Notes towards a progressive vision

The progressive vision is still at a very early stage. It centers on a shared sense that diversity is a good thing, that we should broaden community through political and cultural inclusion, and that the rise in inequality is destructive. It involves values of wide participation, understanding, sharing, openness, and collaboration. There is now probably a majority in the U.S. who accept this point of view in a general sense. But when we get to details – what does it look like, what are the institutions that make it work, how does it affect daily relations and ways of life? – there is far less agreement. We need to do a lot of work to develop the vision to a level needed for the challenges we face.

For example:

• We need to sort out our ambivalence about government. Progressives generally favor the welfare state, including government programs to reduce inequality and help the poor. Yet many also have a deep suspicion of big bureaucracies and technocracy – this phase of progressivism, after all, began in the anti-Vietnam War movements. There is hostility to many aspects of government, such as the police and the military and the spread of surveillance.

One strand of progressivism wants to avoid the issue by retreating to local communities with local food and energy. That’s a hopelessly impractical solution – partly because we all depend to an extremely high degree on the global economy (even local farmers use tools and seeds and money and ideas from all over); partly because very few people would support the policies that would be needed for the model to spread widely; partly because we need large-scale governance to deal with extremely threatening issues like climate change and pandemics.

If we accept the complexity and interdependence of the world, we need a much better model of government. The direction should be towards more participation and inclusion, but government will always need to involve effective policing and defense. In an era of high complexity and interdependence, in which disgruntled individuals can wreak unprecedented havoc, surveillance in some form will be absolutely necessary to prevent major disasters. As for the welfare state, it has been ineffective in stopping the spread of inequality everywhere. Support has been declining for many decades – not only in the U.S., but throughout the industrial democracies of Europe. Even in the Scandinavian heartland, conservative parties have risen in strength after a long period of almost unquestioned dominance.

We need an idea of government that is different from the welfare state of the past, without falling into simplistic localism. Various efforts to square this circle, such as ideas of “participatory” and “deliberative” democracy, remain very undercooked, with few good models and no plausible ideas for how to achieve this kind of governance at a societal or global scale.

• Our focus on diversity and inclusion is still just an impulse, not a program. The almost reflexive progressive belief that Europe should embrace the suffering refugees of the Middle East, for example, has sparked a furious backlash of extreme right-wing populist movements seeking to retreat behind walls. And that’s not surprising: no community can simply throw open its doors to a sudden influx of strangers without fragmenting. Building community is slow work; inclusion of new groups – whether immigrants or internal groups that have been kept subordinated – takes a great deal of patient interaction and efforts to understand across differences, a learning of new frames, and long practical working-through of mechanisms and routines that everyone can feel comfortable with.

Conservatives have a point: “conservatism” at its heart is a preservation of the past, a sense of continuity and identity. We all need that: we can’t just fly around experiencing new things all the time– we need a home to come back to. Conservatism in its pure form is stagnant; liberalism in its pure form is chaotic and exhausting. The current polarization has pushed the conservative and liberal views towards their extremes.

Progressivism needs to find a balance that moves towards greater inclusion without losing touch with the past. But we haven’t built a shared vision of what that might look like. How do we actually achieve inclusion? There are many experiments and models of dialogue– most of them failures, none of them at large scale.

• We sorely lack an economic model. The idea of a “sharing economy” is attractive, but in real life it is mixed in with a new form of capitalist division and many types of social disruption – of taxi drivers, neighborhoods, small businesses. Some parts of it, like crowdsourcing, verge on old-style sweatshops.  And no one, to my knowledge, has produced a plausible model of what an entire economy might look like on a sharing basis, or on any other basis that reflects progressive values. A few niche areas seem promising – bartering of home arts and crafts, open source software – but they don’t plausibly solve the problem of how most people are supposed to make a living.
• We’re pretty intolerant of conservatives. We think they are stupid, or evil. Of course, they think that of us as well; but a movement that centers on inclusion should do better in reaching out. We’re not going to succeed unless we can engage with most of the “heartland” – the Trump supporters who are fed up with everything, the gun supporters who worry about losing their freedom. There are obviously some lines that have to be drawn, but if we exclude most of the country we’re not going to get anywhere. The work of inclusion includes them: understanding better how they see the world, what offends them about us, what they like; building something with them that they can feel part of.

There has been progress in progressivism, slow but real. I’ve seen some meetings in recent years that have been remarkable at including diverse people – blacks and latinos, unions and community groups, environmentalists and business leaders – in serious, respectful conversation, without the posturing and treading-on-eggshells quality that marks the early phases of developing relations. The success of the gay rights movement has been extraordinary. But it’s still a very small start.

Conservatives have a big advantage: they are, in general, trying to preserve something that exists or has existed – a way of life they actually know. That gives them a unifying concreteness of vision that is a strong basis for collective action. We, by contrast, are trying to build something to reflect an abstract set of values and hopes. There’s a lot of work to be done to make it real.