racial distinctions in U.S. immigration law and for unintentionally fueling the post-1970s surge in immigration due to the unanticipated effect of generous family reunification provisions in the law. The restrictionism of the 1965 act is apparent in its maintenance of ceilings both on the overall numbers of immigrants allowed into the United States in any given year and on the numbers allowed to come from any single country. The 1965 act also placed immigrants from the Western Hemisphere under this restrictionist system for the first time.

America’s Encounter with Immigrants

43

Yet, if one looks at the actual year-to-year, or even decade-todecade, progress of efforts at restriction across the second hundred years of America’s history, one cannot but help notice the slowness and unevenness of restriction’s advance. While restrictionist forces achieved some major victories, they also experienced many defeats; and their victories usually required a generation or more of political agitation. Thus, for example, those who finally pushed through the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act, cutting off immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe and sharply reducing maximum immigration levels, had labored for thirty years to get a law of this sort passed. Why did restrictionists experience so much frustration during a period (1890s to 1920s) when anti-immigrant sentiment was running high? The answer lies less in some fundamental and ineradicable progressive basis to American immigration policy than in the complexity of immigration politics themselves and the way those politics have tended to fragment America’s political parties and frustrate policy initiatives. Two very different kinds of considerations have informed political debates on immigration from the 1790s until today. One consideration has been economic: was immigration good or bad for the U.S. economy? Responses have ranged across a broad spectrum, with employers, at one end, typically wanting cheap labor from abroad, and trade unionists, at the other end, insisting on the restriction of the immigrant labor supply and the raising of wages. The second consideration has been cultural-political: What kind of nation did the United States seek to be? Responses to this question have been similarly divergent, with cultural conservatives, at various points, insisting on the importance of national cohesion, racial purity, Anglo-Protestant values, ‘‘Nordic’’ supremacy, and ‘‘English only,’’ and cultural liberals and radicals trumpeting the virtues of hybridity (the melting pot), pluralism, multiculturalism, diversity, and humanitarianism. What has made immigration politics so complex and so bewildering is the frequency with which conservatives on the economic spectrum (industrialists wanting cheap labor) discovered that their best allies were radicals on the cultural-political spectrum (humanitarians demanding that America receive the world’s dispossessed). Both groups historically have favored the open door. The reverse was

44

Gary Gerstle

also true: economic populists and trade unionists realized that their biggest supporters, other than native-born workers themselves, were cultural conservatives who, despite their opposition to organized labor, were important allies in the battle for immigration restriction. The latter’s desire to keep America ‘‘for Americans’’ meant closing the door to cheap foreign labor. These patterns of political divides and allegiances have led to what we might call the iron law of immigration reform: that virtually every law passed by Congress to restrict or increase immigrant access to the United States has required alliances between groups who, in most respects, do not like each other and who often inhabit different ideological universes (and different political parties). Sometimes these strange bedfellows have worked together successfully, as when cultural conservatives and pro-labor groups combined to push through the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924. At other moments of immigration debate, however, the strain of making unconventional alliances became too great. Or, political parties found themselves unable to impose discipline on their own warring factions: free-trade apostles versus social conservatives in the Republican Party, and economic populists versus humanitarians and immigrant advocacy groups in the Democratic Party. Legislative failure or paralysis at the national level then ensued. This occurred first in the 1850s, then again from the 1890s until the 1920s. Such paralysis helps to explain why it took an entire generation to marshal the necessary support for the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924.1 The inherent difficulty of assembling successful legislative coalitions has created a bias in favor of maintaining the status quo, whether that status quo is liberal or conservative. When the status quo regarding immigration policy was liberal, as it was for most of the nineteenth century, restrictionists met with numerous defeats. When the status quo was conservative, as it was in the 1920s and 1930s, those who wished to make America’s immigration regime more progressive (by eliminating racism from immigration policy and by making special provisions to admit immigrants fleeing political and religious persecution in Europe) achieved little for twenty-five years. Breaking the Congressional logjam has sometimes required a huge international or

America’s Encounter with Immigrants

45

domestic event not directly related to immigration but with major implications for immigration policy: World War I and the Russian Revolution performed this function early in the twentieth century, and the civil rights revolution did so in the 1960s. America today is living through yet another generation-long period of immigration policy paralysis. Dissatisfaction with current immigration policy has been brewing for at least fifteen years, for several reasons. First, so many immigrants have arrived since the early 1990s that immigrant density in America is nearing its all-time nineteenthcentury and twentieth-century highs. Second, the number of illegal immigrants has soared, creating concerns about the declining respect for law and order on one side and about the ill-treatment of foreignborn workers with little access to workplace rights or to labor unions on the other. Third, a large percentage of immigrants, legal and illegal, are Spanish speakers and live in close proximity to their countries of origin: many non-Hispanics fear that these immigrants would prefer to Hispanicize the United States than to assimilate into America. And fourth, many Americans believe that the influx of immigrants into the unskilled labor market is worsening the already poor economic circumstances of native-born male workers, white and black, with a high-school education or less. Thus, the preconditions for a movement to restrict immigration exist, and have existed, for some time. A briefly energetic effort in the mid-1990s to restrict immigration and make the life of illegal immigrants tougher in the United States fizzled by the late 1990s. The September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon surprisingly did not provide the boost, as the World War I and the Russian Revolution had done, necessary to pass legislation that would dramatically restrict the flow of immigrants into the United States. The 2001 attacks and the subsequent war on terror did change some elements of immigration policy, especially in terms of heightened scrutiny directed at all foreigners wishing to enter the United States and against Muslim and Arab foreigners in particular. But huge numbers of immigrants continued to enter the United States after September 2001, especially from Latin America, East and South Asia, and Africa, making America even more of an immigrant society than it

46

Gary Gerstle

was before the war on terror began. Moreover, with the important exception of the Spanish language question, America seems to have become comfortable with what I have elsewhere called its ‘‘soft multiculturalism’’—a regime that tolerates, even celebrates, cultural differences among Americans as long as those preserving their subcultures agree to embrace core American values: fluency in English, pride in the American nation, and love of American liberty and democracy.2 The culture wars in America, even the one involving Spanish language and Hispanic culture, seem tame compared to the raw nerves exposed by the Islamic-secularist struggle in Europe today. The most recent effort to restrict immigration began in late 2005. In summer 2005, increasing levels of violence in Iraq overwhelmed the Bush administration’s ability to persuade a majority of Americans that the occupation and reconstruction effort there were going well. Then, in September, the Bush administration’s credibility suffered another blow when it displayed first indifference and then incompetence in responding to the physical destruction and human suffering that Hurricane Katrina had unleashed on the Gulf Coast. By October 2005, Bush’s poll numbers were plunging. Many Republicans feared that political power in Washington would soon slip from their grasp. In this moment of crisis, the social conservative wing of the Republican Party seized on immigration as an issue that could rally the party’s demoralized base and restore the party’s credibility in time for the fall 2006 Congressional elections. Socially conservative Republicans pushed through the House of Representatives harsh anti-immigrant legislation (the Sensenbrenner bill) meant to militarize further the border between the United States and Mexico and to make it a felony to enter the United States illegally or to assist anyone who had. If this bill were to become law, every one of the 12 million illegal immigrants resident in the United States, and anyone who had assisted them, risked being arrested as a criminal, and subjected to jail or deportation. The militant restrictionism of the Republican social conservatives in the House antagonized big business and internationalist Senate Republicans, who viewed the large flow of illegal aliens into the United States as a reasonable response to labor market demand. They further believed that the free movement of labor, like goods, was the

America’s Encounter with Immigrants

47

best way to maintain the vigor of American capitalism, and that steps ought to be taken to protect and legalize that flow. Bush lined up with these Republican free-traders, as did the editorial page writers of the Wall Street Journal. Republican social conservatives in the House of Representatives found even fewer friends in the Democratic Party. The once strong forces of immigration restriction in the Democratic Party had become more inchoate after the 1970s as the labor movement lost political clout while also turning away from its restrictionist past in its bid to appeal to Latinos and other groups of immigrant workers. Antiimmigrant, economic populist forces still existed in the Democratic Party among African Americans, Reagan Democrats who were returning to the fold, and other constituencies. But none of these groups or individuals possessed the influence that organized labor once wielded. In part for that reason, and in part because of the rapidly rising number of Latino voters in electoral contests, the Democratic Party has been leaning more heavily in recent years toward its humanitarian–immigrant rights pole. Republican social conservatives, hemmed in by business internationalists in their own party and deprived of erstwhile allies among the Democrats, thus were not able to push through Congress the harsh anti-immigrant legislation they so desired. The results of the November 2006 midterm election not only cost the Republican Party its majority status in Congress, but also revealed that the party had probably lost as much as it gained by giving the militant restrictionists in its ranks a bully pulpit. After the 2006 elections, the initiative in the immigration struggle passed to a centrist bipartisan group of Democrats and Republicans, led by Senators Edward Kennedy (Democrat) and John McCain (Republican), who did most of their work behind closed doors and out of the public eye, where the national interest and a pragmatic search for common ground would, they hoped, trump the search for partisan advantage. This group developed a plan to militarize the southern border with Mexico very similar to what the social conservatives had proposed. But they insisted that the millions of illegal aliens already in the United States must not be treated as criminals. Because most illegals had become important contributors to the economy and valued members of their communities, the Senatorial group believed,

48

Gary Gerstle

they ought to be given an opportunity to put themselves and their families on the road to legal residence and then citizenship. The Kennedy-McCain caucus did not intend to make the ‘‘pathway to citizenship’’ an easy one. Indeed the proposed path was long (a minimum of thirteen years), expensive (more than $10,000), and bureaucratically cumbersome. Illegal immigrants wanting to get on this path would have to wait eight years and then return to their country of origin to become eligible to apply for permanent resident visas to the United States. Theoretically, they would be given these permanent resident visas as soon as the eight-year waiting period had ended, provided that they paid their taxes in the United States, had stayed out of legal trouble, learned English, and could pay the visa fees. With such visas in hand, the now legalized immigrants would become eligible for U.S. citizenship five years later. The proposed legislation, however, contained a potentially major delay mechanism: visas for illegals would only become available once U.S. immigration authorities had processed all of the millions of existing legal petitions for permission to enter the United States. The Kennedy-McCain group believed that eight years was more than enough time to clear up this backlog. But given the Department of Homeland Security’s reputation for moving slowly on immigrant petitions, eight years may have been far too rosy a scenario. Anyone trying to arrive at a realistic estimate for how long it would take an illegal to become a citizen under the Kennedy-McCain plan would have to reckon on fifteen to twenty years. The Kennedy-McCain caucus presented its legislation as a compromise measure. But the torturous nature of the proposed path toward citizenship they held up as the sign of the package’s liberalism actually revealed how far sentiment in the United States had shifted against immigrants. Immigrants and their supporters had difficulty mustering enthusiasm for the bill, while the opponents of immigrants, sensing weakness in the supporting group’s ranks, went for the kill. They condemned the ‘‘path toward citizenship’’ as a blanket amnesty for illegal aliens that rewarded ‘‘criminals’’ for breaking American laws. Supported by a well-oiled right-wing media machine that filled radio and television airtime with talking heads who railed against ‘‘amnesty’’ for aliens who had broken the law, and deluging

America’s Encounter with Immigrants

49

Capitol Hill with a blizzard of petitions, e-mails, and phone calls, social conservatives persuaded enough Senators to vote against the bill to send it down to defeat. The Kennedy-McCain group tried to save the bill by adding additional punitive measures to it, in the process weakening its appeal among liberal Democrats even further. By July 2007, the legislation was dead. The 2005–2007 struggle over immigration has changed some things. The Department of Homeland Security and allied agencies in the federal government have ratcheted up enforcement of their existing powers vis-a`-vis illegal immigrants—stopping more from entering the country, stripping more of those already here of their access to jobs and benefits, and deporting large numbers. State and local governments, meanwhile, have been trying to take matters into their own hands by sending National Guard units to the U.S.-Mexico border and passing laws of questionable legality punishing landlords who rent apartments to illegal immigrants and employers who hire them. In these circumstances, it is does not seem surprising that illegal immigrants have become more pessimistic about their future in the United States and have begun returning home in large numbers. Crops are going unharvested in Colorado and California, prompting Colorado farmers desperate for labor to find new workers among the state’s prison inmate population, and concerned California agribusinessmen to begin thinking about moving portions of their operations to Mexico. Recently, too, suspicion of illegal immigrants has spread to legal ones, revealing the growing nativist fear of foreigners who allegedly are not assimilating and thus who have to be stopped from entering the United States not because they are illegal, but because they have been judged uninterested in learning English or in integrating themselves into American society. The political struggle over immigration is not over, however. The legal population of Latino immigrants in the United States is well more than 10 million and the entire Latino population— encompassing several generations—is well more than 30 million. Increasing numbers of them have either gained the right to vote by becoming citizens or are choosing to exercise their right to vote for the first time. George Bush began cultivating the Latino vote when he was governor of Texas. In the 2004 election, he received 40 percent of

50

Gary Gerstle

the Latino vote, a record for a Republican presidential candidate. The recent hostility of Republican social conservatives to immigrants, however, has now identified the Republican Party as the enemy of immigrants. The draconian anti-immigrant bill fashioned by House Republicans in winter–spring 2005–2006 ignited among Latinos in spring 2006 an immigrant rights movement of breadth and intensity without precedent in American history. Demonstrations involving tens and even hundreds of thousands of immigrants and their supporters erupted in numerous American cities, from Washington, D.C., and Atlanta to Houston and Los Angeles. And even as that movement receded from view in 2007, the sentiments that energized it are still strong, and may well reappear in the 2008 presidential elections. Republicans have reason to be worried, not only because the popular vote among Latinos is expected to lean heavily Democratic, but also because Latino votes may be the margin of difference in a number of states, such as New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, and Florida, considered critical to Republican chances. If the Democrats take the White House and Congress in 2008, and thus have the opportunity and responsibility to devise a progressive policy toward immigrants, what might that program look like? What follows is not a draft piece of legislation, but rather a list of principles that ought to inform a progressive and Democratic approach to immigration reform. Principle One: Reaffirm the United States’ historic role in opening itself to immigrants. The prejudice that new groups often faced in the United States (and that denied certain groups entry into America) must be acknowledged, but so too should America’s success in admitting large numbers of immigrants, creating decent conditions for them in which to work and live, and integrating them into American life. This success has been substantial, a positive legacy of the American Revolution that is worth preserving. Principle Two: Affirm the role of a labor movement as a positive force in improving the conditions of labor in the United States and as an institution capable of bringing native and foreign-born workers together in pursuit of common goals: higher wages, better working conditions, and social justice. In the 1930s and 1940s, the labor move-

America’s Encounter with Immigrants

51

ment in the United States played a vital role not only in organizing immigrants and regulating labor markets (and thereby improving living standards for all American workers) but in integrating immigrants into American life. A progressive approach toward immigration should attempt to create the conditions that allow a labor movement to do this work again. Principle Three: Illegal aliens must be brought out of the shadows and put on a reasonable path to legality and citizenship. Many of these immigrants have been important contributors to the American economy; many have sunk roots into American society and culture. As long as these immigrants remain illegal, however, they lack basic economic and political rights, remain vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation, and must contend with cultural isolation. They should be brought into the economic, political, and cultural mainstream. The Kennedy-McCain group was right to insist that immigrants meet conditions for legalization, especially in terms of learning English, paying taxes, and staying clear of jail, but wrong to insist that their wait for citizenship take the form of a purgatory extending across fifteen to twenty years. Principle Four: Bilateral discussions with Mexico ought to replace unilateral militarization of the border as the favored strategy for reducing the flow of future illegal immigrants. Militarization is hugely expensive and of questionable value. Portions of the border where policing has become more effective have so far mainly shifted the points of entry to other less well defended (and far more physically hostile) territory. This has also led to such unintended consequences as the rise of criminal activity at the border, especially through the role of smuggling rings that traffic not only in human ‘‘contraband’’ but in drug contraband as well. Undertaking bilateral discussions with Mexico signals first that the illegal immigration problem in the United States has more to do with Mexico than with any other country and that a satisfactory solution to the problem will require the governments of both nations to work together. The United States might offer Mexico a program of economic assistance, in exchange for a Mexican government pledge to invest funds in education, physical infrastructure, and other areas that would invigorate the Mexican economy, create jobs, and per-

52

Gary Gerstle

suade potential migrants to stay at home and the ones who had left to return. The two countries might also strike bilateral labor accords that grant workers in both countries adequate and similar protections. Such accords would help to insure that American investment dollars would benefit Mexican’s poor and not just flow into the pockets of Mexican business elites.3 The two countries would be wise to resist embracing one kind of bilateral accord for which there is likely to be substantial support on both sides of the border: a large temporary worker (or guest worker) program that ferries Mexican migrants back and forth across the border on short-term labor contracts. Powerful groups in the United States would welcome such a program for promising employers a steady supply of cheap labor while freeing the country from having to worry about complicated questions regarding the place of Mexican migrants in American political and social life. Many Mexicans might welcome such a program because of the promise that virtually all migrants would be gone for only short periods and maintain their lives and families in Mexico.4 The problem with guest worker programs, however, is that they create ‘‘hostage’’ labor markets in the receiving country. Temporary workers are highly vulnerable to exploitation. More often than not, they are segregated from the culture and politics of the society in which they are laboring and lack the rights of workers who are citizens or who have the right to permanent residence. Over the long term, these programs sow the seeds of resentment and alienation. A preferable bilateral agreement would be one built around the program of economic assistance and labor reform noted above. It may be that such an agreement would require a broader evaluation (and perhaps renegotiation) of the terms of the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA). This would actually be a useful time to undertake such an evaluation, given that this free-trade zone has been in existence for almost fifteen years. It should include an assessment not simply of NAFTA’s own successes and failures but also of the achievements and limitations of other experiments in continental trading zones, most notably that of the European Union. This is a conversation in which progressives need to make their voices heard. And it is a conversation that ought to begin now so that progressives,

America’s Encounter with Immigrants

53

should they do well in the 2008 elections, can move quickly and confidently to implement a progressive agenda, fully cognizant of alternatives from which they have to choose. Immigration will not be an easy issue for them to address, any more than it has been for the Republicans. But it is too important an issue for this country’s future for progressives to ignore.

Chapter 4

The Media Obstacle Todd Gitlin

Many hurdles stand in the way of the practical American Left—a left that actually has an interest in governing, not simply standing apart and denouncing the Empire. It must formulate itself not as a ‘‘they,’’ or even an ‘‘it,’’ but as a ‘‘we’’ whose solidarities are more intense and compelling than its internal divisions. It must overcome deficits that are deeply rooted in American history and highlighted by its absence from power in recent decades. It must find constituencies that are disposed by social position and mentality to take its ideas seriously, and win their allegiance. It must be led astutely so as to embody its values and thus make sense to its public. This essay is not the place to rehearse all the formidable organizational and ideological deficiencies and historical obstacles, of which I have written elsewhere.1 Here, I will speak of only cultural and communication problems, not others at least equally substantial. One more prefatory note: I will be making broad generalizations about American culture and media. The culture of a complex society is elusive—it is a landscape and not a diagram, and moreover, a landscape in time and in flux. This cultural landscape is nothing so plain and solid as a valley or a mountain range but rather a complicated expanse of folds, ravines, plateaus, underground wells, swamps, and currents. Such a culture does not sit still for analysis. It may even be moving in more than a single direction at once. It is not a unity but a shifting me´lange. Generalizations are usually confessions of incapacity or laziness. American culture is peculiarly difficult to grasp because its distinct nature is to juxtapose contraries. This is in no small part because

The Media Obstacle

55

the overriding imperative of popular culture is to command attention. What its artifacts, stories, songs, and images have in common is that they are calculated to attract an audience. Most win attention by generating sensations and emotions. The main thing that people seek from these messages, and the main thing they take from them, is fun. Not enlightenment, not ideas, but entertainment is the central transaction. Within the totality of American culture, political messages are a minority—a small minority. The very notion that an American should function as a citizen—should vote, should debate politics, should participate in political institutions whether inside the electoral system or outside in political demonstrations—is, for much of the population, controversial if not outlandish. The Left’s communication problem is therefore twofold. It must forge a connection with a public, much of which is not disposed to think politically in the first place. (It is less inclined to think of itself as a public than as an audience.) And when the Left reaches a public that is, or might be, disposed to think of itself as a political force, it must be persuasive. The Left’s cultural problems will emerge more clearly if we first consider the achievements of the American Right. Right-wing Republicans rose to power on the strength of a double mystique. Abroad, fueled by a mixture of arrogance, panic, and utopian fantasy, they would aim for global supremacy by frequently resorting to the big stick of military power. At home, they would fight against a liberal culture that they designate as ‘‘elitist’’—a culture that is libertarian with respect to sexual questions and rationalist with respect to scientific questions. The Republicans’ faith-based politics is, at least in significant part, a reflex of their religious zeal and its apocalyptic, Manichaean scenarios. Manichaean rhetoric is the theme music of their drive for power. Whether they emerge from the moralist wing or the procorporate wing of the conservative movement, they are the inheritors of a compelling story of American virtue and an apparatus through which to tell it. Their mission, both morally and economically, is to mobilize virtue in the heart of a sinful world. The test of their virtue, in fact, is that they are willing to see it subjected to tribulation. Defeats are prologues to victories—the Bible is full of such sequences. Once the virtuous have plunged into the inferno of ordeals, their

56

Todd Gitlin

good works will be rewarded. The consequences of their virtuous struggle will be revealed, if not in this world, then in the world to come. This perhaps helps explain the vigor with which what is ostensibly the anti-government party pursues government power. The test of true virtue is that it be visited upon the nest of vipers: Washington, D.C. They must carry the fight into the very lair of Satan. Embattlement in Babylon is the proof that they are, in fact, the party of virtue. In the Calvinist root of the militant conservative mind, the world flooded with sin and goodness is always in jeopardy. In the bornagain overlay, the flood of sin is God’s test. Goodness is under siege, the godly stalked by the Antichrist, but will overcomes adversity. The two religious streaks come together where will meets opposition: in the struggle of power against a shape-shifting enemy. Modern conservatives ring various changes on these themes, but on and off during the last century the structure of their struggle has been the same. The Great Awakening is always at risk. Once, faith was called upon to march into combat against godless Communism. Faith also had to combat modernity, a three-headed beast featuring political liberalism, corrosive secularism, and moral relativism. Now it confronts terrorists (and their secular enablers). These are all, in effect, phases of the same moon. They are the changing names of evil. One need not believe in the widespread fantasy of the ‘‘Rapture’’—when true Christians will be transported into thin air to meet God—or any other millennial tale to subscribe to this bipolar world view. The road to political victory, Bush’s chief political counselor, Karl Rove, wrote in a 1985 strategy memo, is marked by a single sign: Attack, Attack, Attack.2 Rove has now departed the White House, but his advice to the party still prevails, and the Republicans’ major candidates for the next presidential nomination took it to heart. The endless repetition of bullying political slogans is partly tactical, on the double theory that repetition is needed to punch through to an inattentive public, while wavering is the essence of liberalism, conveying an impression of womanishness or worse, effeminacy, the limp ‘‘flip-flop’’ label hung on the decorated war hero, John Kerry, by the draft-dodgers George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and the rest. But the Right’s bulldozer approach to politics runs deeper than tactical calculation. It is an article of faith. It expresses not just George

The Media Obstacle

57

W. Bush’s credo, not just what the Republicans like to call their ‘‘ideas,’’ but the party’s, and the conservative movement’s, way of life. To keep their base mobilized and contain their opposition, conservatives need to command media power. Harshness, insult, and dark innuendo must reverberate from the party high command down through the media to the base, and back up to the media. For this purpose, wholly owned media are useful—to amplify not only the right-wing command’s notions but their aggressive style. The means of communication evolve over time, but what remains the same is Republican bluntness. Throughout recent decades, right-wing propaganda, heavy on spleen and percussion, has cascaded endlessly through direct mail, talk radio (liberated from the constraints of the Fairness Doctrine, a regulation requiring balance in broadcast opinion, by a Reagan-appointed Federal Communications Commission in 1987), and cable television, and, in daily print, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the Unification Church’s Washington Times, and Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post.3 The media of the Right roll out a nonstop war game, specializing in sprees of demonization: the sneers and rants of Rush Limbaugh (whose weekly radio audience has been estimated at 13.5 to 20 million at various times), Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, James Dobson, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, and hosts of other sonorous brawlers with listeners in the millions. These effusions of malice and mendacity directed against liberals and liberalism as a whole, not just particular liberal policies, do triple duty: they give many listeners an identity, a way to name and interpret their resentments; they reinforce that identity and mobilize the base to campaign and vote; and at the same time, they exercise a gravitational force on the so-called mainstream media. Through such channels of bombast, speaking in the name of ‘‘regular people,’’ Republican politicians keep in touch with the movement-conservative voice, and vice versa—the politicians never have any doubt which subjects are inflaming their base. Despite the ragged effort to start a national radio network of the Left, Air America, there remains no left-of-center equivalent of the evangelical broadcasters who, according to the journalist Mariah Blake, ‘‘openly pushed the Republican ticket in the run-up to the 2004 election,’’

