Democracy is Not Enough

One of the more interesting contrasts between the conservative political posture and that of progressives is that conservatives emphasize personal values, which are by their nature abstract. They stress morality which, when pressed for instances, amounts to little more than convention. They stress individuality no matter what the economic circumstances; they stress courage, e.g. Reagan's "walk tall", no matter how stupid the goal. Progressives stress equality and fairness, which are social virtues. We have a host of programs to achieve various aspects of these values, which we tend to stress more than the values themselves. The result is that conservatives make personal attributes the center of their political mantra. Progressives make society the center of theirs. The personal will always trump the social in the minds of the majority of people. This is a fundamental problem for progressives and is why progressives make headway mainly when society has fallen apart and its value is starkly reduced to personal terms.

In what follows I will try to articulate a way to begin bridging this gap by suggesting that progressives need to get personal and a way to do this without sacrificing the need for major social change.

As I read Thomas Jefferson, he not only tried to establish the basis for democracy, i.e. all men are created equal, but also the fundamental purpose of democracy, i.e. the optimization of the citizen's potential. I think this is why he laid such a heavy emphasis on education. I think Hilary Clinton had this in mind when she published her book It Takes a Village, a phrase taken from an African tribe that believes the group is fundamental to human beings. She was taken to task in the 1996 presidential election, by Bob Dole who countered that it takes a family to raise a child. Given the looseness and irresponsibility of political propaganda this dispute could go on endlessly and this is all the conservatives need to retain credibility and relevance. Get most people to identify with the personal or near personal, e.g. family, and they will relegate social justice to the back burner.

However, let us try to understand "individual" in a more developed fashion. Suppose we use Maslow's hierarchy of human needs to define the individual for political purposes. The conservative argues that human freedom is preeminent. What is done with that freedom is of less consequence. If it is used to deprive others of their freedom by producing an elite of wealth and hence power, that is ok. Nobody, in their view, ever promised anything resembling a level playing field. Hence the wealthy, whose wealth continually accrues more wealth, deserve to grasp and hold all the wealth they can. I submit this is nothing more than the law of the jungle. Republican's since the 19th century have advocated social Darwinism as the modus vivendi for our society. Corporate leaders are fond of regarding business competition as war and advocate The Art of War by Sun Tzu as a strategy manual for corporate competition.

Maslow, however, proposed and it has been widely accepted in sociological circles, that individuals are a bundle of needs. At the bottom of his needs hierarchy are survival needs, e.g. food. Near the top of the hierarchy are needs for self-esteem, achievement and the respect of others. At the top of the hierarchy are a collection of needs he calls "Self actualization" needs, e.g. morality, creativity, spontaneity. I suggest democracy can be viewed as an instrument for meeting this hierarchy of needs with the objective of producing citizens whose lives are optimized as they move from necessity to self optimization. The conservative view of democracy, at best, leaves human beings with the freedom of the jungle to be victimized by those who dominate the jungle. Hence we have the hopeless poor, the haggard job holder and the dominating rich. Some conservatives, when faced with the brutality of their sociopolitical philosophy, proclaim their advocacy of charity. Indeed Bush 1 advocated the charity of a "thousand points of light" to replace government aid programs. Conservatives do not aim at producing a society, but rather a continuous warfare of competing classes, with many people at Maslow's survival level, many more in jobs held mainly to avoid sinking to a survival level and a few with the resources to seek self optimization.

Looked at this way, progressivism is far more concerned for the individual than is conservatism. Progressivism, so understood, can bring far more of that overwhelming concern of libertarians, i.e. merit, to the surface than can a society ruled by the so-called meritorious.

I want to underscore the absolute barbarity that underlies the conservative view of society. Theirs is that of a collection of human beings seeking their own ends at the expense of others. Notably, these are the same people who have the unmitigated gall to call those who seek social justice advocates of class warfare. I suggest that progressives devote considerable energy to thinking out, articulating and pushing its concern for the civilized individual rather than the self-centered barbarism that issues from conservative ideology.

Bob Newhard