Progressives are trying to rebuild their themes to consolidate the movement and prepare a foundation for long-term influence.
Saturday, July 4, 2009
by Paul Starobin
Imagine a squad of construction workers with tools in hand, except that the team isn't assembling a road or a bridge or a building but a sequence of words. Yes, words. The words are being hammered into themes, or story lines, and the story lines are being incorporated into a grand edifice that might be called a narrative, or a meta-narrative, to use the postmodern term of art.
So goes an all-consuming task of Information Age politics -- the construction of stories that can inspire the troops and appeal to wider audiences. No riper example of this quest can be found than in the American progressive movement -- the nationwide community of left-oriented activists bound by a proud if somewhat antiquated history and peopled by a new generation of activists hailing from organized labor, peace groups, environmental organizations, think tanks, universities, foundations, magazines, book publishing houses, and, not least, the blogosphere.
Their work is already producing some surprising twists. For example, did you know that the 1990s, when Democrat Bill Clinton inhabited the White House, were bad years for the American worker and the U.S. economy? That is the tale -- more on the facts later -- that progressives are telling as they seek to indict an entire period of American political history, from the time of Ronald Reagan through to the presidency of George W. Bush, as complicit in malevolent policies such as financial deregulation.
As progressives understand, it is not enough to simply stand up and ask Americans to support the movement's long-standing aims such as universal health care, strict regulatory controls on Wall Street, easier organizing terms for unions, and a more even distribution of income. The agenda must be embedded in a larger context; it must be bound to larger moral and emotional considerations to which every American can relate. A skillful narrative can serve this purpose, for "in human affairs," as Franklin Roosevelt once told Charles de Gaulle, "the public must be offered a drama."
Thus, for the progressive movement to steer the national political conversation, as it has not for decades, for the movement to become a weightier presence in a Democratic Party that welcomes its grassroots energy but not always its policy advice, the 21st-century technology of politics as storytelling must be mastered. And no time can be lost, because the global economic crisis is the progressive opportunity of a lifetime.
In a recent Rasmussen Reports survey, a bare majority of Americans, 53 percent, said that capitalism is better than socialism, and among adults under age 30, only 37 percent said that capitalism was better, with 33 percent preferring socialism and 30 percent undecided. No matter that Americans tend to have a fuzzy idea of what socialism is. The point is that unfettered capitalism -- the style of capitalism that makes conservative hearts in America swoon--is under heavy suspicion. Ordinary Americans are open to another story on how the country can regain its vitality and happiness -- a story that might come from the province of the Left, whose perpetual warnings about the perils of unregulated markets now seem prescient. "Today, more than two-thirds of Americans rate a 'progressive' approach to politics favorably, a 25-point increase in favorability over the last five years," noted John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira, co-directors of the Progressive Studies Program at the Center for American Progress, in a recent article in The American Prospect.
And so goes the job, the great job, of progressive politics, of crafting and conveying the narrative, choosing selectively from history. As ever in symbolic exercises, the use of language is key -- hence the calculated eschewing of "liberal" as a label Americans tend to dislike, but many other delicate considerations also arise. Which thematic elements to include? Which to leave out? Which media vehicles are best for packaging and marketing the most resonant themes?
These are the kinds of questions that Hollywood filmmakers and Madison Avenue marketers typically consider in a day's work -- and the questions are likewise familiar to the political consultants who run election campaigns. But it is one thing to create a narrative to get a candidate through a single election cycle and quite another to retool a national political movement for long-term success.
To do this, the movement is drawing on folks who have experience at this sort of work and are adept at new media. Jane Hamsher, in an earlier life in Los Angeles, was a producer of Natural Born Killers, the 1994 film directed by Oliver Stone that satirized shock-media coverage of a pair of mass murderers. These days, living in Georgetown, she publishes an influential blog, firedoglake.com, and is an integral part of a growing progressive new-media hub anchored in Washington. The Service Employees International Union, the left-leaning labor group headed by Andy Stern, now has an 11-person new-media department as a key strategic asset.
Progressive new media is even injecting pizzazz into old media -- making stars of figures such as Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a D.C. think tank. Baker's new book, Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy, garnered him a guest appearance on Hamsher's blog. Published as a slim softcover by PoliPointPress, a progressive house, the book reads like a pamphlet, a morality play flavored with easy-to-swallow statistical nuggets that help the reader, any reader, make smooth passage from "How We Got Here," the title of the first chapter, to "Learning From the Bubbles," the title of the last one.
"He has a very bloggy understanding of how to present his material -- it is very simple, it is very direct. He goes straight to the heart of the matter," Hamsher, in an interview, said of Baker. And Baker is valuable, Hamsher added, because he always attends to the overarching story that the progressive moment is seeking to tell: "He understands the narrative."