58

Todd Gitlin

even ‘‘launching and promoting massive voter-registration drives with the apparent goal of helping Republicans clinch a victory. . . . James Dobson held pro-Bush rallies that packed stadiums and told his 7 million U.S. listeners that it was a sin not to vote.’’4 Air America and similar efforts on the Left lack the institutional base that rightwing radio finds among the Christian Right; they do not attract demagogic radio personalities comparable to the Right’s Limbaugh & Co.; and with their greater propensity for debate and analysis, they seem to inspire a smaller measure of blind loyalty. In the Right’s media, politics engenders commerce which in turn engenders politics: there is a chicken-egg loop. Relentless pugilistics and demonization accord with a certain public taste for shrillness and melodrama, which, in turn, generates and regenerates the demand for a take-no-prisoners style, not only on Murdoch’s Fox News but on commercial radio. The common style runs from muscularity to resentment tinged with sarcasm—right-wing populism from A to B. The general style is bombastic, melodramatic, percussive—that is to say, compelling: punditry as extreme sport. Despite decades of rightwing rants against public broadcasting as a putatively liberal redoubt, two prototype templates of the right emerged on public television itself. William F. Buckley’s relatively mannerly Firing Line promoted right-wing ideas weekly starting in 1966. During the Reaganite 1980s, the McLaughlin Group reveled in bluster and sneers from right-wing pundits barking at token liberals. Another right-wing media strand derives from apocalyptic, prophetic evangelical Christians, its lineage stretching back to Father Charles Coughlin’s 1930s anti-Semitic-cumpopulist demagoguery. In the 1990s, Rush Limbaugh tinkered with the model and bellowed his way into millions of hearts and spleens, mixing mirth and sarcasm into a radio preacher’s urgency and ad hominem viciousness. Imitators cropped up around the radio dial. The formula was set: the successful pundit doesn’t discuss, he brays. Here was a model for the round-the-clock uproar of celebrity froth, crime news, terror fright, weather hysteria, liberal-baiting, and pictures within pictures that Rupert Murdoch and the longtime Republican political consultant Roger Ailes launched with Fox News in 1996. Murdoch’s far-flung business interests—and acumen—support some loss-leader enterprises (such as the New York Post and the

The Media Obstacle

59

Weekly Standard) that made him a political player in the key markets of New York and Washington even before he purchased the Wall Street Journal. Mainly, Murdoch adroitly melds commercial formulas (attractive blonde newsreaders, hyperkinetic sound effects, a thumping atmosphere suggesting all crisis all the time) with brawling personalities and daylong propagandistic blasts in the guise of news. His financial breakthrough with Fox News rests on his having begun with successful over-the-air entertainment stations. Starting with those built-in advantages, able to dig into his very deep pockets, Murdoch was able to place his propaganda network on so many cable systems that by 2006 he had access to almost 90 percent of American households.5 As right-wing radio and television emerged, liberals barely paid attention at first, or tried to wish the menace away. They lacked entrepreneurial zeal; perhaps, despite their populist rhetoric, they lacked confidence that they could connect to mass audiences. In the early 1980s, magazines like the Nation, liberal foundations, and philanthropists preferred to build up small circulation magazines than gamble on pricier, riskier television ventures. They were satisfied to corner markets that already belonged to the Left—in the range of a few hundred thousand readers. Liberal philanthropists funded documentary films but shied away from founding new media. The Left’s own talk radio candidates, such as the populist Jim Hightower of Texas, were not smash successes. Most of the right-wing programs have small audiences—Fox News viewership rarely rises above 1 or 1.5 percent of all households (roughly 1–1.5 million).6 This is much smaller than conventionally understood. But the Right’s cultural apparatus is a force. To it much power is attributed—and in politics, reputation is the prologue to fact, moving money, making things happen. Authoritarian to the bone, their audience embraces ‘‘dittoheads’’—true believers so-called because their proud response to Limbaugh was ‘‘ditto, Rush, ditto.’’ (The closest thing to an equivalent on the Left are the daily Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert shows on Comedy Central, with audiences of the same order of magnitude, and passionate ones at that, but as comedians—liberals, moreover—they are not in the business of lining up dittoheads.) The knowledge that these channels are at work day

60

Todd Gitlin

and night, offering positive feedback for the White House line of the day, taking their agenda from Bush and the Republican Party, not only heartens the right-wing base but hovers over the mainstream, pressing them to play defense. Thus, to compete with Fox News, CNN hired the right-wing fulminators William Bennett and Glenn Beck. Shamed by right-wing bloggers for the shoddy features of a 60 Minutes report before the 2004 election about Bush’s National Guard evasions, CBS discarded its anchorman and long-time correspondent Dan Rather. The net effect of the Right’s echo chamber has been to help normalize its view of the world, protecting Bush and his fantasies, heightening the sense that ignorant, scabrous, often scurrilous views are legitimate, reasonable, and worth hearing. The cultural apparatus of the Right has been a useful amplification system for its well-chosen leadership and impressive organization. With the center dragged rightward, conventional discourse has bent toward false equivalences—as if the balance of American media were demonstrated by the misleading claim that it runs a gamut from ‘‘Right’’ (Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal editorial page) to ‘‘Left’’ (New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, ABC, CBS, and NBC). But to posit these as equivalent sides is laughable. One can argue that the mainstream media skew tacitly liberal on social issues, and that, by fits and starts, they gained investigative courage as Bush sank in the approval polls, but there exists nothing close to a left-of-center equivalent of Fox News, with its penetration of most cable markets, or the right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns fifty-eight television channels that reach, in sum, 22 percent of American households, and during the 2004 campaign planned to require its owned stations to broadcast an anti-Kerry documentary until an advertising boycott campaign convinced them to water the film down.7 Public television has never offered a stew of bombast skewed liberal the way The McLaughlin Group and the Journal Editorial Report, staffed entirely by the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, have skewed to the right.8 As for the Journal’s editorial page, even before Murdoch came on the scene, it has been for many years almost completely closed to liberals, whereas, by contrast, the New York Times’s op-ed

The Media Obstacle

61

page makes a point of commissioning and choosing commentaries that counterbalance the (generally liberal) editorials, and the Los Angeles Times cultivates a balance in columnists. I discovered from my own research that during a twelve-week period in the run-up to the Iraq war, the Washington Post ran thirty-nine hawkish op-ed pieces to twelve dovish ones, a ratio of more than three to one.9 The Right’s voices also enforce political uniformity in a way that the mainstream ‘‘liberal media’’ neither wish to nor do. In the realm of editorials, Michael Tomasky’s 2003 study demonstrated that rightwing editorial pages were far more consistently ‘‘on-message’’ than ‘‘liberal’’ ones. Comparing 510 editorials during Clinton and Bush II administrations, in the Wall Street Journal and Washington Times, on the one hand, and the New York Times and Washington Post, on the other, Tomasky found a drastic asymmetry in partisanship: The rightwing editorial pages were more intensely rhetorical and ‘‘far less willing to criticize a Republican administration than liberal pages are willing to take issue with a Democratic administration.’’ Only one of forty Journal editorials during the Bush administration criticized Bush. Whereas the New York Times ran as many anti-Clinton as proClinton editorials, the Journal supported Bush 75 percent of the time and opposed Clinton 83 percent of the time.10 So far as newspaper columnists are concerned, a similar imbalance prevails. A study conducted by the liberal think tank Media Matters concludes: ‘‘In a given week, nationally syndicated progressive columnists are published in newspapers with a combined total circulation of 125 million. Conservative columnists, on the other hand, are published in newspapers with a combined total circulation of more than 152 million . . . . The top 10 columnists as ranked by the total circulation of the papers in which they are published also include five conservatives, two centrists, and only three progressives.’’11 Moreover, mainstream news cites the Right’s think tanks—to use the term of art for the ideological havens more devoted to propagandizing for their positions than thinking through new ones—more frequently than their less posh liberal equivalents. And likewise, too, the guest lists on the Sunday morning network shows, the principal arena for political discussion in broadcasting, are seriously skewed. As Eric Boehlert reported in his authoritative book Lapdogs: How the

62

Todd Gitlin

Press Rolled Over for Bush, in 2004 NBC’s Meet the Press had room around its round tables for thirteen times as many conservatives as liberals, though during the first ten months of 2005 the ratio slumped to a mere three to one. Between 1997 and 2005, Sunday morning talk show guests on all three major networks leaned rightward. Even during Bill Clinton’s second term, Republicans and conservatives outnumbered Democrats and liberals 52 percent to 48 percent, this margin widening to 58 percent against 42 percent during Bush’s first term. Even during the sixteen months in 2001–2002 when the Democrats barely controlled the Senate, the number of Democrats on the Sunday shows actually declined.12 In news coverage, too, even as Bush’s power to cow journalists has worn thin, the proprietors of the mainstream bend over backwards to demonstrate that they are not those damnable ‘‘liberal media’’ of conservative song and story. The result is credulity. As long as Bush seemed triumphant—that is, until the Republicans lost the midterm elections of 2006—Washington journalists tended to think it would be unseemly to ask him difficult, probing questions. At worst, watchdogs with laryngitis licked the hands that fed them. At best, they exposed some administration deceptions, but rarely the patterns of malfeasance, secrecy, deception, and corruption—the connections between ‘‘dots’’ of discrete reports. Until the power shift of 2006, the expose´s were often consigned to the back pages. On the whole, then, where the largest questions of war and peace were concerned, especially after the trauma of September 11, 2001, it is not too much to say that most news organizations spent most of the Bush years rolling over for a variously (and sometimes simultaneously) fanatical, inept, mendacious, and clueless administration. During the decisive months of the run-up to war, television in particular gave the president the benefit of many undeserved doubts. When he claimed to accomplish his mission, they saluted. They buried their doubts and when the time came for apologies, displayed remarkably little curiosity as to how they had acquired so many sins to apologize for.13 Indeed, it would have been hard to keep up with the reality of the Bush administration without conveying the impression that the press was precisely what it didn’t want to be—an opposition press. But to appear to be an opposition press at a time when the presi-

The Media Obstacle

63

dent was riding high in the polls would be to take on a distinctly unwanted mission. Mostly, the mainstream keeps up a spurious impression of balance: Some say that the emperor is naked, others say that his new clothes are easy on the eye. The Right, having mastered the pernicious dynamics of manufacturing ‘‘issues,’’ thus gets to drive the agenda, unchallenged by any leftward-tilting equivalent. The so-called Swift Boat charges leveled against John Kerry during the 2004 campaign—long-discredited charges by unreconstructed enthusiasts for the Vietnam war—illustrates the right-wing advantage. A propagandist group calling itself Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, many of its members inveterate liars more swift than truthful, succeeded in hijacking the presidential campaign for the better part of the month of August, nearly one-third of the total time left to Kerry after his apparently triumphal convention. All it took to undermine Kerry’s campaign was a single commercial accusing him of having fabricated an incident during the Vietnam war in which he had won three medals. Professing fairness, journalists escorted this canard into the limelight with a bodyguard of publicity, vastly and costlessly amplifying the advertisement’s power. There were charges, there were countercharges, the whole affair looked messy, and the headline on the mess was: John Kerry on the Defensive. To make matters much worse, the actual Kerry misgauged the force of the charges, delayed his response, and thereby lost control of his campaign. Journalists performed as accomplices to liars and half-truth tellers, granting them piles of publicity that money couldn’t have bought. This recent history, of course, ill-comports with the conventional narrative of expose´ journalism in our time. From roughly 1955 through 1965, didn’t journalism play a heroic part in spreading news about the civil rights movement, exposing the racist violence that had gone largely uncovered in the majority press?14 Over the following decade, didn’t the press bring down two mendacious and overreaching governments, Johnson’s and Nixon’s? Didn’t David Halberstam, Seymour Hersh, and others expose the U.S. government’s lies in Vietnam? What of journalism’s crowning achievement, as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein unraveled the Watergate crimes? All this happened during the decades between 1955 and 1975. But journalistic defiance in those years was not so common as the legend

64

Todd Gitlin

holds. In ordinary times, big media are uncomfortable with opposition to power. The glory years of Vietnam and Watergate, however noble for Hollywood purposes and the lore of journalism school, unnerved the journalistic mainstream. Especially when media conglomerates depend on the national government for largesse, the institutions of journalism are vulnerable to assault by Fox, Limbaugh, and the dittoheads barking over their right shoulders. The media bend over backward to prove, even to themselves, that they’re not leftwing. If journalists were to call falsehoods falsehoods with regularity, they believe that they would undermine the standard of fairness that secures their professional status. Thus they trap themselves in the selfparodying notion of objectivity immortalized by The Daily’s Show’s Rob Corddry: ‘‘My job is to spend half the time repeating what one side says, and half the time repeating the other.’’ The journalistic surrender to power, manifest especially during the run-up to the Iraq War, is more representative.15 But even a milder version of the legend does not sit comfortably with the media proprietors, especially given two additional factors: (1) broadcast corporations rely on administration favors and (2) government prosecutors inspect journalists with baleful eyes. The real, imagined, or anticipated threat to deprive them of access cows journalists, although access, in fact, affords more inhibition than revelation.16 The mainstream quivers at the accusation ‘‘liberal.’’ To live down an inflated reputation for speaking truth to power, they are more acutely attuned to noises right than left. Thus the hypersensitivity at many media outlets as to whether they are doing right by conservatives. I was present at a meeting summoned by New York Times editors, reporters, and business staff early in 2005 where one reporter asked, ‘‘Should we have affirmative action for conservatives?’’ Political editors expressed relief when the Democratic Congressman William Jefferson was found with $90,000 cash in his freezer and charged with criminal conduct in 2006—they could then balance the systemic corruption of Republican members of Congress connected to the lobbyist-bagman Jack Abramoff against a Democrat’s isolated malfeasance.17 In May 2001, Washington Post political reporter (later editor) John Harris, in an unusually reflective dot-connecting piece, wrote: ‘‘The truth is, this new president has done things with relative impu-

The Media Obstacle

65

nity that would have been huge uproars if they had occurred under Clinton. . . . Above all . . . there is one big reason for Bush’s easy ride: There is no well-coordinated corps of aggrieved and methodical people who start each day looking for ways to expose and undermine a new president.’’ There was just such a gang ready for Clinton in 1993. Conservative interest groups, commentators, and congressional investigators waged a remorseless campaign that they hoped would make life miserable for Clinton and vault themselves to power. They succeeded in many ways.18 The mainstream media’s generosity toward government claims about al Qaeda–Saddam connections and Iraqi weapons of mass destruction has been amply documented, even, belatedly, in the New York Times and Washington Post themselves. But on other fronts as well, these papers and the rest of the mainstream cut Bush plenty of slack. It was business as usual to scant the substance of candidates’ and presidents’ views in favor of their tactics and strategies. But when the president is a serial obfuscator and fabricator—not to say flipflopper—this inside-dopester coverage works to his advantage. So many small expose´s take place, but the dots, once unearthed, are usually reinterred unconnected. Patterns go unrecognized. ‘‘If there’s anything missing,’’ New York Times former Washington bureau chief and executive editor Max Frankel told me, ‘‘it’s the single voice pulling it all together.’’19 Especially in television’s once-overlightly collages, the deep patterns that make comprehension possible and actionable remain obscured. Few suggestions are heard that Bush systematically arrived at decisions in an uninformed, irrational manner. Diehard Democrats may already know that the Republican Party doesn’t incidentally or occasionally stoop to please big corporations; it does so systematically, but many independents and Republicans do not. Infrequent reports on fox-henhouse cohabitation in the coal industry, say, did not refer to examples from drug, hospital, utility, oil and gas, and other sectors.20 Every Washington journalist I have spoken with between 2001 and the present agrees that the Bush administration has been more clammed up and robotically on message than any other in history. How to cover the White House (in anything other than gauze) therefore poses a professional problem, and it troubles the Washington bu-

66

Todd Gitlin

reaus. Several serious reporters told me they fled the White House beat after tiring of closed doors and puffery—the equivalent of the desert travelogues that were the best that most reporters embedded in Iraq could muster. One former White House reporter for a major newspaper told me, ‘‘This White House is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to cover. The editors need to realize their journalists are like in straitjackets. When it came to [Monica] Lewinsky and [Bill] Clinton’s campaign finances, White House reporters had help from investigative reporters. Where are they now?’’ But the investigations that would go to demonstrate the day-inday-out corruption, malfeasance, ignorance, and partisanship of the Bush years are costly—even more so under Bush than during the Clinton years. Reporters are scarcer than they used to be, and extensive investigations required that reporters be dislodged from daily beats for months of work that may, in the end, prove fruitless. With dead-tree circulations in apparently irreversible decline, newspapers are in a cost panic. Meanwhile, predatory investors hold large stakes in chains like Knight Ridder, which was forced to sell off newspapers in March 2006 because its profits were in the low 20 percent range— far higher than the average firm’s, but no matter. The profits of 15 percent or so that Wall Street considered desirable if not obligatory in the 1990s are, in the early twenty-first century, considered deficient, probably because investors are pursuing what newspaper consultants call a ‘‘harvest strategy’’ predicated on the assumption that metropolitan newspapers are ‘‘mature’’ businesses facing dwindling growth, so that the best way to realize their value is to maximize profits and run. Only the family stockholders of New York Times, the Washington Post, and (until recently) the Wall Street Journal, who occupy an exclusive tier of stock ownership, can sometimes insulate their firms from such fierce market pressures. In the end, the Journal bowed to Murdoch because the family that owned the lion’s share of its stock could not agree on any civic purpose more important than its desire for profit maximization. But this media elite, too, has other reasons to mute its criticism or narrow it. On social issues, it does tend to tilt toward the liberal side, but on other matters, the institutional mind normally thinks that, to respect the nation, one must respect the government—at least

The Media Obstacle

67

until the evidence of government failure and malfeasance overwhelms their tendency to defer to the White House, as it did during the New Orleans hurricane-flood of 2005 and eventually did in Iraq. Washington journalism is customarily as enamored of conventional wisdom as it is desperate for access. Professionalism, as conventionally understand, demands a show of balance. Reporters have had a symbiotic relation with officials since time immemorial.21 On the Washington fashion beat, there is always an authority standing by to comment on the emperor’s bright new garb. Once establishment institutions go looking for reasons to be establishment institutions, they can always find them. This was true before George W. Bush took office and it will be true after he departs. This is not to say that the variously bland, euphemistic, lazy, smug, shallow, supine, and otherwise de facto conservative news organizations are by themselves responsible for America’s long conservative ascendancy. To assume as much is to grant them too much power, to neglect the Right’s organizational successes, and, implicitly, to prod journalists to take on a mission that they will never accept. They operate as one set of forces in a larger field of forces. The overall media imbalance is an impediment for progressives. The mainstream media do a good deal to promote certain agendas and images above others, to certify that certain controversies are legitimate and others, not. But they are only the media, a communication apparatus, relaying whatever consensus is reached, or is in the process of being reached, by elites outside the newsrooms. Their legitimacy is eroding, as is their circulation. Challenges to their authority emerge not only in right-wing talk radio and cable TV but via Internet diffusion sites like YouTube and in the liberal blogosphere, at sites like dailykos.com, atrios.blogspot.com, huffingtonpost.com, talkingpointsmemo.com and its affiliate (where I blog), TPMcafe.com. In the 2001 article I quoted above, the Washington Post’s John F. Harris went on to write: ‘‘It is Bush’s good fortune that the liberal equivalent of this conservative coterie does not exist.’’22 No longer. Eventually, the liberal equivalent did spring into existence thanks to the Internet, and it is now a crucial locus of movement-style (generally energetic, sometimes bombastic, sometimes illuminating)

68

Todd Gitlin

news, interpretation, and debate, with aggregate readership in the low millions of unique viewers per month. Here, cheeky commentary, constantly updated, alternates with aggregated journalism—snippets from far-flung news sources collected (edited, in effect) to reveal patterns. Many readers are fervent, circulating items to their favorite e-mail lists. Talkingpointsmemo.com deserves credit for original investigative reporting as well as for advancing the progressive agenda in Washington on several occasions: in 2005, for example, by exposing Republican members of Congress who were contemplating offending their constituents by supporting Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security; and in 2007, by ‘‘connecting dots’’ to figure out that the Bush Department of Justice was systematically removing local U.S. attorneys who refused to mount attacks on Democrats. There is also the influential liberal organization MoveOn.org, with some 3.3 million online members and a tested capacity to raise money for candidates and advertisements, mobilize get-out-the-vote efforts, and function generally as a far-flung lobbying and interest group. The power of YouTube to shame right-wing politicians by exposing their worst moments was exhibited during the 2006 senatorial campaign in Virginia, when the incumbent Republican Senator George Allen, then expected to be a serious contender for the presidential nomination, was caught on video emitting a racist slur. From YouTube the story catapulted to national news. In a closely contested election, the bad publicity was probably decisive in defeating Allen and terminating his political career. The whole span of liberal blogs and online networks—sometimes known collectively as ‘‘the netroots’’—demonstrated during the 2004 and 2006 election campaigns that they have the capacity to conduct debates about policy, strategy, and tactics, raise funds, inspire campaigners, even conduct their own investigative journalism, and that, while frequently shrill and not always reliable, they can bolster the morale of liberals, amplify their voice in the Democratic Party, and offer them focus and intellectual ammunition. They are the rambunctious amateurs who prod professional journalists and sometimes shift the mainstream agenda. If they have not broadened the liberals’ base, they have deepened it. If they do not always elect their preferred candidates or stop Republican initiatives—they have failed, to date, to

The Media Obstacle

69

transform Bush’s Iraq war strategy—they are likely to grow and deepen their impact. Their annual summer convention is now a must-visit stop for serious Democratic candidates on the campaign trail. Although the media, when they act in a concerted manner, can be a decisive force by themselves, such moments are rare. More often, the power of media lies in their ability to limit the terms of debate—a significant force, at least in the absence of intense public mobilizations, but still only one force in the larger political field. Still, in the end, there is not only a journalistic but a political consensus that journalists are not obliged to constitute themselves a political opposition. They can further opposition or dampen it, and in a run-up to war, to take one huge example, they can be mighty pulpits for bullies. But when political life at large falls afoul of public neglect and ignorance, and the party system is tilted toward knownothing politics, and a single party stands astride government, and the president of the United States brooks no serious opposition, it would be astounding if large commercial organizations were willing to convert themselves into battalions of resistance. For that, there is politics and only politics. The Internet, not the mainstream, is the place to look for the Left’s popular discourse. It is a given that the mainstream of American culture will continue to elevate the sensational over the thoughtful, the emotive over the rational, the simple over the complex. It is likely, too, that much of the public will expect no more. That said, what may be emerging, unevenly, sometimes blurrily, especially in the liberal blogosphere, is the shape of a liberal narrative that counters the right-wing version. Within the confines of a culture of sensation, it is possible for a practical American Left to cultivate an approach that diverges from the conservative paean to the corporate economy and the bulldozer state. What is looming, I believe, is a confrontation between two versions of American history. I began by saying that in the narrative of the Right, American history is an epic of godly virtue and entrepreneurial zeal pitted against effete, bureaucratic elitists embedded in big government. In the narrative of the Left, the main line of American history is the story of widening circles of people seeking liberty and pursuing happiness

