The series finale of Bill Moyers Journal last night (transcript here) fittingly opened with a segment on Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, a contemporary heartland organization carrying on not just the spirit, but a good deal of the organizing approach of the populist movement of the late 19th Century. Others have noted the loss of Bill Moyers Journal in Quick Hits, and of course it's perfectly reflective of the Obama era that we should lose such a distinctive and populist voice, and see it replaced with yet more corporate-friendly pablum.
But I want to focus on what Moyers himself focused on, and relate it back to an outstanding question from my diaries on regaining progressive focus that began with "Regaining focus: Growing a progressive majority-Part 1"--and that is the question of how we should proceed in our organizing strategy. The populist movement is an important model for this, because it was mass movement deeply rooted in local communities, which was also an intellectually sophisticated, morally grounded and historically informed movement. It was also centered outside the party system. At one point in the segment, an ICCI activist, Hugh Espey says:
The power of groups like CCI is its members. It's people that's going to give legs to our organization. People give legs to democracy. We're just everyday people, regular folks. Grandmas, grandpas, people you see in the grocery store. People you see in church. People you see at school. Just regular folks that don't want to be trampled on by big money.
These are, in fact, exactly the people that the Tea Party pretends to be, except they aren't overwhelmingly white, well-off, and conservative. Instead, they are who they say they are-and no hidden corporate sponsors!
This diary is intended to continue a progression started two weeks ago in a pair of diaries titled "Regaining focus: Growing a progressive majority", parts 1 & 2, combining that progression with observations drawn from the previous diary today, "A REALLY big picture look at at what works--pragmatism vs. ideology in economic development--Pt 1". The purpose is to clarify some basic issues about organizing for long-term progressive political power.
Recap
Before getting started, a brief review is in order. In Regaining focus: Growing a progressive majority-Part 1, I introduced Chris's idea of A Liberal/Reform Coalition, which he introduced in his post-2004 election diary, "Eureka! Or How To Break the Republican Majority Coalition". In that diary, Chris identified a non-ideological reform-oriented segment of the population, which has shown up in third-party presidential campaigns since the Populist era, and argued that liberalism could sensibly be expanded to deal with reformer concerns. In Part 2, I discussed the political foundations of what such a coalition might look like, starting with evidence of the progressive nature of millennial voters as a whole and the example of the Dean campaign and the continued thrust of his 50-state strategy, then moving on to two examples I had discussed during the 2008 primary campaign. First was Jacob Hacker's Great Risk Shift analysis which sees a security focus as enabling and encouraging creative and product risk by managing needlessly crippling risk. Second was Robert Fuller's Dignitarian analysis, a comprehensive framework for an all-inclusive egalitarian politics.
Last week, following a tip from commentator essaywhuman, I discussed Stirling Newberry's "Petroleum Paradigm" analysis, which slices up the electorate along different lines, and does a particularly good job of clarifying the deep, but poorly-understood chasm between Obama and progressive committed to fundamental change. One of the most significant points of this analysis was that both Obama and his more progressive critics are advocates of gradual transition--the difference is gradual transition to what. As Newberry explained it, progressives are committed to a new order, a post-petroleum world that operates by a different logic, while the moderates that Obama represents want a transition to a more stable version of the dying petroleum paradigm--a practical impossibility that's politically quite appealing since it avoids all-out war. In "Triangulating progressive change: Adding Stirling Newberry's 3-polar petroleum politics to the mix". I wrote:
(2) Second, in a passage already quoted above, Stirling perfectly captures the fact that progressives are as much about gradual and carefully-managed transitions as anyone else. They are not about radical jump-off-the-cliff changes. But what they are about is moving away from continued subsidizing of and subservience to the dinosaur special interests that are bleeding us dry:
The second view is that the land casino can continue longer, but only if carefully managed, this is the "Moderate" view. The third view is that it requires careful management to transition away from the land casino, or the "Progressive" view.
This captures perfectly the difference between progressives and Obama, as well as capturing why it's been hard for many progressives to see how he differs from us.
