I've got some discomfort at speaking on a panel with such a title- I'm what they call the opposite of an academic. Being the decidedly un-intellectual political operative that I am, my usual speech topic is more like:
"How do we beat the hell out of Republicans on the health care issue?"
or
"How do we make Mark Foley and Tom DeLay metaphors for the entire Republican Party?"
But I will give this "intellectual underpinnings thing" a shot.
I think the reason I was asked to speak here has to do with the fact that I am writing a book on the history of the American political debate between progressivism and conservatism. My book will argue that when progressives were in power, we created the best ideas that America had to offer- democracy, equality of opportunity, and bottom-up economics, among them; and that when conservatives have won the day, we made mistakes of historic significance, including slavery, Jim Crow, the Great Depression, mass corruption, and the troubles of our present day.
It may come as a surprise to learn that many of our debates on issues echo over and over through all of our time as a country. For example, who do you think was the first American political figure to advocate for:
-A publicly funded Social Security system for the elderly
-A progressive estate tax and a progressive income tax system
-Welfare programs
-Employment centers for the jobless
It was not FDR or Woodrow Wilson, or even the populist movement or labor movements of the 1880s and 1890s. It was Tom Paine in the 1790s.
Another example is that n addition to winning the Civil War and ending slavery, Abe Lincoln presided over the biggest public distribution of wealth in history with the Homestead Act, and the biggest promotion of affordable college education with the land grant university system, the most significant public infrastructure program of all-time with the Pacific Railroad Act, and the first adoption of the progressive income tax?
I would argue that the intellectual underpinnings of a renegotiated social contract are rooted deeply in our history. And that relates to the newest and freshest debates we are having. The renegotiated social contract is going to have to involve the dramatic changes in our economy and media and technology, but the values that are involved in those debates are historical.
When progressives argue that net neutrality is an essential underpinning of American democracy because the internet needs to be a neutral space in the public square, we are making the same argument that the advocates of public education made, and that the advocates of the idea that railroads needed to treat their customers equally made.
When progressives argue for universal broadband so that all Americans have equal opportunities, we are making the same argument that Jefferson did in the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln did in the Gettysburg Address and King did in the "I Have a Dream" speech.
When my partner on OpenLeft, Matt Stoller, created the Legislation 2.0 idea with Senator Durbin, a new way of using the internet to create legislation with the public fully involved in drafting legislation through live-blogging, he was reviving the old argument between Jefferson and Hamilton on true democracy vs. one run by the elites. By opening up the debate to anyone who wanted to participate, Durbin and Stoller were echoing Lincoln by saying we ought to have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Our great leaders have always understood the importance of tying their ideas to history. Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address very consciously went back four score and seven years before, to the Declaration of Independence rather than the Constitution 11 years later that embraced slavery. FDR was the one who created the Jefferson Memorial after conservatives had tended to downplay his legacy in the decades before, and FDR quoted from Jefferson and Tom Paine constantly. Martin Luther King, Jr. stood in Lincoln's shadow, and quoted from Jefferson in his "I Have A Dream" speech.
We live in a new era, with new technologies and new issues facing us. We will have to be innovators, open to fresh ideas about how to renegotiate our social contract. But our basic intellectual underpinnings are the same as they have always been.
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