70

Todd Gitlin

by challenging the authorities who would tread on them. In the American Revolution, they toppled the British crown. The Declaration of Independence declared that it was legitimate to eject the king because Americans were a people of unalienable rights, including ‘‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’’ The Constitution enshrined a system of balanced government that was intended to secure those rights by limiting the dominance of any elite. At every turning point in American history, rights have collided with privileged interests, whether religious, governmental, or economic. When the country was beset by slavery, by monopolies and oligopolies, by abusers of power of all sorts, whenever limits were clamped upon the freedoms of ordinary people and the whole society’s democratic potential, one out-group after another fought to secure its rights by turning America’s unfulfilled promises to its benefit. The unpropertied, the landless, the enslaved, women, African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, homosexuals, immigrants—all fought for full citizenship and dignity. Eventually, for the most part, sometimes haltingly, always against fierce resistance, they came some distance, even a considerable distance, to winning over majorities and making democratic reforms. Now, this narrative is not without its seams, hurdles, detours, blind spots, and cross-pressures. Liberties for some people collide with liberties for other people. The happiness of some is purchased with the unhappiness of others. In order to increase liberties for the many, it may well be necessary to enlist one powerful force (generally, the state) against others (corporations, say, which must be deprived of their liberty to abuse people who work for them and swindle those who buy from them). Moreover, large numbers of Americans interpret ‘‘the pursuit of happiness’’ as strictly a private matter, a substitute for the pursuit of the common good—or rather, they assume that America can be properly handled by a social version of Adam Smith’s invisible hand in which the sum of private pursuits is sufficient to generate a public good. And (no small thing) the problem of how to confront Islamic jihadists will remain contentious. But no political narrative is without its internal contradictions and lapses. The more power Democrats gain, the more opportunities arise for fracases to break out under their big tent. Distinct interests

The Media Obstacle

71

will vie, all under the banner of ‘‘the common good’’—for, after all, who in a modern society does not claim to embrace the common good? (‘‘We’re the elite!’’ ‘‘Vote for our special interest!’’—such slogans do not have the right political ring. People who want to eliminate the estate tax for billionaires claim to be defending small business and family farms.) All factions will stomp their feet and demand priority, and all will have their reasons to do so, to declare their positions principled to the point of nonnegotiability. As some problems are more or less successfully addressed, others will come to the fore. This is politics. Still, over the din of the Democrats’ internal battles, a consensus may be emerging: that the party’s prospects rest heavily on its ability to stand for an ideal of the common good, one that breaks with and transcends the beggar-thy-neighbor ruthlessness of today’s Republicans, their trickle-down inequity, the sectarianism of the Christian Right, and the recklessness of neoconservative foreign policy. The premise is that after the Bush years of rampant self-seeking, Democrats now rise or fall on their ability to evoke a spirit of high and shared purpose against the party of obeisance to large corporations, of Iraq occupation, Halliburton and Hurricane Katrina. It has become the conventional wisdom—and high time, too—that opponents of abortion and gay rights have, and deserve, no monopoly on the word values. A liberal politics of commonality would be comfortable speaking the language of morality but would also happily cross the line dividing religious voters from seculars. (We are already hearing from prominent evangelicals who do not believe that Christian piety requires an unending spew of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels into the atmosphere.) This liberal politics of commonality would be willing to jettison gun control, a minority preference in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Colorado—even Montana, where the populist Democratic Governor Brian Schweitzer, elected in 2004, is a proud hunter. It would not jettison a woman’s right to choose abortion—a majority view—but neither would it demonize its pro-life standard-bearers or those who, while subscribing to abortion rights generally, disagree at the margins. Such common-good politics would

72

Todd Gitlin

also have the virtue of speaking to all the constituencies that the Democrats must blend if they are to assemble a working majority. If the Democrats are to do more than creep into office at emergency moments, if they are to build mandates for major policy shifts, they must know how to unite around central themes even as they diverge on others—environmental sanity, an enriched public sphere, universal health care and other public remedies for market failure, more income equality, intelligent foreign policy and security. Under the prodding of liberals, the party may evolve toward an identity—a ‘‘signature’’—that can be recognized as more than revulsion, justified as it is, against the ruinous regime of George W. Bush. Most likely, mainstream media will continue to bend over backward to prove that they are not in the pockets of Democrats; even as public opinion favors Democratic reforms, the media will hand the benefit of the doubt to Republicans. But the disrespect of media does not spell doom. The challenge to liberals in the coming years is to override the conventions of ‘‘balance,’’ consolidate their victories into an enduring majority and continue to pull the center of gravity of American politics leftward.

Chapter 5

Think Tanks and the War of Ideas in American Politics Andrew Rich

Assessed from just about any angle, conservative ideology appears to be dominating the policy agenda in the United States. Even at a time when Republicans seem to be losing strength and Democrats have regained control of Congress, ideas about limited government, unfettered free markets, and strong families remain pervasive and influential in debates over everything from tax policy and business regulation to education reform and civil rights. In the United States, conservative ideology has been advanced by conservative politicians but, even more, by a conservative infrastructure of nonprofit organizations led by think tanks. Think tanks are independent, nonprofit, policy research organizations—producing research and ideas relevant to policymaking and supported by combinations of foundation, government, and individual resources. During the past three decades, explicitly ideological and particularly conservative think tanks have exploded in number—in Washington and in state capitals around the country. These conservative think tanks have been a principal engine for conservative ideology. By 2005, they outnumbered liberal think tanks by almost two to one. In what is often referred to as the ‘‘war of ideas’’ in American politics (especially by conservatives), conservative think tanks have numerical superiority. They also appear to use superior methods in organizing their efforts, compared with liberals. In recent years, I and others have argued that liberals are at a disadvantage in the war of ideas because mainstream and liberal foundations—those most likely to provide financial support to progressive efforts in the war of

74

Andrew Rich

ideas—are prone to support research over ideas. They ‘‘back policy research that is of interest to liberals. But these funders remain reluctant to make explicit financial commitment to the war of ideas, and they do relatively little to support the marketing of liberal ideas.’’1 The argument is that mainstream and progressive foundations, which are the most important source of financial support for politically engaged think tanks in the United States, might have more success in the war of ideas if they supported explicitly liberal think tanks, rather than focusing their resources primarily on think tanks that often go to great lengths to avoid being perceived as ideological— places like the Brookings Institution, Urban Institute, and Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation. New findings suggest even if these foundations follow that advice, greater success in the war of ideas might still be difficult to achieve. The preference to support nonpartisan research rather than the promotion of ideas is pervasive not just among mainstream and progressive foundations; this preference dominates the ranks of identifiably liberal think tanks as well— the very think tanks that, in many cases, formed with explicit intentions to be counterweights to conservative institutions. The results of a national survey of the leaders of state-focused think tanks suggest that conservative and liberal think tanks don’t, in the end, just seek to advance different ideologies, but they organize think tanks and other advocacy efforts in ways that reflect these ideologies as well. That spells trouble for liberals. For conservatives, that ideology is one that values the power of ideas—and positions think tanks to be the infrastructure for advancing ideas, above all else. By contrast, even when they profess to be attracted to think tanks for the same reasons, the leaders of liberal think tanks are often preoccupied by deeply held commitments to producing objective research, on the one hand, and to connecting their work to issue-based grassroots activism, on the other hand. These commitments are compatible with the tenets of liberal ideology, but they are far less helpful to fighting a war of ideas.

Think Tanks as an Infrastructure for Ideas Between 1970 and 2005, the number of think tanks nationally quadrupled; the number of think tanks focused in some way on informing

Think Tanks and the War of Ideas

75

state policymaking in the United States grew at an even faster pace, reaching 183 organizations. Of these 183 state-based organizations, 117 had research agendas focused primarily on state policy issues, more than a tenfold increase over the ten that existed in 1970. These 117 think tanks are substantially different from their national counterparts only in that their target is state policymaking, rather than decisions in Washington, D.C. Among these 117 think tanks, conservative ideology dominates. By 2005, state think tanks that represented an identifiably conservative ideology outnumbered both think tanks that were liberal and think tanks that sought to remain balanced or objective by almost two to one. These numbers parallel but are even more pronounced than trends among think tanks at the national level. In July 2003, I administered a mail survey among leaders of 115 of the 117 state-based think tanks nationally; two of the organizations were formed after the survey was administered. The survey inquired about the histories, missions, and strategies of these organizations, beginning with questions about leader and staff backgrounds.2 The findings generally reveal differences in the leadership of think tanks. Among conservative think tanks, a significant plurality—almost 40 percent—of those who were the organizations’ first leaders came from the private sector. By contrast, almost two-thirds of those who formed liberal think tanks came out of state government or from the nonprofit advocacy community. And these leadership differences seem to have bearing on decisions about how to organize operations and decision-making. The survey asked think tank leaders about the criteria they use when selecting or promoting full-time staff. Out of nine response options (along with an option to write in a response not listed), leaders of conservative think tanks most often named political or ideological orientation as the most important consideration when hiring staff; for liberals, ideology was far down the list.3 Almost three-quarters of the leaders of conservative think tanks named political or ideological orientation as most or very important in making decisions about who to hire (73.6 percent). By contrast, less than half of the leaders of liberal think tanks named ideology as most or very important (42.2 percent). Among the other top priorities for the leaders of conservative think

76

Andrew Rich

tanks were issue expertise (61.8 percent), media and public affairs experience (35.3 percent), and a record of publication (32.3 percent). By contrast, in addition to being less concerned about political or ideological orientation, the leaders of liberal think tanks expressed less concern with media and public affairs experience (21.1 percent) and a record of publication (5.1 percent). Instead, liberals place a premium on advanced degrees (either policy degrees, 42.1 percent, or Ph.D.s, 31.6 percent) and experience in government (36.9 percent), along with issue expertise (57.9 percent). Leaders of conservative think tanks show far less interest in advanced degrees (23.5 percent for policy degrees and 8.8 percent for Ph.D.s) and with experience in government (20.5 percent). These results about the hiring preferences of think tank leaders are consistent with who think tank leaders report that they actually employ. Almost three-quarters of conservative think tank leaders indicated that all or some staff came from the business community or private sector. By contrast, liberal think tank staff came from the nonprofit advocacy community in almost the same proportion.4 One more difference between survey responses from conservative and liberal think tanks is worth noting: how they rank the significance of different kinds of staff activities to their organizations. Respondents were asked, ‘‘How do you rate the importance of the following activities in relation to fulfilling your organization’s mission?’’ They were provided ten choices, along with the option to write in an additional response.5 Leaders of both conservative and liberal think tanks most often named advising policymakers and the news media about their research products as either most or very important to fulfilling their mission.6 But from there, differences quickly emerged. The leaders of conservative think tanks were significantly more likely to name ‘‘advising legislators on immediately pending policy issues’’ and ‘‘shaping public opinion on policy issues’’ as high priorities compared with the leaders of liberal think tanks. Three-quarters of the leaders of conservative think tanks named advising legislators as most or very important (76.5 percent), whereas just more than half of liberal think tanks named that as important (57.9 percent). Likewise, three-quarters of the leaders of conservative think tanks named shap-

Think Tanks and the War of Ideas

77

ing public opinion as important (73.5 percent), while only half of the leaders of liberal think tanks report that as important (52.6 percent). The leaders of liberal think tanks, by contrast, named informing nonprofit advocacy groups about their research as important at much higher rates than those at conservative think tanks. More than threequarters of the leaders of liberal think tanks named the nonprofit advocacy community as very or most important (78.9 percent), whereas only one-fifth of the leaders of conservative groups named it as a priority (20.5 percent).

Differences in the Strategic Priorities of Think Tanks Overall, these findings begin to illustrate important ways that ideology affects the organization of think tanks. The differences in their priorities with respect to staffing decisions offer perhaps the starkest contrast between conservative and liberal think tanks. Consistent with a view that ideas matter—and that differences in ideology are important—the leaders of conservative think tanks place substantial importance on the ideological and political predilections of those they hire. Conservative think tanks are interested in hiring politically conservative people above all else. Next in importance for conservative think tanks is that those that they hire be prepared to make a contribution to the war of ideas. Staff members of conservative think tanks need to have an issue expertise; they need to have experience in media and public affairs. And staff should have a record of publication. The leaders of conservative think tanks were much more likely than their liberal counterparts to express a preference for staff who are ready ‘‘to hit the ground running’’ in the public battles to shape the terms of American policy debate. Responses to the question about staff qualifications were wholly consistent with the view that conservatives see think tanks as idea promoters and are supported by in-depth interviews with many national think tank presidents. The legitimacy of this understanding of the role of think tanks among conservatives was also confirmed in a final survey question. Think tank leaders were asked to choose from among three descrip-

78

Andrew Rich

tions of think tanks: as places for (1) public intellectuals, (2) policy researchers, or (3) issue activists. The majority of conservative think tank leaders (56.0 percent) selected the response that described think tanks as a place for ‘‘public intellectuals—for those with well-formed ideas about the role for government and talents in producing and organizing policy research about these ideas in ways that might inform policymaking.’’ For conservatives, think tanks are important as promoters of ideas; the research that takes place at think tanks is in the service of a broader ideological agenda. This is how we understand the power of the best known national conservative think tanks—the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, and American Enterprise Institute. Conservative think tanks have used this power to advance successfully a range of conservative policies, including deregulation of a number of industries in the 1970s and 1980s, and welfare reform in the 1990s. More recently, the neoconservative scholars based at conservative think tanks played a central role in making the case for the war in Iraq—a successful story of influence on their part that has informed what by most accounts has been a poorly conceived and badly managed war. This same sort of power—as promoters of ideas—is evident among the ranks of statefocused conservative think tanks. By contrast, the leaders of liberal think tanks selected the description of think tanks as places for ‘‘public intellectuals’’—as places for those with well-formed ideas—least often among the three choices offered. Instead, they were split between those who described think tanks as ‘‘for policy researchers—for those with interest in the researchable dimensions of particular issue areas and talents in producing applied policy research that might inform policymaking’’ (31.6 percent), and those who saw think tanks as ‘‘for issue activists—for those with concerns about specific policies and populations and talents in producing research and organizing citizens in ways that might inform and affect policymaking’’ (36.8 percent). The leaders of liberal think tanks view their organizations first and foremost as research organizations—not as idea promoters. Yet these are the think tanks that one might assume are poised to do battle for the Left in the war of ideas. Instead, the results on this and other questions in the survey

Think Tanks and the War of Ideas

79

reveal identifiably liberal think tanks as virtually indistinguishable from think tanks coded and confirmed as of no identifiable ideology. The leaders of liberal think tanks are most concerned with hiring staff with issue expertise and with research/academic credentials, rather than staff with media experience or with records of popular publication. For the leaders of liberal think tanks, it is most important that the organization be able to produce credible, rigorous research rather than promote that research or fit it into a broader ideological project. Research is the product of think tanks, and its completion is the core purpose of the organization. Further evidence of this last point is provided by how the leaders of liberal think tanks characterize the importance of different types of staff activities. The leaders of liberal think tanks consistently placed priority on informing specific audiences about their research products rather than on shaping the broader terms of policy debate. They describe informing policymakers, nonprofit advocacy groups, and the news media about their research products as most important to fulfilling their organization’s mission. The leaders of conservative think tanks also describe informing policymaking communities about their research products as important. But they place equal emphasis on shaping public opinion on policy issues (regardless of their research products) and advising legislators on immediately pending policy issues (again, regardless of research products). These findings suggest that conservative think tanks basically place much more importance on finding a receptive audience for their ideas—separate from their research—than do liberals.

When Ideology Impedes Organization The survey findings suggest that many of the differences in how think tanks approach their missions are closely related to differences that come out of the ideologies they seek to promote. As a practical matter, this conclusion suggests a far bigger problem for liberals than for conservatives in the war of ideas in American politics. To the extent that this war is ongoing and think tanks are important to it, conservatives have the advantage, first, because they have more think tanks

80

Andrew Rich

that are better funded. And second, because even where they exist and have resources, liberal think tanks are typically not organized to be effective counterweights to conservative organizations in the war of ideas. Liberals approach think tanks from a century-long tradition of investing in the production of objective policy research. Since the creation of the social science disciplines during the Progressive Era, liberals have been committed to the view that research is essential to an informed policymaking process. Research may lead to ideas—but ideas that are pragmatic and well-reasoned, not value-laden. The tradition for research among liberals is one that ‘‘tends to minimize disagreement over political values, and at times seems to ignore underlying values if not wish them away altogether.’’7 In this context, liberals are inclined to approach a war of ideas in American politics by, in some sense, denying its very legitimacy. Ideological battle is political nonsense; the results of rigorous, objective research can—and should—best inform the appropriate possibilities for government and society. Politics should not be about winners and losers so much as it should be about building consensus, and research can point the way toward that consensus. To view the role of research—and research organizations—in any other way would be inappropriate. It is the obligation of the disinterested expert to develop optimal policy-based solutions. The findings here lend support to this conclusion. These are attitudes pervasive not just among think tank leaders at the state level, but among those who run national organizations as well. As the president of one national think tank consistently perceived as liberal put it to me: I work very hard to maintain a posture of nonpartisanship and nonadvocacy. If you look at an organization’s agenda, you can form a view— without knowing anything about what they’re doing or who they are. You look at the agenda and say, ‘‘Well, look, these people are working on income distribution, health insurance, welfare, public housing. They’ve got to be liberal Democrats. After all, who works on those things?’’ That’s not so true here. . . . We do honest work. That is our charter—to do objective work, to put it out there, to try to get it in the hands of people who need it, when they need it. But not to push an agenda. Well, you might say that the work may lead to an agenda. That’s true. But we’re not an agenda organization. We don’t think there is a political bias.8

Think Tanks and the War of Ideas

81

This neutral perspective is in part a remnant of an earlier era—a period in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s when there was far greater consensus among policymakers and policy elites in the United States about the desirability of government programs and government intervention in the economy. During that era, the liberal think tanks of today did not need to behave in an ‘‘ideological’’ way when promoting government progress because there was a ‘‘liberal consensus’’ behind which to hide. These think tanks have not done so well at making the transition to the more contentious environment of the past few decades. Conservatives begin their thinking on these issues in a very different place. They begin from the perspective that ideas and values motivate—rather than result from—research. In their view, all research is ideological insofar as ideas or ideology at least inform the questions that so-called ‘‘neutral’’ researchers ask. There is no such thing as disinterested expertise or the disinterested expert. Instead, there are ‘‘permanent truths, transcending human experience, [that] must guide our political life.’’9 These truths motivate research, and research is a means to a more important end: realizing the ideas that are a reflection of this core truth. Conservatives believe at a fundamental level that ideas have power.10 Ideas inform preferences and behavior far more than research. And ideas not only are—but should be—more powerful than expertise. One engages in (or supports) policy research for the same reasons one supports political advocacy: because both contribute to the larger causes of shifting the terms of debate in American policymaking and amplifying the power of conservative ideas. For conservatives, the war of ideas provides the rationale for creating think tanks. Think tanks are the engine for conservative ideas. And conservatives apply an entrepreneurial spirit to their organization with the view that in a war of ideas, conservative ideas need a machinery to promote and disseminate them from every angle possible. Conservative think tanks should operate across the full range of issue domains, and they should be poised to interject ideas into any issue debate that captures the attention of policymakers or the public. This has been the guiding philosophy of everything from the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute at the national level to the Mackinaw

82

Andrew Rich

Institute for Public Policy in Michigan and the Manhattan Institute in New York City at the state and local levels. Because of their alternative views about research, liberals have a much more difficult time reconciling the formation of research organizations with the promotion of ideas in American policymaking. Rather than approaching think tanks with a commitment to advancing a particular worldview as their main priority, liberals view think tanks with a pragmatic eye, relying on them to produce research that might speak to the policy needs of different issue domains. As the president of one liberal think tank put it to me: ‘‘The important thing for us, and it’s not true—and I don’t say this purely out of a spirit of rivalry and competitiveness—but it’s not true, for example, for the Heritage Foundation. They don’t really care whether their numbers meet academic standards. For us, it’s a question of survival. We know that we can’t make it unless we continue to be credible to places with our numbers. So we try to be bold politically but we spend a lot of energy making sure our numbers are right.’’11 But in the survey—and in the country—liberals are actually split with respect to how they view the appropriate role of research and research organizations. If one group of liberals takes the approach just described—which I call a ‘‘pragmatic liberal’’ approach—another group comes at it from a very different direction. They are ‘‘progressive activists’’ (describing think tanks as ‘‘issue activists’’ in the think tank survey), and they reject the elitist proclivities of social science research organizations and the very notion that research can best reveal the appropriate directions for public policy. An expert-based politics is problematic in their view, not because ‘‘progressive activists’’ embrace a politics of ideas over expertise (as conservatives do). Instead progressive activists reject the elitist, anti-democratic features of the liberal pragmatists—an approach where research reveals truth and the policy researcher knows best. Progressive activists prefer instead a politics that relies on ‘‘the people’’—on grassroots mobilization and a mass base for political change. For progressive activists, any effort to turn research into advocacy requires grassroots popular mobilization. In order for research and ideas to have legitimacy, they must reflect the real prefer-

Think Tanks and the War of Ideas

83

ences—or interests—of citizens, who are actively supportive of, and engaged in, their promotion.12 The progressive activist is closer than the pragmatic liberal to the entrepreneurial conservative’s view of think tanks as primarily important because they might influence political change (rather than simply produce policy expertise for its own sake). But whereas ideas are the most powerful currency for conservatives, the people—organized as grassroots constituencies—are more important for progressive activists. And it is the interests of the people—rather than any set of ideas—that progressive activists seek to pursue, with their help and on their behalf. This attention to interests and to public mobilization is largely incompatible, or at least in tension, with the war of ideas in American politics and with the central role and purpose of think tanks in that war. Ideas are really not important to liberals— pragmatists or activists—in the ways that they are to conservatives. As a result, the translation of liberal ideas and ideology into the organization of think tanks seems to have followed not only a different trajectory from that of conservatives, but also a far more difficult one. The war of ideas may seem undesirable to some—particularly those who have trouble contending with a role for ideas in policymaking in the first place. Wars are rarely easy, and when they are fought over ideas, substance can sometimes seem secondary to storytelling. War implies a place for winners and losers in politics that those who prefer consensus building find uncomfortable. But liberals—and scholars—who might wish to dismiss the legitimacy of political ideas right along with the ‘‘war’’ itself would be making a mistake. As two avowedly liberal researchers recently concluded, ‘‘Most new programs and initiatives come from the right. The left has had little to do with setting the country’s agenda and seems unable to mount any sort of effective resistance to the conservative juggernaut.’’13 In the wake of the 2004 election, foundations and individual donors have demonstrated a fresh interest in supporting new liberal think tanks.14 Since that election, the Center for American Progress has become a sizable force in Washington and other, smaller think tanks have emerged on the Left. My research suggests that new support should be directed not just toward the straightforward development of more think tanks, but think tanks of a particular type. These

84

Andrew Rich

think tanks need to adopt missions and reflect strategies at odds with what has been the typical approach for liberals. They should be focused on ideas over research and on building a movement to support those ideas over the long term. Widespread opposition to the war in Iraq provides an opening for progressives to inject new ideas into foreign policy debates, and the weaknesses in the housing market (and consequently, in the broader economy) and the failures in the mortgage industry create space for new progressive ideas in a variety of domestic policy debates—around everything from consumer debt to universal health care. There are funders poised to support these efforts, whether among the limited number of foundations that believe in and support building a progressive infrastructure, like the Open Society Institute, or among the ranks of individual donors organized in part by the Democracy Alliance.15 Yet despite these possibilities, to date, with only a few exceptions, as conservatives and liberals have pursued very different ideas about the role for government, they have also followed very different ideas of how best to use think tanks to promote these roles for government. Liberals—and the leaders of liberal think tanks—might do well to appreciate the power of these ideas, both in policy debates and in the organization of their efforts to influence those debates.

Chapter 6

From Incremental to Transformative Change Ezra Klein

To understand the state of the American Left, it is important to understand the context in which its resurgence is taking place, and the economic trends which are bolstering it. So this essay, though in sum about the coming years in American politics, will spend a substantial amount of time wandering through the recent past. Conservatism, after all, hasn’t failed. Rather, it has oversucceeded. And those successes—and the economy and society they’ve created—are sparking a profound counterreaction, which is both propping up a progressive movement that recently seemed near death, and forcing the whole country, Republicans included, to move left. One could do worse than to start with John Graham. Graham is arguably the most important government official you’ve never heard of. The founder of the Center for Risk Analysis at Harvard University, Graham is a bald, bespectacled, unassuming bureaucrat in his midfifties, exactly as gray and forgettable as his chosen subject: regulatory policy. But within his specialty, Graham is something of a reformer, even a radical. Graham made his name advocating cost-benefit analysis, an anodyne evaluative technique that weighs regulations in terms of how much they cost industry versus how they aid society. Like its prime proponent, the approach is superficially inoffensive, a mere technocratic tweak to regulatory analysis, nothing for citizens to fret over. But for those of us who think this country is more than a federation of corporate interests and the measure of its success isn’t the health of their balance statements, it’s one more unfamiliar waypoint showing the ship of state has drifted dangerously off course.

