This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The fiscal policy terrain is shifting radically—and rapidly. Europe’s response to the Greek crisis combines debt and enforced austerity. In the UK, the official Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition agreement states that “deficit reduction and continuing to ensure economic recovery is the most urgent issue facing Britain” and commits to a “significantly accelerated reduction in the structural deficit over the course of a Parliament” (that is, between now and 2015). And in the United States, two major economic journalists—David Leonhardt of The New York Times and Steven Pearlstein of The Washington Post—weighed in on Wednesday with major articles. Leonhardt shows that by a widely-accepted metric, cyclically adjusted primary balance (a country’s medium-term deficit as a percentage of GDP, excluding interest payments and assuming full employment), the U.S. is in worse shape than Britain and even Greece. Pearlstein goes a step farther, laying out his own budget that brings together “some of the best ideas of the left and the right.” (A colleague and I intend to emulate his good example in more detail this June.)
In related developments, a well-known conservative, Kevin Williamson, published an article in the National Review Online entitled “Goodbye Supply Side.” In it, he criticized conservatives for “falling for happy talk about pro-growth tax cuts and strategic Laffer Curve Optimizing” and quoted Arthur Laffer himself as saying, “Does every tax cut pay for itself? No.” “The exaggeration of supply-side effect”—Williamson continues—“the belief that tax-rate cuts pay for themselves or more than pay for themselves over some measurable period—is more an article of faith than an economic fact.” In a follow-up piece published on Tuesday, Williamson said that “conservatives would do better to support a budget plan that combines real spending cuts with tax increases than to support a budget that does nothing to reduce spending but leaves taxes where they are or reduces them.” On the other side of the aisle, Leonhardt quotes the redoubtable liberal Robert Greenstein as saying, “Most of the public thinks, ‘If only the darn politicians could get their act together to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, and to make tax avoidance go away and so on.’ But the bottom line is, there really is no avoiding the hard choices.”
I may be a cock-eyed optimist, but I’m seeing signs that the ice is breaking and that a discussion that has been frozen for a generation is beginning to develop. The question now is whether people who have the power to make a difference—starting but certainly not ending with the members of the bipartisan fiscal commission—will have the courage to abandon long-held positions and do what just about everyone knows needs to be done.
U.S. fiscal policy is now in a race between sanity and catastrophe, and the window for action may well be narrower than we suppose. As a number of economists have told me in recent weeks, we know two things about fiscal crises: 1) we can’t predict their timing, and 2) once they start, they move faster than we imagine possible. When they’re imminent, it’s much too late to prevent them. Our real choice boils downs either to effective preemption or to some version of what Greece must now endure.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Many observers are wondering why the Conservatives failed to gain an outright majority in last week’s elections. After all, Labour has been in power for thirteen years, Gordon Brown is deeply unpopular, and the budget is in crisis. Moreover, David Cameron worked hard to modernize and moderate the Conservative party, and despite a surge after the first debate, the Liberal Democrats scored only a modest gain in the popular vote and actually lost five seats.
The answer is starting us in the face, and it’s disturbing: the Tories fell short because the right-wing anti-Europe, anti-immigrant parties surged. Let’s look at the past three elections:
UK Independence Party
2001 Vote: 390,563 (1.2%)
2005 Vote: 603,298 (2.2%)
2010 Vote: 917,832 (3.1%)
British National Party
2001 Vote: 47,129 (0.2%)
2005 Vote: 192,746 (0.7%)
2010 Vote: 563,743 (1.9%)
Between them, these two parties now enjoy the support of nearly one and a half million British voters – a full five percent of the total.
This may well have made the difference between a Tory majority and the actual result. I count twenty-three constituencies narrowly won by Labour or the Liberal Democrats where the vote for the UK Independence Party alone was greater than the margin of the Conservative defeat. We can’t know for sure, but it seems likely that those votes would have gone to the more Euro-skeptic Conservative candidates had it not been for the UKIP.
This suggests that immigration may have been the sleeper issue in 2010 election – and that the Conservatives will have a strong incentive to respond. They’ve positioned themselves to do so, promising in their manifesto to “take net migration back to the levels of the 1990s – tens of thousands a year, not hundreds of thousands.” Among the steps they propose to achieve this result: “setting an annual limit on the number of non-EU economic migrants” (AKA Muslims); and “limiting access only to those who will bring the most value to the British economy” (AKA university graduates and others with advanced technical skills). By contrast, the Liberal Democrat manifesto does not call for any new numerical quotas and offers undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship. If they enter into a formal coalition with the Conservatives, they will have to go along with – and thereby facilitate – a new immigration regime with which they profoundly disagree.

