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.