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I like Jon Cowan personally, and think his Third Way organization has done some interesting and thoughtful framing of the issues over the years, although I have disagreed with them sometimes on the positions they have taken. With his and Anne Kim's latest post, though, I feel like Third Way has decided on the old DLC strategy: go out of your way to gratuitously insult the progressive community. Cowan and Kim set up the ultimate straw man stereotype: that progressives want to make "expanding the entitlement state the defining goal in the 21st century as well." The "as well" at the end of that sentence references their lead in the article, which suggests that progressives in the 20th century were defined by, put all of our political capital into, a cradle to grave safety net.
After building that big straw man, Cowen/Kim suggest what we ought to be able to do instead is "policies that build national and individual wealth." They then make three points:
- With the passage of health care, the safety net project is completed- we really don't need to worry about poor people anymore, or working-class folks who might fall through the cracks.
- Second, we have to grow the economy or deficits will overwhelm the safety net.
- Third, "a more generous safety net is not what our nation needs to win in the 21st century."
The temptation on a piece like this is to react defensively, or just write if off as another example of conservative Democrats reflexively stereotyping the progressive movement, but I think a piece like this is a great opportunity to say what progressives really do stand for. This tired old caricature of what progressives care about doesn't understand the entire history of the American progressives tradition from Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson through Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and Abraham Lincoln; from the (real) populists of the 1880s and 1890s to the Progressives of the Teddy Roosevelt era to the New Deal; from Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy to progressive champions today. We have never cared only about the poor and safety nets, although we do care about lifting them up and expanding the middle class. What we have cared about and fought for is an economy built from the bottom up. Our view is that prosperity is best built for the long-term not by helping the wealthy get wealthier, but by investing in poor and middle-class folks so that they get good education and jobs with good wages and benefits. We believe in a safety net and higher wages for the poor and working people not only because it is compassionate, but because people with a decent standard of living can buy products, and that makes the economy hum.
One other rather important thing to note when comparing a progressive philosophy to one that espouses as its central goal creating wealth: it's that old pluralist thing. From Jefferson and Madison talking about the importance of widely distributed political and economic power to Andrew Jackson, the populists, Teddy Roosevelt and FDR taking on corporations they thought were too powerful, progressives have believed that wealth and power should not be concentrated in the hands of an oligarchy. When six banks control assets worth more than 63% of our country's GDP, that is too much market power. When one or two insurers dominate an entire state's health care market, that's too much market power. Progressives believe that a free market economy only works when there is real competition among a wide array of competitors. When Jefferson was opposed to Hamilton's sweetheart deals with a handful of big banks, progressives believed in competition. When Teddy Roosevelt took on the big trusts, progressives believed in competition. When FDR got Glass-Steagall passed to break apart the big banks, progressives believed in competition. And we still do today. Core to the progressive worldview is the idea that both the economy and democracy work better when power and wealth are less concentrated, and that citizens and their government need to provide a check on big corporate power.
The progressive worldview from Paine and Jefferson to today has always been more broad in scope than just caring about the safety net. In the Cowan/Kim straw man world, they feel a need to lecture progressives on the importance of clean energy, innovation, modernizing infrastructure, intellectual property rights, immigration reform, and education policy. We have never needed such lectures, as our movement has provided the leadership and the troops to put all of those issues front and center. We have always been on the front lines for building a strong economy, but based on middle-class prosperity, not trickle-down economics that begin (and all too frequently end) with helping the already wealthy and already powerful.
That, I guess, is the defining difference between progressives and Third Way folks (and conservative Republicans for that matter): we are not going to define our mission as policies that help build individual wealth. Building our nation's prosperity? Yes, absolutely. But us old-fashioned progressives still don't think that folks with individual wealth need any help from us in building it or growing it. In the which side are you on question, we believe that our loyalties lie with those in the middle class and yes, those struggling to make it at all. We believe in helping those folks get more political power and more prosperity, and we're happy to let those who already have wealth and power fend for themselves.
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