Progressives Need a Paradigm Shift

What progressives need today more than anything else is a “paradigm shift”. To be sure, we need to reject all the attempts to privatize Medicare and Medicaid, we need to defend the ACA, Planned Parenthood, Voting Rights and the EPA, we need a financial transactions tax and we need to take hundreds of billions from a bloated military budget to fund our communities, to repair and update our infrastructure, to provide public education for our children, etc.

But winning some (or even all) of these battles will NOT change the situation we are in unless we tie them to a revolution in the way Americans think about the role of government in society. In 1962 Thomas Kuhn popularized the concept of “paradigm shift” in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolution. He argued that scientific advancement is not evolutionary, but is accomplished through revolutions where “one conceptual world view is replaced by another.” (Think - Newton, Darwin and Einstein) I would argue that this same model applies to Americans’ ideas about government’s role in society.

The reactionaries (please, let’s stop calling them conservatives, because that’s not what they are) understand this. More than 40 years ago, they set out to produce just such a paradigm shift, to reverse the social and economic thinking of the previous 70 years of history in this country. To undo what the Progressive Movement, the New Deal and The Great Society (and similar movements lead by Socialists and Social Democrats in Europe) had accomplished, they had to vilify government as the source of all problems in society (particularly in the economy) and to promote the ideas of economic individualism and the free market as the solution to these problems.

Their intellectual forefather, Friedrich Hayek, provided the economic and philosophical underpinnings in his book, The Road to Serfdom. In this work, Hayek argues that government intervention in the economy (and collective action more generally) inevitably leads to tyranny and that the only defense of individual liberty is the free market and laissez faire capitalism. These ideas, further developed by the Chicago School of Economics and think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, formed the basis for the neoclassical school of thought and the antigovernment politics of the new right in the 1970s.

Enter David Stockman, et al. From the Reagan “revolution” to the Tea Party and Donald Trump, the arguments of reaction have been based on the acceptance of this conceptual framework. If we accept this paradigm (and it is today, and has been for the past 30 years, the dominant framework in economics and politics), the best we can hope for is to fight a rear-guard action to slow the erosion of programs that meet the needs of ordinary Americans. In 2017 that is what we are doing, and it feels very much like a terrible game of Whack-A-Mole.

What we need is to shift the paradigm, to reassert the concepts of collective response to problems and the expansion of the public sector (aka the commons) as the only guarantor of real freedom and social progress. This won’t be easy, but to use a sports analogy, the best defense is a good offense.

To change the debate we must do three things: first, redefine what government spending is and why it is critical to society; second, overcome the argument that the government is already spending too much and as a result going into debt and make clear that government budget deficits are NOT primarily a product of increased spending over the last 40 years (with the exception of spending on the military & war, which has played a significant role), but rather of reduced revenues due to tax cuts for the wealthy and tax avoidance by the corporations; and finally emphasize that the growing economic inequality and the problems it creates are a product of the very changes in government policies which the reactionaries keep shoving down our throats.

Government (more accurately “the state”) is the way in which a society protects and provides benefits for individuals that they can not effectively provide for themselves. It performs that role by taking some of the wealth produced by society (usually through taxes) and investing it to make available these benefits and protections. While individuals may disagree with this or that particular use of society’s resources (and as progressives we do disagree with its use to project American power and dominance abroad), we need to recreate a consensus that overall what governments do is both necessary and beneficial. Here we can use examples to demonstrate how society could not possibly function without these collective activities (police, roads, schools, etc.)

Well duh, everybody knows that, don’t they? No, this is where the reactionaries get support from ordinary Americans, by simply denying this role for government. What progressives must do is repeat this framework whenever we fight for a particular program or policy. We need to point out that the collective actions of government benefit society even when they may not affect a particular individual. Public education benefits everyone in a multitude of ways, even those who don’t have children in the schools!

But government has a second role to play (and one that it has not always carried out). Jared Diamond in his book “Collapse” points out that individuals’ and private corporations’ pursuit of their short-term interests may frequently occur at the expense of other individuals and of the long-term survival of the society. Thus, a critical role of the state is to defend those collective and long-term interests against rapacious forces that threaten individual and/or group survival (read coal and oil industries and global warming).

Conclusion: Society needs government with adequate resources to carry out those functions. The question then becomes, where can those resources come from, not where can we cut, cut, cut.

Our second task should be a lot easier. “Congressional Budget Office data show that the tax cuts have been the single largest contributor to the reemergence of substantial budget deficits in recent years.  Legislation enacted since 2001 added about $3.0 trillion to deficits between 2001 and 2007, with nearly half of this deterioration in the budget due to the tax cuts (about a third was due to increases in security spending, and about a sixth to increases in domestic spending).” (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities) And that does not even include the much more significant Reagan/Bush tax cuts of the 1980s and early 1990s.