The narrative is a work in progress; its planks roughly hewn. Certain obvious themes -- Wall Street is bad and green is good -- are easily nailed home. On national security policy, the slogan for progressives, who mostly opposed the Iraq war and often sound anti-imperial notes, is also predictable, encapsulated by "Come home, America." Not only did George McGovern use that refrain in his 1972 speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination, it is also the title of a new book by William Greider, national affairs correspondent for The Nation, the New York City-based magazine that was founded in 1865 to give voice to the progressive cause and is still fulfilling that mission.
But other conceits, which might appear to be naturals, are played down. For example, progressives are wary of constructing a narrative that depends too much on economic class themes, because they recognize that ordinary Americans -- unlike, say, ordinary Europeans -- tend to believe (rightly or wrongly) that America is a mobile, fluid society, in which humble origins need not bar one from wealth and success. To take aim at Wall Street fat cats is OK, but to direct fire at rich folks generally is risky.
Still other possible themes are the source of a debate that threatens to divide the movement itself, especially now that the aim that has recently driven the narrative -- the need to evict Republicans from the White House -- has been accomplished. It is not easy to tell good stories and especially not easy to tell good political stories, because the exercise involves its own edgy political choices. Consider these four main story lines, all of which could add up to a convincing tale -- but then again, could fail to persuade, leaving the movement bereft of a good story, a tale about good and bad and how best to march into the future.
The Clinton Years Were Bad
"For 40 years after the end of World War II, asset bubbles were insignificant, while blue-collar workers participated in the country's prosperity alongside shareholders. Boom and bust were leveled out by a variety of regulatory devices." So declares Thomas Frank in the foreword to Plunder and Blunder, and his is a significant voice, used with great effect in the 2004 book What's the Matter With Kansas? an iconic progressive effort to tell the story of ordinary working Americans distracted from the pursuit of their true economic interests by conservative cultural sorcerers.
After starting in this placid fashion, Frank takes out his sword: "With the atavistic economic policies of the Reagan, Clinton, and Bush years, however, the old ways have returned. Money flows irresistibly to the top, and along the way oversight is muted or compromised in some manner, professional ethics cease to restrain, conflicts of interest run rampant, and government becomes the property of those who can afford it."
This is most certainly not the tale that Bill Clinton, elected to the presidency in 1992 on the platform of "putting people first," tells of the America he governed for eight years. His story line is about "historic economic growth," about "record budget deficits" becoming "record surpluses," about inflation "at the lowest rate since the Kennedy administration" -- all quotes from the White House website at the end of the Clinton presidency.
And yet, for several reasons, progressives may well be right to feel that Clinton's story must be destroyed and a new one erected on that ground. The first reason has to do with the nature of storytelling. Successful stories, whether imagined or reality-based, tend to benefit from a "once upon a time" moment, as in, "Once upon a time, things were good, and then along came, well, bad people and bad happenings to muck things up." In this sense, it's an awkward narrative zigzag to take the reader from a bad Reagan and Bush time to a good Clinton time and then back to a bad Bush time. To talk about the first decades after World War II as the golden years and then introduce a long fallow period works much better as a setup to a promised epic deliverance.
A second reason to gut the narrative as told by Clinton relates to ideology and principle. Progressives aim to change the metric of how economic performance is judged: For the conventional yardstick of growth in the gross domestic product they aim to substitute the standard of fairness. This is crucial: Fairness, a good, strong word with a moral grounding, is a core narrative theme for the Left.
By the fairness standard, the Clinton years are vulnerable to attack. Although fabulous fortunes were amassed in what historians may one day call a Second Gilded Age extending from the Reagan ascendancy through the Bush years and ending in the crash of the housing and stock markets in late 2008, the wealth was not spread evenly. Dean Baker, elaborating on Thomas Frank's foreword to Plunder and Blunder, notes that between 1980 and 1995, the inflation-adjusted "real" wages of all American workers declined 0.9 percent, with much steeper declines for workers on the low rungs of the income ladder. Baker also reminds us that the Clinton years were plagued by real interest rates at historically high levels and by a "high-dollar policy" that made foreign goods cheaper for American consumers but proved unsustainable.
Progressives have support for this story line from Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke, a George W. Bush appointee. In a 2007 speech in Omaha, Neb., nuggets of which SEIU President Andy Stern has lovingly committed to memory for the benefit of interviews like the one he gave to this reporter, Bernanke declared that "rising inequality is not a recent development but has been evident for at least three decades, if not longer." Most musically, to the ears of Stern and other labor leaders, Bernanke cited a long-standing decline in private-sector union membership as one source of the increase in wage inequality, because, he said, the level of unionization can shape the entire wage structure.
