Progressive Pragmatism -- A Conversation With The Left

The word "Conservative" is now a political epithet.

I read a speech by Bill Moyers a couple of years ago saying something to the effect that an eagle with two right or two left wings could not fly - you need both.

It seems to me that idealistic or peacemaking-type people (such as myself) want to find a happy medium between two sides of a spectrum or to reach a particular ideal that seems perfect, but this perfection is like an asymptote or something - it's impossible to exist in that state... I don't think that means we shouldn't attempt to make things better, but won't there always be a struggle? Is that human nature? Sorry, I'm feeling kind of philosophical right now. :) Anyway, i like your ideas above, and i don't think that many of the 'comfortable' people in this country realize a) the swings of the pendulum or b) the chasm that lies between the rich and poor.

The Left lost, perhaps for decades, its identity as an ideology in pursuit of economic security

It's funny that you write this and yet only just yesterday you wrote, The price of Freedom is Risk. and quoted Ben Franklin,

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety

The whole income inequality line is also a bit tired, considering that our poor have just as high an disposable personal income and quality of life as those in the major European nations, while the real reason for the income gap is that our middle class and rich is far better off than Europe and the rest of the world. [source | source]

How is it that freedom always seems to be such a radical concept? That freedom also includes the freedom of other to make bad choices and not forcing others to make up for it.

A rising tide no longer floats all boats and the trickle down effect is a pseudonym for "Golden Shower"

Reagan was a well-calculated lie. He spouted a lot of libertarian rhetoric but hardly followed through with it.

Again, government itself is a hodgepodge of stealing from the rich to give to the poor (welfare, medicare, etc.) and then stealing from the poor to give to rich (subsidies). Nearly everything it does is detrimental in some way to the economy.

I just want to start over. ;)

The most important figures aren't so much how many kids go to bed hungry. That number just seems unreliable to begin with, and totally subjective.

The number to look at is what percentage of Americans identify themselves and their family as middle class. It's well over a majority of Americans think that way. So, we may think some of them are poor, but they believe themselves to be content.

I am not one to walk into their house, throw a check in their face, and tell them they are wrong.

great article. i'm working on something similar, altho it probably won't be as well-formed a thesis as yours is.

What "Progressive" promised this?

...We are their country too. And each of us must share in its promise or the promise is diminished for all.

If that boy in Marlin believes he's trapped and worthless and hopeless, if he believes his life has no value, then other lives have no value to him, and we're all diminished.

When these problems are not confronted, it builds a wall within our nation. On one side are wealth, technology, education and ambition. On the other side of that wall are poverty and prison, addiction and despair. And my fellow Americans, we must tear down that wall.

Text of George W. Bush's acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, August 2000.

In the last 6 years, that wall has become more entrenched and the gap wider. The Wall has not in the least been tore down, the policies of the Bush Administration have further strengthed and worsened the problem and in his own words leaving us "all diminished."

i wonder what percentage shares in the prison companies went up in that time.

Are all CONservatives evil, miserly, selfish, treasonous @!$%#s?

In regard to liberalism and pragmatic progressivism; I certainly am tired of the constant battering over the 'L' word as if it's a profanity by the neo-conservatism as far back as the Reagon Administration. In Canada, where I live, for a long period the Liberal Party of Canada, was in succession of winning government leaderships. The Canadian prospective, in general, believes in government funded programs in harmony with the economic machine to support well-being for disadvantaged individuals, while allowing free enterprise to to roll with the punches with competitors for nation wealth building. The price for these government programs, including universal medicare, is provided by a higher tax burden on Canadian citizens.
However; the Liberal Party of Canada in recent years lost the respect of many Canadians by a whole scheme of wasteful tax dollars, secretly and illegally, conducted on a notorious sponsorship scandal, that lost the Liberals foot-hole and government leadership, which the Conservative Party capitalized in an election, with a minority government leadership.
Power is often known as a corruptive force in politics. Liberals in Canada welded power for a long time with the Canadian public begrudingly knowing the center from left policy positioning worked favorable with big-business, debt reduction, and providing relatively healthy social programs. I assume the greatest assault on the well meaning Canadian public, is the actuality of a very bloated federal revenues that was being used for self-serving, frivolous spending so outrageous, that the Liberal party has to re-build constructively to regain a sense of political integrity for the Canadian public.
Liberalism is not a dirty word. The liberal ideals of social justice and offering opportunities for fairer equality of individuals participating in the market-driven economy is pragmatic and viable. Keynesian economics is a balancing method of the 'mixed-economy', which can never underestimate the role of the market place and the role of government to operate separately and coordinate at best to bring a better balance in the equality picture in terms of opportunity and social securities.

I, like Leah, am an idealist and an eclectic. The liberal side of the equation makes up for qualities lacking on the conservative side and vice versa. When I vote, I vote for the candidate that seems most reasonable and least-biased - party be damned. A politican will lose my vote when he/she makes one or another hot-button topic the centerpiece of his/her campaign.

Though hunger and poverty scratch at the doors of millions of Americans, the suburban middle class has forgotten the economic perils faced by their grandparents nearly 80 years ago. In the abundance and prosperity of the post WWII era, the American Left has, to greater or lesser degrees, lost its way amid political struggle and legislated morality.

