I recently expressed my disappointment at her vote on
Senate filibusters to Senator Elizabeth Warren. Warren ran for the Senate and I
supported her as a self-declared progressive. She voted for the anemic Reid
proposal. In her response to my letter Warren expressed her deep disappointment
with the result of the effort to eliminate the Senate filibuster rule, but she
voted for Reid’s bill “because it is better to get something than nothing.”
This is, in effect, the mantra we have been getting
from Democrats from Bill Clinton on. It reflects, in my judgment, a very narrow
view of “something,” namely, what goes on in the legislature, not what goes on
in the country.
Bernie Sanders, alone as usual, voted against Reid’s
bill. That is because Bernie has a far larger view of progressive politics than
most of the Progressives in Congress. Bernie understands the responsibility of
progressive legislators to educate the public about the importance of issues
facing the country’s legislature. His way of doing politics is to make his decisions
in terms of the people, not his fellow legislators. He knows that Progressives
will never effectively make their case unless they are known for their
integrity and thoughtfulness. A pallid vote for Reid’s bill did little, if not
nothing, to let the people know the extent of Progressive opposition to it and
the reasons for that opposition.
Warren, along with some other of today’s Progressives,
needs to take a serious look at what “Progressive” meant in the 1930’s. It might
be helpful if these people read the article Eleanor:
the Radical Roosevelt, which can be found on the Yes magazine web site at
The Progressive agenda of FDR’s Work Projects
Administration (WPA) did not merely set out to put people to work, but also to
put them to work for which they could make the greatest contribution. Thus the
WPA not only had administrations for building dams, schools, roads and
libraries, it also had the Federal Music
Project, the Federal Theatre Project,
and the Federal Writer’s Project.
The latter produced a series of superb state histories that were noted for
their thoroughness and readability. These became staples in public libraries. Dorothea
Lange’s photographs for the Resettlement Administration became American icons
and are still some of the best vehicles for understanding human despair and
grief. The point is that government relief programs were aimed at keeping the
society whole in its many dimensions. These survival programs made room for
laborers and engineers, but also for artists and intellectuals. All this and
much more was accomplished by government responsive to people’s needs.
This was progressivism in action. This is what was lost
with the arrival of Bill Clinton and his Democratic Leadership Council and “Dynamic
Middle” concept through which he continued Ronald Reagan’s practice of
privatizing everything in sight. Today’s problems are different from those of
the 1930s in that we have allowed the manufacturing base of that economy to be
exported to other countries. Because of the continued replacement of human
labor, mental as well as physical, by computers, jobs in the conventional sense
can be expected to diminish and those that remain will become fewer and fewer.
The threat from witless technological development to social development can
have effects as disastrous as those of the Great Depression. Today’s
Progressives should be devising and promoting the social programs to meet the
needs of this anticipated future in order to mitigate adverse impacts, provide
opportunities for human development and bring human population, consumption and
industry into harmony with the capacities of our planet. To do this we must
begin by reintroducing the fundamental role of government in achieving those
goals. This cannot be left to the caprice of the profit-chasing private sector.
To do the above we also need to shift our primary focus
from getting progressives elected, as exemplified by the Progressive Democrats
of America and Democracy for America, to developing a progressive response to
the issues of our future as well as the issues of our time.
I have looked rather assiduously for organizations or
web sites that are focused on articulating a progressive futurism. I have not
had much luck. In the course of this search I went to the Congressional
Progressive Caucus web site at http://cpc.grijalva.house.gov/. I found a lot of
thinking and work going on, especially a 2012 ‘People’s Budget and the 2013 ‘Budget
For All’ progressive budgets as rivals of Paul Ryan’s Republican budgets and
President Obama’s Democratic Party budgets. These budgets evidence a high level
of critical and comprehensive thinking. However, nowhere on the CPC site nor
elsewhere, have I been able to find Progressives articulating a comprehensive
and coherent progressive perspective to offer people and to compete with other
perspectives for humanity’s future.
For instance, in these well-regarded Progressive budgets
there is a massive effort to create jobs, but nowhere on this site or elsewhere
have I found progressives trying to think out the consequences of a continuing
job loss due to technology and increasing population. We will need an
alternative to the job as we know it or we will have to create pointless
surrogates though their only role is to distribute income, e.g. store greeters
are common in Japan and becoming increasingly so in this country. As society’s
productivity is increasingly turned over to machines, the results of that
productivity will have to be turned over to human beings, either the wealthier
few as in this country or the average many, as the preservation of democracy
will require. Again, if our planet’s resources demand a sustainable future,
where is the progressive planning for such a future? I ask myself why a society
that had converted the working class into the middle class through an improved
level of economic equality would buy Ronald Reagan’s ‘Morning in America.’ Granted there had been a
continuing period of “stagflation.” But if we could pull ourselves out of the
worst depression we had ever seen, could we not deal with a period of little or
no growth? What does this episode, with all of the continuing economic and
social adversity it has created tell us about a society based on a sustainable
economy? Where are progressives wrestling with this aspect of our future?
We must THINK deeply and hard in order to articulate the
solutions to the complex problems that face us and the rest of mankind if we
are to survive in any civilized fashion. That this call to thought is not too
precipitous is indicated by observing that the progressive budgets would
balance the budget by 2021 and a few decades after that humans will be living
with the compound consequences of global warming. Let us work hard to bring
reality into focus in the politics, economics and social consciousness of this
country.
Bob Newhard
No comments:
Post a Comment