The death of the American progressive
This article, found on the BBC news website, sums up most of my feelings on the current state of American politics.
Once, in this country, we had a powerful and vibrant progressive movement. A movement that said, without qualm or hesitancy, that the poor should be helped, the young nourished and educated, that the races were equal, that to the extent they were unequal the inequality stemmed from a lack of opportunity, that women should earn equal pay for equal work, that every American should have a job, that the environment should be protected and conserved for the benefit of future generations, that the rich owe a huge debt to the rest of us for their continued exploitation of the working classes - a debt they should pay back by way of financing the increased quality of life for those they oppressed - and that our duties to humankind do not stop at our borders.
Today, the Democratic party will loudly proclaim that the poor should be helped. They they'll turn around and have a $1000 per plate fundraiser and take gigantic corporate payoffs. They'll look the other way while the White House eviscerates programs designed to help the poor. Even when the people helped by the programs are sympathetic examples of the American poor like those served by the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program (the White House is planning a cut, with democratic support, in funding to "freeze" the numbers of people currently on a program whose stated goals are to provide nutritious food to women, infants, and children who cannot afford to eat).
The Democratic leadership will prattle on about how children are our future, but when was the last time that a bill was introduced to drastically increase federal subsidy of state education? When was the last time that Kansas (or any other state for that matter) voluntarily increased education funding by more than some paltry amount? Why don't our students have computers? Why don't they have modern textbooks? Why is their science and math education falling farther and farther behind the rest of the industrialized world when these are precisely the two subjects that determine the future of the American economy? Why are we allowing the fundamental religious right to further degrade science education by watering down scientific principles on equal par with the idea with the idea that everything we see is made up of smaller bits (atomic theory) or the idea that objects are attracted to each other over great distances because of their masses (the theory of gravity)?
Democratic politicians will nominally throw in their obligatory mention of racial issues in campaigns, but heaven help us if we suggest that our urban youth need drastic advances in their opportunities to help them realize the American Dream. As the Daily Show put it in the last Presidential election (paraphrase) "There was a single presidential hopeful who encapsulated the Democratic message, and spoke profoundly and eloquently on a wide range of issues. [flash up picture of Al Sharpton] But he was black, so they nominated this guy [flash up picture of John Kerry]."
The same can be said about any of the other issues. Democrats will argue that the environment should be protected, but won't do anything about it. Democrats will point out that we owe duties to the poor, but won't even admit that they themselves (mostly millionaires) should be giving up their third and fourth mansions to provide food to those who starve to death on the streets of cities they live in. Why?
Whatever happened to the progressives like FDR? Is it so taboo now to say that all Americans should have a job, and if the private economy won't provide it, then damn it, the government will. We could be doing good and generating international political capital by having teams of American youth building bridges, digging irrigation ditches, paving roads, planting fields, digging wells, rebuilding cities, engaging in vaccination programs, and any number of other things around the world, like we did decades ago. Why not now?
What happened to Johnson's "Great Society?" We made a commitment to the poor and elderly - a commitment that we are about to renege on - to do our best to keep them alive and well. We can't afford to subsidize the lives of our seniors so that they can afford both food and medication, but we can certainly afford to cut billions of dollars in taxes on those so fabulously rich that they will never want for even a hundredth yacht.
The Democratic party has abandoned it's historic role as the sanctuary of the American progressive. The party does not appear to care about the young, the old, the working class, those of minority races in any but a token capacity, the environment, or the world. When the did the Democrats become a party demanding that our troops come home from abroad because what happens in the rest of the world is not our business. A leading democrat even characterized the issue as "American troops should be helping Americans."
Isolationism is not a progressive value. Engagement is progressive. We should be saving the world. Why? Because we can.
Let Non Nobis and Te Deum be sounded for the American progressive. Let the dead with charity be enclosed in clay. He is dead and none exist to replace him.