Although the drop in union membership in the Reagan years was steeper, the Clinton regnum failed to reverse this decline, so that by 2000, just below 10 percent of American private-sector workers belonged to a union, approximately the same level as when Congress passed the landmark National Labor Relations Act in 1935. (By 2008, unions' share was down to 7.6 percent of workers.)
How important is it for leftists to undermine the narrative of the Clinton years as still rendered, to this day, by Clinton and his loyalists? "I think it's very important," Baker said in an interview. "We want to create a sustainable path going forward."
Throw the Bums Out
This theme has a pleasing association with the Jeffersonian populist character of the early American Republic, and today's progressives see no reason to leave such fertile ground to anti-government conservatives, who have successfully appropriated such talk-radio issues as term limits. "Throw the bums out," after all, is as American as apple pie, whether "the bums" are overpaid Wall Street executives, past-prime home-run hitters juiced on steroids, or entrenched members of Congress who raise tons of money from Washington lobbyists every election cycle and get re-elected despite regularly voting against the clear preferences of constituents back home.
In story line terms, progressives' adoption of this theme allows them to function as good-guy protagonists in the drama -- the spear-carrying deliverers of justice to a populace plagued by a dysfunctional and undemocratic government. The staple conservative talking point against "the liberals" is that they are a species of wimps -- which is another point in favor of a thematic staging of progressives as not only principled but also tough-minded.
But for this presentation to work, progressives must not just talk the line but walk it, too. And so they are doing, with sniper-rifle targeting of "bad" Democrats who are deemed heretical to the cause -- and who occupy congressional seats generally safe enough so that a "better" type of Democrat can win.
Their first kill, still tasty to their lips, was Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut in the state's 2006 Democratic primary. Progressive bloggers went after Lieberman with a ruthless vengeance for his impassioned support of the Iraq war at a time when it was hugely unpopular in the state. Their hero was the insurgent anti-war Democrat Ned Lamont, a political neophyte whom they avidly financed and promoted. Lamont knocked off Lieberman in the primary; and even though Lieberman, running as an independent, retained his seat by winning the general election, progressives felt that they had made their point. "Joe got his ass kicked in the primary," Jane Hamsher said in a recent interview: "Nobody wants to be Joe."
Less noticed is a second kill -- important because progressives see it as a model for the 2010 election cycle. In February 2008, in the Democratic primary in Maryland's 4th Congressional District, a safe Democratic seat including territory in Montgomery and Prince George's counties, challenger Donna Edwards put away veteran Al Wynn. She won despite Wynn's support from such pillars of the Democratic establishment as AFL-CIO-affiliated unions (but not the SEIU, which is outside the AFL-CIO and strongly backed Edwards). Edwards, a community activist who had never held elected office, highlighted Wynn's ties to lobbyists. Leading progressives on the national scene came to her support with financial and organizational aid. The Nation called the race "a bellwether contest in the fight for the soul of the Democratic Party."
Now the question is whose Democratic butt the progressives are going to target in 2010. Their anti-incumbency machinery appears stronger than ever, run by battle-tested hands. At the SEIU, the new-media team is headed by Tim Tagaris, a Chicago native and ex-marine who was Lamont's Internet director in the race against Lieberman. At the SEIU these days, Tagaris said in an interview, "we are working a lot more closely with bloggers," including Hamsher and Markos Moulitsas, the founder of Daily Kos. Along with Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com, both Hamsher and Moulitsas are active in Accountability Now, a political action committee established a few months ago, with support from the SEIU, to help favored challengers unseat vulnerable incumbent Democrats whom the progressive movement views as unfriendly.
One possible target is Allen Boyd in Florida's 2nd District, which takes in most of the panhandle. Boyd, who is white, may connect to fellow white conservative Democrats in the district's outlying counties, but the urban area centered on Tallahassee has many liberal white and African-American voters. He is facing a challenge from the Left from state Sen. Al Lawson, an African-American; progressive sources said they have not yet decided whether to go all in on Lawson's behalf.
Another possibility is Jane Harman, the Democrat representing California's 36th District, which stretches along Los Angeles-area beachfront. She has a more conservative voting record than other House Democrats in the region; progressives also view her as too close to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobbying group. Although Harman survived a harsh primary challenge from the Left in 2006, she is now in hot water because of a recent news report, broken by Congressional Quarterly, that she was open to pursuing leniency for two AIPAC employees whom federal law enforcement authorities suspected of espionage.