Yep. We're spoiled rotten. Some of us haven't forgotten. I distinctly recall tales of my grandmother (and other ladies in her small town) going down to the local railroad with buckets when the train stopped to take on water to pick up the coal that had fallen from the train to heat their depression-era homes. Soon, the train conductor crawled up to the top of the coal car and tossed coal down to them.

Fast foward to today and we're lulled by unlimited credit to believe we're far removed from a depression. (We'd likely call it a recession instead.) Look at the housing boom. Analysts warned and warned it was about to pop. Now, foreclosures are happening at an incredibly rapid pace.

Americans have to get used to the idea that a "quality of life" in this country based on "bigger and better", keeping-up-with-the-Jones' consumerism has to go down somewhat for our own good.

I'm not a political analyst by any stretch, more interested in the human condition overall, but the philosophical/ideological element is very prominent in this piece, so please bear with me.

The left has lost both its sense of purpose and its true identity. (So has the right, but we're talking about the left.)

First, I think that - especially - we the people have to start with the obvious: The government we have now not only doesn't work for us but acts as if we don't exist. Government is that far removed from the will of the people, imo. And the reason so many people don't vote anymore is not apathy, but disgust: Don't give me an either/or, especially when they're both -frankly - exactly the same.

Sometimes I imagine that any kind of realistic sense of direction was turned on its ear in the sixties (with Vietnam and the social revolution) and instead of recovering to any degree sped headlong out of control instead. In addition to the apparent flip-flop of the parties in the North/South/East/Midwest/West during and after the sixties there has been a tremendous shift in focus from progressivism on a realistic economic/social front to never-ending "personal morality" debates (for votes) rather than concerns of equality and economic parity for all - and this from the time fast-paced modernity (and not just in the North) met go slow and take-your-time (turned) regressivism (and not just in the South).

Now, national Democrats are apparently willing to dump the rural population in pursuit of its "metropolitan" goals, if I understood the gist of a recent comment on the subject correctly.

If so, the left has been distracted from its true purpose and has fallen prey to the same pitfalls it tried to negate in the rising - now prevalent - wind on the right: Personal and special (unto even corporate) interest. Question is, how? Trying out the centric route? Win at all costs - unto its very soul? Maybe?

An interesting take on this... confusion... I thought was Left, Right and Wrong

The essential problem of the American left is that it has been displaced. Its current position in the liberal imagination is that of a dumped first wife.

What now sleeps on her old side of the bed is a purportedly leftist solution to the same bourgeois conundrum that faces the right: namely, how to maintain a semblance of moral decency while enjoying the spoils of a winner-take-all economic system. Or, put another way, how to maintain the illusion that you can be a good person and want a good society without either kind of goodness costing you a dime....

Both (Republican and Democratic) solutions are marked by a wily propensity to talk about any kind of conflict except class conflict. Having duly explored the polarities of black and white, male and female, gay and straight, we now distract ourselves by talking ad nauseam about Blue States and Red States, a construction that wants only a Dr. Seuss or a special edition of Dungeons & Dragons to achieve its final apotheosis in the realm of Whoozits and elves. The true enemy of progressivism is not the Red State Voter. The true enemy of progressivism is preciousness....

(Once the left's) common belief was a classless society in which no identity trumped that of a human being. Its common belief was that a condition of equality and solidarity was the destiny of humankind. There is no language that the left needs to recover so badly as it needs to recover that faith.

Maybe, unable to come up with a defensive "morality" platform (which should be based squarely on human rights and not necessarily one group or another's so much), it somehow lost its egalitarian identity to the authoritarian identity that used to be the providence of the right and did so in trying to fight it.

Furedi wrote an interesting piece that illustrates the culmination of this authoritarian aspect on the left very well, The Curious Rise of Anti-religious Hysteria, in which he posits that condemnatory dialog on the left against the right is "hardly an enlightened alternative" to the very authoritarianism it seeks to displace.

Replacing the zealotry of religious intolerance with a secular version is hardly an enlightened alternative....

Instead of acknowledging the failure of its own political projects, the liberal elite prefers to indict sections of the public for being thick and gullible.

This trend for blaming the rise of theocracy on ordinary folks' apparent penchant for simplistic black-and-white solutions shifts the focus from the elite's failure to promote and uphold a positive vision of the future on to the alleged political illiteracy of the masses.... It is the insecurity of the Anglo-American cultural elites about their own values and moral vision of the world that encourages their frenzied attacks on religion.

Incidentally, the conservative elite does the same, except that it prefers to indict sections of the public on accusations of being "immoral". Different approach; same result. The hell of it is, a good deal of the public is (apparently) willing to follow suit.

Onward.... Those "frenzied attacks" are based largely in fear of a phantom: The moral absolutism of an authoritarian right nowhere near as large (or powerful) as so many believe it to be. And the end result? Both traditional parties are equally endowed with "wine and cheese elitists" out of touch with either reality or the American people.

Iow, they both think we're all idiots. "Let them eat cake."