Once, in this country, we had a powerful and vibrant progressive movement. A movement that said, without qualm or hesitancy, that the poor should be helped, the young nourished and educated, that the races were equal, that to the extent they were unequal the inequality stemmed from a lack of opportunity, that women should earn equal pay for equal work, that every American should have a job, that the environment should be protected and conserved for the benefit of future generations, that the rich owe a huge debt to the rest of us for their continued exploitation of the working classes - a debt they should pay back by way of financing the increased quality of life for those they oppressed - and that our duties to humankind do not stop at our borders.
Today, the Democratic party will loudly proclaim that the poor should be helped. They they'll turn around and have a $1000 per plate fundraiser and take gigantic corporate payoffs. They'll look the other way while the White House eviscerates programs designed to help the poor. Even when the people helped by the programs are sympathetic examples of the American poor like those served by the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program (the White House is planning a cut, with democratic support, in funding to "freeze" the numbers of people currently on a program whose stated goals are to provide nutritious food to women, infants, and children who cannot afford to eat).
The Democratic leadership will prattle on about how children are our future, but when was the last time that a bill was introduced to drastically increase federal subsidy of state education? When was the last time that Kansas (or any other state for that matter) voluntarily increased education funding by more than some paltry amount? Why don't our students have computers? Why don't they have modern textbooks? Why is their science and math education falling farther and farther behind the rest of the industrialized world when these are precisely the two subjects that determine the future of the American economy? Why are we allowing the fundamental religious right to further degrade science education by watering down scientific principles on equal par with the idea with the idea that everything we see is made up of smaller bits (atomic theory) or the idea that objects are attracted to each other over great distances because of their masses (the theory of gravity)?
Democratic politicians will nominally throw in their obligatory mention of racial issues in campaigns, but heaven help us if we suggest that our urban youth need drastic advances in their opportunities to help them realize the American Dream. As the Daily Show put it in the last Presidential election (paraphrase) "There was a single presidential hopeful who encapsulated the Democratic message, and spoke profoundly and eloquently on a wide range of issues. [flash up picture of Al Sharpton] But he was black, so they nominated this guy [flash up picture of John Kerry]."
The same can be said about any of the other issues. Democrats will argue that the environment should be protected, but won't do anything about it. Democrats will point out that we owe duties to the poor, but won't even admit that they themselves (mostly millionaires) should be giving up their third and fourth mansions to provide food to those who starve to death on the streets of cities they live in. Why?
Whatever happened to the progressives like FDR? Is it so taboo now to say that all Americans should have a job, and if the private economy won't provide it, then damn it, the government will. We could be doing good and generating international political capital by having teams of American youth building bridges, digging irrigation ditches, paving roads, planting fields, digging wells, rebuilding cities, engaging in vaccination programs, and any number of other things around the world, like we did decades ago. Why not now?
What happened to Johnson's "Great Society?" We made a commitment to the poor and elderly - a commitment that we are about to renege on - to do our best to keep them alive and well. We can't afford to subsidize the lives of our seniors so that they can afford both food and medication, but we can certainly afford to cut billions of dollars in taxes on those so fabulously rich that they will never want for even a hundredth yacht.
The Democratic party has abandoned it's historic role as the sanctuary of the American progressive. The party does not appear to care about the young, the old, the working class, those of minority races in any but a token capacity, the environment, or the world. When the did the Democrats become a party demanding that our troops come home from abroad because what happens in the rest of the world is not our business. A leading democrat even characterized the issue as "American troops should be helping Americans."
Isolationism is not a progressive value. Engagement is progressive. We should be saving the world. Why? Because we can.
Let Non Nobis and Te Deum be sounded for the American progressive. Let the dead with charity be enclosed in clay. He is dead and none exist to replace him.
posted by The Academian | 1:58 PM
3 Comments:
Academian...
I don't disagree with much of what you have to say, but I fear that you perhaps are somewhat selectively remembering the past, while perhaps being a little too hard on politicians of our day.