86

Ezra Klein

The Center for Risk Analysis certainly had a healthy bottom line. Corporate donors adored it and funded in step with their enthusiasm. That’s because Graham’s formulas transform our society into an economy, evaluating it entirely in terms of casualties, ignoring benefits to the environment, quality of life, safety, life expectancy, and a host of other factors the rest of us would see as government’s job to augment and safeguard. Unsurprisingly, this myopic technique tends to favor ditching the regulation in question. After applying his evaluative wizardry, Graham has declared regulations against PCBs, saccharine, and nuclear power evidence of society’s ‘‘flustered hypochondria.’’ The hole in the ozone layer, metastasizing cancer cells, and radiation thank him for clearing their good names. So too did the Bush administration, who nominated Graham to become head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Once before the Senate, Graham’s blithe dismissal of the public so enraged senators that the nominee for this obscure bureaucratic position garnered the second most opposition of any of Bush’s initial appointees—only John Ashcroft beat him in ‘‘no’’ votes. The position—more colloquially known as ‘‘Regulatory Czar’’— wields immense power. Every proposed regulation from any of the government’s fifty-some agencies crosses Graham’s desk for evaluation, and if the possible law fails his pro-business acid test, it gets tossed out. In his first year, he halted more proposed laws than the Clinton administration stopped in eight. Nine days after 9/11, he released an extraordinary memo advising government agencies that the administration was no longer evaluating regulations based on health, safety, and other public good metrics. From here on out, they’d also be judged on how they affected business. If future historians ever want to understand what killed this country’s middle class, they’ll find that document a helpful signpost. Over the past few decades, corporations have become the government’s most valued—and assiduously protected—constituency. Where the state used to see its role as safeguarding the common good, upholding the interests of society against and above the desires of industry, in recent years that sense of populist mission has collapsed, leaving behind a hollow federal authority that increasingly augments

From Incremental to Transformative Change

87

and enhances the desires of its most powerful petitioners at the expense of those it’s supposed to protect. The result is a deeply, tragically imbalanced economy, one that does fantastic, astonishing things for a small sliver at the very top, while doing very little for the great mass beneath. Save for a brief period in the mid- to late 1990s, middle- and working-class wages have stagnated since the late 1970s. The unequal distribution of income and wealth has now surpassed that of the Gilded Age. The corporate welfare state is in sharp decline, and government policy is colluding with human resource department preferences to shift ever more risk and cost onto workers. Organized labor lies motionless on its apparent deathbed, making news, most recently, for a massive split in its ranks over who was doing a worse job for workers. Meanwhile, the manufacturing sector and its high-wage, blue-collar jobs have been decimated, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts the largest job growth over the next twenty years will be in retail sales. Say good night—and good luck—to America’s middle class. But it’s morning in America for the upper class. Over the last quarter century, the portion of the national income going to the richest 1 percent of Americans has doubled. And lest anyone doubt the importance of that statistic, it has doubled to more than 20 percent of all the income in the United States. One out of every five dollars in wages now goes to the top 1 percent. The other 297 million Americans must split the other four. The share going to the richest one-tenth of 1 percent has tripled, and the share going to the richest one-hundredth of 1 percent has quadrupled. The share going to the bottom 90 percent has declined. In light of all this, recent conversations about the common good are almost quaint. Then American Prospect editor Michael Tomasky excited liberals with talk of such a vision in April 2006, and the idea was quickly adopted by the Center for American Progress, the Take Back America conference, and all manner of operatives, presidential candidates, and activists. It’s fun to muse about what the ‘‘common good’’ is. And lord knows we’re all in favor of good things. But in a society bereft of countervailing powers, where the unions have been crushed by corporate interests and the government captured by them, who, precisely, is supposed to actualize this amorphous vision? Will

88

Ezra Klein

it be achieved by a Democratic Leadership Council-like merger of market mechanisms and liberal ends? Public-private partnerships? The discredited gods of job retraining and education? The goodwill of Wal-Mart? The working class saying ‘‘please’’? As rational actors, corporations and the rich will continue to wrest as much income and wealth as they can. It’s not an issue of ethics, but incentives. We all seek, as the economists say, to ‘‘maximize our utility,’’ and if the river of national income is trickling down through your bank account, you’re going to build a dam. Which is precisely what the well-off have done, and precisely why the wellintentioned fixes of the Left have failed. When Bill Clinton entered office, wage stagnation looked like a simple problem. Wages tracked with productivity, and productivity had been averaging 1.5 percent since the late 1970s. In the period before, it was 2.5 percent. That difference meant corporations couldn’t justify strong annual pay increases. The administration assuaged the problem through a combination of deficit reduction (which freed up money for private businesses to borrow and invest toward productivity increases) and mild downward redistribution. The strategy, with a heavy assist from the tech bubble, worked, and productivity accelerated, and wage growth sputtered back to life. And then it died again. The problems of the old period had been solved: Productivity was up, growth was high, unemployment was low. But after the Clinton boom busted, those healthy macro indicators stopped indicating healthy micro experiences. Wages stagnated, and in the past few years, have gone down (even for the college educated). The easy thing for liberals to do was implicate Bush and his tax cuts, but the data held true for pretax income too. Most Americans were becoming poorer, even as the country became significantly richer. What’s happening is that some of the country is becoming vastly richer. It’s a very small some, but it’s quite a lot richer. Recently, unsuspecting data junkies woke up one morning to hear the Bush administration trumpeting higher-than-expected tax revenues. ‘‘[The] tax cuts worked to generate economic growth, and economic growth is now working to raise revenues,’’ chortled budget director Rob Port-

From Incremental to Transformative Change

89

man.1 Reaganomics, it would seem, had been vindicated. The Democrats were doomed. Sadly for the Bush administration, the Wall Street Journal staff (hardly a bunch of socialists) took a peek into the numbers, and found a far more discomfiting explanation for the windfall revenues. ‘‘While tax revenue is growing far faster than the Bush administration forecast in its budget projections in February, the nation’s economy isn’t. What has changed isn’t the size of the economy, but how the economic pie is divided. The share of national income going to corporations and the wealthiest individuals, already large, has expanded, while the share going to typical wage earners has shrunk. Because corporations and the wealthy generally pay income tax at higher rates than does the typical wage earner, that shift benefits the federal Treasury.’’2 In other words, growth was right on schedule. What generated the heightened tax revenues was the distribution of that growth: An unexpected amount of it apportioned to the rich, and they pay higher taxes than the rest of us. Not a whole lot more was said about those revenues after they were explained, oddly enough. Guess the fact that growth is only growing the rich didn’t merit party hats and noisemakers. What it did merit, when combined with all the other data showing accelerating wealth accumulation among the hyperrich, was concern. A 2005 paper by the Northwestern economist Robert Gordon and Ian Dew-Becker concluded that recent productivity gains were going entirely to the top tenth of the workforce. It’s a ‘‘basic tenet of economic science that productivity growth is the source of growth in real income per capita,’’ they wrote. ‘‘But our results raise doubts, that we find surprising and even shocking, about the validity of that ancient economic paradigm.’’3 The implication is that the upper class has forgotten how to share. Or, for the more cynical (and realistic) minded among us, stopped being forced to. For a hackneyed aphorism, the simple truism that ‘‘money is power’’ is surprisingly unsettling, and American politics does a damn good job of ignoring it. To suggest that powerful interests have used parts of their fortunes to neutralize the countervailing powers that could force the equitable distribution of growth

90

Ezra Klein

and even the redistribution of riches is marginalized as ‘‘class warfare.’’ To not believe it, however, is nuts. Why wouldn’t rational, rich actors use their money to ‘‘convince’’ politicians of the evils inherent in the estate tax, of the undue burden imposed by their tax rates, of the dangers of campaign-finance reform? Why wouldn’t rational corporations seeking to maximize shareholder value ‘‘convince’’ politicians of the evils of the minimum wage, the undue burden of regulations, and the dangers of unions? In other words, in a world where we value wealth, power, and riches, why are we so naive as to think powerful actors don’t feel the same, or don’t use their power to enhance their accumulation of such goods? It is proof positive of the artificial limits of our political discourse that to suggest such things, to venture the opinion that large actors behave in a rational and predictably self-interested manner, somehow exceeds the bounds of polite conversation. The conventional wisdom holds that it’s ‘‘class warfare.’’ Political suicide. All Americans believe they will one day be rich, goes the argument, and so resent the Left’s assault on the plutocrats they eventually expect will take them skeet shooting. Indeed, didn’t Bill Clinton and his merry band of neoliberals definitively discredit such misguided populism as a useable template in modern political life? They did not. And the 1990s, while superficially recent, took place in a vastly different context. Forgotten though the early years of the period may be, Clinton’s political maturation, and his initial election, both occurred in the shadow of the Soviet Union, which managed to miserably merge the rhetoric of progressive, class-conscious uplift with a murderous, dictatorial, imperialistic approach to governance. During the Cold War, the USSR posed an existential threat, bristling with nuclear weapons and belligerent intentions. With such a grotesque, demonic regime providing the template for statist, working class–oriented visions of politics, it is no surprise that more moderate, social-democratic alternatives were eschewed in favor of an ideology that could provide a simple, compelling, and clear counterpoint. That, in essence, is what small government conservatism was. In 2007, David Frum, one of its wiser and more thoughtful proponents, took to the website of the Cato Institute to compose an elegiac eulogy

From Incremental to Transformative Change

91

for the ideology. ‘‘For all the threat we now face from a demographically driven expansion of big government,’’ he wrote, ‘‘it is a very different and far less severe threat than the ideologically driven expansion of three decades ago. Sometimes intellectual movements are called to life to save their countries at a time of challenge—and then gradually fade away as their work is done, as the Whigs faded away in the 1850s or the Progressives after the First World War. It may be that the future of conservatism is to recognize that it belongs to the past.’’4 It is both deliciously ironic and strangely fitting to conceive of small government conservatism as a dialectical response to Communism. In retrospect, it is a cruel ideology, one that conceives of a freedom entirely separated from security, individualism fully distant from ethics. Whittaker Chambers got it right when he reviewed Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, a canonical text for free marketeers. ‘‘The news about this book,’’ he wrote, ‘‘seems to me to be that any ordinarily sensible head could not possibly take it seriously, and that, apparently, a good many do. . . . In this fiction everything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly. This kind of simplifying pattern, of course, gives charm to most primitive story known as: The War between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness.’’5 But the almost cartoonish supervillainry of the Soviet Union required laissez-faire conservatism’s similarly two-dimensional response. The more moderate alternatives proposed by liberalism only served, in Chambers’s insightful phrase, to ‘‘complicate reality.’’ It wasn’t a moment when America could afford to face such complications, and so they were eschewed, ignored. Free-market capitalism was never quite practiced, but it was oft professed, and that was, for a time, important. The Democratic Party could not convincingly respond, and so it required Communism’s fall, and Clinton’s healthful, public bloodletting of liberalism, to renew the party’s relevance in the country’s eyes. But while liberalism required a convincing defeat to achieve eventual resurrection, small government conservatism needed a total victory to trigger absolute collapse. In 1994, Newt Gingrich and his

92

Ezra Klein

band of Republican revolutionaries provided just such an opportunity. Riding a wave of revulsion at the Clinton White House’s legislative ineptitude and aura of scandal, the GOP, under Gingrich’s volatile and confrontational leadership, captured a historic fifty-two congressional seats in the midterm elections, reclaiming the House of Representatives from the Democrats for the first time in more than four decades. The election was seen as a referendum on small government conservatism, Gingrich’s victory a clear call to take a cleaver to Washington. That was, to put it mildly, a mistake. Within a couple years, Gingrich would try to do nothing more than slow the rate of growth in Medicare spending, and find his own revolution first against the wall when the voters came to their senses. Gingrich made a slew of understandable—but fatal—errors. Foremost among them was mistaking voter anger at gridlocked, outof-touch government with voter opposition to government in general. The misread came from a skewed interpretation of Clinton’s first two years. Clinton entered office in a moment of intense economic anxiety and insecurity. The door was opened for him by Ross Perot’s revolt of angry white males terrified by a globalizing economy that seemed ruthless in its pursuit of profit and indifferent in its treatment of workers. And so what was Clinton’s first high profile act? NAFTA. It is testament to the punditocracy’s fetishization of centrism that Clinton’s primary political mistake from the health care debate is often said to be his unwillingness to engage welfare reform first. That he initially pursued NAFTA, exhausting and enraging his union base while further contributing to the public’s sense that government was out to serve corporate and elite interests, goes oddly unremarked. But it was a massive mistake. When Clinton then attempted to turn his attention to the common good and pursue universal health coverage, he found the corporate world implacably opposed—no residual goodwill from NAFTA there—and the liberal community disaffected and demobilized. A solid year of dithering over policy specifics allowed the enemies of change—and there were many, and they were powerful—to launch a populist advertising campaign portraying Clinton’s reforms as overly

From Incremental to Transformative Change

93

complicated and certain to allow government bureaucrats to overrun individual preferences and desires. It was no accident that the seminal appeal from that period came in the form of Harry and Louise, an anxious white couple gathered around the kitchen table and fretting over their powerlessness before the bureaucratic behemoth Clinton was creating. So health care reform was defeated. At least, Clinton’s incarnation was. Even at the end, polls were clear and unanimous: The public still wanted heavy reforms, and surveys depressingly revealed that their preferred structure closely mirrored Clinton’s doomed proposal. Sadly, the barrage of corporate and Republican (ah, but I repeat myself) assaults on the bill overwhelmed the ability of the Clinton administration to communicate its proposal and effectively answer concerns. Indeed, the most telling finding of the period was that understanding of the Clinton proposal actually deteriorated throughout the fight. That point deserves a moment of special emphasis: During this era of round-the-clock media coverage of a single issue, the selfinterested forces of the status quo were able to manipulate the press into literally misinforming their audience. Then came the 1994 elections. The Clinton record boasted NAFTA, no health reform, and a commitment to deficit reduction that had—and would continue—to crowd out any serious increases in investment or entitlement spending. Is it any wonder the Democrats were soundly routed? The strongest anti-Clinton demographic were white males with some college, precisely the group that had made the smallest economic gains during the Clinton period, and precisely the group most vulnerable to NAFTA’s dislocations. Live by the Perot voter, die by the Perot voter. Meanwhile, pollster Stan Greenberg found that nonvoters were heavily comprised of disillusioned, one-time supporters of Clinton. Enter Gingrich. White-haired, sharp-tongued, and given to wild flights of egotism, the self-described ‘‘definer of civilization’’ read the electoral pig entrails and divined a robust, antigovernment mandate in them. This was incorrect. Voters may not have memorized the specific provisions of Gingrich’s widely hyped but poorly understood ‘‘Contract with America,’’ but they understood what they thought it meant. Unlike Clinton, Gingrich’s forces would keep their promises

94

Ezra Klein

to change the country. Unlike Clinton, they would preside over an effective and responsive state. As E. J. Dionne has pointed out, the deficit had, over this period, become a symbol of a wasteful, sclerotic, unconcerned government. What Gingrich and company did was force specificity. ‘‘The Republican proposals,’’ Dionne wrote, ‘‘forced the country to come to terms with what it really thought about sharp cuts in the deficit. Not deficit reduction in the abstract. Not ‘waste, fraud, and abuse.’ Not whether it would be nicer to pay lower taxes.’’ When that conversation engaged, the answer was profoundly discomfiting to the GOP. ‘‘Americans may not like government or particularly trust it, but (and this is the big fact Republicans missed) neither do they fully like or trust what the market produces when it is unconstrained by government.’’6 Retribution for Gingrich’s actual attempts to act on small government conservatism was swift and severe. His party suffered historic losses in the 1998 midterms and, four years after he’d assumed power, Gingrich resigned from Congress. Years earlier, John Kenneth Galbraith had summed up the dynamic perfectly: ‘‘Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are painfully aware of the alternative.’’ Galbraith was describing, in his inimitably arch style, the Free/ Cantril paradox. Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril were public opinion analysts who, in the 1960s, analyzed a slew of political preference data and concluded that the American people were rhetorically conservative and operationally liberal. In other words, they liked the platitudes of conservatism—individual initiative, shrunken government, the invisible hand—but recoiled from its policy implications. Conversely, the nanny-state pessimism of liberals was unsuited for campaigns, but their endpoints of safety net security and robust public services relaxed the electorate. Newt Gingrich was a clean example of the paradox’s effect. Elected on the strength of conservative rhetoric, he was discarded the instant he sought conservative governance. The GOP had watched all this quite closely. Where Reagan’s fealty to small government principles was largely mythological, conservatives had long explained away his recurrent tax raises as the product of a Democratic Congress. But that wasn’t the case with Newt. Two years later, George W. Bush would capture the Republican nomina-

From Incremental to Transformative Change

95

tion for president on a platform of ‘‘compassionate conservatism,’’ which promised a new strain of conservatism free from the cruelty, or, if you prefer, the capitalism. We’d balance the budget ‘‘but not on the backs of the poor.’’ We’d respect the free market but build a prescription drug benefit into Medicare. We’d honor individual initiative but swear to safeguard Social Security. Compassionate conservatism represented a sort of fusionistic approach to the paradox. Speak as conservatives, signal that you’ll govern as liberals, and then . . . do so. Just without financial responsibility. Bush’s domestic agenda was marked by three major domestic accomplishments: Tax cuts, the No Child Left Behind Act, and the Medicare prescription drug benefit. You’ll notice an odd fiscal imbalance on that list: Two entitlement expansions shouldn’t, theoretically, be coupled with a revenue decrease. But tax cuts, to conservatism, operated as a sort of mystical, financial cure-all. As it became clear that Americans had little stomach for serious reductions in government, the rationale for lowered taxation shifted. No longer were the lower revenues supposed to defund government and restore power to individuals. Now, by encouraging economic dynamism and growth, lower taxes would actually increase revenues! Voila`! But up isn’t down, black isn’t white, and tax cuts don’t boost revenues in any serious sense. That was fine, though: Conservatives could keep saying they did while actually, as Grover Norquist put it, ‘‘starving the beast.’’ To cut taxes is popular. To cut spending is not. But if you promise doing the former will not do the latter, you can let the delayed effect of the revenue reduction force spending cuts in the future. But a funny thing happened on the way to a small government: government grew. William Niskanen, chairman of the libertarian Cato Institute, recently crunched the numbers. He found that ‘‘the relative level of federal spending over the period 1981 through 2000 was coincident with the relative level of the federal tax burden in the opposite direction; in other words, there was a strong negative correlation between the relative level of federal spending and tax revenues . . . federal spending increased by about one-half percent of GDP for

96

Ezra Klein

each one percentage point decline in the relative level of federal tax revenues.’’7 On reflection, this shouldn’t be too surprising. When taxes are low, voters are happy to green-light further spending. And because Congress can deficit spend, legislators focused on the next election—as opposed to the next generation—can have their cake and eat it, too. And with all those sweets sitting around, the government grew predictably fatter, and its financial situation increasingly unhealthy. And so this is what small government conservatism’s successor had come to: A mixture of entitlement expansions meant to guarantee political popularity combined with tax cuts that, it turned out, were doing nothing but accelerating spending and wrecking the budget. To label that a governing philosophy would demean the term. Increasingly, that’s being realized. Grover Norquist, the aforementioned low-tax crusader, is a good case study. Norquist’s strategy has begun to implode. In governor’s mansion after governor’s mansion, former allies of Grover began breaking their oath to eschew tax increases. Mitch Daniels, Bush’s first White House budget director, was the recipient of Norquist’s 2002 ‘‘Hero of the American Taxpayer’’ award. Shortly thereafter, he became governor of Indiana, and proposed a 29 percent hike in the income tax to close a $600 million budget gap. Norquist raged against the betrayal, warning that ‘‘Gov. Daniels [was] closing Indiana for business’’ and counseling Americans to ‘‘turn to people like [Texas] Gov. [Rick] Perry . . . for alternative solutions.’’8 Days later, Perry offered up a tax increase of his own. Turned out that starving the beast sounded good, but starving the schools didn’t. Meanwhile, Bush was expanding the national government at a record rate, increasing federal control over the education system, adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare, and empowering the NSA to listen in on American phone calls. His only serious attempt to cut government came in his 2005 push to privatize Social Security. It was also his highest profile failure. Rejected in the states and discredited nationally, small government conservatism has worked absolutely nowhere. The state continued to expand, and the only practical effect of the government-

From Incremental to Transformative Change

97

cutting impulse was to enable fiscal irresponsibility and wild deficit spending. The rhetoric may have been sound, but the implementation was a disaster, and for those who cared about the size of government rather than the success of the GOP, that was small comfort. For a long time, the movement had sought to explain away these disappointments, but cognitive dissonance can only obscure operational failure for so long. But if, as David Frum sadly acknowledges, conservatism belongs to the past, what, precisely, is the GOP’s future? The answer may lie in the peculiar makeup of the GOP’s coalition. According to a recent study by the Pew Foundation, all three of the GOP’s main groups— enterprisers, pro-government conservatives, and social conservatives— register about 60 percent support for the Christian conservative movement. All three offer 60–80 percent approval of teaching creationism in schools, and 90 percent approval to displaying the Ten Commandments in government buildings. A majority of both the social conservatives and the pro-government conservatives attend Bible study and prayer group meetings and report ‘‘at least weekly’’ church attendance. All this bespeaks a commonality on social conservatism that the GOP no longer enjoys on small government conservatism. And, in accordance with various theories arguing that values issues are aspirational statements meant to protect against forces and trends buffeting the ‘‘traditional’’ family, enterprisers, pro-government conservatives, and social conservatives are the first, second, and third most likely groups to be married with children. As Democrats are quick to point out, though, the forces most dangerous to the traditional family are economic in nature. Insecure benefits, declining wages, and the transition to a service-sector economy all stress marriages in a way married homosexuals—devious as they may be—could never match. For most families, the ideological debate of full-time work versus homemaking is an unaffordable luxury—the demands of the mortgage long ago decided the issue. And so it may be the case that the small government conservatives give way to the pro-family Republicans; a breed of thinker that marries

98

Ezra Klein

social conservatism to a sort of economic progressivism meant to incentivize and protect the traditional family structure. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, has undergone its own transformation. Where the party’s economic progressivism had long been subsumed beneath political caution, for the first time its champions are sensing that the country’s mood is amenable to transformative change. Every Democrat elected to Congress in 2006 supported raising the minimum wage. They all supported stem-cell research. Only nine described themselves as pro-life. And the most conservative Democrats, mainly those running in the South, largely went down in defeat. In Tennessee, Harold Ford, whose campaign focused on his church-going ways and conservative values, lost. Jim Webb won by a few thousand votes. Meanwhile, unabashed progressives like Sherrod Brown, Ben Cardin, and Sheldon Whitehouse cruised to victory. As the political scientist Tom Schaller noted, the flip rate in the South was a meager 5 percent. The real transformations came in the liberal Northeast, where a slew of not-quite-left-enough Republicans were felled by a phalanx of progressive candidates, and the Rust Belt, where economic populists took out a series of traditional conservatives. So not only did the election see the ascendance of liberal candidates, but it pulled the Democratic Party to the left by recentering its support in more liberal regions of the country. Maybe the oddest element of that election was the recalibration of the ideological spectrum. Economic leftism—distinct even from economic liberalism—didn’t get anyone tagged as too liberal. Indeed, such opinions were entirely ignored, replaced by a focus on whether the candidate in question professed belief in God and faith in fetuses. Politicians attacking NAFTA, or the broken health care system, or unfettered free trade, or the rise of inequality not only won their elections, but suffered no media censure for their positions—a sharp change from recent years in which such heterodoxies would have sparked broad opprobrium on the nation’s editorial pages. This set up a presidential race substantially to the left of anything Democrats had recently seen. John Edwards serves here as a useful case study. In 2004, he ran as a southern centrist in the mold of Bill

From Incremental to Transformative Change

99

Clinton. He had a small-bore, incremental health care plan and was hawkish on foreign affairs. The 2008 primaries witnessed Edwards’s transformation from a moderate southern Senator to a hard-charging populist running a mainstream, top-tier candidacy on a domestic political platform considerably farther left than anything a major Democratic candidate has proposed in decades—and that includes past insurgents like Howard Dean and Gary Hart. His was a candidacy unafraid to elevate poverty into a major political issue, that scheduled an earnest announcement in the mud of New Orleans’ Ninth Ward, that proposed a fully universal health care plan with heavy regulation of insurers and a public coverage option modeled on Medicare, that forthrightly admitted ill judgment in supporting the Iraq War, that called for the immediate withdrawal of 40,000 troops, that was unafraid to court the ‘‘crunchy’’ label by promising a zero-emissions campaign and producing a global warming plan that would reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent in 2050 and force polluters to buy, rather than simply be given, permits. In all this, Edwards acted as a bellwether for the Democratic Party. Where his 2004 campaign sought to closely conform to the Clintonian model Democrats had grudgingly accepted as their best hope, his 2008 effort suggested a rather new era, in which Democrats no longer saw a forthright progressivism as a political liability. In this, Edwards set the tone for the other top-tier candidates. Barack Obama ran a candidacy of comparable liberalism, and Hillary Clinton’s campaign was considerably to the left of her husband’s presidency, and indeed her own time in the Senate. Where but a few years ago she was partnering with Newt Gingrich and proclaiming that she had learned the worth of ‘‘incrementalism,’’ in 2008 she spent her time on the campaign trail advocating for ‘‘transformative’’ change. From incrementalism to transformation: That’s a pretty good description of the evolution in Democratic ambitions over the past few years. It’s not because they are braver, or smarter, or better people. Politicians are basically reactionary creatures, and in this case, they are reacting to unsustainable economic trends, which are ratcheting up the level of anxiety and discomfort among the electorate. So

100

Ezra Klein

the Republicans are moving left, and the Democrats yet further in the same direction. Add in the failed war in Iraq, which has substantially eroded the Republican’s advantage on national security, and there is considerable reason to believe that the era of conservative economic dominance is ending, and America is entering a corrective period.

