Reposted from YPP http://youngphillypolitics.com/yes_virginia_there_progressive_movement_philadelphia
There have been a couple of interesting threads at YPP recently that discuss what it means to be a progressive in Philadelphia and whether we really have anything worth being called a progressive movement in the city. And there was a great article in the City Paper this week that makes a pretty good case that there is such a movement but also pointed to some of the tensions within it. I’ve been pretty sick with flu-like symptoms all week and today I spent my first day at home since late December. So I have a little time to stop and think and take stock in where we are. I want to, as quickly as possible, discuss four issues: (1) What makes for a progressive movement as far as ideology goes; (2) Whether there are real ideological divisions within the progressive movement today; (3) Is the progressive movement too much oriented towards white middle class folks; and (4) What makes for a movement as far as organization goes.
I apologize in advance for the length and theoretical nature of this post. But I think many of the posts that have been written in these threads have gone off-kilter because they rely on models of political thought and action that are both historically ill-informed and theoretically misguided. And I have spent much of the last thirty years working as an intellectual on these (and a few other) issues. After the first few paragraphs, I leave theory behind and get back to our progressive movement.
(1) Ideology
I am a political philosopher by trade. So you would think that all the recent effort to define points of division among us progressive would both interest me because I would want to take part in the effort to define progressivism and would concern me because our progressive movement seems to be rent with conflicts.
I have to say, however, that I’m not all that interested and I am not concerned at all.
I’m not concerned because I think some folks here are working with an outdated model of what makes for a movement, a model that is drawn most directly from late 19th and early 20th century left-wing political thought and more deeply from the whole tenor of modern (that is, post-Machiavellian) political thought. On that model of political thought, real serious political action requires a theory about both the ideal we want to create and the steps we should take towards attaining that ideal. To borrow from my own academic work, modern political thought from Locke to Rousseau to Hegel to Marx to Mill (and even including in some respects) Burke, tells us what to do. And, on this view, without a theory about what to do, we can’t be practioners of politics.
(Some of you probably spent—or misspent—some part of your college careers talking about the critical issue of the relationship between theory and praxis. I certainly did. That is why I once had a cat name Theory and have been looking for years for a dog named Praxis.)
I’ve spent much of my career as an intellectual rejecting this model of political thought entirely and instead looking back to Aristotle and Plato and forward to the American Pragmatists such as Dewey and James. Those political theorists don’t try to tell us what to do but ty to teach us how to think about politics. This is a fine distinction, but an important one. Aristotle and the Pragmatists believe that there is a large gap between theory and practice. To act politically requires a great deal of practical understanding and experience with the particular political circumstances in which one lives. The role of theory, on this view is not to derive some conclusions about what to do, but to give us some general orientation to the political world that helps us evaluate our practical experience.
The first, modern model, holds that practice is more or less derived from theory. The second is that practice is mostly independent of theory.
I believe that the ideas of modern political theorists are mostly wrong. Practice is mostly independent of theory. And, while there is an important role of political theory in helping us imagine alternatives to what we see in the present, much of the day to day work of politics requires not theory but a good sound understanding of the practical possibilities open to us.
To say that we don’t need a political theory to guide us is not to say we don’t need some strongly held moral ideals. I think we progressives have such ideals, although we define them differently. To me, the central progressive ideal today is to create a democratic community. Democracy is not just a form of government but a set of political and social practices. There is no democracy if there is no civil liberty and freedom. There is no democracy if government is not open and transparent. There is no democracy if large numbers of people are cut off from mainstream life because they lack education, health care, and income. There is no democracy if government decisions are made by special deals with special interests instead of by representative listening to the voice of the people. There is no democracy if people don’t have the means to organize politically. There is no democracy if there is no ethos of civic participation and few opportunities to enjoy—and I mean that literally—taking part in civic life.
The ideal of democracy by itself doesn’t tell us what to do with the BPT or how to fix L&I or what to do about how the schools or how to reduce the crime rate. But it does give us an orientation to these problems. It teaches us how to think about them in ways that reflect fundamental moral commitments and a certain way of thinking about human beings and political life. That, to my mind, is what political theory is for.