But tax cuts have had another “side effect” recognized as early as the later 1980s. Kevin Phillips (former chief political analyst for Nixon’s 1968 campaign) in his book “The Politics of Rich and Poor” points out that it was a major factor in the massive transfer of wealth from the middle class and the poor to the very wealthy beginning in the 1980s.

Which brings us to the third point we need to hammer home. While many “mainstream” economists and politicians seem oblivious to the fact, the outstanding economic problem of the 21^st century is not growth, but rather income and wealth inequality, that is the distribution of the income society produces.

The third point requires a lot more analysis, but I would highly recommend the book our Wilmington Progressive Book Club is currently reading and discussing, Runaway Inequality by Les Leopold as a good starting point. More on this later.

The Empire Strikes Back

In the wake of the populist explosion of the last 8 year that has swept the US Democratic, UK Labor and other Social Democratic parties from power, we have seen two different responses from the traditional conservative and neo-liberal elites that have dominated Western politics for the last 40 years, particularly since the fall of Communism. This is perhaps most true of the US and Great Britain.

The conservative elites have embraced rightwing populism and are utilizing its energy to continue to roll back the economic, social and political advances that social democracy achieved in the 20^th Century. They have done this by focusing the legitimate anger of ordinary people on immigrants, terrorism, etc., while enriching their friends at the public trough and through privatization of the commons. And they are winning just about everywhere, but particularly in the US.

Not so the neo-liberal elites. They have not only resisted the populist wave, they continue to urge that the way forward is to move to the center, although in this period the “center” keeps shifting to the right. They do this for several reasons: a sincere, if misguided, belief that by moving to the right they will pick up support from middle forces alienated by the extreme right turn of the conservative parties; a desire to maintain support from wealthy patrons in finance (Wall Street) and in the technology sector (Silicon Valley); and a supposition that the left has no other place to go.

One would think that after a series of disastrous defeats (and long-term decline, as is the case for the Democratic Party in the US and many Socialist and Social Democratic Parties in Europe) they might have reason to question this approach. But, NO, instead they keep doubling down.

Two articles in the New York Times illustrate this refusal by the liberal elite to take seriously the populist explosion and the force behind it – the growth of inequality. The first “John Lennon vs Steve Bannon” by Jochen Bittner (Feb 23, 2017) focuses on cultural and political differences as the source of the deepening rift with American and European societies. According to Bittner, the Lennonists have an internationalist, traditional liberal/libertarian, secular world view often based on identity politics while Bannonism arouse as a critique of the Lennonists and takes a nationalist perspective, is more likely to align with Judeo-Christianity, and rejects the idea that various sectors of society (women, minorities, LGBTQ) are still not treated equality with straight, white males. His conclusion – that the two world views must engage in dialogue from the center, a “third way”, if you like.

Tony Blair (yes, he keeps turning up like a bad penny; reminds me of someone else closer to home) is even more direct in his opinion piece “Against Populism, the Center Must Hold” (March 3, 2017). Blair’s dismissal of “leftist populism” as being unable to compete with rightwing populism shows that he is totally out of touch with what has been happening – both in the US (Sanders campaign) and in Southern Europe. His recipe for the “progressives” is to build from the center by caving to the right on issues like immigration and gender identity (he doesn’t mention racism or sexism, but I’m sure he would include these as issues that the progressives obsess about). Then, we can bring together Silicon Valley (did he forget to mention Wall Street?) and those responsible for public policy and all live happily in our Brave New World.

The problem with all this BS is that it ignores the 8000 pound gorilla in the room. “It’s the economy stupid”, to quote James Carville, campaign strategist for the Bill Clinton campaign. Populist movements do not arise out of thin air; they are a response to something that causes widespread pain. Is it a coincidence that we have seen these movements, both of the right and left, in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession and the lack of a real recovery (forget the great gambling house for the rich, the stock market) for the large majority of the working class in Europe and the US?

Economic inequality has reached an extreme that has not been seen since the Gilded Age and continues to grow. Real economists (like Thomas Piketty and Joseph Stiglitz), not those who are point men for big business, have been pointing this out for several years, but the political elites of the Democratic Party and its counterparts in Europe have turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the consequences.

Guy Standing, Professor of Economics at the University of London, in his book The Precariat: A Dangerous New Class, has given us some insight into the social and political implications of runaway inequality and they are not pretty. His analysis concludes that members of this new class face a life of insecurity, lacking prospects for long term employment (even m any who are college graduates) and living a precarious life on the edge of poverty and despair. His analysis is that as much as 50% of the population of European countries and the US now belongs to the “precariat”. Its members are susceptible to demagogues, think Trump, unless the progressive left offers clear and palpable alternatives.

The road ahead for progressives in the US must not be to double down on the failed politics of neoliberalism. If we are to resist and overcome the rightwing surge, we must offer something more – a true vision of a society where the government and the economy meet the needs of the many, not the rapacious greed of the few.