Chapter 7

Rebuilding the Welfare State in the United States Dean Baker

The welfare state in the United States had been under attack since Ronald Reagan was elected president almost thirty years ago. Since 1980, dismantling the welfare state has been at the center of the Republican Party agenda. In some areas, conservatives have made enormous headway. This is most apparent with their attacks on unions. The unionization rate for the private-sector workforce fell from more than 20 percent in 1980 to just 7 percent in 2006. In other areas they have been far less successful. President Bush’s effort to privatize Social Security in 2005 was pushed back by a groundswell of opposition, as the public rallied behind the program. Similarly, the Medicare program that provides health insurance for retirees was actually expanded under President Bush to include prescription drugs. In short, conservatives have been blocked from achieving their biggest goals, even if they have been able to keep supporters of the welfare state on the defensive. In 1980 the welfare state in the United States was already far less generous than in Western European countries. This gap has increased substantially over the past quarter century. Workers in the United States have no right to any paid vacation or holidays, or in fact any paid time off whatsoever. Under the law, workers can be fired at any time for almost any reason, with no compensation from their employers. (Laws do prevent firings based on race, sex, and several other explicitly defined forms of discrimination.) People under age sixtyfive are not guaranteed access to health care. As a result, more than 45 million people in the United States lack health insurance coverage.

102

Dean Baker

The Social Security program provides an average worker with about $12,000 a year in retirement benefits. Most workers have little by way of private pensions or personal savings to supplement this income. Constructing a welfare state that provides the sort of basic guarantees that workers in much of Europe take for granted will require a qualitatively different approach from that used to defend past gains. It will be necessary to design innovative strategies that recognize the political differences between the United States and Europe, first and foremost the fact that the government is generally viewed with suspicion in the United States. At the same time, an effective strategy can take advantage of some of the differences between the United States and Europe, most importantly the greater power of state governments in the United States. The current weakness of the welfare state and the labor movement also provide one advantage to progressives in the United States compared with their counterparts in Europe, in that it is not plausible to blame these institutions for the country’s economic problems. The benefits available to people who are not employed, whether in the form of unemployment insurance or welfare payments not related to work history, were always very modest in the United States. They became even more stingy following the 1996 welfare reform, the explicit intention of which was to make most benefits dependent on work. At present, less than 2 percent of families receive benefits under the main welfare program. This benefit is strictly time-limited and most of the families who receive benefits have at least one family member who works full- or part-time. This program takes up just 0.6 percent of the federal budget. Similarly, with labor unions representing just 7 percent of the private sector workforce, they can hardly be blamed for the failure of U.S. firms to succeed in international competition. While there are sectors, such as auto manufacturing, where unions still have a substantial presence, in most areas of the economy their presence is very limited. Employers argue that higher unionization rates will impede their ability to compete internationally, but this argument has much less resonance today than it did a quarter century ago when it could be made more plausibly. Also, as a practical matter, it is difficult to know what becoming

Rebuilding the Welfare State

103

uncompetitive can mean in a country that has been running trade deficits that are close to 6 percent of GDP. Most conservatives and business-oriented political figures have tried to distract attention from the U.S. trade deficit out of the fear that it will lead to new restrictions on some types of imports. Therefore they have not been overly anxious to use arguments about competitiveness. Pro-business arguments are most often advanced on the grounds that they will increase growth and employment, not that the country is being forced to change its ways. This chapter outlines political strategies for rebuilding the welfare state in four key areas: Social Security and pensions, universal health care, paid vacation time, and expanding trade union membership. The path described here is no doubt optimistic from the standpoint of those seeking to provide real security to the working population in the United States, but hopefully it is still sufficiently realistic to provide a useful guide to political action.

The Lessons from the Victory over Social Security Privatization Immediately after his election victory in 2004, President Bush announced that he was going to make the privatization of Social Security the top item on his second-term agenda. Social Security is by far the largest and most popular government social welfare program. In public opinion surveys, it regularly scores approval ratings of more than 90 percent. In addition to providing retirement benefits to more than 40 million retirees, it also provides benefits to surviving spouses of retirees and workers who die at an early age, as well as disability benefits to more than 8 million workers who are unable to work. In addition to being an important source of income for a large segment of the population, the program is also very well managed. The administrative costs are just 0.5 percent of annual benefit payments. Recognizing the popularity and importance of Social Security, conservatives worked for two decades to create a public climate that would allow for the dismantling of the program. The central theme of this effort was the claim that Social Security was on the edge of bankruptcy, due to the impending retirement of the huge baby-boom

104

Dean Baker

generation, born in the years 1946 through 1964. In reality, the program is well financed. In fact, it is in the process of building up a large surplus in anticipation of the baby boomers’ retirement, which will leave the program fully solvent until 2046, even without any changes. While some changes may be needed in the distant future as life expectancies continue to rise, this is hardly the crisis that conservatives have sought to portray. Regardless of the reality, the conservatives almost succeeded in convincing the public that the demise of Social Security was imminent. The victory over the Bush privatization effort in 2005 was possible first and foremost because the forces opposed to privatization, which were centered in the labor movement and retiree organizations, were able to reverse public perceptions of the financial solvency of Social Security and explain that the problems facing the program were relatively distant. Once the public recognized the true status of the program, it was possible to explain that the real issues were replacing a secure guaranteed retirement benefit with one that would depend on market timing and investment skill. It was also possible to point out that workers on average would get less under the Bush proposal because an efficient government-run program would be replaced with one in which the financial industry got a share of workers’ retirement income. Once the issue was framed in this manner, the outcome was not in doubt. The vast majority of the public opposed the Bush plan. No Democratic members of Congress endorsed the Bush plan, and few Republicans were prepared to openly support the proposal. There are several important lessons from this battle. First, the public popularity of Social Security never wavered. In spite of being a big government social program, it always enjoyed enormous public support and the conservatives never succeeded in undermining this support. Their strategy was to claim that privatization was the way to ‘‘save’’ Social Security. In fact, the commission charged with designing a plan to privatize Social Security was called the commission to ‘‘strengthen Social Security.’’ The public values Social Security because it is a program from which they or their family members directly benefit. People don’t think of Social Security as ‘‘big government.’’ As much as possible,

Rebuilding the Welfare State

105

our debates have to be framed in ways that make policy proposals as concrete as possible. Public suspicions of government programs will make the introduction of entirely new programs extremely difficult. However, building on, or tinkering with, programs that the country has come to accept is a viable strategy for moving forward. The second big lesson from the Social Security debate was the importance of the new media in influencing public debate. Prior to this battle, the major media outlets had willingly conveyed misinformation about the financial health of Social Security to the public. Even the most respected news outlets (for example, the New York Times, Washington Post, and National Public Radio) routinely passed along dire scare stories about the imminent demise of Social Security, reinforcing the drumbeat coming from the Right. However, the Internet provided an important check on the mainstream media. It directly provided information to millions of people by expanding the reach of think tanks, progressive journals, and blogs. More important, by exposing biased and inaccurate news stories, progressive Internet sites forced the mainstream media to be more honest in its reporting on Social Security. The Internet has the potential to vastly alter the balance of power in the country. The third important lesson is the continuing importance of the labor movement in U.S. politics. After the 2004 election, there were many issues that demanded attention from progressives. However, the labor movement decided to make the defense of Social Security the most important item on the political agenda. Its membership was at the center of a huge nationwide movement that generated grassroots opposition to privatization across the country. In spite of all the setbacks of the past quarter century, the labor movement remains the only progressive organization with the ability to mobilize millions of people across the country. In addition to the direct benefits that unions provide workers, the labor movement continues to play a central role in protecting and expanding welfare state benefits.

Social Security and Pensions With luck, the defeat of President Bush’s privatization effort will discourage politicians of either party from trying to dismantle the pro-

106

Dean Baker

gram for many decades into the future. Since the program is fundamentally sound, there is no reason for major changes, although some modest tweaking could make it a better safety net. For example, the benefit formula could be modestly adjusted to raise benefits for low-income workers and surviving spouses, many of whom live in poverty.1 The cost of such changes are small and could be met by reducing the spousal benefit for higher-income workers, a legacy from an era in which women were less likely to enter the labor force. However, the main focus with Social Security should be to protect the program in its current form. While the Social Security system is fundamentally healthy, the private pension system is in a state of collapse. The number of workers with defined-benefit (DB) pensions, in which workers received a guaranteed benefit related to their wages, is falling rapidly. In 2006, less than 20 percent of the private sector work force has a definedbenefit pension. The companies that still offer defined-benefit pensions are excluding new workers, converting to defined-contribution plans, and, in many cases, laying off workers and going out of business. Conservatives have promoted defined-contribution (DC) pensions as a preferred alternative to DB plans, since these plans allow workers to control their own investments and take more or less risk as they choose. At this point, more workers have DC pensions than DB pensions, but even taken together, only half of the workforce has any pension at their workplace. In most cases, workers with DC plans manage to accumulate relatively little for retirement. This is due to generally low contributions from employers, frequent job changes (workers often don’t qualify for a plan until they have been employed for one or two years), and high administrative fees charged by financial companies. While it is not plausible to envision a return to widespread DB plans in the foreseeable future, there is a plausible path forward that builds on the existing DC system.2 Individual states could establish pension systems that are centrally administered, with workers contributing through their employer. This would give every worker in the state the option to contribute to a state-administered pension system. The pension would be fully portable, as workers could keep the same

Rebuilding the Welfare State

107

pension even as they changed jobs, as long as they remained in the state. The pensions should also have much lower administrative costs than most existing DC plans, since the state would be able to use its bargaining power to demand low administrative fees from the financial industry. To minimize political opposition, simply putting this sort of pension system in place, without any requirement of a contribution by the employer, would be an important first step. (Economists generally believe that employer-side contributions to pensions or other benefits are taken out of wages in any case.) If the system came to be accepted, then it may be possible to require some level of mandatory contribution (by workers, employers, or both). It is also possible to have the defined-contribution plans effectively offer a defined-benefit option. Workers can be given the option of putting their money into a fund that would make a fixed payment in retirement, based on when they contributed. For example, contributing $1,000 at age thirty-five could get a worker an annuity of $200 (adjusted for inflation) a year at age sixty-five. Contributing $1,000 every year from age thirty-five to age sixty-five would get a worker an annuity of $6,600 a year at age sixty-five, or $8,000 a year at age sixtyseven. This option would protect workers from investment risk and bad market timing. Proposals for universal systems of voluntary retirement accounts have received considerable support at the state level. Two states (Washington State and Maryland) have taken the first steps to implement such a system and legislators and governors in many other states are also considering the establishment of such a system. The fact that states have considerable power under the U.S. system makes a state strategy an attractive alternative to national legislation. There are huge differences in political alignments across the states, which are at least partially reflected by differences in unionization rates. In many southern states the unionization rate is in the low single digits. By contrast, some states in the Northeast, Midwest, and on the Pacific Coast still have unionization rates that are close to 20 percent. In these states, unions continue to be an important political force. This situation has allowed many progressive initiatives to move forward first at the state level. The most obvious example is the higher

108

Dean Baker

minimum wage, which was implemented in many states across the country before legislation was passed by Congress early in 2008. If voluntary account systems were successfully implemented in several states, then there would likely be pressure to create a national system. This would allow for complete portability, since workers would be able to maintain their accounts even when they moved from state to state, and it would also allow for even greater administrative efficiencies, as the economies of scale would be largest at the national level. However, even if a national voluntary pension system is still a distant prospect, it is very plausible that many states will have implemented such a system within a decade. This will be an important first step toward increasing workers’ retirement security.

Achieving Universal Health Insurance The health care system in the United States is a disaster. It costs more than twice as much per person as the average for other wealthy countries, yet the United States ranks near the bottom in many key outcome measures, such as life expectancy and infant mortality rates. More than 45 million people lack insurance throughout the year, with tens of millions more going without insurance at some point in the year. Even workers with regular employment and relatively good insurance are not really protected against medical catastrophes. In many cases, if a worker’s health problems causes her to lose her job, she will eventually also lose her insurance, since keeping the insurance depends on remaining employed. This means that a serious illness will cause many workers to lose both their job and their health insurance. As bad as the U.S. health care system is now, it is projected to get even more inefficient over time. In the last two decades, annual health care costs have increased by approximately 2.5 percentage points more rapidly than GDP. If this pattern continues, health care costs will reach 30 percent of GDP by 2030. This will lead to enormous strains on government budgets (approximately half of health care costs in the United States are paid by the government) and also on the private economy. Employers who provide health care insur-

Rebuilding the Welfare State

109

ance for their workers (most employers do still provide insurance) will either cut wages to cover the increase in insurance costs, or they will demand ever greater contributions from workers for their insurance. In either case, rising health care costs will leave workers much less money to spend on other items. Since the health care system in the United States is so bad, it should not be difficult to design a better system. In fact, our Medicare system, which provides insurance for people over age sixty-five and for disabled workers, provides a good model. Its administrative costs are less than 2 percent of the money paid out in benefits. This compares to more than 15 percent for private insurers. In fact many members of Congress and several minor presidential candidates have put forward proposals for establishing a universal Medicare system that would cover the entire population. The obstacle toward putting in place a more efficient system along these lines is political. The health insurance and pharmaceutical industries are both enormously powerful. They would be prepared to devote a huge amount of resources to derailing any effort to establish a universal Medicare system. (The doctors’ lobbies may also join such a campaign—physicians in the United States earn almost twice as much on average as their counterparts in Western Europe.) The political structure in the United States would allow them to block the establishment of a universal Medicare system if the opponents can sustain the support of just 40 percent of the members of the U.S. Senate. While most of the public supports health care reform, it is difficult to envision a situation in which a universal Medicare system can gain the 60 percent supermajority needed to pass the Senate.3 Opponents of health care reform managed to generate considerable public opposition to the Clinton health care plan in 1994 by raising concerns that the government would dictate standards of medical care. For most of the public, who do have insurance, this was a scary proposition. They were led to believe that they would get worse health care if the Clinton plan passed than what they had under the existing system. Even though more people are uninsured now than in 1994 and more people are unhappy with their current insurance, it would probably

110

Dean Baker

still be possible for the industry lobbies to generate enough fear to block the creation of a universal Medicare system. However, it is possible to get to a universal Medicare system through a market process. The key step is to make a government-run Medicare-type plan available to everyone (both employers and individuals).4 Such a plan would have enormous administrative efficiencies and economies of scale compared to private insurance plans. Therefore it is quite likely that a very large segment of the population, both those currently insured and those who are uninsured, would enroll in such a plan. In time, the public system is likely to dominate the market as few private insurers would be able to offer competitive plans. This is effectively the process that took place within the traditional Medicare program, when Congress passed legislation in 1995 that encouraged private insurers to participate in the Medicare system. Originally, many insurers offered policies that were more attractive than the government-run program, pulling away millions of beneficiaries from the publicly run plan. However, most of the private insurers quickly left the market, complaining that they could not make a profit charging the same amount per beneficiary as the public system. By 2003, only 3 percent of beneficiaries were enrolled in private plans operating within the Medicare system. (This number has since jumped to more than 15 percent, as Congress passed legislation providing additional subsidies for private insurers in 2003.) Of course even with the efficiencies obtained through a large public system, it will be necessary to have substantial subsidies to allow low- and moderate-income people to afford health insurance. While this will require additional tax revenue, universal coverage becomes a feasible target once health care costs are under control. (It will also be necessary to have some sort of mandate at either the level of the individual or employer to ensure that everyone does in fact sign up for health insurance.) The key political step to get beyond the current deadlock on reforming the health care system is to allow the general public to buy into a Medicare-type system. In principle, this step should get around the sort of fears that the industry lobbies will raise with the public, since it does not force anyone into a government-run health insur-

Rebuilding the Welfare State

111

ance system. The issue is simply whether people will have the option to join a Medicare-type system, if they choose. There can be little doubt that the industry groups will understand what is at stake and use their full power to obstruct such a reform. However, it will be harder to sell the idea that people need to fear getting a new choice than to sell the idea that they should worry about being forced into a government-run system.

Getting a Break: Paid Vacation and Leave People elsewhere in the world are often surprised to find out that workers in the United States do not have guaranteed vacations or holidays. While most workers do have some paid vacation time and can count on getting a small number of major holidays as paid days off, this is not mandated under law and almost a quarter of the workforce receives no paid days off whatsoever.5 Even among those workers who have paid vacations, the average is just twelve days, considerably less than the five to six weeks of paid vacation that is now standard in Western Europe. Disproportionately, those without paid time off are less educated and less highly paid workers. Workers without paid time off are also disproportionately women and nonwhite. This group includes many mothers of young children for whom the absence of paid sick days can impose an especially great hardship. These women may risk firing if they miss a day at work, which means that many mothers must choose between staying at home with a sick child and keeping their job. There has been little progress in increasing access to vacation and other forms of leave at the national level during the past quarter century. In fact, much effort has been devoted to protecting the legislated forty-hour workweek against efforts to weaken the law. In 2005–2006, the Republican Congress seriously considered legislation—‘‘The Friendly Family Work Act’’—that would substantially weaken the current requirement that employers pay a wage premium of 50 percent on additional hours, after workers have been on the job for forty hours in a week. (The law also requires a premium of 100

112

Dean Baker

percent for additional hours after a worker has worked forty-eight hours in a one-week period.) The last victory at the national level in providing workers with time off was the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which was passed in 1993 during the Clinton administration. This bill only guaranteed workers the right to three months of unpaid leave to deal with family or medical emergencies. It guaranteed that workers could take this time off and return to the same job or one that is comparable and not experience any loss in pay or benefits. Even this limited benefit was restricted to workers employed by firms with more than fifty people and who had been on the job for at least one year. These restrictions effectively excluded a very large percentage of women workers. They are likely to prevent young mothers from benefiting even from the FMLA protections, since many of them work for small firms and/or have not been employed at their current job for more than a year. Little progress on this issue is likely in the near future at the national level; however, the prospects at the state level are much more promising. California passed a paid medical leave bill in 2004 that is financed through a small payroll tax. In 2007, Washington state passed legislation mandating five weeks of paid parental leave for workers with firms that employ more than twenty-five people. There are bills getting serious consideration in many other state legislatures around the country that would guarantee workers some amount of paid time off. The bills that are most likely to pass in the immediate future provide for paid leave only for medical and family emergencies, but bills that provide for mandatory vacation days have gotten serious consideration. The process of extending paid leave is likely to develop its own momentum once a few states take the lead. While employer groups almost always oppose these mandates, the reality is that they will impose little or no cost on employers. Standard economic theory holds that mandated time off (whether for sick days or vacation days) would come at the expense of workers’ wages. In effect, workers would be paid less for the hours they do work in order to compensate for the fact that they are being paid for hours that they do not work. Requiring that employers accommodate workers’ request for time off

Rebuilding the Welfare State

113

can limit their flexibility, but since most businesses even in the United States do offer some amount of paid time off, and still manage to operate profitably, allowing time off can’t be that large a hardship for employers. In fact, it is even plausible that time off would increase productivity by allowing workers to come back well rested after a vacation and also by reducing turnover that might be necessary because a worker has to care for a family member and her employer refuses to allow time off. If several states implement mandatory paid leave measures, and there are no serious negative economic effects, then there will almost certainly be increased demand for such measures in other states. Social policy in France or the Netherlands is generally viewed as having little relevance to people in the United States. However, if a policy works in two or three states, it will generally be seized upon by politicians in other states who are anxious to associate themselves with a successful and popular measure. Mandates for paid time off are likely to fit into this category. Also, if several states successfully experiment with mandates for paid time off, such proposals are more likely to be seriously considered at the national level. Paid time off also has an extremely important side benefit. In effect, mandated time off requires that workers trade off some amount of income for increased leisure. The main reason for the difference in per capita GDP between the United States and Western Europe is that people in the United States work on average many more hours per year than people in Western Europe. Income corresponds closely with energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.6 If average hours worked in the United States were to decline 10 to 20 percent, bringing them closer to the average number of hours worked in Western Europe, it would likely result in a corresponding reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. It is difficult to envision another measure that could have such a large effect on emissions at so little cost to the public. The state by state route to gaining paid time off and vacation days may be a slow one, but it allows for a way around the gridlock in Washington that would almost certainly obstruct any progress on this issue for the foreseeable future. However, once several states have demonstrated that workers can be guaranteed some amount of paid

114

Dean Baker

vacation without negative economic consequences, politicians in Washington are likely to view such proposals very differently.

Rebuilding the Union Movement Union membership has been in sharp decline over the past quarter century. Stopping this decline and increasing union membership must be an essential part of any progressive agenda. Unions not only protect the workers they directly represent, but they have also historically played a vital role in defending and extending welfare state protections. As noted earlier, unions played a central role in defeating President Bush’s plan for privatizing Social Security. Unions will also play a central role in any effort to extend retirement security, health insurance coverage, or achieve other important gains for workers through public policy. The prospects for increasing union membership, and specific policies to achieve this goal, are addressed elsewhere in this volume.7 It is worth noting that, in spite of its success in campaigns for raising the minimum wage, defending Social Security, and other important policy issues, the labor movement has largely failed in its efforts to organize on its own behalf. Measures that directly support workers’ right to organize have failed to garner comparable levels of public support. This will have to change if the long decline in unionization rates is to be reversed.

The Path Forward The route outlined here toward building a modern welfare state is undoubtedly optimistic, but it is also intended to be realistic. None of the big goals—universal pension coverage, universal health coverage, guaranteed paid vacation, or increased unionization rates—will be achieved any time soon, but it is possible to draw a roadmap where real progress can be achieved in the immediate future, even while the ultimate goals are still visible in the distance.

Rebuilding the Welfare State

115

An important distinction between U.S. politics and the political process in many European countries is that it rarely flows from any explicit program. Political figures usually don’t want their range of options to be constrained by political platforms. As a general rule, the political agendas that get formally laid out in public, whether coming from political parties, labor unions, or other interest groups, don’t have any real impact. Nonetheless, given the need to respond to its political base, if the Democratic Party wins the presidency and maintains its hold on Congress in 2008, it is likely that important progress will be made in several areas, most importantly on the road toward universal health care coverage. It is also likely that labor laws will be changed in ways that make them more friendly to unions. In addition, if progressive Democrats can maintain and extend their hold on many state legislatures and governorships, then there will be opportunities to make legislative advances at the state level as well. Of course, politics in the United States is never simple. Historically the Right has used a wide variety of tactics to divert working people from pursuing their true interests. For much of the postwar period the threat of Communism, and the claim that progressives were insufficiently strong on defense, were able to distract voters from supporting candidates who supported progressive economic positions. More recently, the threat of terrorism has played this role. In this area, progressives in other countries can assist their allies in the United States by trying to prevent their governments from blindly supporting adventurous interventions by the United States. In the same vein, conservative politicians have also routinely exploited racial prejudices to distract workers from supporting progressive economic policies. These efforts have taken the form of crackdowns on drugs, crime, welfare, and various other policies that had appeal largely for their racial overtones. Conservative politicians will undoubtedly continue to exploit racial prejudices in their efforts to obstruct progressive economic policies. If progressive politicians can steer clear of the landmines of scare tactics used by conservatives, there is a clear majority in favor of extending the welfare state in many important areas. Polls regularly

116

Dean Baker

show that people support government-provided health insurance, more paid leave from their jobs, and even increased protection for workers’ right to organize. Progress will depend on keeping the public focused on the real issues that affect their lives, rather than the scare stories on display from the Right.