In my next diary, I'll continue by discussing some factors that Stirling didn't touch on, and how I see his outlook and mine fitting into a larger framework.
But the more I thought about it, the more complicated this began to seem. So I decided to break things down a bit. In this diary, I want to do just two things: first, highlight some ways in which the Democratic establishment--not the DFH McGovernites--destroyed the dominance of the Democratic Party by empowering what Stirling Newberry calls the "Confederate" block of voters. And second, add a reminder about the petroleum-based foundations for the "long war", and how Obama began preparing his transition to where he is now, fully signed on for the duration of that war.
In a followup EarthDay-themed diary, I will discuss the true costs of continuing to cling to the "Petroleum paradigm", which is what Obama has also signed on for.
The Democratic Party's Role In Creating "Confederate" America
The standard narrative of why the New Deal coalition lost power blames the left. The right says it was because the left went crazy, feminists burning bras, gays judges letting criminals out of jails and kicking God out of the classroom, etc. The center says it was more noble, in part-LBJ saying, "There goes the South for a generation" after signing the Civil Rights Act-but also foolish in failing to understand and sympathize with "Joe Sixpack". There is some truth in the second version of this narrative, but there's a lot more truth in a story seldom told about the role of the Democratic Party establishment in sowing the seeds of its own destruction. And much of this story revolves around oil.
(A) Segregated oil-based suburbanization, hollowing out the Democratic Party's urban Northern industrial base. In America's Undeclared War: What's Killing Our Cities and How We Can Stop It , Daniel Lazare explores a centuries-long antipathy to cities which New Deal Democrats uncritically played along with this, effectively undermining their urban working-class base and building the segregated, soon-to-be-Republican suburbs. Even as the New Deal restructuring of the mortgage market made mass homeownership possible, the institutionalization of geographically coded financing-most notably redlining-facilitated not just a suburbanization process, but one that was decidedly conservative in producing both class and race segregation. The Publishers Weekly review of Lazare's book is worth quoting in full to give a sense of the scope of stakes and forces at play over the long sweep of time, to which New Deal Democrats were largely blind:
"I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man," said Thomas Jefferson, voicing a concern of many early Americans about the moralAand, implicitly, democratic and politicalAsuperiority of rural over urban life. If Jefferson's view was predicated on a fear of powerful federal and state governments (dependent upon urban centers), Alexander Hamilton promoted strong, stable states and the idea of cities as necessary to economic and civil health. According to Lazare (The Frozen Republic), the Jeffersonians are winning this ideological fight, much to America's detriment. As a result, he says, the U.S. consistently treats its urban centers with prejudice and neglect. Lazare has marshaled an enormous range of ideas and facts to advance and substantiate his argument, variously suggesting that though cities breed social reform, they are traditionally condemned as hotbeds of immorality; that automobile mass production occasioned urban redesign that endangers the public; that California's draconian 1979 Proposition 13 tax cut further eroded the state's highways and urban schools; and that Jacob Riis's urban reform campaigns were profoundly anti-immigrant and anti-urban. In his last chapter, "Solutions," Lazare calls for implementing our (constitutional) right to amend our "ancient Constitution," and for broader acceptance of emerging technologies like cheaper, faster and lightweight trains. Drawing upon rich historical details, the urban and social theory of John Kenneth Galbraith, Jurgen Habermas, Michel Foucault and Jane Jacobs, and economic and environmental studies, Lazare provides an engaging, provocative and alarming portrait of America at the turn of the millennium.
In my diary last weekend, "Regaining focus: Growing a progressive majority-Part 2", essaywhuman drew attention to a July 2009 diary Sterling Newberry, "Three Polar Politics In Post-Petroleum America". While my diary was based on Chris's post-2004 election analysis, which resulted in his argument for a liberal/reformer alliance, Stirling came at things from a different direction. First he argued that America was operating within what he called the "Petroleum paradigm", which he introduced thus:
The American economy exists in the "Petroleum Paradigm." That paradigm is visible in a host of ways, the fundamental idea is that value is created by turning petroleum into consumption, and using petroleum driven transportation to act as a "wind" that expands the size of the suburban land bubble. Think of it like a balloon, with people driving being the pressure that keeps it inflated.
