Booman wrote a thoughtful piece on this site some time ago about winning the argument (I don’t remember if that’s exactly what he called it). But the point was that there are certain issues, like voting rights, that were once hotly debated, and are now settled. And Booman’s point was that eventually these issues are settled in the favor of the liberal viewpoint.
I want to make a distinction that is seldom made between liberalism and progressivism and to argue that the opposite is true about the progressive viewpoint. The argument is settled, and the progressives lost.
The heydey of progressivism was the era from the 1880s to the end of the Wilson Administration. There were different issues which were tossed together to characterize progressive positions, but the defining character of progressivism was an attitude toward large corporations that ranged from distrust to loathing. This is the attitude that united politicians as disparate as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Bob LaFollette.
2010 should have been a banner year for progressives. It is hard to conceive of a more perfect storm. There was the overriding issue of the continuing economic mess that had been brought about by grossly irresponsible corporate behavior. Then the BP oil rig blew up, causing the greatest environmental disaster in American history. And as the cherry on the sundae, the CEO of BP turned out to be a clownish caricature of corporate insensitivity.
And yet, I found myself wondering all summer, where is the outrage. If you run the highlight reel of anti-BP outrage, it consists of a single episode of a now-unseated Congressman (and a Republican at that) pointing out to the CEO that if his company had been named Japanese Petroleum, he would have been obligated to perform seppuku. Just compare the level of outrage this year against BP and against ACORN, and that will tell you all you need to know about the state of the progressive movement in Americn politics.
So, in a year tailor-made for a progressive, anti-corporate argument, that argument was never advanced in any congressional race of which I am aware.
The argument, basically, has been lost. Lost in a final sort of way, the way that the argument in favor of Prohibition has been lost (although whatever the evils of alcohol were in 1910 are no less present a century later). The very idea of a corporation suggests to me environmental degradation, underpaid workers, corruption of the political process, destruction of community-based businesses, and a host of other evils. But I am so far out of the mainstream on this that my views are no consequence in a political sense.
The prevailing view of the corporation is that the corporation produces wonderful goods (I find even the use of the word “goods” to describe things like Big Macs to be suspect, but what can you do?). They create jobs. They have made America innovative, prosperous, and strong. In the story that we tell ourselves, the good corporations were hounded by the evil unions and evil regulators who made it impossible for the corporations to function anymore, and so they had to send their jobs out of America.
Where I live, in Wisconsin, the biggest issue this year was a railroad line that the Federal government wanted to build between Madison and Milwaukee. Imagine this: In a state with alarmingly high unemployment, an infrastructure project that Ted Stevens and Robert Byrd could only dream of falls into the lap of the state, promising an influx of hundreds and millions of dollars and thousands of jobs, and the voters wanted no part of it. If the mantra of Republicans in the 80s was “No New Taxes,” today it has become “No New Infrastructure.”
Let’s do a little thought experiment. Suppose that it turned out that high-speed rail was actually profitable, and some large corporation was going to invest a billion dollars or so to build this very rail system. Does anybody doubt that the response would have been totally different? People would be ecstatic, they would be jumping over each other to praise the corporation and welcome them to Wisconsin and hand out any tax breaks they could come up with.
Any politician who takes the progressive, anti-corporation line of argument is going to be marginalized. The only national figure to make the progressive case in contemporary politics is Ralph Nader, who is not only marginalized, but has become perhaps the most reviled figure in politics.
I put the score at 534-1 because of Bernie Sanders. Maybe you could count Kucinich and make it 533-2. Maybe there are a few others hiding in the woodwork. It doesn’t really matter. A progressive today is a fringe and ineffectual figure. The argument has been lost.