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The dust-up on Friday between me and Matt re: insiders vs. outsiders (here and here) reminded me of a post I was thinking about writing a while back.
As those who read my writing now know, I am a bit of a history nut, and I have been thinking a lot about how change has happened throughout American history. If you really look at the dramatic progressive movements in our country, the way change happened was through the intersection of an outside progressive movement and insiders who opened themselves to the ideas coming from that movement.
The greatest periods of progressive change in American history were the following:
-The ending of slavery and other reforms pushed by Lincoln and the "radical Republicans" in the 1860s
-The progressive era reforms in the 1900s and 1910s
-The New Deal programs of the 1930s and 1940s
-The surge of progressive legislation in the 1960s
Every single time an outside movement combined with decent-hearted politicians on the inside who made the change happen. The abolitionists built up a head of steam over a 30-year period, created the political atmosphere where a new anti-slavery party (the Republicans) could emerge and gain power, and then pushed Lincoln to finish the job. (And by the way, along the way, they passed some other great reform legislation as well.)
Starting in the 1880s with the populist movement, and evolving into the progressive reform movement, a popular will was created to pass many major reforms. When an open-minded reformer named Teddy Roosevelt became president in 1901 following the McKinley assassination, he listened to the outsiders and created the national parks system, began busting the corporate trusts, and got the first food and consumer safety laws passed. In the decade afterward, the progressive movement worked with political leaders to pass an income tax, get direct election of U.S. Senators, and enact women's suffrage.
In the 1930s, strong progressive leaders led by John L. Lewis, Walter Reuther, A. Phillip Randolph, and Norman Thomas created the political power to allow FDR to get Social Security, labor law reform, banking regulation, rural electrification, the GI Bill, and all the other remarkable reforms of the New Deal passed into law.
In the 1960s, the civil rights movement changed the nature of political debate, both on that issue and many others, and helped sympathetic politicians like the Kennedys and LBJ push through historic civil rights legislation. But it also opened the door to a broader progressive movement, as Medicare, Medicaid, the Peace Corps environmental legislation, the 18-year-old vote and many other important reforms made their way into law.
I think the lesson history is that change doesn't happen only by electing better politicians, and it doesn't happen only by building an outside movement. It happens when both things are going on simultaneously, and when the progressive insiders and outsiders are talking to each other and pivoting off each other.
One of the things I worry about with the current yawning chasm between insiders and outsiders is that we sometimes get to a place where each side is so angry with the other that the creative dialogue that drives real change is in danger of being shut down. It isn't that John L. Lewis and FDR always liked each other, or that Martin Luther King, Jr. and LBJ didn't fight at times. But they usually found ways to bridge the gap, to keep talking to each other, to keep figuring out ways to solved problems together. In this moment we can do that too, in part by figuring out innovative ways to have the dialogue, like Stoller and Durbin did with the Legislation 2.0 discussion on broadband, and in part by doing the hard work of understanding the perspectives of each other.
We have a great opportunity for a new progressive movement in American history. The ecountry has rejected Bush-style conservatism and has moved left on a range of key issues. A movement for change is building and growing. All of us just need to be smart and strategic about how we keep building that movement for change, and we need to keep talking to each other about how to work together to make things happen. Progressives don't yet have a governing majority, but I believe that is soon to come, and we better take advantage of it when we have the chance.
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