This item is by John E. Schwarz, who wrote the introductory essay for the Demos/TDS online forum on “Progressive Politics and the Meaning of American Freedom.” It is his response to the other essays submitted to the forum.
Let me say how impressed I am with the many different angles of this important topic that the respondents have spoken to and the thoughtfulness of the responses. Summarizing the forum, Ed Kilgore points out that two kinds of issues have been dominant. I’d like to take up each of the two issue areas and the respondents’ comments about them in turn.
The first general area has to do with how significant freedom actually is. One issue, voiced by Mark Schmitt, is that focusing on freedom amounts mainly to simple “reframing by naming,” that is, it is little more than merely rebottling the same product. I see the purpose very differently, not as cosmetic but as absolutely essential. At bottom, the purpose is to identify the foundational value that progressives actually believe in; to recognize what that crucial value means and requires, reaching back to the Founders; and, to advance that basic value against false libertarian representations of it. On that basis, it also serves as an umbrella transforming what now is a series of different and discrete individual policy elements into an overarching, coherent, and inspiring vision.
An allied concern, raised by Will Marshall, is that the progressive ideal of freedom has only limited political salience because Americans don’t and never will understand freedom in the expansive way that progressives do. In this view, the conservative notion of freedom as small government and free enterprise is encoded in our DNA. Yet, the introductory essay (and Halpin and Teixeira as well) cite strong evidence contesting this conclusion and indicating, to the contrary, that a sizeable majority of Americans in fact do instinctively support the progressive ideal of freedom (see Center for American Progress, “The State of American Political Ideology 2009: A Study of Values and Beliefs,” p. 41).
Even so, Halpin and Teixeira and also Hilary Bok raise the problem that the progressive ideal of freedom, with its call for governmental activism in the economy, is seriously weakened to the extent that Americans distrust government. They contend it is crucial to address the substantial misgivings that many Americans presently have about government. I agree.
There are a number of approaches to build on which in combination can move successfully toward that more favorable attitude. Effectively articulating the goals of programs in terms of protecting and expanding our freedom (and the security that comes with freedom), rooted in the thinking of the Founders, should moderate the feeling that government is going far beyond its proper bounds, which is a major component of today’s misgivings about government. It is also a way to show how and why progressives care about getting budgets under control—and have the record, relative to conservatives, to prove it.

Read more…

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
For all of the excitement surrounding the UK’s general election, its main players have been deeply evasive on the nation’s central question: What to do about the massive fiscal imbalance they’re staring at? Here is how the respected Institute for Fiscal Studies begins its quietly scathing analysis:

The financial crisis and the recession have prompted a huge increase in government borrowing over the last two years, as the gap between what the public sector spends and raises from taxes has widened to an extent not seen since the Second World War. The Treasury believes a significant part of this increase in government borrowing is ‘structural’—in other words, that it will not automatically disappear as the economy recovers. This means that, in the absence of discretionary tax increases and spending cuts, government borrowing would remain high by historic standards, pushing the government’s debt burden and interest payments onto an unsustainable upward path.
Confronted with this prospect, the three main parties all accept that a significant fiscal tightening will be necessary over the coming Parliament, and perhaps beyond. Given that this is likely to be the defining task of the next administration, it is striking how reticent all three parties have been in explaining exactly how they would go about it. The Conservative and Liberal Democrat manifestos do not even state clearly how big a fiscal tightening they would seek to achieve, and by when, assuming that the public finances evolve as the Treasury currently expects. And all three parties are particularly vague about the cuts in public spending that they all think should deliver the majority of the fiscal tightening. [Italics mine]