Chapter 8

Families Valued Karen Kornbluh

In his 1986 book Family and Nation, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote, ‘‘No government, however firm might be its wish, can avoid having policies that profoundly influence family relationships. This is not to be avoided. The only option is whether these will be purposeful, intended polices or whether they will be residual, derivative, in a sense, concealed.’’1 As Moynihan knew, government policies have real effects on the lives of families, often producing unintended consequences. Sometimes this is the result, as Moynihan implied, of policymakers not fully understanding the scope of their actions. But, just as often, it can be the result of changing patterns within the American family itself. Indeed, over the past generation the American family has changed dramatically, but the policies designed to mitigate the risks it faces have remained frozen in time, many of them operating on rules developed in the midst of the Great Depression. As a result, the most vulnerable families in the new economy all too often wind up with limited protection in times of need. Recent efforts to fashion policies to respond to the strains on modern families have focused, for the most part, on providing jobprotected leave to help balance work and family responsibilities. After years of partisan wrangling, President Bill Clinton signed the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) in 1993; since then, progressives have focused on expanding the FMLA to more workers, allowing workers to take time off to attend school activities and doctor’s appointments, and providing workers with sick leave for their own or a relative’s illness.

118

Karen Kornbluh

The FMLA, though overlooked by many opinion-makers, was a breakthrough in updating the American social contract for today’s families. It amended the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to allow workers to take time off to care for a new child or a sick relative without losing their jobs. Clinton realized its impact; it was the first law he signed, and he mentioned it in every State of the Union address. But the ability to take time away from one’s job, while a critical component of modern family policy, is not comprehensive. To give families the security they need to raise healthy, productive members of society, we need also to address the financial risks parents incur just for being good parents—when they take time out of the workplace, require a flexible schedule, or get hit with high health care or child care expenses. For this, progressives should turn to one of the most important innovations of the last century: social insurance. In the 1930s, progressives established a suite of social insurance schemes to help families share the risks of the industrial economy: the risks associated with the inability of the breadwinner to earn the family income because of old age, death, a temporary layoff, or disability. These social insurance programs continue to provide families essential support. But today we need to create new elements in the social insurance system—as well as reform the protections now in place—to confront the new risks families face. Our current social insurance system—a patchwork of programs put in place over the course of decades—was designed to help nuclear families in which a breadwinner worked one job his entire career while the homemaker cared for the children and any ill relatives. Today’s American family and today’s workforce are markedly different. Both two-earner and single-parent families operate in a volatile, winner-takes-all economy; families often are expected to raise a younger generation and care for an older one, while saving to prepare for the current one’s future; and workers at all skill levels face a career of increased mobility and volatility. Contrary to what conservatives have argued, Americans do not need to replace social insurance with some version of the private accounts of President George W. Bush’s Social Security plan. Rather, they need a way to continue sharing the all-too-real risks families bear as parents across the country attempt to raise kids in a new economy

Families Valued

119

that provides them no margin for error. This should be the central goal of our social insurance system in the twenty-first century.

The Changing American Family Families in the early twentieth century lived in a transformative period and confronted new challenges analogous to those we face today. In a quickly urbanizing and industrializing society, old patterns of life were breaking down. Many families had left agricultural lifestyles for wage labor in cities, making them dependent on a single breadwinner’s earnings. Extended family networks, capable of providing additional economic support for individuals in times of need, were replaced by the rise of the nuclear family. Better public health and health care had increased the lifespan of Americans by ten years from 1900 to 1930. President Franklin D. Roosevelt responded to these changes, as well as to the exigencies of the Great Depression, by creating a series of policies to soften the rough edges of the industrial economy for workers and their families. In addition to employment innovations like the creation of the minimum wage, the forty-hour workweek, and the ban on child labor, he also created a system of social insurance to guard against the ‘‘hazards and vicissitudes’’ of life in the new economy. Social insurance programs had precedents both at home, where there had been a national system of Civil War pensions, and in Europe, dating back to Bismarck’s Germany. While governor of New York, FDR had implemented the first comprehensive system of unemployment relief and an extensive program for industrial welfare. Roosevelt sought a similar program for the entire nation. The result was the Social Security Act of 1935, centered around old age and Unemployment Insurance (UI) programs to prevent catastrophic drops in families’ incomes resulting from old age, widowhood, or cyclical downturns. (Disability insurance was added in 1956.) From its beginning, the system combined two competing strands: earnings-based benefits and benefits designed purely to keep families afloat. Social Security’s old-age program keyed individual

120

Karen Kornbluh

benefits to lifetime earnings, but the benefit structure was progressive: lower-income workers received relatively more per dollar earned, while higher-income workers received relatively less. In 1939, before it began paying out benefits, Social Security was changed to provide a spousal benefit: married couples would receive 150 percent of the benefits of a single worker with the same earnings and a survivor’s benefit for dependent children and spouses. In addition, the Social Security Act contained Aid to Dependent Children, designed to provide aid to needy single-parent households. The family benefits became a central feature of the Social Security program. Even today, the National Women’s Law Center finds 50 percent of people receiving Social Security benefits actually collect these benefits as either a widow or widower, spouse or child of a worker, or a disabled worker rather than as an individual receiving Social Security benefits based on employment history.2 The system was, of course, built around the American family and social assumptions of that particular time. The Social Security family benefits went to spouses, whether or not they had children, because in the 1930s most mothers were in fact wives and only 15 percent of married women were in the paid workforce (and even then they were under pressure to leave to make way for male breadwinners). Wives were ineligible for the benefit unless they remained married for a fixed amount of time, in an attempt to prevent women from marrying just for benefits. Even if a former spouse was entitled to a benefit after divorce, it was less than what the worker received, because it was thought that a woman living alone could survive on less than a man (one participant in the debates at that time argued that a woman could do her own housekeeping, while a man would have to eat in restaurants). Single women were assumed to be widows and expected not to work; Aid to Dependent Children provided help to these women as long as they were not married and did not work. To ensure that funds benefited only those with a strong labor-force attachment (not women working for ‘‘pin money’’), Social Security benefits were keyed to lifetime earnings, and UI eligibility was tied to past work history and whether the worker was seeking full-time employment. Moreover, Social Security’s old-age program, Unemployment Insurance, and later Social Security Disability Insurance, was designed for

Families Valued

121

manufacturing workers who would spend forty hours a week for forty years working for a single employer; as a result, the programs covered only income interruptions associated with retirement, temporary layoffs, and later, disability. 3 The system worked well for the families for whom it was originally designed, keeping the wolf from the door even when an assembly line closed, an injury occurred, or the breadwinner grew too old to work in the mill. As a result of the old-age insurance program, the official poverty rate for people age sixty-five and over dropped to 10 percent by 2003, from 35 percent in 1959 (the first year the federal government kept records using a standardized measure of ‘‘poverty’’). It allowed people to start new companies or switch jobs knowing that if the business failed, their families would not be destitute. The system of social insurance has, in short, been one of the most successful government initiatives ever undertaken, demonstrating how Americans can act together to improve the lives of all citizens.

The Rise of Juggler Families That, however, was then. Today, as years of newspaper stories on mass layoffs, globalization, rising costs of living, and lower real wages make clear, Americans no longer rely on stable careers, nor do they assume that they will earn enough to raise a family on one salary. Americans compete with workers around the world for wages and benefits. In one out of four cases, they are employed in nonstandard positions—temporary, part-time, freelance, contingent, day labor, on-call, or self-employed. They change jobs on average every five years and are unemployed for longer periods than in the past. Employees today are less likely to be offered defined-benefit pensions or sufficient health insurance from their employers; if they are lucky, they get 401(k)s and meager health care coverage. The new system is winner-takes-all: Those who have rare and needed assets to sell on the global market can earn large returns, while those who compete against educated workers in India or China or unskilled labor in Malaysia or Mexico fare far less well. The family has changed as well. Today, 70 percent of all families

122

Karen Kornbluh

with children are headed by either two working parents or a single parent who works, the reverse of 1960, when 70 percent of all families had a breadwinner and a full-time homemaker.4 Fifty percent of marriages end in divorce, and one-third of children are living in singleparent families at any given time. The number of children being raised by same-sex couples is also on the rise. Parents in these new ‘‘juggler families’’ do not fit the old models and are under increasing economic strain. Despite the fact that parents in these new ‘‘juggler families’’ are working more and more hours, their earnings have stagnated, and so the additional income is often needed just to pay the bills. From 1979 to 2000, for example, mothers in median-income, married families increased their hours on the job by half, while mothers in lower-income families increased their hours by between 60 and 70 percent. These families are dependent on the mother’s earnings: Without them, family income would have virtually held steady in the median-income families, and it would actually have fallen in the lower-income families.5 Credit-card debt has increased for the average family by more than 50 percent over the last decade, while low-income families saw a 184 percent increase in their debt. As Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren has pointed out, as a result of the rising costs of health care, child care, education, and housing, economic insecurity and even bankruptcy rates have increased for these families, despite the fact that the mother is in the workforce.6 For these families, juggling to make ends meet and so dependent on the caregiver’s income, time off to care for a sick child or a new baby can result in devastating income interruptions and even job loss. In addition, these workers are often denied the flexibility they need to get home in time for dinner or for a sick day. Over half of all workers report having no control over scheduling alternative start and end times at work; half of all workers have no access to paid sick days; and parents with young children and working welfare recipients who need flexibility the most are the least likely to have these benefits.7 As a result, juggler parents often wind up paying a hefty penalty just to be good parents. They lose jobs as a result of a child’s illness; they take part-time, contingent, or other nonstandard jobs; and they sacrifice wages, benefits, and job security if they can’t do shift work. The job interruptions and part-time penalty affect all juggler

Families Valued

123

families, but they put the most pressure on mothers and their kids. Mothers still bear the overwhelming responsibility for childrearing, and as a result they are more likely to wind up in nonstandard jobs or to lose their jobs completely when they stay home with a sick child or refuse overtime to be able to pick up a child at day care. It is no wonder researchers find that, in comparing women in the workforce, those with children earn 10 to 15 percent less than those without.8 Women are also less likely than men to be offered health insurance directly through their employer. The problem compounds for single mothers—either divorced or never married—as they bear both the high economic risks of an inflexible job market and the high cost of supporting a family alone. Shelly Waters Boots of the New America Foundation has summarized some of the negative effects of juggler family life on children. In 2000, nearly one out of every eight couples with children was putting in one hundred hours a week or more on the job, compared with only one out of twelve in 1970. The consequences for juggler families are striking: Long work hours have been shown to produce negative maternal attitudes and more negative behaviors from children. When fathers work nights, separation or divorce is about six times higher than for fathers who work standard hours, while they are three times higher for mothers who work nights. Children’s cognitive well-being also may be affected by parents’ work hours: Studies have shown that children with parents who work nights or evenings have lower reading and math test scores.9 Rather than lessening these costs, outdated benefit and eligibility rules mean that parents who turn down a promotion or take leave to care for a sick child often wind up paying in lost Social Security, unemployment insurance, and disability insurance benefits as well. The result is a large penalty for taking time away from the 24/7 working world to raise children.

A Vision for Reform In the twenty-first century, parents are more important than ever as the producers of human capital, and families need help smoothing

124

Karen Kornbluh

shortfalls in their income at least as much as families did in the postwar period, irrespective of whether they are part-time workers, temporary workers, taking time out of the workplace to care for a family member, or retraining because an employer moved to India. They need income-replacement no less when they take time out or cut back to care for a sick child than the industrial family did when the breadwinner experienced a temporary layoff. And when they have to retrain to enter a new industry, they need help as well. Parents— whether mothers or fathers—and other caregivers who pay a parttime penalty in reduced earnings, job security, and benefits for working flexibly should enjoy some peace of mind knowing that Social Security will be there in their retirement, unemployment insurance will be there if they lose a job even for family reasons, and that the social insurance system values the work of parenting as much as it does a paid job. This is already the case in other industrial countries, which have structured their retirement systems to provide both a minimumbenefit guarantee (to keep the elderly out of poverty) and an earningsrelated benefit. They also grant credit toward the earnings-related benefit for time spent away from the labor force caring for children. As a result, poverty rates are higher in the United States and more unevenly distributed than in most other industrialized countries. In addition, all European countries have provided family allowances to help support families raising children. More recently, in addition to granting parents the right to work part-time or flexibly and public provisions for early childhood education, they have adapted their systems to help juggler families with such programs as paid parental leaves for mothers and fathers.10 But the United States has made few concessions to juggler families. To be sure, since 1993 the FMLA has provided job protection for employees of companies with fifty or more employees who take leave to care for a new child or an ill relative. President Clinton also expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit for low-income working parents and won new child care and afterschool program funding. In addition, Democrats worked with moderate Republicans to make the child tax credit refundable as part of the Bush tax cuts. But the United States offers no right to even refuse overtime—let alone work a flexi-

Families Valued

125

ble schedule—and only limited, means-tested child care assistance and a small, regressive child care tax credit. Seventy years ago, the Roosevelt administration designed its social insurance system to address the real needs of families at a critical time. But the national policies designed to meet the needs of breadwinner-homemaker families in the 1930s are woefully inadequate for contemporary households. America needs to take concerted action to update its policies for a new century and new families. This most definitely does not mean privatizing our existing social insurance system, as the Bush administration proposed. Instead, we must fix the holes in the existing programs for retirement, unemployment, and disability insurance through which too many of today’s families fall. And we must put in place insurance against new risks that will help today’s families thrive in the century ahead. But what would such reform look like? First, the Social Security spousal benefit cries out for change. Because the Social Security family benefit is provided to spouses of workers, rather than outright to parents, it leaves out single heads of household who work, pay taxes, and raise children. These parents— mostly mothers—already sacrifice earnings to raise children, so they wind up with less in their own earned benefits. Yet they do not have the option of claiming a spousal benefit instead. In fact, they might even get less in benefits than someone who never works, doesn’t pay payroll taxes, and raises no children—but has a working spouse. Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute, one of the nation’s leading Social Security experts, and his colleagues estimate that a single head of household who works for $20,000 a year for forty years and raises her children will get lifetime benefits of about $95,000 while paying taxes of $50,000, whereas a nonworking spouse who doesn’t raise children but happens to marry someone making $100,000 a year will receive about $250,000 in lifetime benefits and pay nothing in taxes. The system even penalizes married juggler families—in effect, rewarding Ward and June at the expense of Roseanne and Dan (when there are far more of the latter than the former). Because spousal benefits are keyed to the income of the primary worker, Social Security values childrearing by higher-income families more than childrearing by lower-income families and rewards single-earner families with far

126

Karen Kornbluh

more in benefits than dual-earner families that earn the same total income. Steuerle estimates that a couple with each spouse earning $15,000 annually will get lifetime benefits of about $177,000, whereas a couple with one spouse earning $30,000 but paying no more in taxes will get about $273,000—close to $100,000 more. Social Security also denies spousal benefits to those who divorce within ten years of tying the knot, and it forces couples who divorce after ten years to split benefits inequitably; the lower-earning spouse receives only the incremental spousal benefit, worth one-half as much as the own-worker benefit that the higher-earning spouse receives. Given lower savings and a longer life expectancy, it is apparent why almost one-fifth of all women age eighty-five and over still have an income below the poverty level.11 To update this part of Social Security, we should convert the spousal benefit gradually (phasing in for people in the workforce today, and not affecting those who have already retired) to a flat-rate parental benefit (thus unrelated to a spouse’s wages). In the case of divorce, the underlying Social Security benefit and the parental benefit should be shared jointly, which would also create a small disincentive for the primary earner to desert his spouse, as well as to reduce the mother’s double jeopardy. A second problem with today’s rules is that parents are penalized in retirement because Social Security benefits are calculated based on average earnings over the thirty-five highest-earning years of work. A worker who begins work at twenty-five and works forty years to age sixty-five incurs a penalty if he or she reduces earnings for more than five years. These rules apply equally to women and men, but since women with children take more time out of the workplace and pay a part-time penalty when they do work, they earn less over their lifetimes than women without children. This has the effect of reducing Social Security benefits for mothers. Women received average monthly retirement benefits of $826 in December 2004, while men averaged $1,077. Social Security retirement-benefit calculations should be rejiggered so as not to penalize parents who take time off from work. The years when parents cut back on work to care for children should not weigh down average earnings for the purpose of calculating benefits.

Families Valued

127

This could be done by allowing parents to subtract from the thirtyfive years up to ten years in which they have a child at home. Third, unemployment insurance must be reformed to accommodate today’s families and help them maintain their labor-force attachment. Most states restrict UI eligibility to those who meet requirements designed around a breadwinner’s job patterns. They provide benefits to workers who quit as a reasonable response to an action taken by their employer but, according to the National Employment Law Project, only fifteen states provide benefits to workers who quit for equally compelling family circumstances—such as the requirement to work night shifts when an employee cannot find child care. In addition, twenty-four states categorically deny UI benefits to part-time workers (although nearly one-fifth of American workers are part-time and their wages are subject to UI taxes). Many nonstandard workers are misclassified as independent contractors and thus ineligible for UI benefits altogether. The result of these and other outdated rules is that the proportion of workers in jobs that even qualify for unemployment insurance who received benefits during a period of unemployment has decreased dramatically, from 80 percent in 1947 to 38 percent in 1995. In response, unemployment insurance should be made available to workers who leave a job involuntarily because of family, those looking for part-time work, and those who have been in the workplace a shorter period of time or are contingent workers. Eligibility should be calculated based on hours worked rather than wage rates.12

A New Social Compact While our current social insurance programs call out for renovation, we also must build anew. Adapting existing programs would help families better navigate retirement, unemployment, and disability, but it is also time we took seriously the new economic challenges that loom in the lives of today’s families. Today, the United States and Australia are the only two industrialized countries that do not guarantee paid maternity leave. Just as before the passage of the Social Security Act, the states have begun experimenting on their own. Five

128

Karen Kornbluh

states require employers to have temporary disability programs, which pay benefits to pregnant women. A few others offer lowincome families subsidies for infant care. And, in 2004, California became the first state to expand its state disability insurance system to provide paid family and medical leave. What is needed, though, is a national commitment to mitigating the new risks to the economic well-being of families. Social Security took on the problem of financial vulnerability in old age and won. We have no equivalent commitment to addressing the financial vulnerability of Americans earlier in their lives, before they have had time to save, when they are hit with the exorbitant costs of raising a child at the very same time as they find their earnings and benefits slipping because of their childrearing responsibilities. We need a new, universal family insurance system in America. It would not eliminate the costs of having and rearing children—parents who cut back on work would still receive less in wages, and they would still have to pay for housing, clothes, and education—but it would prevent the more common catastrophic economic disruptions that too often send today’s families to bankruptcy court. Family insurance would address the very real possibility that income will decline when one parent—or the only parent—stays home with a new child, takes a part-time job to be home after school with a kindergartener, or is forced into a temp job to gain the flexibility to care for a parent with Alzheimer’s. Families would be able to draw down benefits to replace earnings lost as a result of taking family and medical leave up to a capped amount, just as they do in retirement. The benefits could replace partial earnings if a worker goes part-time instead of taking full-time leave—including if he decides to take part of his child leave as reduced leave. Family insurance also would encompass the common risk that a family loses health insurance, which is all too often the casualty of a flexible job. In order to allow parents who can’t work nights, go parttime, or even take time out of the paid workforce access to the same tax-subsidized group health insurance available to full-time workers with employer-provided insurance, family insurance would provide a progressive credit to help families buy into the federal employees’ group health plan. Far preferable, and one of the most important

Families Valued

129

steps for helping families, would be universal, affordable, comprehensive health care. Such a new system must provide affordable coverage to those whose responsibilities caring for family members keep them from working full-time. Finally, to address the vulnerability that results from the fact that the high costs of rearing children hit at the same time as the part-time penalty, family insurance would include an add-on account, such as the accounts some have proposed for supplementing Social Security. These new parent accounts would be a substitute for today’s littleknown flexible spending accounts, which allow employees to put aside $5,000, pre-tax, for health care expenses and another $5,000 for childcare expenses. Flexible spending accounts are available only to employees of participating firms and are regressive to boot, whereas all workers could establish new parent accounts for the health-, child care–, and education-related expenses of raising a child. The government would match a family’s pretax contributions to the account on a progressive basis (giving a higher match to low-income families and none to high-income families). These steps—replacing a portion of wages when families take time away from work with a child or an ill relative, providing access to subsidized health insurance for part-time workers, and creating an add-on account to help with the major expenses of raising a child— would provide families the security they need to carry on the critical job of raising our next generation. They could be financed through a combination of a more progressive payroll tax (starting at a higher wage rate and not capped by income) and general revenue to reflect the fact that everyone in society, not just wage-earners, benefits from the work parents do raising the next generation of citizens. Of course, reforming social insurance cannot be a substitute for continuing the effort to reform employment laws. All workers in the United States should be able to return to their jobs after caring for a new child or a sick relative, take a few days of sick leave, and have the ability to negotiate a flexible schedule. But, after all, FDR did not choose between giving the industrial family new labor protections and providing them the ability to share risks. He did both. In a new century, today’s families deserve no less.

Chapter 9

How Labor Can Win Nelson Lichtenstein

A labor victory depends on the definition of what it means to win. In 2008, the Democrats may well succeed in winning control of both Congress and the presidency. But the fact remains that a prounion program is passable in almost inverse relationship to that agenda’s capacity to strengthen the institutional and political power of trade unionism itself. This has been true for more than forty years, ever since the mid-1960s, when during the second of the two great surges of liberal legislation in the last century—the mid-1930s are the other one—labor saw civil rights, Medicare, immigration reform, and aid to education all pass with relative ease, while the repeal of Section 14b of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which allowed southern and western states to pass and maintain anti-union ‘‘right-to-work’’ laws, never really had a chance in a Congress dominated by ostensible liberals. Today’s Congress, even when controlled by the Democrats, is far less liberal than that of forty-odd years ago, but the political dynamic remains much the same. Those elements of labor’s agenda that are the least attached to the institutional needs of trade unionism per se have the best chance of passage. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and it provides some guidance for labor strategists. An increase in the minimum wage law was enacted in 2007 and more tax cuts for the wealthy were forestalled. Likewise the privatization of Social Security remains off the table as long as the Democrats remain in relatively secure control of at least one branch of the legislature. But the problems facing the trade-union movement are enormous. Much has been made of the difficulties experienced by all labor movements in the North Atlantic as manufacturing has come under

How Labor Can Win

131

pressure from the low-wage and increasingly efficient and sophisticated industries and entrepreneurs of East and South Asia. For most managers, many pundits, and even some progressives, ‘‘globalization’’ is an easy catch-word that sums up the reasons for the decline in the power and influence of traditional trade unionism, in Europe no less than in the United States. Indeed, global competition, especially in apparel, electronics, toys, home appliances, and automotive products, has shrunk employment and weakened trade unions in the industries that once built and marketed these commodities in North America. In the United States private sector union density now stands just below 8 percent, down from 21 percent in the late 1970s. However, the greatest peril faced by contemporary U.S. trade unionism does not come from abroad. More than 80 percent of all employment is still linked to the domestic economy: conditions in the vast service sector are rarely threatened by job loss or downward wage pressure stemming from overseas competition. Despite recent alarms raised by the growth of Indian computer engineering and call-center operations, almost all service-sector employment remains relatively insulated from ‘‘globalization.’’ School teachers, retail clerks, truck drivers, hotel and restaurant workers, carpenters, nurses, and municipal employees constitute an American workforce—often heavily immigrant to be sure—whose livelihoods and union status, potential or actual, are determined almost exclusively by domestic politics and policy. The erosion of wages, social benefits, and trade unionism among the majority of these millions of workers is almost entirely a product of the rightward turn in U.S. social policy, labor law, and managerial ideology during the quarter century since President Ronald Reagan inaugurated a conservative, anti-union ‘‘revolution’’ in the early 1980s. Today, labor progressives seek to regain a bit of lost social and organizational ground by advancing a key piece of legislation: the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which is designed to make organizing new workers into trade unions much easier. The EFCA would greatly reduce employer interference during organizing campaigns by making ‘‘card checks’’—a worker signing a small card as a binding indication of her interest in joining the union—as legally and administratively legitimate as the cumbersome effort trade unions now must

132

Nelson Lichtenstein

endure in order to win a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) certification election. EFCA also provides for first contract mediation and arbitration and puts in place far stiffer penalties for the unfair labor practices that have become part of the routine price of doing business for so many managers determined to maintain or return to a ‘‘union-free’’ workplace.