To maintain their chosen role as dragon slayers, progressives probably need to take down at least one dragon every cycle -- or at least bring the beast to within an inch of a bloody death. That is actually harder than it sounds, but unless progressives can pull if off, they run the risk of being seen as unworthy of their self-styled heroic warrior profile.
Obama Probably Is Good
As a community organizer, as a public opponent of the Iraq war before it started, and as the man who demolished the color barrier to the presidency, Barack Obama would seem to be a natural choice as a hero of the contemporary progressive narrative. But that is not quite the place he occupies, at least not yet.
One reason for wariness comes from the progressives' interpretation of how change works -- and in particular, the role of leftists in fostering change. The mainstream media, such as The New Yorker and Time, depicted Obama's election as the immediate second coming of FDR, the great liberal hero of 20th-century American politics. Progressives, though, remember that the New Deal did not happen all at once, as if by political magic -- it happened because progressives kept the pressure on Roosevelt to adopt the banner of reform.
They make a good point. For all of the media hype about FDR's (and now Obama's) first 100 days, the fact is that Social Security was enacted in 1935, in Roosevelt's third year in office, as was the landmark Wagner Act protecting the rights of workers to engage in collective bargaining. The Fair Labor Standards Act, establishing a national minimum wage, did not become law until 1938, in FDR's second term. While Roosevelt liked to blast the bankers, he also talked about the need to balance the budget. Progressives of that era thus had to challenge him "to produce a second New Deal," Robert Borosage, the co-director of Campaign for America's Future, pointed out in an interview in his Washington office, adorned with a poster of Jesse Jackson.
A veteran of the progressive movement, Borosage over the years has been a campaign adviser for Jackson as well as the late Sen. Paul Wellstone and Sen. Barbara Boxer. The movement needs a compelling narrative, he pointed out, not least, to "educate our activists." In this respect, the theme is necessarily broad-based, stressing not so much the role of any single political leader but more the wider play of forces within the Democratic Party -- and indeed within the Obama camp. He noted that Obama's economic-policy team is stocked with Clinton administration veterans who supported financial deregulation. Progressives especially distrust Lawrence Summers, director of Obama's National Economic Council and a Treasury secretary under Clinton.
It is possible to see how Obama could fall in the progressive estimation and even become a bete noire or a foil in their narrative. Anti-Obama sentiment will ripen if he digs in his heels against calls for a full-fledged investigation, with criminal prosecutions if warranted, of the Bush administration's authorization and use of torture of suspected terrorists in the government's custody. This issue inflames the progressive quadrants of the blogosphere -- which funnel muckraked materials to sympathetic broadcasters such as MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow.
Still, progressives, in their hearts, want to like Obama. Probably all that he needs to do to become a hero of the movement is to engineer one magical moment in which he unambiguously delivers on their behalf. That moment could come if the president -- against adamant opposition from the business community and Republicans, and amid reluctance from Senate Democrats representing swing states -- can get Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act that would remove barriers to union recruitment that have cropped up in recent decades.
Labor's heart and soul, not to mention its muscle, are invested in this epic legislative drama. Enactment, in the unions' view, would quickly add millions of workers to organized labor's depleted ranks and swing the balance of power away from management toward workers in the macro-economy. As a bare-knuckled battle shapes up in Congress, a place in the progressive hall of fame awaits Obama if he can get this done.
Workers of the World, Unite!
So Karl Marx concluded at the end of The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, and so labor activists, whether Marxists or varieties of socialists and progressives, have been urging ever since. Circa 2009, the global proletariat remains, for the most part, not particularly united, in part because of the persistence of nationalism as a primary source of political identity, and this disunity leaves progressives lacking a potential driver of their narrative.
Still, it is possible that today's global economic crisis will at long last be the catalyst that creates a true global consciousness among workers. After all, the crisis, even if the proximate cause was the collapse of the U.S. housing bubble, quickly spread like a virus to Europe, Russia, Asia, and South America. Workers are suffering worldwide. Global capitalism is a quotidian reality of the 21st century -- not a dream yet to arrive -- and multinational businesses long ago organized to operate on a worldwide playing field. Borderless technology makes it easier than ever to develop transnational links. So, why not a global labor movement as a strategic pillar of a global progressive movement?
Christy Hoffman, a movement veteran of 30 years, is the head of global organizing for the SEIU. The trend is in the right direction, she said in an interview. As an example, she pointed to an agreement signed in 2008 between Denmark-based ISS, a global provider of cleaning and other services and one of the world's largest employers, and UNI Global Union, a coalition of hundreds of unions, including the SEIU, in more than 150 countries. Under the deal, hailed as a "benchmark" by UNI Global Union, ISS committed to making it easier for its employees to join a union and pledged 100,000 euros annually to a joint fund to raise labor standards in particular markets.
