The Progressive Moment

When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, many of us believed that a new progressive era was at hand. But when the Tea Party arose in opposition to health care reform and some of Democratic leaders—but not President Obama or Speaker Pelosi—wavered, many of us feared that the new progressive era was slipping out of our reach.

This experience would have been less traumatic for us if we had paid more attention to the history of progressive reform in American history. That history teaches us that progress is never as straightforward as we would like. It comes in fits and starts. It always generates intense opposition. It takes commitment and long struggle to achieve. And it can take a generation to consolidate.

Right now, the opportunity to create a new progressive era is still there. But we have to avoid some missteps to get there. If we fail to understand what America wants and does not from this new progressive moment, we risk losing it.

Opportunities

What are the opportunities before us?

First, we have a President who has articulated the deepest ideals of progressives.

He’s shown us that the key to a prosperous America is a strong and growing middle class and  community that give everyone who will study and work hard an opportunity to enter it.

He’s challenged us to live up to our moral responsibility to care for the weak and vulnerable.

And he’s put forward a vision of an America which holds that each of us must take responsibility for our own live but that we all do better when we work together to provide for the common good. A market economy provides the framework for freedom and economic growth, But it needs rules to create a fair economy; an education system that trains everyone from entrepreneurs and executives to those who work on the shop floor; scientific and medical research that leads to the innovations of the future; and the roads and bridges and public transportation systems that make the it go.

Second, the President’s vision has increasingly touched a chord in the American people. Not only the election, but poll after poll show that the American people share our ideals.

They believe in our market economy but also believe that government has an important role to play in our common life.

They want to be able to take risks to achieve their dreams, but also want a safety net to protect them if, through no fault of their own, they lose their jobs or become ill or suffer from natural disasters.

They don’t want to pay more taxes than necessary, but they are willing to pay their fair share for the vital services that government provides.

And, third, we face an opposition that has been taken over by a radical group that does not share these beliefs. The radical right lives in a past of its own imagination, a world that never existed and never could exist, in which there is barely any government, almost no taxes, and Americans care about no one but themselves.

That radical right’s history is a fantasy. The reality is that progressive Americans in each generation have creatively reinvented government to meet the challenges of their own time.

We have the opportunity to do that in our generation as well.

Challenges

But we can’t do it by rushing to the left while the Republicans march lockstep to the right. We can’t do it by mimicking the Republicans and only talking to ourselves. New eras in our politics come about only when activists and political leaders present innovative ideas that speak to and for a broad swath of the American people.

So we have to understand what our fellow citizens don’t want, as well as what they do want. And it is clear that they don’t want a huge expansion of government and far higher taxes. They don’t want a large inflexible state. They don’t want an ideological  politics that divides one group or class from another.

What Americans want is what progressives have created in the past: pragmatic, uniquely American solutions to the barriers that stand in the way of a growing, prosperous middle class.  They want what America, at its best, has created before: new ways for the public and private sectors to come together to solve our problems in ways that reflect the broad progressives ideas we share. They want innovative approaches that stear clear of the one-sided programs of left and right.

The great post-war era

Look, for example, at the great post-war war era in America between 1945 and 1973. America’s economy and its middle class grew faster during that period than at any time before or since. That growth was powered by not just by both private but by public investment. It was the era of great public work projects, of new road and bridges, airports, dams, and of course hundreds of schools. And it was the time when a huge expansion of higher education not only educated millions of college students but generated the explosion of scientific research that led to the space program and the computer. That era created a higher education system that included an incredible diversity of public and private schools and that gave young people the opportunity to attend the college or university that best suited them.

That is the kind of innovative, pragmatic progressive approach we need today.

Health Care and Education

Let me give you two examples where innovative thinking will help us find progressive solutions that America as a whole will embrace.

First, look at health care reform: I was proud to work for the Affordable Care Act, which created a hybrid public / private system of health insurance, even while people on my left criticized it as a sell out to insurance companies and people on my right called it socialism. It was and is neither. It is a uniquely American, pragmatic solution to the goal of guaranteeing quality affordable health care for all. It is, to be sure, a complicated proposal but it fit a complicated issue. Still as each step of it has gone into effect, Americans have embraced it. As it goes fully into effect in the next few years they will continue to do so.

The ACA takes advantage of markets and the private sector to provide health insurance, while regulating insurance companies to ensure that everyone can get coverage and care and that excessive profits are limited. It takes advantage of the public sector to make insurance affordable to all and to encourage new, life- and cost-saving ways of delivering health care, while making room for a diverse group of non-profit and for-profit insurance companies, hospitals and medical practices to find the best way to attain those goals. 

The ACA is not perfect. It will need careful implementation and perhaps amendment along the way. But it will save tens of thousands of lives and reduce the pain and suffering of hundreds of thousands while giving security and peace of mind to millions. And it is not the end of reform. Perhaps the best part of the ACA is that it encourages further creative innovations that will solve the problems that remain in our health care system

Second, look at education. Nothing can be more important to our future than educating our kids. But today we are locked in an ideological struggle between people on the left who want to return to the monolithic public schools of the past and people on the right who want to privatize all of our schools.

I very much share the concerns of those who see in many proposals for privatization a way to end the public responsibility for educating our kids or an attempt to undercut teacher unions. Elementary and secondary education is a fundamental responsibility of any community. And no public money should ever be spent on schools that aren’t carefully regulated and evaluated by public authorities. We also know that the best education is found where teachers are organized and recognized as professionals deserving of respect, opportunities to advance, and good pay and benefits.

We can, however, recognize those principles while also understanding that the monolithic schools of the past won’t meet the needs of the present. In education, like health care, we need a variety of approaches—and a good deal of experimentation—to learn how to best educate the incredible diversity of kids who enter schools today. (Indeed, as someone whose unhappy early education took place in a monolithic school system, I can say we’ve needed much greater flexibility, and the innovation that comes along with it, for a very long time.)

Taking advantage of the progressive moment

We can find many other examples—in economic and community development; in addressing the dangers of global warming and environmental degradation; and in others as well—where new creative thinking will enable us to find pragmatic progressive solutions that have a broad appeal.

If we present ideals like that in one area after another, we will be taking advantage of this moment in our history to build a new progressive era, one that captures the broad center of our politics and the energy of the American people. If we do that, we will take our place among the progressives who have, in each generation, moved American forward, handing a better country on to our children and grandchildren.