The consequence is that the next British government, whatever its composition, will take office without a clear popular mandate to do what every potential leader (indeed, all but the most benighted back-bencher) knows needs to be done. Because the campaign has not adequately prepared the people for sustained austerity, every significant spending cut will come as a nasty surprise, and many will evoke fierce resistance. This is not a formula for effective governance in hard times.
I’m not saying this to single out the Brits, because the politics of evasion has infected almost all western societies, including our own. Just about everyone knows that the U.S. government will have to turn toward fiscal restraint, for the simple reason that we can’t keep borrowing a trillion dollars a year (and turning over a total of five trillion a year in public debt) without incurring burdensome interest payments and running grave risks. But almost no one running for office is talking about this challenge in more than vague generalities.
I shudder to think of what will happen when we hit a wall—when the risk premium demanded on U.S. debt begins to rise and holders of capital become less and less willing to finance our structural deficit on terms our economy can afford. The people will feel blindsided and betrayed—rightly so. If you think public mistrust and anger are bad now, just wait. Will our leaders—starting with the president in his 2011 State of the Union address—summon the courage to treat our citizens as adults and level with them about what needs to be done? Our future is riding on the answer.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
While it may take months to stop the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it’s not too soon to begin asking some questions about why it happened and what can be done to minimize the chance that something like this will happen again. Thanks to The Wall Street Journal’s terrific reporting last week, there are two important things we already know.
First, an oil-drilling procedure called cementing—which is supposed to prevent oil and natural gas from escaping by filling gaps between the outside of the well pipe and the inside of the hole bored into the ocean floor—has been identified as a leading cause of well blowouts. Indeed, a 2007 study by the Minerals Management Service (or MMS, the division of the Interior Department responsible for offshore drilling) found that this procedure was implicated in 18 out of 39 blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico over the 14 years it studied—more than any other factor. Cementing, which was handled by Halliburton, had just been completed prior to the recent explosion. The Journal notesthat Halliburton was also the cementer on a well that suffered a big blowout last August in the Timor Sea off Australia. While BP’s management has been responsive to press inquiries and relatively forthcoming as to its responsibility, Halliburton has refused to answer any questions—an all-too-familiar stance on its part.
Second, the oil well now spewing large quantities of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico lacked a remote-control acoustic shutoff switch used by rigs in Norway and Brazil as the last line of defense against underwater spills. There’s a story behind that. As the Journal reports, after a spill in 2000, the MMS issued a safety notice saying that such a back-up device is “an essential component of a deepwater drilling system.” The industry pushed back in 2001, citing alleged doubts about the capacity of this type of system to provide a reliable emergency backup. By 2003, government regulators decided that the matter needed more study after commissioning a report that offered another, more honest reason: “acoustic systems are not recommended because they tend to be very costly.” I guess that depends on what they’re compared to. The system costs about $500,000 per rig. BP is spending at least $5 million per day battling the spill, the well destroyed by the explosion is valued at $560 million, and estimated damages to fishing, tourism, and the environment already run into the billions.
There’s something else we know, something that suggests an explanation for this sequence of events. After the Bush administration took office, the MMS became a cesspool of corruption and conflicts of interest. In September 2008, Earl Devaney, Interior’s Inspector General, delivered a report to Secretary Dirk Kempthorne that has to be read to be believed. One section, headlined “A Culture of Ethical Failure,” documented the belief among numerous MMS staff that they were “exempt from the rules that govern all other employees of the Federal Government.” They adopted a “private sector approach to essentially everything they did.” This included “opting themselves out of the Ethics in Government Act.” On at least 135 occasions, they accepted gifts and gratuities from oil and gas companies with whom they worked. One of the employees even had a lucrative consulting arrangement with a firm doing business with the government. And in a laconic sentence that speaks volumes, the IG reported: “When confronted by our investigators, none of the employees involved displayed remorse.”
So here’s my question: what is responsible for MMS’s change of heart between 2000 and 2003 on the crucial issue of requiring a remote control switch for offshore rigs? What we do know is that unfettered oil drilling was to Dick Cheney’s domestic concerns what the invasion of Iraq was to his foreign policy—a core objective, implacably pursued regardless of the risks. Is there a connection between his infamous secret energy task force and the corrupt mindset that came to dominate a key program within MMS? Would $500,000 per rig have been regarded as an unacceptably expensive insurance policy if a drill-baby-drill administration hadn’t placed its thumb so heavily on the scale?
It’s possible that my dark suspicions are baseless, and there’s no connection between the Bush-Cheney administration’s energy policy and the sad events of the past two weeks. But I’m just one guy with a keyboard reading documents and asking questions. I hope that some entity—public or private—with the needed staff and resources will do what’s necessary to get to the bottom of these questions. Before we even consider going forward with any more offshore drilling, we need some answers.

