Tired of right-wing guru Grover Norquist's
reactionary platitudes passing for wisdom? Want to
debate more than taxes and terrorism?
Just as conservatives regrouped, retooled and came
back strong after their painful loss in 1964, there
are multiplying signs of a progressive resurgence
sparked by the extremism of the Bush Administration.
The huge response to books critiquing Bush, the
blockbuster success of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit
9/11, the growth in membership of many liberal
organizations and the plunging support for W. and his
Iraq invasion are only some of the public indicators
of a comeback.
At the same time, a large number of scholars,
writers and activists have been quietly cobbling up a
clear, confident and credible set of policy
alternatives for a new Administration. For example, in
May fifty leading scholars and advocates--Jamie
Galbraith, Robert Reich, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Gary
Hart, Joe Trippi and others--convened at a two-day
conference at New York University to lay out "a
program for progressive patriotism."
As a governing agenda, "progressive
patriotism" is built on one premise and four
foundations. The premise is that patriotism, or love
of country, must mean not only defending our country
against attack but also improving our country through
dissent, debate and elections. From Walt Whitman's
description of America as "always becoming"
to the GE slogan that "progress is our most
important product," America is based on the
notion of challenging the status quo in order to
progressively do better. In an interesting example of
this spirit of democracy, Cass Sunstein wrote in his
2oo3 book Why Societies Need Dissent, "A
high-level official during World War II, Luther Gulick,
attributed the successes of the Allies, and the
failures of Hitler and other Axis powers, to the
greater ability of citizens in democracies to
scrutinize and dissent and hence to improve past and
proposed courses of action." By this standard,
it's unpatriotic and un-American not to question
authority and the status quo in an effort to do
better.
Real patriots should now not only wave flags but
also, after three-plus years of George W. Bush's
presidency, ask whether a policy or program advances
the middle-class, collective security, a stronger
democracy and One America. These are four goals that
candidates can run on and govern by:
§ Strengthen the Middle Class. George Bush has
redistributed wealth more than George McGovern was
ever accused of--except upward rather than downward.
His $1.7 trillion in tax cuts on income, estates,
dividends, capital gains and corporate earnings has
been a program of plutocracy posing as populism. Such
"soak the middle class" fiscal policies have
only compounded the flat real income of blue-collar
workers over the past thirty years--the result of
declining unionization, the temping of jobs, the
Wal-Marting of wages and benefits, and the outsourcing
of high-end manufacturing and technology jobs. No
wonder so many families feel like they're running
faster after an ever-accelerating bus.
It's time to become liberal hawks in the class war
of ideas. Public policy should now ask whether a
proposal closes the growing gap between the rich and
the rest of us in terms of income and services. Ways
to do that include providing more healthcare coverage
for the uninsured, creating a living wage, providing
for preschool and after-school programs, pursuing
energy security starting with a 5o percent increase in
auto-fuel efficiency and investing in job training--to
be partly paid for by reversing unproductive tax cuts
for the top 2 percent.
§ Strengthen Collective Security. As World War II
was drawing to a close, FDR and Churchill developed
plans for international peace and financial
institutions so allies could pool their resources and
interests to defuse future threats. This approach is
even more necessary in today's world of stateless
evils--of shadowy terrorists carrying devastation in
backpacks, brilliant scientists selling the nuclear
secrets stored in their brains, invisible pollution
drifting from Chernobyl to Hartford and AIDS-carrying
lotharios seducing women in different countries.
Older maxims, that "might makes right"
and "bigger is better"--or the perception of
the United States as the Lone Ranger and our allies as
Tonto--is hopelessly counterproductive in a world
dominated by "problems without passports,"
in Kofi Annan's phrase. Simply walking away from the
ABM Treaty, Kyoto Protocol, Small Arms Agreement,
International Criminal Court, Chemical and Biological
Weapons Convention and UN Commission on the Status of
Women--as well as our growing calamity in Iraq--has
alienated the populations of nearly every nation on
earth.
Greater efforts at collective security make us
stronger, not weaker. Can anyone now seriously doubt
that we should have either avoided entirely our
quarter-trillion-dollar extravaganza in Iraq or
committed troops with a far greater international
presence?
§ Strengthen Democracy. It's ironic how often
American warriors are eager to cross oceans to fight
for democracy but how uninterested--or opposed--they
are to expanding it at home. The result: While our
allies regularly have 70 percent majorities voting in
national elections, we barely have half in
presidential years and a third in off-year
Congressional elections. And while it cost an average
of $87,000 to win a House seat in 1976, that increased
tenfold, to $842,000, by 2000.
If the laws affecting voting and contributing mean
that those who govern us respond more to donors than
voters, then there's little prospect of enacting
needed consumer, environmental, housing and
educational laws. A "democracy agenda" would
include the public financing of Congressional
elections, restrictions on self-financed candidates,
paper trails for electronic voting, elimination of
racially discriminatory felony disenfranchisement
laws, restrictions on further media concentration and
the merging of Veterans Day on November 11 into a
Democracy Day on the first Tuesday of November so we
honor veterans by giving citizens a day off to
celebrate democracy by exercising the franchise that
so many fought and died for.
§ One America. Thirty-eight years after the end of
the Civil War, the great black scholar W.E.B. Du Bois
predicted that the twentieth century would be
dominated by "the color-line." Will it now
include the twenty-first century as well? Can we
really afford to continue to have two-thirds of black
children born out-of-wedlock? The net worth of Latino
families averaging one-twenty-fifth of white families?
A US Senate without any black, Latino or Asian members
in a country nearly one-third nonwhite?
How can a President and Congress change this in an
era when discrimination comes not in the form of
hooded vigilantes but politicians in dark suits and
big smiles arguing against "reverse
discrimination" (when they never really spoke out
against racial discrimination in the first place)?
We not only need more candidates and officeholders
who can comfortably speak to and for white, black and
Hispanic audiences--as Robert F. Kennedy did so well
forty years ago--but also look more to universal
solutions based on need rather than complexion in
order to mobilize majority coalitions. So better
public healthcare, public transit, public schools and
environmental regulation can simultaneously be more
readily enacted but also disproportionately help
minorities enduring second-class healthcare and dirty
air.
The frequently aired Cialis ad asks, "When the
moment comes, will you be ready?" The progressive
community is ready with a long-gestating and
well-considered program that rejects messianic
incompetence abroad and class warfare at home in favor
of nation-building--that nation being America.
Mark Green, the former Public Advocate for New
York City, is president of the New Democracy Project
and editor of What
We Stand For: A Program for Progressive Patriotism
(Newmarket Press).
Copyright © 2004 The Nation
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