People "make" money by creating communities, and drawing in waves of people afterward who are willing to pay more for houses. In this way public goods of community, economy, and education, are turned into private goods that require that people buy houses in the right places, or drive farther. Much of the Reagan revision to the structure of the American economy was to prop up these suburban land rents by a variety of means.
As long as the petroleum paradigm exists, any efficiencies will be plowed back into generating more sprawl, and attempting to maintain the land rents in the form of higher housing prices.
More on this in a moment, below the fold. Stirling went on to argue that there were two distinct primary ways of trying to manage this paradigm, representing fundamentally different political blocks, and another block that realizes the need to transition away from the paradigm:
The present break down of political forces follows three different views of this thesis. The first view is that the land casino merely needs to be allowed to run. This is the "Confederate" wing of American politics. The second view is that the land casino can continue longer, but only if carefully managed, this is the "Moderate" view. The third view is that it requires careful management to transition away from the land casino, or the "Progressive" view. The Confederate view has between 30% and 40% of the voting population nationally, with local majorities in swathes of the empty reaches of the country and in the South. The Moderate view commands between 35% and 45% of the country, with local majorities in the metro-suburbs and some cities. The Progressive view has approximately 20% support, with local majorities in scattered areas. America's three wings of politics are not a spectrum. The Moderates do not live between the Progressives and the Confederates, but in a direction away from both.
Now, I agree with essaywhuman's intent to bring this thesis into the discussion, as I think it has some very valuable insights to offer (plus a shitload of links). But I also think that Stirling's approach is more poetic than analytical, and that some things-such as the relative strengths of the blocks he referse to above-are not just speculative, but almost certainly wrong. For example, later on he writes:
Each of the three wings of American politics are based on a particular thesis. The Confederate believe in the Imperium Thesis. The Imperium Thesis states that America's providing of security is an irreplaceable asset, and that therefore other nations will fund their parts of the American system of rents indefinitely. The corollary to this is that other activities that do not fund American Imperium crowd out that debt. Namely all social programs and infrastructure not tied to the military sector and so on.
Now, as I read Stirling, what he's saying here is not that everyone involved consciously subscribes to this thesis, or even that a lot of them do, but that the logic of what they do consciously believe inherently implies the acceptance of this thesis. But this is where cold hard facts argue for considerably more nuance, since those who think we're spending too little on defense (from the General Social Survey) also think we're spending too little on a broad index of social spending:
Now, it's obvious that those who think we're spending too little on the military are less supportive of social spending most broadly (4-6 items) than others are, but they're still far more likely to say we're spending too little on social programs than to say we're spending too much. And thus, while I think Stirling is definitely onto something very important in his diary, his argument needs to be taken with a grain of salt on some of the details.
That said, I'd like to highlight what I think Stirling got right:
The Political Foundations of A Liberal/Reform Coalition
In Part 1, I introduced Chris's idea of A Liberal/Reform Coalition, which he introduced in his post-2004 election diary, "Eureka! Or How To Break the Republican Majority Coalition". In that diary, Chris identified a non-ideological reform-oriented segment of the population, which has shown up in third-party presidential campaigns since the Populist era, which he talked about thus:
This segment of the electorate can be swung toward the liberal camp, thus breaking the Republican majority coalition, if the pragmatic, non-dogmatic, reformer, anti-status quo, entrepreneurial aspects of liberalism are foregrounded and turned into a national narrative and platform. Pulling this off will also require dismantling the Great Backlash narrative of oppressive liberal elites, and replacing it with a narrative about conservatism being a force that relies on pure theory, faith-based worldviews, and that supports status-quo institutions such as corporations and the media.
In this diary, I want explore what it would take to actually do that, focusing on a few key foundational thrusts.
