When Admiral Stockdale opened his remarks in the 1992 Vice-Presidential debate with “Who am I? Why am I here?” it became a joke. But, it’s a question I have been asking about myself and about the whole progressive netroots movement. What are we trying to do? I know there isn’t one single answer to that question. We are not all here for the same reasons. We don’t all share the same political goals. Some of us would be satisfied to go back to the days of Bill Clinton. After all, those were prosperous and peaceful times. Crime went down every year. Abortion rates declined every year. The budget deficit was erased and we started paying down the debt.
But, I am not satisfied with going back to Clintonism, and I don’t think the blogosphere should be setting that as its goal. I think we should aim higher and then maybe we can settle for Clintonism if we can’t reach our goal.
Our country is facing big problems that require radically new thinking. I don’t want to go back to standard FDR/LBJ liberalism, either. Demographic and generational inequities alone preclude a return to policies that worked while the Baby Boom was in the work force.
We are living in a new era that requires new thinking. Some of that thinking involves making tough concessions that things that used to work no longer will. A medical program that would have been affordable in the sixties cannot be sustained in an era of prescription drugs. Europe’s social programs are going to come under enormous strain as their population ages and is not replaced with workers to pay for their elderly’s benefits.
The old fossil fuel based economy is not sustainable. Globalization is putting huge pressures on our manufacturing base. We need forward thinking. But, now, more than ever, we need progressive thinking, too.
How do we provide basic affordable health care to all Americans when the cost of aging is soaring and the workforce is shrinking? How do we expand opportunity to young Americans when foreign competition is driving down wages and exporting good jobs?
For me, it all starts with making smart choices about how our government spends its money. We can’t ask our workers to pay for every aging man’s Viagra. And, we especially can’t afford to do so if we will not, at least, negotiate for lower prices for Viagra. We can’t afford to spend 4% of our GDP on our military. We can’t spend $10 billion a month in Iraq, and billions more to protect the homeland against reprisals.
The true costs of our medical care (and other entitlements) and our empire are disguised because we are not paying for them. We are borrowing the money from our children, at interest. We are selling off our country and our future to try to control the Middle East and to give our middle-aged men hard-ons.
The real problems the country and the world face are being ignored while we fight pseudo wars about evolution and the existence of global warming, and the nature of homosexuality, and the morality of abortion. Instead of coming together to tackle really difficult issues, we find ourselves fighting a rearguard action to protect what we thought we had already gained: women’s rights, the franchise for African-Americans, science in public education.
It’s not enough to go back to the divisive days of Clintonism. All these problems got worse, not better, under his watch. He may have slowed the progress of the reactionary trend in American society, but he did not stop its march.
It was under Clinton that the media was deregulated and the right gained an institutional advantage that tilted the national dialogue to the right. The media stopped covering joblessness, poverty and homelessness, as they had done with Reagan and Papa Bush. Pressure mounted to kill off LBJ legacies like Welfare and Affirmative Action. Seventies-style feminism went from being en vogue to being a fringe radical position. Liberalism and progressivism were abandoned in the White House and, thus, relegated to the extreme of the national debate.
In one sense, traditional liberalism succumbed to greater forces, both economic and demographic. But the principles, if not the specific programs, of liberalism still have mass appeal. Americans still believe that people should have access to health care, that they should make a living wage for a hard day’s work, that the sick and needy should not be left to fend for themselves, that quality education is a basic right, that discrimination based on race or gender is wrong. Increasingly, America is coming around to the idea that discrimination based on sexual preference is wrong.
At its base, progressivism is not an adherence to any single program or way of doing things, but a dedication to providing for the basic needs and sustanence of everyone, while expanding the opportunities for everyone. ‘No Child Left Behind’ is a progressive idea.
Progressive politics has become marginalized. And, more than any other factor, it is the media that is responsible for the marginalization. The progressive blogosphere should make it one of its primary goals to counter the media spin that distorts what progressivism is all about.
But, in addition to the media, Washington has also become increasingly dominated by corporate lobbyists, and both parties find it absolutely necessary to cave into these lobbyists in order to raise the funds they need to campaign. So, the second thing the progressive blogosphere needs to do is find and fund its own candidates that will forego corporate donations and ignore their lobbyists.
The third thing we need to do is start getting to work on coming up with new progressive policies that fit into our new world and new fiscal restraints. We can’t afford to just create astronomically expensive new entitlements for people. We can’t even afford the entitlements that already exist. Jerome a Paris’s energy initiative is a great example of the kind of work we need to be doing to find progressive third-way solutions to our problems.
So “Who am I? Why am I here?” We’re here to change things, not go backwards. It’s people-powered politics. We can make progressive politics mainstream again and provide new leadership. It’s not about just getting Democrats elected. It’s important that we get a new kind of Democrat elected.
We’re here to level the media playing field, to provide a source of non-corporate funding, and to come up with non-corporate reform legislation. We can do this, but we cannot allow the bright lights of fame and insider access to derail us or co-opt us in the task.