FDR and Johnson were gutless in their own rights. FDR was too cowardly to publicly take up the issue of Civil Rights, so Eleanor had to do it alone (and the result was rather awkward). Johnson, meanwhile, plunged headlong into Vietnam and then was too cowardly to admit he'd made a mistake.
While I think much of your critique of the current state of the Democratic party has some truth to it, I think many within the party are fighting worthwhile, progressive causes. As for Iraq, the party is far from unified on the issue. I'm more than confident that most democrats would not vote for an immediate pullout. While I agree that America should not be isolationist and should do what good it can in the world, I fail to see how that necessarily translates to the situation in Iraq. I don't think it contradictory to support "saving the world" while having serious misgivings about the Iraqi war and how it has been carried out. I fully support what we tried to do in Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo in the 90's and I lament what we did not do in Rwanda and have thus far failed to do in Darfur, but I question whether the world is better off after what we've done in Iraq. I hope that doesn't make me isolationist.
You've got some good points, Marc. In my remembrance of the past, I am idolizing larger-than-life caricatures of my political heroes. FDR and Johnson had their moments of weakness, but their weaknesses were mitigated by what I see as accompanying strengths - namely, the idea that every person deserves a shot (or maybe more than one) at the American Dream.
My argument regarding the current Iraqi conflict is a bit deeper than I have presented, but my general conclusion (absent nuance) is that the Iraqi people were in a bad situation, and that had we gone about helping them solve their problems in the correct way, we would have been able to save them. As it is, we've undoubtedly made things worse. As bad as Hussein was (in terms of political leadership), he brought both terror and order. Like the saying about WWII Italy, "the trains in Rome always ran on time." Now, we have terror and chaos.
My real beef with the democratic party is the absence of individuals who seem willing to take the heroic steps to combat problems, when it is clearly within their power to do so. When I make a purchase, I have made an implicit statement of my valuation of objects and services. If I buy a Snickers bar at the grocer's checkout line instead of a Three Musketeers, I have given a clear statement that (at the moment of the purchase) I valued the Snickers bar more. Well, at any moment, I have the opportunity to spend that same dollar on buying medication for a young child in Africa who will die without it. My statement about preferring the Snickers bar to the Three Musketeers is also a relative valuation between the life of that African child and my own selfish desire to enjoy some caramel and chocolate.
A politician makes the same economic valuations. The only difference between them and myself is that they have a much larger checkbook at their disposal. Not only do they not spend the People's money in a way that shows that we value people's freedom from suffering, but in fact create policies to heap luxuries on those who do not suffer, at the expense of the impoverished (i.e., huge tax cuts to the super-rich while cutting programs like WIC and Headstart).
Until the Democratic party can come up with a few modern-day heroes capable of demanding that the country make morally justifiable economic valuations, I'm going to play my dirge for the progressive wing of the Democratic party.
May I humbly suggest that Democrats are much more powerless right now than your posts seem to imply? In my opinion, there are countless Democrats that would love to do more to help those in need both at home and abroad. It's difficult to get any Democratic legislation whatsoever passed though when your party is minority in the House, Senate and doesn't hold the Presidency. Take the recent Deficit Reduction Act that cut student loan subsidies and medicaid among other programs to the tune of $40 billion. The Democrats fought that tooth and nail and were lucky to get enough GOP moderates to defect to scale it back to where it was (it had been proposed at some $52 billion and initially included cuts to things like food stamps). How does a "progressive" Democrat expect to fund anything in a Congress so antagonistic toward social programs and with such a myopic obsession with tax cuts (nevermind the ballooning deficit)? I do think the Democratic party needs more "heroes"... hopefully we find some this year and they help us erase our deficits in both the house and the senate (Democrats are widely expected to make large gains in the elections). I do think there ARE some heroes now though... at least I look up to politicians like Barack Obama. I guess I would say there are problems, but they're nuanced and some simply stem from being the minority party.
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