Progressivism Reborn or A New Progressive Paradigm

One of the salient failures of contemporary progressivism is the absence of a basic progressive paradigm. The conservatives under Ronald Reagan used the paradigm of an inept malmotivated government as the enemy to overcome. Government was portrayed as the enemy of freedom. The "positive" side of this paradigm was "freedom" from government, indeed as we have seen, from democracy itself. That is because the freedom of the wealthy is at war with the democracy that secures freedom for the rest of us. The genius in this "freedom" paradigm is that it appeals to a basic human desire. The range of political games that can be played between the paradigms of big brother and the self identity that is the basic motivator of freedom, is enormous and the conservatives have played them to the point of the ME generation," Greed is Good", and the moose-skinning individualism of Sarah Palin. However, the real name of the game was not big brother and freedom, but corporate capitalism's takeover of an otherwise distracted country. By the rigging of this country for maximum corporate profit conservatism is and has been a profound enemy of democracy. Our voting has been about as effective as that of Soviet Russians voting for members of the Duma. We no longer have a democracy, but a plutocracy.

It is instructive, however, to understand why the conservatives have been so successful in transferring massive amounts of wealth to the rich with no uproar from the populace. As noted above, they have a designated enemy and a positive remedy. Progressives, I suggest, need a similar paradigm used for the benefit of the people and honest in portraying the world as it is. A progressive paradigm, I think, must posit excessive wealth as the enemy. Highly concentrated wealth is what has created a dominant source of power, deprived us of an effective vote and hollowed out our economy by substituting finance for industry and shipping jobs off shore. It is the wealthy that formed G. W. Bush's acknowledged base, i.e. "the haves and the have mores" and generated the Iraq war to maximize corporate profit. In brief, excessive, maldistributed wealth has been the source of massive harm to our citizens and mankind in general. Progressives need to forcefully detail the magnitude of the harm that excessive wealth has done. We need to detail the effects of the greatest gap between the rich and the rest of us in nearly a century.

The "positive" part of a progressive paradigm will, in my judgment, require deeper thought and understanding of human motivation than we now have. When Ronald Reagan tapped freedom as the goal of society he called into play a basic human desire. Progressives must find an equally fundamental element in human nature to call upon. The problem can be understood when one reflects upon the fact that the whole of human civilization has been accomplished in the face of basic human predilections. Civilization is not in our primitive genes. It was built up substantially as a result of thought and the overcoming of our basic human predilections. Thought, for most human beings, is not a fundamental response mechanism, which accounts for our species' increasingly terrible short sightedness. What to do? I suspect that we must make clear the necessity of the group for our survival as a species. We are after all a social animal. We can begin this process by making widely known the many times that group responses to danger have saved us when individual responses would have or did fail. Why, after all, do we gather together when threatened? Thus the paradigms of the destructiveness of excessive wealth and the value of groups (some say communities) as vehicles for mitigating conflicts that would otherwise be extremely deleterious to humankind could provide a focus for progressive proposals and practices.

This still leaves the larger and much more difficult question as to what progressivism should pursue in the long or very long run. Questions of this sort force one to get very clear about what one means by progressivism. I suspect at root progressivism means creating a society in which the community sees its task as optimizing the potential of its citizens and citizens see their responsibility to carry forward a society that will optimize the potential of future citizens. This will require a much longer range of forethought than is currently permitted by the extremely short term next-quarter's-profit thinking of contemporary corporate horizons. The whole of capitalism, as now practiced, is made both irrelevant and dangerous by such a requirement. But human beings have practiced the art of responsibility to the future. The five nation Iroquois Confederation, at the time of this nation's founding, considered all of their proposed actions in terms of the welfare of those to the seventh generation in the future. They could do this because their world changed relatively little from generation to generation. They controlled birth rates to maintain their relationship to their natural resources. For us to do likewise we will not only have to control our reproduction rate, we will have to slow our uncontrolled development and deployment of new technology. Considerations such as these begin to highlight the immensity of the task facing progressivism. It prompts me to ask as some have asked of democracy itself, is it up to the task? We have, however, little choice if our species is to persist.

Bob Newhard