I’m not saying that all of us progressives take democracy to be their central ideal. We might define progressivism in different ways. But I think we mostly do share the commitments I listed above under the heading of democracy.
And it doesn’t matter much if our commitments are a little different. For, to bring this discussion back to the real world of progressive movements, I note that the three most important progressive political movements in my lifetime—the struggles for civil rights, feminism, and against the Vietnam War—were not motivated by any one political theory or ideology. These movements were split by lots of different theoretical and ideological tendencies. And yet people holding those different views were able to work together to attain concrete goals: the civil rights bills of 64 and 65; the legalization of abortion; the creation of affirmative action laws for blacks and women; the limits on funding the war. We can do the same today.
The theoretical and ideological pluralism in these movements and future movements is a good thing, I believe, because all this ferment makes us more thoughtful and less likely to be fall into the traps that have so damaged progressive movements influenced by Marxism: ideological stultification and tyranny. (I have presented a much more detailed story about the political and philosophical reasons we are so inclined to seek theories that tell us what to do and why that aspiration is so dangerous in an article you can find on my academic website, Three Ends and a Beginning: Theory, Ideology, History, and Politics.
(2) Are there real ideological divisions within the progressive movement today?
With this theoretical background, I think the answer to this question is pretty clear: No. We have seen at YPP that there are some differences in our movement about the BPT. But, while I think there is much truth in Stan Shapiro’s views about the dangers of drastically reducing our revenues, I can’t go along with him in thinking that this dispute is a litmus test for being a progressive in Philadelphia. After all, this is a basically empirical dispute about whether cutting business taxes will create economic development in Philadelphia, a goal we all want. (My view is that it will at some point, but will take much longer than many people think.)
Other folks at YPP have tried to inflate this difference of opinion into a dispute between those who want to bring new businesses and people folks into Philly and those who want to improve the economic well-being of people who already live here. That, unfortunately, is not an especially useful distinction. After all, most of the public policies that would improve the lot of people who live here—improving education, reducing crime, investing in our commercial corridors and business tax increases—will also help attract new people and businesses to the city.
There are lots of reasons we try to inflate concrete disputes about issues into faux ideological disputes. I discuss a few in the article I mentioned above. I want to urge us to try not to do this. Dispute about issues is a very good thing. But the worst thing we progressives can do right now, as our movement is just getting started, is to start the witch hunts and excommunications that are part and parcel of authoritarian movements on both left and right. It is much more important to keep talking than it is to define ourselves too soon.
(3) Is the progressive movement too much oriented towards white middle class folks?
A further possible ideological conflict in our movement might be one presented in the City Paper article, where Doron borrows a distinction I put forward in my blog last year, between “good government” reform and “social justice” reform, that is between making our politics fair, efficient, clean, and transparent, on the one hand, and making our politics more focused on providing justice and equal opportunity to the poor and working people. Some folks at YPP, such as Ray Murphy, have suggested that there is a tension between these goals. And they have pointed out that our possible overemphasis on good government might reflect the white middle class influence on the progressive movement.
I disagree with this argument on a number of grounds.
First, there may, at times, be some difficulty in finding the time to pursue both goals. But I have argued in detail in my blog that we need to pursue good government to attain social justice and that, in turn, social justice will help us attain good government.
I won’t rehearse that argument here. But I do want to give one example of the importance of good government to social justice. I have been campaigning a great deal in North Philadelphia in recent weeks and people there are as much concerned about our broken politics as folks in Mt. Airy. In fact, they are more concerned because they recognize that a government that works only when someone makes a special deal with a politician is likely to be far more responsive to folks who are rich and white and than those who are poor and black. More than once in the last few weeks I have heard about problematic development projects being forced down the throats of people in North Philadelphia and have said, “No one would dare do that to us in Mt. Airy.” People understood exactly what I meant. A government that is fair and efficient will clean the streets in Brewerytown, Strawberry Mansion, and Logan as well as they are cleaned in Mt. Airy and Chestnut Hill. And it will protect people from development that harms the existing community in all areas.