‘‘No Reason to Subject the Workers to an Election’’ To see what labor is up against one merely has to open the newspaper—the Washington Post or Los Angeles Times will do—and read one of the advertisements put together by the shady lobbyist Rick Berman, now working for the mysteriously funded Center for Union Facts. The ad has three pictures: Kim Jong Il, identified as the North Korean ‘‘leader’’; Fidel Castro, also identified as a ‘‘leader’’; and Bruce Raynor of UNITE-HERE (the recently merged union of garment, hotel, and restaurant workers), identified as ‘‘American Union Leader.’’ Above their pictures is the quotation, ‘‘There’s no reason to subject the workers to an election,’’ and below the pictures of these three men, the query, ‘‘Who said it?’’ It was Raynor, of course, now made to seem clearly in league with the Communist dictators. Says the Center for Union Facts: ‘‘American workers reject unions in almost half of all secret ballot elections. Find out how union leaders are forcing people to pay dues by trashing democracy.’’1 Likewise the Human Resource Policy Association, an anti-union business group, sums up employer opposition to the labor-liberal push for card checks and employer neutrality: ‘‘The secret ballot election process . . . guarantees confidentiality and protection against coercion, threats, peer pressure, and improper solicitations and inducements by either the employer or the union.’’2 Bruce Raynor tells his side of the story in a recent issue of American Prospect, where he offered readers a tragic tale of thwarted hopes and smashed solidarity at Goya Foods in Miami, one of the largest Hispanic-owned companies in the United States. In 1998 workers at Goya voted by overwhelming margins for representation by UNITE, not once but in two separate NLRB election

How Labor Can Win

133

contests. The board certified the union, but company management stalled negotiations, fired key worker activists, and bribed others. UNITE filed scores of complaints with the NLRB after which the board’s chief lawyer charged Goya with twenty-three separate textbook violations of U.S. labor laws, including the threats of job loss, plant closings, hostile interrogation, discrimination in work assignments, and the firing of at least four union supporters. As is routine, the union and the company appealed to the federal courts, which after a long, frustrating, five-year delay, ruled decisively for UNITE in August 2006. Goya was found to have engaged in unlawful threats and interrogations, but the court leveled no monetary fine and imposed no real penalty against the company or its managers, so Goya continues to flaunt the NLRB and courts, not to mention the will of its several hundred employees. Concludes Raynor, ‘‘after seven years, winning does not look all that different from losing’’ for these Goya workers. And the union president continues, ‘‘on election day in 1998 Goya workers celebrated their win only to suffer years of frustration and denial of their legal rights. That is why, indeed, ‘there’s no reason to subject workers to NLRB elections.’ ’’3 Unions today consider it a big victory when they extract from employers a promise to be ‘‘neutral’’ in a representation campaign. But no one seems to remember that employer neutrality was once what the law itself required. Once free choice came to be synonymous with electoral choice, it followed that employers would be seen as parties to the process, that their ‘‘free speech’’ rights would then prevail, and that we would end up more or less as we have, with employer domination of the representation election. Today proponents of the representation election analogize it to an election within the larger body politic, as in the advertisement attacking union leader Bruce Raynor. But the analogy is false. In political life the outcome of an election is accepted by all parties within an hour or two after a decisive majority of all the votes are in hand. I hasten to add here that when this is not the case, as in Florida in 2000 presidential election, the subsequent crisis is not the kind of normal politics that the U.S. political class, even that of the victors, seeks to repeat. But in NLRB elections, balloting is often de-

134

Nelson Lichtenstein

layed and challenged, and the precise scope and inclusiveness of those eligible to vote is always up for contestation. Next, the expansive character of the employer free speech doctrine makes certain that the playing field is hardly equal between union challengers and managerial incumbents. In light of these conditions, individual employees attending sophisticated captive audience speeches, or participating in one-on-one encounters with their immediate supervisors, may understandably feel intimidated, if not coerced, by a series of oral, written, or electronic communications linking ‘‘union presence’’ to reductions in the workforce, plant closings, and unpredictable conflict and tension within the workplace. Unlawful behavior is rife during a NLRB election campaign— here the analogy would be something close to the elections held during the Reconstruction era in the American South, when white supremacy was imposed by force and fraud, or in contemporary Latin American countries on the brink of civil war, but the remedies for this unlawfulness are minuscule. The NLRB sometimes forces outlaw employers to pay back wages to those they have illegally fired, but the deterrent effect is minimal because the stakes are so high that violation of the law is just an expense necessary to the campaign. It is hardly surprising that 40 percent of all nonunion, nonmanagerial employees believe that their own employer would fire or otherwise mistreat them if they campaigned for a union. And of course, unlike in a political election, a union certification election is not a precursor to assuming the powers of governance; it is simply a precursor to initiating a collective-bargaining process that is itself full of delay, contestation, and intransigence.4 Finally, those hostile to card check and other forms of ‘‘selforganization’’ are really hostile to the entire idea of the voluntary association, which Alex de Tocqueville, among others, saw as the glory and essence of American democratic life. The trouble with authorization cards, says a spokesman for the Labor Policy Association, is that they are ‘‘signed in the presence of an interested party—a prounion co-worker or an outside union organizer—with no governmental supervision.’’ The issue is not that unions coerce workers; that is already prohibited by Taft-Hartley. The issue is that workers talk among themselves and with organizers without ‘‘governmental super-

How Labor Can Win

135

vision.’’5 That is a Stalinist conception of public life, and it is how far we’ve come from Senator Wagner’s celebration of self-organization.

What Should a Democratic-Controlled Congress Do? Congressman Barney Frank has one solution. When the Democrats gained control of Congress in 2006, Frank, a progressive from Massachusetts, became chair of the powerful House Financial Services Committee. He proposed a grand bargain with corporate America. The Democrats would agree to reduce regulation and support freetrade deals in exchange for business agreeing to greater wage increases and job benefits for workers. ‘‘What I want to do is break that deadlock,’’ he told reporters right after the 2006 election. ‘‘A lot of policies that the business community wants us to adopt for growth are now blocked. On the other hand, the business community . . . has created a very anti-union attitude in the Congress. What we want to do is to look at public policies that’ll get some bigger share of the increased wealth into wages and in return you’ll see Democrats as internationalists.‘‘6 But this deal will fail because business won’t buy it. Congressman Frank may have the financial services industry on his side—little union threat here—but the Chamber of Commerce and all the laborintensive businesses are adamantly against such a bargain. Historically, corporatism in the United States has rarely worked because the business community is too fragmented, and on trade issues, so too are liberals and labor. Indeed, corporatist schemes are almost always proffered to solve not just a problem of labor or management, but one of national concern as well. The classic moment for U.S. corporatism came during the first two years of the Roosevelt administration during the Great Depression, when anti-trust laws were suspended and labor got the right to organize in the famous Section 7a of the National Recovery Act. Then in World War II labor traded its right to strike for the union shop, a membership-enhancement device that generated a 50 percent increase in union numbers during that conflict.7 But, in more recent years, business has never thought the crisis,

136

Nelson Lichtenstein

for themselves or the nation, sufficient to precipitate much interest in a corporatist bargain. Who remembers the Dunlop Commission (named and headed by a former Secretary of Labor) during the early years of the administration of President Bill Clinton? It sought to ratchet up U.S. productivity (then thought to be lagging Japan) by allowing companies to expand their management-dominated employee-involvement schemes—‘‘quality circles’’ and ‘‘team production’’ initiatives—thereby circumventing labor law prohibitions against company-controlled employee organizations. In return the AFL-CIO would have gotten an easier road to organization and the elimination of some of management’s more egregious practices. But there were no takers, not even in high-tech Silicon Valley, so the Dunlop Commission was already history when the Republicans took over Congress in 1994.

We Need a New La Follette Committee Progressives in the United States need an ideological offensive against the anti-union Right, one that puts the idea of a labor movement and workers’ rights at the center of American liberalism and democracy. We need a Congressional investigation that exposes and interrogates the key personnel and the key practices of the union-avoidance law firms, consulting operations, private security companies, and personnel departments to demonstrate the cynicism and illegality that are rife in this segment of corporate America. If the Democrats retain control of Congress after the 2008 elections, they need to reestablish, in spirit, energy, and human resources, the committee once made so famous by Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette, Jr. That was a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor which, from 1936 to 1940, sought to ‘‘drain the industrial swamp’’ by investigating ‘‘violations of the rights of free speech and assembly and undue interference with the right of labor to organize and bargain collectively.’’8 We should urge Congressman George Miller of California, the labor-liberal who chairs the House Committee on Education and Workforce, to open such a set of hearings. They should be bold, intrusive, and purposeful, and backstop-

How Labor Can Win

137

ped by an investigative staff every bit as aggressive and committed as that which poured their energy and ideals into the committee once chaired by Senator La Follette. And the circumstances, then and now, are not so different. We forget that from the moment President Roosevelt signed the Wagner Act in June 1935, that law faced fierce and sustained resistance from the Liberty League, an entity funded and dominated by DuPont, General Motors, and Bethlehem Steel. When Liberty League lawyers pronounced the new labor law ‘‘a serious threat to our freedom . . . whether we stand as employers or as employees,’’ the NLRB chair of the time declared that ‘‘this kind of incitation to disobedience’’ made administration of the Wagner Act ‘‘impossible.’’9 For nearly two years, the labor movement faced judicial resistance, corporate subterfuge, and even violence, and all this before the great strike victories at Akron in 1936 and Flint in 1937. The Supreme Court was as hostile to New Deal legislation, to mass unionism, and to federalization of labor law in those days as is the Republicanmajority NLRB today. Thus did labor partisans, academics, and journalists prod and prompt sympathetic legislators to expose the de facto negation of the Wagner Act during these early months of its existence. Heber Blankenhorn, a journalist, civil libertarian, and prominent spokesman for the rights of labor, concluded that ‘‘what civil rights were won depended perhaps more on incessant talking about them in the papers than on arguing in court.’’10 Thus did Robert La Follette, Jr., of the storied activist Wisconsin political tribe, enter the lists. His Senate Resolution 266, offered in fall 1935, proposed ‘‘to make an investigation of violations of the rights of free speech and assembly and undue interference with the right of labor to organize and bargain collectively.’’ The key thing here is a linkage between the rights of labor and the abridgment of free speech and assembly. It was not called an investigation of industrial relations, but was known as the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee. Labor organizers and advocates supplied La Follette with hundreds of stories and narratives of the illegal and autocratic resistance mounted by the nation’s big corporations to the new labor law and the men and women who sought to use it. There were more than two hundred espionage and strike-breaking agencies whose activities had

138

Nelson Lichtenstein

come to the attention of union partisans over the previous twenty years. Blankenhorn told Senator La Follette, ‘‘Moral indignation is no good. Mere indignation has expressed itself for many years. . . . Investigation is urgently needed.’’ Thus did a staff member write a sympathetic congressman, ‘‘I really believe that today we are the most powerful agency in this country against Fascism.’’11 Over the last several decades, labor and its liberal allies may have grown too cautious about what can be expected from congressional investigations. Since the anti-Communist era of Joe McCarthy, such probes have more often than not been used to tar and denigrate trade unionism and its proponents, for being Communist, mafiaconnected, or merely self-interested. But today the times are right for something quite different. A new La Follette Committee would be able to draw on a generation of research and experience by labor activists and their allies in order to put before Congress and the American people the obstacles, money, and organization that have stymied union advocates during the past several decades. Just as the La Follette Committee of 1936 investigated the strikebreaking agencies, the arms suppliers, and the labor spy rackets at General Motors, Republic Steel, and in California agriculture, so too could the Committee on Education and Workforce use its subpoena power to examine allegations that major anti-union U.S. companies—Wal-Mart, Smithfield Meatpacking, Fed Ex, and Peabody Coal, first among them, and key law firms, including Jackson Lewis, Seyfarth Shaw, and the Burke Group—have abused and violated the law to deny workers their right to self-organization. Take Wal-Mart, for example. There have been numerous studies, using the best available public information, surveying Wal-Mart’s wages and health care polices, but what we need is a high-profile probe into how and why that company deprives its own workers not only of the right to organize, but also of workers’ compensation benefits, overtime pay, lunch breaks, and promotion opportunities. A new La Follette Committee will have a lot to work with. The Dukes v. WalMart gender discrimination suit has already unearthed a wealth of data on the company’s employment practices. A Human Rights Watch report on Wal-Mart’s abridgment of the labor law, especially that concerning the right to self-organization, has demonstrated in

How Labor Can Win

139

exhaustive fashion the degree to which the big retailer violates the letter and spirit of the labor law, both domestic and international.12 And there are hundreds of attorneys and thousands of litigants who are either suing the company or who are ready to speak out. Scores of former Wal-Mart executives have quite a bit to say about the corporation’s present and past transgressions. Some are illegal, others are not, but even where the company fails to break the law, it relentlessly squeezes workers, suppliers, communities, even state and federal agencies, so as to externalize many of its costs of doing business and thwart the New Deal/Great Society laws designed to shield its employees and sustain their dignity. The La Follette Committee investigations of the late 1930s did not generate any new legislation, but that heroic enterprise did something even better: it helped transform our understanding of the rights held by American workers, of their civil liberties and civil rights, whether they be exercised by individuals or in the collective. A twenty-first-century renewal of the spirit that infused that crusading committee could once again demonstrate to the public and to Congress what constitutes a genuine effort to defend the rights of American workers and what represents a cynical corporate subversion of that union-building liberty. And should such a transformation take place, then the Employee Free Choice Act will be seen by all as but a modest, necessary first step in the reconstitution of freedom and dignity in the American workplace.

Chapter 10

The Once and Future Christian Left Michael Kazin

One of the big, if unexpected, stories from the early stages of the 2008 campaign was the decline of the power of the Christian Right and the internal havoc it caused. Leaders of the once cohesive, vote-rich constituency were frustrated that neither abortion nor gay marriage seemed to stir GOP candidates or the voting public. Such prominent figures as James Dobson, Tony Perkins, and Gary Bauer even briefly threatened to bolt from their long-time political home and launch a third party. The abysmal approval ratings of George W. Bush, whose born-again moral convictions had earlier gained him solid backing from white evangelicals and traditionalist Catholics, fueled criticisms of his policies from within the conservative Christian fold. No longer were activists read out of the movement if they expressed alarm about global warming, or endorsed national health insurance, or even opposed the war in Iraq. But discord on the Christian Right did not persuade many journalists to investigate its progressive counterpart. Even when the media does note attempts by liberal Democrats to reach regular churchgoers, observes Amy Sullivan, an editor at Time magazine, they usually assume that ‘‘religious Americans could only support liberal politics by putting their faith aside, not because of their faith.’’ As a result, the Christian Left seems a small and powerless group, one that’s hardly worth the time and expense to cover.1 Yet it was once a force of great size and fervor. From the midnineteenth century through the 1930s, activist believers dominated an array of progressive movements. Abolitionists cursed slavery as a national sin. The Knights of Labor labeled big business the Antichrist

The Once and Future Christian Left

141

that only a new Pentecost could humble. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the largest women’s group in the nation during the late nineteenth century, declared that its work to close down saloons, improve prison conditions, shelter prostitutes, and support female labor unions was an expression of ‘‘God in politics.’’ In the agrarian heartland, Populist lecturers assured their audiences that ‘‘God has promised to hear the cry of the oppressed.’’ Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs admired Jesus Christ as ‘‘a pure communist’’ and pinned his portrait to the otherwise bare walls of the prison cell where he was serving time for opposing World War I. Mass protests routinely called on the language of the Bible because, like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, it was the common property of Americans and thus needed no explanation or apology.2 In the early decades of the twentieth century, most reformminded politicians spoke comfortably and frequently in biblical metaphors. William Jennings Bryan, three times the Democratic nominee for president, preached that the national state should counter the overweening power of banks and industrial corporations by legalizing strikes, subsidizing farmers, taxing the rich, banning private campaign spending, and outlawing the ‘‘liquor trust.’’ If his Republican opponents hadn’t enjoyed solid support from the industrial elite—which enabled them to outspend him by as much as 1,000 percent—Bryan may well have been elected president. Few of his loyalists abandoned Bryan after he failed to capture the White House. In their eyes, he was spiritual kin to the patriarchs and prophets who, according to Hebrews 11, ‘‘subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, [and] stopped the mouths of lions.’’ Bryan’s fame and influence depended on his passion for an ‘‘applied Christianity’’ that millions of Americans shared. Every Progressive president echoed that faith. During the 1912 campaign, Theodore Roosevelt famously thundered, ‘‘We stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord.’’ Woodrow Wilson consistently framed his messianic foreign policy in terms he had learned from his father, a Presbyterian minister. Franklin Roosevelt sprinkled references to Scripture and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress into many of his speeches. The Christian Left was not just a Protestant phenomenon. In

142

Michael Kazin

cities from San Francisco to New York, hundreds of Catholic priests instilled labor-organizing campaigns with a pious energy. Father Edward McGlynn, an ally of the Knights of Labor, described Christ as ‘‘an evicted peasant’’ who ‘‘came to preach a gospel of liberty to the slave, of justice to the poor, of paying the full hire to the workman.’’ The pioneer theorist of a living wage was Monsignor John A. Ryan of Catholic University. And, at every convention of the Congress of Industrial Organizations during its glory days, a priest or bishop delivered the opening invocation. ‘‘A victory for labor in its struggles for decent conditions,’’ declared Father Charles Rice from Pittsburgh at the 1938 CIO convention, ‘‘is a victory for Americanism and Christianity.’’3 As late as 1940, wage earners and small farmers of both races routinely read the Bible as a class-conscious text. That year, Woody Guthrie, who was close to the Communist Party, sang that ‘‘Jesus Christ was a hard-working man and brave who said to the rich, ‘Give your goods to the poor.’ But they laid Jesus Christ in His grave.’’4 The sharp division between the religious Left and Right emerged only after World War II. During the 1950s and 1960s, activists for black freedom and migrant farm labor turned the social gospel into a credo of racial justice. Martin Luther King, Jr., explained, ‘‘It’s all right to talk about heaven. I talk about it because I believe firmly in immortality. But you’ve got to talk about the earth. It’s even all right to talk about the new Jerusalem. But one day we must begin to talk about the new Chicago, the new Atlanta, the new New York, the new America.’’5 Liberal Christians of all ethnic backgrounds marched along with King, Cesar Chavez, and the secular foot soldiers of their causes. With the support of sympathetic lawmakers, they dismantled the racist order for which Bryan had apologized. At the same time, the force that would become the Christian Right began to define itself in opposition to modernist liberals, whether inside or outside the churches. Few white evangelicals supported either the black or Chicano crusades for justice. During the heat of the civil rights struggle, some theological conservatives, such as Jerry Falwell, defended segregation and backed such race-baiting politicians as George Wallace and Jesse Helms. But most turned inward, building new churches and asserting their political muscle

The Once and Future Christian Left

143

mainly on issues like prayer in the schools that directly affected the status of their religion. And their harvest was impressive. Starting in the mid-1960s, every evangelical body enjoyed a spurt in membership. Soon, the Southern Baptist Convention had become the largest Protestant denomination in America. And when white evangelicals joined the GOP coalition in the late 1970s behind Falwell and his ilk, the old social gospel was nowhere in sight. Why did Bryan’s successors reject his meld of liberal policies and biblical orthodoxy? In addition to the racial divide, the Scopes trial marked a transition of sorts. Some Americans who took Bryan’s side during that confrontation in Dayton, Tennessee, did not share his progressive reasoning that viewed Darwinism as a philosophy which legitimated eugenics and war. Like today’s creationists, they opposed Darwinism simply because it threatened the foundation of their faith. The fact that the ACLU hired Clarence Darrow, an avowed agnostic, to defend the teaching of modern biology made them suspicious about the motives of every secular liberal. It didn’t help that H. L. Mencken became the leading voice of modern skepticism. After covering the trial, the acidic writer described Bryan as the ringleader of a mob of yahoos, ‘‘a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology . . . a peasant come home to the barnyard.’’6 Mencken was no liberal: He liked to make nasty remarks about Jews, was blind to the menace of Hitler, and despised FDR. But young progressives in the Jazz Age echoed his eloquent cynicism toward the old-time religion—and a culture war was on. For the cosmopolitan Left, a belief in reason and science largely replaced the romantic, bottom-up faith of Bryan and his admirers. The cultural conflict raged on different fronts during the Cold War. Skirmishes over ‘‘Godless communism,’’ prayer in public schools, and legalized abortion pit liberal modernists against evangelical Protestants. Gradually, the two groups moved into opposing political parties. Whatever their personal beliefs, every Democratic nominee from Adlai Stevenson in 1952 to George McGovern in 1972 tried to skirt the subject of religion and assumed the fires of biblical politics had all but gone out. In 1976, a Southern Baptist from Georgia briefly reignited the idea that white evangelicals could also be progressives. But soon Jimmy Carter’s maladroit style—and the new Chris-

144

Michael Kazin

tian Right’s attack on his apostasy—doused it once again. Its favorite enemies were feminists who challenged truths, both textual and emotional, that many evangelical Protestants and traditional Catholics had always taken for granted. Conservative Republicans learned to spin such threads of resentment into electoral gold. But one should not exaggerate the salience of these battles over gender and race in the politics of the twenty-first century. Most white evangelical preachers have come to terms with the memory of the black freedom struggle; they frequently quote King and denounce gay marriage from the same platforms as some inner-city black ministers. The old jokes about ‘‘women’s lib’’ ring hollow in Christian families where both parents work and fathers take an increasingly active role in raising their children. And without the creative labors of women, most conservative churches would go out of business. Resistance remains strong to granting gays and lesbians the same rights to wed and raise families that heterosexuals enjoy. But it may be the last popular stand of those who once touted themselves ‘‘the moral majority.’’ All the attention given to the red-blue chasm over values and public religiosity also neglects the fact that few devout Americans attend church for political reasons. While they cherish tradition, a good many evangelical Protestants were adults when they joined their current place of worship. A personal crisis was often the reason: alcoholism, drug addiction, the death of a family member, a divorce. Others sought a counterweight for their children to the endless seduction of video games, crass TV, R-rated movies, and malls. Few started praying and studying the Bible because they wanted to blockade a Planned Parenthood clinic. Most evangelicals hope to find or build what civil rights activists in the early 1960s called a ‘‘beloved community,’’ one that fills needs both worldly and spiritual. For millions of Americans, church is the only institution that attempts to help them with a variety of personal problems and places no bureaucratic obstacles in the way. An increasing number of churches offer child care, recreation, and job and marriage counseling, in addition to sermons and Bible study. Respected peers have the greatest influence on how most people vote. So when a trusted minister or fellow congregant urges support for candidates who stand up for families and ‘‘traditional values,’’ otherwise apoliti-

The Once and Future Christian Left

145

cal church members are inclined to go along. Democrats have long gained a similar boost from both African-American churches and liberal white ones. Moreover, the results of the 2004 presidential election actually show that the allegiances of many reverent Americans are up for grabs. Liberals are not besieged rationalists on a shrinking island of good sense in a red sea filled with fundamentalist sharks. An extensive poll conducted for the Pew Forum soon after the votes were counted in 2004 found that the most significant divide was between churchgoers rather than one that pits them against the nonobservant and the unaffiliated. Bush and Kerry each drew half the votes of mainline Protestants, which includes members of such denominations as the Episcopalians and United Methodists (to which the president himself belongs). Bush carried three-quarters of all evangelicals, but Kerry won a narrow majority among modernist evangelicals who, whatever their theological preferences, take progressive stands on most political issues. A slim majority of Catholics voted Republican, even though Kerry is a member of their church. But the Democrat won easily among both modernist Catholics and Latinos who adhere to their traditional faith. 7 These numbers should embolden those progressives who are trying to bridge the divide among believers. Most liberal Christians are as troubled as devout conservatives about the greed and materialism that pervade American culture, although the latter are less likely to finger the profit motive as a main source of the problem. Both groups reject the extreme libertarianism of such figures as Grover Norquist, who never met a social program he didn’t loathe. The same postelection Pew poll found that majorities of both conservative and liberal Christians favored such measures as humanitarian foreign aid, guaranteed health care for all, and aid to poor Americans—even if that means a boost in the income tax. Recently, such groups as the National Association of Evangelicals—most of whose 30 million members vote Republican—have been promoting a ‘‘global vision’’ that would include canceling the debt of impoverished nations and acting aggressively to counter the warming of the planet. An ethic of social responsibility thus increasingly pervades the gospel of both liberal and conservative Christians. Over time, it may

146

Michael Kazin

prove more powerful than their sharp differences over abortion and gay marriage. If many evangelicals favor progressive programs, at least in principle, why have most continued to vote for GOP candidates who oppose them? One should not assume, as does Thomas Frank in his Menckensque tour de force What’s the Matter with Kansas? that the faith of orthodox Christians of modest means blinds them from understanding their true interests. In truth, national Democrats have done little in recent decades to back up their vow to be the party of ‘‘people who work hard and play by the rules,’’ in Bill Clinton’s still resonant phrase. Over the past forty years, what grand program did Democrats enact that resulted in measurable, durable changes in the economic fortunes of working Americans? The last landmark piece of legislation that fit that description was Medicare, passed by Congress and signed by President Lyndon Johnson in the summer of 1965. Health care insurance for all could have been such an achievement, but the Clintons failed to overcome staunch opposition from Republicans and most employers, as well as the serious flaws in their own design. The consequence is that the lower and middle classes of white Americans who once voted for Bryan, Wilson, FDR, JFK, and LBJ no longer expect presidents to do much that will improve their material lives. But the one thing they know politicians can do is talk, and that rhetoric signals which aspects of American culture are harmful and which need to be strengthened. So it’s not surprising that many religious, wage-earning Americans vote with their more prosperous brothers and sisters. They trust a conservative president to use his bully pulpit to promote abstinence, bash abortion, promote the power of prayer, and denounce wicked television programs. Voting for conservative candidates has made them feel part of a growing, mainstream, virtuous community. To challenge that bond, progressive Christians should engage in a serious moral dialogue with their conservative counterparts, to practice what Michael Walzer, the political theorist, calls ‘‘connected criticism.’’8 One attempt to do this is Hillary Clinton’s view that abortion is often ‘‘a sad, even tragic choice’’ but should remain a legal one.