The left needs to stop blaming anything other than itself for losing its way and the same goes for the right. (I'm socially left and a bit economically right, so I feel I can say that.) The blame game is beneath human dignity and neither side is all that convincing in its superior claims to "enlightenment". If either side wants to prove how much more intelligent and enlightened it is than the other, one of them needs to stop shooting themselves in the foot. But that's only part.

There is also a sense of disorganization on the left. "Now what? Where do we go from here? How do we do what we need to do?" That doesn't ring well with a public that needs solid leadership.

I've noticed (and, yes, this is anecdote) that one party or other seems to work better on the local level depending on the locale. I don't know why Republicans win over Democrats in other places locally but - here - they win because when they say they're going to do something they do it. They don't sit around talking about it and, unfortunately, many Democrats do. A lot of people, then, (including some Democrats) familiar with Republican success on the local level tend to vote for them also on the national level. But...

For the purpose of argument, let's say the Republican party has identified itself conservative and the Democratic party liberal on the national level. Republican politicians (no offense meant whatever to Republican voters) - at present - seem to be very much myopic and US-centric on the national level. A "get it done now" attitude doesn't work so well when one has no clue what is the best thing to do. Dialog, diplomacy - determining the best thing to do - works a little better on the national level where compromise (on the social front) and diplomacy (on the foreign policy front) take the upper hand. National Republicans haven't seemed to catch on to the virtues of diplomacy... yet. Now, it has cost them dearly. They have been duped themselves by their own authoritarian kind. (Again, this in no way means Republican voters are in any way the same. We're talking politicians - and especially of the career variety - here.) By the same token, Democrats have lost the ability to compromise when the compromise is not life and death - maybe because they've become too accustomed to fighting uphill by now.

Neither party seems to be able or willing to hear us much less work for the interests of America over the long-haul rather than for some short-term, selfish objective. Both need to reign in their own respective extremist elements and replace them with something resembling reasonable people. In my mind, what's trickled (up or down isn't important) is the very short-sightedness that both now seem to share.

Where's the egalitarianism... in either party? They're both too busy fighting for the prize to be egalitarian - stuck on a merry-go-round going nowhere. It's like a death-spiral. One or the other needs to decide to get off the merry-go-round and get off it now. There's been no more opportune time for the left... if only they'll seize it. They won't seize it (in my humble opinion) by serving up more of the same. (Hillary comes to mind. They back Hillary and they're dead in the water, imo. If she wins the primaries, another Republican will win the Presidential election despite how badly they've screwed up.) They could seize it with a dark horse backed up by a "rhetoric of hope" interested in building bridges and a realistic future for America...

maybe.

I don't know. Some that are "firmly left" do a good job of putting the platform out there ahead of any special interest. But too many others are so freaking biased - ensconced in their own particular dogma - they out-shout the more reasonable and least-biased leaving us to choose between more of the same or... more of the same.

My feeling is that the left and right choices we get now have little to do with the core values on either side. Clinton did more to advance the spread of the biotech funding and crop growth than BushI and Quayle. There's nothing conservative about the fiscal policies under Bush and nothing liberal about Hillary helping to give the biggest chunk of the NYC 9/11 recovery funds to Goldman Sacks while small business still struggle and many failed and the workers from Ground Zero are still sick and dying without health benefits.

To me the bulk of them regardless of what party they claim are bought and paid for by big corporate interests. When the Reagan era did away with equal time for candidates and media began to consolidate we, the public got two sides of one corporate coin. There are many issues that the public can agree on in terms of cleaning up toxic waste and looking for cures for cancer and other epidemic diseases that affect us all. The only ones who don't benefit from that are the same corporations who sell those services and that's who owns the media, dumped the toxins in the first place, collect farm subsidies and call the shots.

What we have is too many idiots creating conflict and talking heads controlling what is put out as news. If there were any desire to find common ground among the "leaders" to serve the public interests it would not be so hard to do. What's hard is to keep feeding the corporate welfare system and keep the public from catching on to the fact that they are being robbed and getting little but lip service in return. Divide and conquer and so that's what they do, both sides of the aisle, pay to play, corporate rules.

i don't even know where to begin with this one. there should never be a hungry kid in this country. never. it is nothing short of immoral, ans God is watching. i am a christian, and i am a liberal democrat. ok, try to keep the snickering down a wee bit. i am also a father of a soon to be 21 year old son. that he never went hungry is testement that he had a mother and father who would have whatever it took to ensure he never did. that there are parents out there that will not is something i am not capable of comprehending on any level. there are no easy answers or solutions, but first, feed the the children.
as far as who is to blame, there are no easy answers the either. i think both parties are to blame in there own way. you can say that liberalism caused these problems is to easy. that it keeps the poor down is to simple, and incorrect. same thing with conservatism.
to think that the government should be the caretaker for all is foolish and impractical. it takes the responsibility of taking care of ones own from those who care for only themselves. on the other hand, to say that everyone is on their own forgets that children cannot take care of themselves. understand this, i am not talking about taaking care of mom and dad cradle to grave. this is about the kids.
we can beat each other up later about left vs. right. the children come first.