Second, if we look broadly at the progressive movement it would be hard to say it is overwhelmingly white and middle class. The membership of Philly for Change is mostly white but that of Neighborhood Networks is about 15% black and NN has worked very closely with the African American Heritage Coalition on a number of issues. And the progressive movement goes far beyond those organizations. ACORN, has an overwhelmingly black working class membership. The folks in the leadership of the Philadelphia Coalition for Housing Justice are both black and white. And a number of the trade unions that work broadly with other groups on progressive issues (e.g DC 47 and SEIU 32bj) have memberships that are partly or overwhelmingly black.
As Hannah Miller points out in the City Paper article, there are good, progressive black and white activists emerging from various parts of the city to lead movements and run for office. Some of them are connected to existing organizations, others have been inspired by those organizations, and some are simply frustrated with the problems in their own community. We should welcome and embrace them all.
Doron spent some time with my in my own neighborhood, Mt. Airy, and wondered whether progressives rely mainly on the support of the white middle class. But while Mt. Airy is middle class, a slight majority of the population is black, and had Doron hung around a little longer he would have seen that, just as I know every other white person in Mt. Airy, I know every other African American. And, had he joined me last week at the ACORN candidates event, he would seen me practically get a standing ovation from an almost entirely black audience, not just because of what I said but because of my long record of working with Acorn on behalf of issues of great importance to its membership such as public, the minimum wage, inclusionary housing, and the state EITC.
(And, if you don’t mind an Advertisement for Myself, I want to point out that Jesse Brown and I may be the only progressives running at large in the 2007 primary who have records of working on behalf both kinds of reform. I played an important role in the campaigns for both in increase in the minimum wage and the Independent Ethics Board, for both inclusionary housing and the charter change that limited campaign contributions from those receiving no-bid contracts. I was one of the leaders of the Pennsylvania Transit Coalition and I’ve been working on public financing of political campaigns.)
(4) What makes for a movement as far as organization goes.
There has also been some talk about what kind of organization we progressives should aim for. Ray is looking for us to build the capacity to mount large field campaigns. So am I. But I don’t know that we need one organization to do that. After all, this is a big city, and field campaigns are best when they are tied to local concerns. Ray and, in other places Ben Waxman, have talked about the importance of creating jobs for organizers committed to political reform. I think this is very important. And one thing I intend to do after May 15 is to keep raising money to hire a staff of organizers to work with progressive organizations and civic groups around the city. But, again, I don’t think that we need one organization and we certainly don’t want one source of funds for our organizations. (I trust myself implicitly, but we will always need a diversity of opinions and perspective in this movement.)
My friend David Koppish made some suggestions a few weeks about the kind of organization we should seek. He said we need “acutal organizations that follow a disciplined organizing model…These organizations mostly follow an organizing model that dictates that you start with people and their lived experience, build on existing membership-based community institutions (or create them).” I think that there is much to be said about this model. And I certainly would love to see Neighborhood Networks someday become an organization rooted in the lived experience of communities that are both white and black, working class and middle class. But I do wonder about the notion of a “disciplined organizing model.” I’ve been a member of the Philadelphia Coalition for Housing Justice since it formed and I think it is a great model of an inclusive, deliberative, and disciplined organization. But our sometimes three and four hour long meetings remind me of Oscar Wilde’s quip that “socialism would take too many evenings.” And I wonder about the difficulties created when a movement tries to draw on the lived experience of people who have no time to come to meetings of that length.
That’s not to say that there is no room for this kind of organization. Rather, my point, once again, is that, just as we need a plurality of theories and ideologies, we need a plurality of organizational models, some for one purpose, some for another.
Conclusion
My conclusion, then, is that there is indeed a progressive movement in Philadelphia. It does not have a single ideology or organizational structure. But it should have neither of these things. We need a plurality of ideas and institutions. And most of all, we need to keep talking to each other—both in person and on-line—about our ideas and institutions and about the issues and problems of this wonderful city that drew us into politics to begin with.
PS We should also talk more about how beautiful this city is when it snows!