The SEIU's big Northeastern local, known as 32BJ, stretches from New York to D.C., and it represents members of some 80 nationalities, including immigrants from Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa, Hoffman noted. These members understand that many of the owners of the office buildings they clean are halfway across the planet, and they "want SEIU to be engaged in global work."
"I think global unionism is the future of the labor movement. I feel very strongly about that," Hoffman declared. So does her boss, SEIU's Andy Stern, who has visited China seven times.
Perhaps the narrative payoff is that a truly global union movement could help make unions cool again. Cool is a vital ingredient of a successful narrative, with the model in this case being the environmental movement, which has succeeded in making a single primary color, green, a universal symbol and marketing agent and nearly a new secular religion. Opinion polls show that young Americans, in particular, are more globally minded than older generations, with an interest in emerging fields such as world health. For unions to become a new kind of cool, the global element of this narrative surely has to resonate.
Are Narratives Really So Important?
As artists and craftsmen everywhere fall in love with their creations, creators of political narratives invariably overestimate the importance of their beloved constructions. While good stories matter, hard (and unpredictable) circumstances matter more. Conservatives had been honing their free-market, small-government story line for decades before their longtime hero, Ronald Reagan, got elected president in 1980. He was put over the top not by some brilliant refinement in the conservative narrative but by an economic "misery index," the combined rate of inflation and unemployment, that topped 20 percent during the tenure of the hapless Jimmy Carter.
Then, too, there is an irony in the primacy that progressives give the task of narrative building. Their cause came of age amid labor strikes and other mass actions set against the steel furnaces of late-19th-century working-class industrial America, long before the invention of the Internet and the creation of a political culture revolving around not well-muscled men with calloused hands but cerebral types who labor amid the flickers of a computer screen.
Still, progressives surely are right to devote intensified energy to their story line. For one thing, the task can be a useful discipline for its own sake, as a means of concentrating the mind and developing the correct message-delivery vehicles, as in the impressive work that leftists have done in colonizing the blogosphere.
Moreover, if progressives are unable to agree among themselves on their message for today's times, how can they expect to win devotion from the audiences, especially young people, on which their movement's future relies? This, too, is a question that the conservatives faced in their wilderness years, in the decades before Reagan's election, and their answer was to invest in building chapters at college campuses and the like as a means of creating and educating a cadre of activists that later came to have a dominant influence on the Republican Party.
The digital age may hand progressives a comparative advantage in narrative building, as it turns out. Conservatives were the first to conquer talk radio and they remain a dominant presence in that medium, but progressives are better performers in the blogosphere and seem to have a better intuitive feel for new-media techniques. The liberal enclaves around Boston, New York City, and San Francisco are at the cutting edge of the computer-age economy. Meanwhile, those Americans who mainly get their news from websites and blogs -- that is, from the media that may dominate the future -- are more progressive in their beliefs than the population as a whole, according to the research of John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira at the Center for American Progress.
The pioneering Daily Kos is perhaps the best illustration of the impressive media synergies the progressive movement is creating. Although it is best known for its bloggers, Daily Kos does not ignore old media. For example, it has an arrangement in which it steers would-be book authors to PoliPointPress, and it helps market the books once they're published. As for video, DailyKos TV.com, a self-described "political news video blog," plans to add more original content to prepare for the day when "everyone will watch TV through the Internet," as Will Rockafellow, general manager for Daily Kos, said in an interview.
This is not a philanthropic effort: Daily Kos, which is owned by founder Moulitsas, actually made a profit last year on more than $1 million in revenues from advertising and other sources, according to Rockafellow. A key, he noted, is, "we own our own [media] infrastructure on the progressive left." Not only conservatives tend to distrust The New York Times these days, and understandably so: Most of the big old-line media organs are mega-corporations with publicly traded stock shares. A well-paid elite journalist, liberal in politics or not, is apt to be more focused on the Dow Jones industrial average than on the minimum wage or on legislation to make it easier for unions to organize a workshop.
Progressives have yet to achieve within the Democratic Party the commanding level of influence that Reagan-era conservatives accumulated in the GOP. But to the extent that narrative and the ability to deliver narrative count, achieving that goal may be only a matter of time. Nowhere in the center and the right of the party is there a match for the strategic planning and intensity of the progressive storytelling effort.
Progressives are seriously bidding for control of the national political narrative and will not easily yield possession of that grand prize -- that grand meta-prize -- once it is gained.