Even as Republicans try, somehow, to make the Gulf oil spill disaster “Obama’s Katrina,” the evidence of actual responsibility is pointing in a very different direction: right at former Vice President, Halliburton executive, and self-appointed czar of All Things Petroleum, Dick Cheney.
TDS Co-Editor William Galston has an important piece up on the New Republic site today marshaling the evidence for Cheney’s culpability for BP’s failure to utilize a device that would have largely prevented the disaster, which was required by federal authorities prior to 2003.

So here’s my question: what is responsible for the [Mineral Management Service’s] change of heart between 2000 and 2003 on the crucial issue of requiring a remote control switch for offshore rigs? What we do know is that unfettered oil drilling was to Dick Cheney’s domestic concerns what the invasion of Iraq was to his foreign policy—a core objective, implacably pursued regardless of the risks. Is there a connection between his infamous secret energy task force and the corrupt mindset that came to dominate a key program within MMS? Would $500,000 per rig have been regarded as an unacceptably expensive insurance policy if a drill-baby-drill administration hadn’t placed its thumb so heavily on the scale?

As Galston notes, it’s indisputable that Halliburton was responsible for the drilling process, known as “cementing,” that appears to have led to the Gulf spill, and to previous spills elsewhere. And it raises new questions about the conflicts of interest involved in the secretive energy policy process that Cheney set up as vice president, which really got into the weeds of the oil drilling business.
So let’s don’t hear any more about “Obama’s Katrina” until we’ve figured out whether the man who so often declared Barack Obama unfit for the presidency might have played a tangible role in making this disaster happen.

While Democratic unity is, given the objective circumstances, pretty well intact, there remains some serious progressive grumbling that the president and congressional Democrats are failing to take advantage of populist fury against the Washington status quo and reclaim the mantle of “hope and change.”
The esteemed progressive journalist Paul Starr has an article up on the American Prospect site arguing that the long-term policy results of Democratic policy initiatives should remain a higher priority than manuevering with the Tea Party Movement for the Angry Populist high ground.

Many progressives blame Obama, saying that he fell in with the wrong crowd in Washington and Wall Street, gave too much ground on policy, failed to mobilize his grass-roots organization, and lost his true voice, at least until the final weeks of the health-care battle when he barnstormed the nation and looked like the candidate the public elected in 2008.
Envious of the Tea Party’s angry crowds, even saying they sympathize with them, these progressives yearn for Democrats to express that same populist anger — but to direct it against the big banks and other corporations….
But there are good reasons why Obama cannot and should not indulge in a full-bore populism that, in practice, would yield nothing but deadlock and disaster.

Starr contrasts Obama’s approach to that of Republicans in power, who pandered for votes with an unfunded and poorly designed Medicare prescription drug benefit precisely because they didn’t care about the real-life consequences. With Republicans now abandoning any real pretense of offering a practical agenda for the country, Democrats have the particular burden of being “the party of responsible government, [because] America needs at least one of those.”