Millennial Foundations
To begin with, I want to argue that the Democrats have already started down the path Chris suggests, albeit not fully consciously. The Dean campaign was the start of this, and Dean's implementation of the 50-state strategy--which Chris also talked about in a couple of related posts at the time--continued the process. What's key to this was/is creating a vibrant grass-roots political culture in which ideas and initiative can come from below--and, indeed, are encouraged to do so. And the evidence of the success of this can be seen in a recent Pew report, "A Pro-Government, Socially Liberal Generation: Democrats' Edge Among Millennials Slips". This report shows both the enormous potential support among Millenials, as well how Obama's status quo presidency has undercut this support. It's my contention that the significant difference between Millenials and earlier generations you'll see in the chart below is due in large part to their shared perception of the liberal/reform coalition as logical political development--as already demonstrated by the Dean campaign and the 50-state strategy.
Perhaps the most striking evidence of this can be seen by comparing the ideological self-identification of Millennials to other generations:
The difference here is simply astonishing. Even the electorate the gave LBJ a 60-40 landslide victory over Barry Goldwater was significantly more likely to identify itself as "conservative" rather than "liberal" by a margin somewhere between 3-2 and 2-1, a range that the conservative/liberal ratio has stayed within ever since then. Of course, this has been counterbalanced by the fact that a large number of self-identified conservatives actually support liberal policies, particularly on core New Deal social spending issues. But the more that politics revolves around identity, the more this ideological ratio has favored conservatives. With Millennials, this is no longer so. The identification ratio hovers around 1-1 instead.
Immediately following the 2004 election, Chris engaged in nearly month-long period of analysis and reflection, which culminated in a post "Eureka! Or How To Break the Republican Majority Coalition". In it, Chris proposed a very different direction from that of a liberal/libertarian coalition along the lines proposed by Markos (in his Cato Institute "Libertarian Democrat" article) and others. Instead of aligning ourselves with anti-government types, Chris argued we should align ourselves with government-reformer types--voters who could be anti-government in some ways or circumstances, but who were just as much reachable by a messages of reform, transparency and openness. Howard Dean took the party in a promising direction with his 50-state strategy, nurturing the grassroots s never before, and Obama campaigned by appearing to stand for more of the same. But by aligning himself with Wall Street & other insiders, Obama has drastically undercut the logic of the direction Chris laid out, even as libertarians have turned sharply against him, as others, such as Ed Kilgore ("Liberals and Libertarians Finally Break Up") have recently noted. Chris was right on target, I argue in this diary, and to get out of the hole Obama & the Democrats have dug for themselves, we need to get back to the strategy that Chris proposed. It's going to be harder with Obama working against us--no question about it. But it's far and away the most realizable political path forward over the long haul. Let's look at the argument in more detail.
The Potential of A Liberal/Reform Coalition
Specifically, in "Eureka!" Chris wrote:
I believe it is possible to break the majority Republican coalition, which is primarily an ideological coalition of conservatives against liberals, and create a majority Democratic coalition that will last for at least two or three decades, by liberalizing / progressivizing the 10-15% of the population that is currently primarily reform minded and non-ideological (and thus has a strong tendency to support major third-party efforts). While it is currently non-ideological, this segment of the population, which has existed in large numbers since at least the 1880's, has an outlook on politics that is far more closely allied with liberalism than conservatism because of its emphasis on reform. It is, to put it one way, latently liberal. This segment of the electorate can be swung toward the liberal camp, thus breaking the Republican majority coalition, if the pragmatic, non-dogmatic, reformer, anti-status quo, entrepreneurial aspects of liberalism are foregrounded and turned into a national narrative and platform. Pulling this off will also require dismantling the Great Backlash narrative of oppressive liberal elites, and replacing it with a narrative about conservatism being a force that relies on pure theory, faith-based worldviews, and that supports status-quo institutions such as corporations and the media.
More specifically, Chris presented a series of seven maps of significant third party presidential vote strength:
STATE BLOGS
Powered by: SoapBlox