The Once and Future Christian Left

147

Another is the doctrine of a ‘‘seamless garment of life,’’ first voiced by the late Joseph Cardinal Bernadin and echoed by Jim Wallis, the evangelical author and organizer. To argue that Christian voters should consider the views of candidates on war, capital punishment, and a living wage as well as on abortion and euthanasia might force activists on both the Left and Right to think hard about and debate the merits of the distinctions they make. In the end, the success of a political opening to white evangelicals and traditional Catholics depends upon the sustained resurgence of a grassroots Left. Too many liberals still harbor a nagging contempt for the God-fearing, the unhip, and the poorly educated—a weakness that GOP strategists from Lee Atwater to Karl Rove have skillfully exploited. As long as millions of ordinary churchgoers see no material advantage to voting for a Democrat and few places where secularists and evangelical believers are working together for the same political causes, they are likely to rely on institutions they already trust and leaders, both local and national, they already know. For most of American history, such people saw no contradiction between practicing their faith and healing the wounds of an unequal society. William Jennings Bryan declared that his overriding purpose was to place ‘‘the heart of the masses against the pocketbooks of a few,’’ and even his enemies didn’t doubt his sincerity. Unless liberals today can articulate their politics in such clear and passionate terms, their victories are likely to be fleeting and rare. More than 80 percent of Americans hold strong religious beliefs, and that is unlikely to change anytime soon. Even Christians who don’t regularly attend church regard the Scriptures and the example of Christ as moral touchstones that dovetail with the ideals of Americanism itself. Secular liberals ought to make their peace with this reality, while making sure that no religious faction—such as creationists—can install its doctrine into law. Poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote: If there is no God, Not everything is permitted to man. He is still his brother’s keeper And he is not permitted to sadden his brother, By saying that there is no God.9

148

Michael Kazin

A new liberalism could begin from the premise that one’s fellow Americans of the lower and middle classes are brothers and sisters whose well-being ought to be the main goal of political activism and public policy. Despite their differences, both Bryan and King preached that same message. A revival is possible today.

Notes

Introduction 1. Rick Perlstein, ‘‘Will the Progressive Majority Emerge?’’ Nation, July 9, 2007, read at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070709/perlstein.

Chapter 1. Democrats and the World 2001.

1. Susan Sontag, ‘‘The Talk of the Town,’’ New Yorker, September 24,

2. Andrew Sullivan, ‘‘America at War: America Wakes up to a World of Fear,’’ Sunday Times, September 16, 2001. 3. Defense Science Board, ‘‘The Defense Science Board 1997 Summer Study Task Force on DoD Responses to Transnational Threats,’’ October 1997. 4. Charles Krauthammer, ‘‘The Voices of Moral Obtuseness,’’ Washington Post, September 21, 2001. 5. Charles Krauthammer, ‘‘The War: A Road Map,’’ Washington Post, November 28, 2001. 6. Frederick Kagan, ‘‘Fear Not the Taliban,’’ Weekly Standard, November 19, 2001. 7. Internal NBC report, cited by Rick Ellis (www.allyourtv.com), February 25, 2003. 8. A transcript of Dean’s speech can be read at www.gwu.edu/⬃action/ 2004/dean/dean021703sp.html. 9. Max Boot, ‘‘How Bush Can Ensure No More Iraqs,’’ Los Angeles Times, January 31, 2007.

Chapter 2. Cultivating Our Own Garden 1. Quoted in Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U. S. Foreign Policy (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), p. 7.

150

Notes to Pages 27–52

2. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York, 1921), Chapter 11. 3. David M. Potter, People of Plenty (Chicago, 1954), p. 126. 4. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York, 1952), pp. 59–60. 5. Edmund Burke, letter to a member of the National Assembly, January 19, 1791. 6. Martha Bayles, Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music (New York, 1994) p.200. 7. Gary Cross, An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America (New York, 2000), p. 86. 8. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia (1782), quoted in The Jefferson Cyclopedia (New York, 1900), p. 252. 9. Ray Delgado and Marc Sandalow, ‘‘Marking Moment of Terror,’’ San Francisco Chronicle (September 18, 2001). 10. Ralph Peters, ‘‘Constant Conflict,’’ Parameters (Summer 1997). 11. Randolph Bourne, The War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays, 1915–1919 (New York, 1964), p. 45. 12. Pope John Paul II, Centisimus Annus (1991). 13. William Pfaff, The Bullet’s Song (New York, 2004), p. 319.

Chapter 3. America’s Encounter with Immigrants 1. For a superb account of the politics of immigration reform, see Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge, Mass., 2006). I disagree with one of his points, however: namely, that American immigration policy was always ‘‘by design.’’ For long stretches of American history, the reality of immigration policy was at odds with the designs that reformers, both liberal and conservative, wished to impress upon America. For more on Zolberg, see Gerstle, ‘‘Immigration Nation: A Guide for the Perplexed,’’ Dissent (Winter 2007), 113–118. 2. Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J., 2001), epilogue. 3. Jeff Faux, ‘‘What to Really Do About Immigration,’’ American Prospect, January 17, 2008, www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article⳱what_to_real ly_do_about_immigration. 4. For one argument for a temporary worker program, framed in progressive terms, see Alejandro Portes, ‘‘The Fence to Nowhere,’’ American Prospect, September 24, 2007, www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article⳱the_ fence_to_nowhere.

Notes to Pages 54–61

151

Chapter 4. The Media Obstacle 1. Some of this essay draws on my book, The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats, and the Recovery of American Ideals (Hoboken, N.J., 2007). 2. James Moore and Wayne Slater, Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential (Hoboken, N.J., 2003), 205. 3. The following discussion draws on my ‘‘We Disport. We Deride,’’ American Prospect, February 2003, viewed August 19, 2003, at www.prospect.org/web/printfriendly-view.ww?id⳱6696. See also Eric Boehlert, Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush (New York, 2006); Michael Massing, Now They Tell Us: The American Press and Iraq (New York, 2004); and Eric Alterman, What Liberal Media? (New York, 2003). 4. Blake, ‘‘Stations of the Cross,’’ Columbia Journalism Review, May– June 2005, viewed August 23, 2007, at http://cjrarchives.org/issues/2005/3/ blake-evangelist.asp/. 5. According to former FCC chairman Reed Hundt (personal communication, November 2002), Murdoch’s Australian-owned News Corporation should not have been permitted to buy an American television network in the first place, even though Murdoch himself had become an American citizen in order to circumvent another legal restriction. An FCC investigation conducted at the behest of NBC in the 1990s confirmed as much. But having reached this conclusion, Hundt decided it was too late to revoke Murdoch’s privileges. 6. Air America Radio, a weak echo of Fox News, was launched only in 2004 and, as of May 2006, picked up about 1.2 percent of market share where it had affiliates. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_America_Radio, viewed August 23, 2007. 7. Www.sbgi.net, and www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_ Group, viewed August 23, 2007. 8. The Journal show, established in 2004 at the behest of Bush’s Corporation for Public Broadcasting, was promoted as an equivalent to Bill Moyers’s long-running Now show, but Moyers was reportorial as well as opinionated; the Journal show was strictly opinionated. 9. Todd Gitlin, ‘‘The Pro-War Post,’’ American Prospect, April 1, 2003, viewed April 19, 2006, at www.prospect.org/web/printfriendly-view.ww? id⳱6751. Subsequently, the Post added a weekly liberal column by Harold Meyerson. 10. Michael Tomasky, ‘‘Whispers and Screams: The Partisan Natures of Editorial Pages,’’ Research Paper R-25, Shorenstein Center, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, July 2003, viewed August 20, 2006, at www.ksg.harvard.edu/presspol/Research_Publications/Papers/ Research_ Papers/R25.pdf.

152

Notes to Pages 61–75

11. http://mediamatters.org/reports/oped/ 12. Paul Waldman, ‘‘John Fund Again?’’ Washington Monthly, March 2006, www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0603.waldman.html/. 13. For mountains of chapter and verse, see Boehlert, Lapdogs, and Alterman, What Liberal Media? My review of Lapdogs, ‘‘All the President’s Pets,’’ appeared in American Prospect, July 2006, viewed August 19, 2006, at www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article⳱all_the_presidents_pets. 14. See Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (New York, 2006). 15. See Michael Massing, Now They Tell Us: The U. S. Press and Iraq (New York: New York Review Books, 2004. Boehlert, Lapdogs; and my ‘‘All the President’s Friends,’’ American Prospect, May 2006, viewed August 19, 2006, at www.prospect.org/web/printfriendly-view.ww?id⳱10745. 16. The point about access was made to me by former CBS political chief Dotty Lynch in conversation, March–April 2006. 17. Thomas B. Edsall, lecture, Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University, October 26, 2006. 18. John F. Harris, ‘‘Mr. Bush Catches a Washington Break,’’ Washington Post, Outlook section, May 6, 2001, p. B1. 19. Telephone interview, Max Frankel, May 2004, quoted in my ‘‘Media: It Was a Very Bad Year,’’ American Prospect, July 2004, viewed August 19, 2006, at www.prospect.org/web/printfriendly-view.ww?id⳱7873. 20. Some of this paragraph is taken from my ‘‘From the Left,’’ commissioned by public editor Daniel Okrent for ‘‘Political Bias at The Times? Two Counterarguments,’’ New York Times, Week in Review, October 17, 2004, p. 2. For an unusual example of successful dot-connecting, see Anne C. Mulkern, ‘‘Watchdogs or Lap Dogs? When Advocates Become Regulators,’’ Denver Post, May 23, 2004, p. A1. 21. Leon V. Sigal, Reporters and Officials: The Organization and Politics of Newsmaking (Lexington, Mass., 1973). On the particular servility of the press toward Ronald Reagan, see Todd Gitlin, ‘‘Media as Message: Campaign ’80,’’ Socialist Review (March–April 1981), and Mark Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency (New York, 1988). 22. Harris, ‘‘Mr. Bush Catches a Washington Break.’’

Chapter 5. Think Tanks and the War of Ideas in American Politics 1. Andrew Rich, ‘‘The War of Ideas: Why Mainstream and Liberal Foundations and the Think Tanks They Support are Losing in the War of Ideas in American Politics,’’ Stanford Social Innovation Review 3 (2005): 18– 25, p. 18. 2. I received seventy-eight responses, a 67.8 percent response rate, from

Notes to Pages 75–84

153

think tanks that were broadly representative of the larger population of state think tanks with respect to ideology, along with geography and size. I received responses from thirty-four conservative think tanks, nineteen liberal think tanks, and twenty-five think tanks of no identifiable ideology. 3. The response choices for this question were: (1) specific issue expertise, (2) media/public affairs experience, (3) coherent/appropriate political or ideological orientation, (4) record of previous publication, (5) advanced policy degree (M.A., M.P.A., M.P.P.), (6) advanced research degree (Ph.D.), (7) experience working in politics, (8) experience working in/around government, (9) academic experience. 4. State government was the second most frequently named background for think tank staff by both conservative and liberal think tanks. And government was the most often named background characteristic raised by leaders of think tanks of no identifiable ideology. 5. The response options were (1) advising legislators on immediate pending policy issues, (2) advising legislative staff on immediately pending policy issues, (3) advising executive branch officials on immediately pending policy issues, (4) advising the news media about immediately pending policy issues, (5) informing the news media about research products, (6) informing nonprofit advocacy groups about your research products, (7) informing lobbyists and/or trade groups about your research products, (8) informing policymakers (legislators and executive branch) about your research products, (9) informing the policy research community (e.g., other think tanks, academics) about your research products, (10) shaping public opinion on policy issues. 6. In the survey, 85.3 percent of leaders of conservative think tanks named this response as most or very important, and 79.0 percent of liberal think tanks did the same. 7. James A. Smith, ‘‘Think Tanks and the Politics of Ideas,’’ in The Spread of Economic Ideas, ed. David C. Colander and A. W. Coats (New York, 1989). 8. Author interview, 2001. 9. Smith, ‘‘Think Tanks and the Politics of Ideas,’’ p. 192. 10. Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago, 1971). 11. Author interview, 2005. 12. For some discussion of this approach, see Deepak Bhargava and Rachel Gragg, ‘‘Winning by Losing Well,’’ American Prospect, July 3, 2005. 13. Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado, No Mercy: How Conservative Think Tanks and Foundations Changed America’s Social Agenda (Philadelphia, 1996), p. 4. 14. See, for example, Thomas B. Edsall, ‘‘Rich Liberals Vow to Fund Think Tanks,’’ Washington Post, August 7, 2005, p. A1. 15. Efforts among foundations and individual donors on the Left have

154

Notes to Pages 89–109

met some challenges in the past few years. For some description of these challenges, especially with respect to the Democracy Alliance, see Matt Bai, The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics (New York, 2007).

Chapter 6. From Incremental to Transformative Change 1. Greg Ip and Deborah Solomon, ‘‘As Bigger Piece of Economic Pie Shifts to Wealthiest, U.S. Deficit Heads Downward,’’ Wall Street Journal, July 17, 2006. 2. Ibid. 3. Robert Gordon and Ian Dew-Becker, ‘‘Where Did the Productivity Growth Go? Inflation Dynamics and the Distribution of Income,’’ paper presented at the 81st meeting of the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity, Washington, D.C., September 8–9, 2005. 4. David Frum, ‘‘Republicans and the Flight of Opportunity,’’ Cato Unbound, May 1, 2006, read at www.cato-unbound.org/2006/05/01/davidfrum/republicans-and-the-flight-of-oppor tunity/. 5. Whittaker Chambers, ‘‘Big Sister Is Watching You,’’ National Review, December 28, 1957. 6. E. J. Dionne, ‘‘Back from the Dead: Neoprogressivism in the ’90s,’’ American Prospect, November 30, 2002. 7. William Niskanen, ‘‘ ‘Starve the Beast’ Does Not Work,’’ Cato Policy Report, March–April 2004. 8. Letter from Grover Norquist, January 21, 2005, read at www.atr.org/ content/pdf/2005/jan/l-pledge%20signers.pdf.

Chapter 7. Rebuilding the Welfare State in the United States 1. Heidi Hartmann and Catherine Hill, ‘‘Strengthening Social Security for Women,’’ Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 1999. 2. This proposal is outlined in somewhat more detail in my report, ‘‘Universal Voluntary Accounts: A Step Towards Fixing the Retirement System,’’ Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2006, read at www.cepr.net/ index.php?option⳱com_content&task⳱view&id⳱646&Itemid⳱8. 3. A New York Times poll in early 2007 found that 60 percent of the public was willing to pay substantially higher taxes in order to ensure universal health care coverage. However, there was much less agreement on how best to change the current system, with only 47 percent supporting the adop-

Notes to Pages 110–124

155

tion of a government-run system of health care insurance (‘‘Most Support U.S. Guarantee of Health Care,’’ New York Times, March 2, 2007). 4. This proposal is loosely based on the plan put forward by Jacob Hacker in The Great Risk Shift (New York, 2006). 5. Rebecca Ray and John Schmitt, ‘‘No Vacation Nation,’’ Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2007, read at www.cepr.net/index.php? option⳱com_content&task⳱view&id⳱1184&Itemid⳱ 8 . 6. See David Rosnick and Mark Weisbrot, ‘‘Are Shorter Hours Good for the Environment? A Comparison of U.S. and European Energy Consumption,’’ Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2006, read at www .cepr.net/index.php?option⳱com_content&task⳱view&id⳱726& Itemid⳱8 . 7. See Lichtenstein, ‘‘How Labor Can Win,’’ this volume.

Chapter 8. Families Valued p. 12.

1. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Family and Nation (San Diego, 1986),

2. Joan Entmacher, How Social Security Benefits Women and Their Families—and Why Privatization Threatens Their Economic Security (Washington, D.C., 2005). 3. Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Oxford, 2001). 4. Karen Kornbluh, ‘‘The Parent Trap,’’ Atlantic Monthly, February 1, 2003. 5. Jared Bernstein and Karen Kornbluh, ‘‘Running Faster to Stay in Place: The Growth of Family Work Hours and Income,’’ New America Foundation, June 29, 2005. 6. Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi, The Two Income Trap: Why Middle Class Families Are Going Broke (New York, 2003). 7. Ellen Galinsky, J. Bond, and J. Hill, Workplace Flexibility: What Is It? Who Has It? Who Wants It? Does It Make a Difference? (New York, 2004); Vicky Lovell, No Time to Be Sick: Why Everyone Suffers when Workers Don’t Have Paid Sick Leave (Washington, D.C., 2004); Katherin Ross Phillips, Getting Time Off: Access to Leave Among Working Parents (Washington, D.C., 2004). 8. Jane Waldfogel, ‘‘Understanding the ‘Family Gap’ in Pay for Women and Children,’’ Journal of Economic Perspectives 12 (1998): 1. 9. Shelley Waters Boots, The Way We Work: How Children and Their Families Fare in a Twenty-First Century Workplace (Washington, D.C., 2004). 10. Lawrence H. Thompson and Adam Carusso, ‘‘Social Security and the Treatment of Families,’’ in Social Security and the Family: Addressing

156

Notes to Pages 126–139

Unmet Needs in an Underfunded System (Washington, D.C., 2002); Janet C. Gornick and Marcia K. Meyers, Families That Work: Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment (New York, 2003). 11. Melissa Favreault, Frank J. Sammartino, and C. Eugene Steuerle, ‘‘Social Security Benefits for Spouses and Survivors in Social Security and the Family,’’ in Melissa Favreault, Frank J. Sammartino, and C. Eugene Steuerle, Social Security and the Family: Addressing Unmet Needs in an Underfunded System (Washington, D.C., 2002). 12. National Employment Law Project, Changing Workforce, Changing Economy: State Unemployment Reforms for the Twenty-First Century (New York, 2004); Maurice Emsellem, National Employment Law Project, Innovative State Reforms Shape New National Economic Security Plan for the Twenty-First Century (New York, 2006).

Chapter 9. How Labor Can Win 1. Center for Union Facts, ‘‘When Voting Isn’t Private: The Union Campaign Against Secret Ballot Elections,’’ 4, at www.unionfacts.com. 2. HR Policy Association, ‘‘Mistitled ‘Employ Free Choice Act’ Would Strip Workers of Secret Ballot in Union Representation Elections,’’ 2, at www .hrpolicy.org/memoranda/2006. 3. Bruce Raynor, ‘‘Losing by Winning: What One NLRB Case the Year Tells Us About Our Broker Collective Bargaining Laws,’’ American Prospect On-Line Edition, December 21, 2006, at www.prospect.org. 4. James Brudney, ‘‘Neutrality Agreements and Card Check Recognition: Prospects for Changing Paradigms,’’ Iowa Law Review 90 (2005): 868– 873. 5. David Brody, ‘‘Labor’s Rights: Finding a Way,’’ in Labor Embattled: History, Power, Rights (Urbana, Ill., 2005), p. 153. 6. Michael Kranish and Ross Kerber, ‘‘Rep. Frank Offers Business a ‘Grand Bargain,’ ’’ Boston Globe, November 19, 2006. 7. For the complex politics of this bargain, see Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II (Philadelphia, 2003). 8. My discussion of the La Follette Committee relies heavily upon the excellent history of Jerold S. Auerbach, Labor and Liberty: The La Follette Committee and the New Deal (Indianapolis, Ind., 1966). Quotations taken from p. 63. 9. Ibid., p. 54. 10. Ibid., p. 59. 11. Ibid., pp. 66, 86. 12. Human Rights Watch, Discounting Rights: Wal-Mart’s Violation of U.S. Workers’ Right to Freedom of Association (New York, 2007).

Notes to Pages 140–147

157

Chapter 10. The Once and Future Christian Left 1. Author conversation with Amy Sullivan, April 2007. See Sullivan’s book The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats Are Closing the God Gap (New York, 2008). 2. For sources of these quotes see Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History, rev. ed. (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998), 83, and Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana, 1982), 311. 3. Kazin, Populist Persuasion, 152. 4. www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Jesus_Christ.htm. 5. www.stanford.edu/group/King/publications/sermons/670827.000_ Why_Jesus_Called_a_Man_a_Fool.html. 6. H. L. Mencken, ‘‘In Memoriam: W.J.B.,’’ Prejudices: Fifth Series (New York, 1926), 68, 71. 7. www.pewtrusts.org/uploadedFiles/wwwpewtrustsorg/News/Press_ Releases/Religion_in_public_life/pew_religion_religiousland_020305.pdf 8. Michael Walzer, The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1988) 9. Accessed at www.iamlookingforgod.com/2004/09/if_there_is_no_ .html.

Contributors

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. He is the editor of The Long War: A New History of U.S. National Security Policy Since World War II. His previous books include American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy; The Imperial Tense: Problems and Prospects of American Empire; and The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War. Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. He is the author of The United States Since 1980; Social Security: The Phony Crisis (with Mark Weisbrot); The Benefits of Full Employment (with Jared Bernstein); Getting Prices Right: The Battle over the Consumer Price Index; and The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer. Gary Gerstle is James Stahlman Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. His books include American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (2001), winner of the 2001 Saloutos Award for the outstanding work in immigration and ethnic history; Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy (2005); and The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (1989). He has written extensively on questions of immigration, diversity, and American nationality. Todd Gitlin is professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the Ph.D. program in communications at Columbia University. He is the author of twelve books, including The Whole World Is Watching; The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage; The Twilight of Common Dreams;

160

Contributors

The Intellectuals and the Flag; the prize-winning novel Sacrifice; and most recently, The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats, and the Recovery of American Ideals, from which parts of the article in this volume are drawn. Michael Kazin teaches history at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. His books about United States politics and social movements include The Populist Persuasion: An American History; A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan; and America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (with Maurice Isserman). Ezra Klein is a staff writer at the American Prospect, where he focuses on social policy, health care, and electoral politics. Klein appears regularly on MSNBC’s Hardball and contributes op-ed columns to the Los Angeles Times. Karen Kornbluh founded the New America Foundation’s Work and Family Program, after serving in senior roles at the U.S. Treasury Department and the Federal Communications Commission and advising companies as a management consultant. She is now policy director for Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.). The views expressed here are hers alone. Nelson Lichtenstein is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he directs the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy. He is the author of Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II; Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit; and State of the Union: A Century of American Labor. He has recently edited American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century and Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First Century Capitalism. Andrew Rich is associate professor of political science at City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Think Tanks, Public Policy, and the Politics of Expertise.

Contributors

161

Matthew Yglesias is an associate editor at the Atlantic Monthly in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws up the Democrats. He was previously a staff writer at the American Prospect and an associate editor at TPM Media.