[F]or all their limitations, the bailouts and other policies have put the economy back in gear. Growth has resumed, productivity is up sharply, and employers are beginning to hire. This is how recoveries look: The market anticipates change, while employment lags it. And because most people cannot yet see the fruits, Democrats are paying a price in public approval and may well pay one in November.
For the fall, Democrats could well use more tactical populism, and the battle over financial reform should provide plenty of opportunity for it. But their true hope lies in building a record as the party of responsible government. Let the Republicans drink the Tea Party’s brew. Progressives shouldn’t wish for the equivalent. Calm and intelligent leadership is ultimately a better formula for long-term public support.

With the current conservative surge relying heavily on record-high public distrust of government, Starr has a good point that running against government as inveterately corrupted by corporate influence is a potentially self-defeating strategy for the party of public-sector activism. Certainly government should be more progressive. But if people don’t believe government can govern effectively at all, it’s the irresponsbile anti-government party that will benefit politically.

This item, the seventh in the Demos/TDS forum on “Progressive Politics and the Meaning of American Freedom,” is by Hilary Bok, Luce Professor in Bioethics and Moral and Political Theory at Johns Hopkins University, and author of Freedom and Responsibility.
I agree with Matt Yglesias that it’s a mistake to try to locate a coherent conception of liberty with which the Republican Party is genuinely concerned. We are, after all, talking about a party whose most recent president claimed the right to detain American citizens indefinitely without charges or trial and to disregard duly enacted laws at will; a party which applauds Arizona’s new law allowing the police to ask people to prove their citizenship or face arrest; which tries to use coercive state power to prevent the terminally ill from choosing the manner of their death; which seeks to prevent members of the LGBT community from marrying the people they love; and which regularly courts the votes of people who look back fondly on the days when blacks were second class citizens. No party with this record can be described as supporting liberty.
That said, I differ with Matt on the utility of challenging Republicans’ claims to champion liberty. For one thing, even if this does not in fact change many minds, I’d rather not give up on the possibility that it might change some. For another, while people’s views of political parties don’t change as quickly as I’d like, they do change eventually. Republicans have already forfeited their reputation for competence and fiscal discipline. I suspect that they are in the process of losing much of the credibility they once had with the military, though I expect this to take a while. If there is any justice in the world, their claim to support liberty will eventually become as obviously risible as their claim to be responsible stewards of the economy. Since I care about liberty, I want to do whatever I can to help this process along.
In his introductory essay, John Schwarz suggests that Democrats embrace an ideal of freedom that has less to do with government inaction than with independence and opportunity: with “the right of every person to be able to provide for himself decently by means that are under the individual’s own control.” People are not free just because the government does not directly interfere with their choices. They need to have a decent set of alternatives available to them so that, in Bill Clinton’s words, “if you work hard and play by the rules, you ought to have a decent life and a chance for your children to have a better one.”
If freedom involves having a decent set of alternatives available to us, then government action can enhance our freedom even if it involves restraints on conduct that would not otherwise violate anyone’s rights. Consider traffic laws. Those of us who drive are constantly subjected to government dictates telling us what we can and cannot do. We can only drive on one side of the street. We have to stop at red lights and stop signs even when no one else is around. If freedom means only that government should not tell us what to do, then the traffic laws are a massive intrusion on our liberty.
I suspect that most people don’t see things that way, though. They probably agree with Elizabeth Anderson, from whom I have taken this example:

To be sure, in a state of gridlock, one has the formal freedom to choose any movement in one’s opportunity set — which amounts to being able to rock forward and back a couple of inches from bumper to bumper, getting nowhere. Some freedom!

Normally, the point of driving is to get somewhere. The traffic laws enable us to get where we are going much more quickly and safely than we would if each of us had to decide for him- or herself which side of the street to drive on. The traffic laws do not tell us where to go. They leave the choice of destination, and for that matter the decision whether to drive at all, entirely up to us. They simply tell us which side of the road to drive on, that we should stop at various points, and so forth. By taking away our freedom to drive on the left, or to blast through busy intersections, they grant us much more freedom in the form of a greatly enhanced ability to get wherever we want to go quickly and safely.
Anyone who thinks that the traffic laws enhance our freedom should acknowledge that in some cases, including this one, government action can enhance our freedom, even if that action takes the form of restrictions on what we can and cannot do. An enormous number of questions about which (other) forms of government action might enhance our freedom would remain to be answered, but the fact that some government policy involves either a more active government or new restrictions on our action would not, by itself, imply that it diminishes our freedom.
Will Marshall thinks that such an account of freedom isn’t really freedom at all; that in cases like this, I give up liberty in order to obtain not more liberty, but something else altogether. He quotes Isaiah Berlin:

To avoid glaring inequality or widespread misery I am ready to sacrifice some, or all, of my freedom: I may do so willingly and freely; but it is freedom that I am giving up for the sake of justice or equality or the love of my fellow men. I should be guilt-stricken, and rightly so, if I were not in some circumstances, ready to make this sacrifice. But a sacrifice is not an increase in what is being sacrificed, namely freedom, however great the moral need or the compensation for it.

If I sacrifice my liberty in order to avoid ‘glaring inequality or widespread misery’, then I am indeed giving up freedom for the sake of something other than liberty itself. But this does not show that there are no cases in which we might sacrifice some liberty in order to achieve more. Note that ‘glaring inequality or widespread misery’ are not states that one would normally be tempted to describe as necessarily involving a loss of freedom at all (assuming that the inequality in question is inequality of wealth or income, and that it does not, for instance, translate into a loss of equal political representation for some.) They involve bad outcomes, not an absence of opportunity. In this respect they differ from the kinds of cases I am interested in. Traffic laws, for instance, leave me free not only to decide whether to travel at all, and if so where to go, but to make stupid choices that prevent me from taking advantage of the opportunity to travel quickly and safely. I can, for instance, decide to ignore the warning lights on the dashboard, or forget to fill up my gas tank; if I do so, the traffic laws will not step in and fix my mistake. They remove impediments to my getting where I want to go in a reasonable period of time, thereby increasing my freedom of action, but they do not compensate for my stupidity.
Similarly, many programs that liberals support arguably increase our liberty – our freedom to decide what kind of life we should lead from among a reasonable set of alternatives, and to have a good shot at living a decent life if we are willing to work hard and play by the rules. Providing all children with a decent education and good health care obviously enhances their freedom, as do lead paint abatement programs. Adopting macroeconomic policies that foster the creation of good jobs enhances the opportunities available to adults. Providing good health insurance for everyone will not prevent us from getting sick, but preventive care might allow us to avoid some illnesses, and might lessen the severity of others by enabling people who become ill to seek treatment promptly without having to ask whether or not they can afford treatment. This would blunt, to some extent, the assault on our freedom that serious illness often involves. And insofar as our ability to make a decent life for ourselves if we are willing to work hard and play by the rules is diminished if we are vulnerable to unforeseen and undeserved catastrophe, the fact that having health insurance means that illness will not bankrupt us enhances our freedom.
Actually justifying these programs by appeal to such a conception of liberty would, of course, involve showing that they do, in fact, have the consequences I have claimed for them, and that whatever costs to liberty they might involve are outweighed by their benefits. But there is no reason to think that no such justification could possibly be offered, or that it could not be based on an appeal to liberty.
Postscript: I agree with John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira that even if we appeal to this conception of freedom, and even if most of the electorate accepts it, Democrats will be unable to translate this into popular support for any actual government program so long as people distrust government. People might be willing to support all sorts of Democratic goals, but so long as they believe that government programs in general are ineffective or corrupt, they will not believe that any actual program will achieve those goals. They might, for instance, agree in principle that it would be better if everyone had decent health insurance, and even that they would be willing to pay for it, but also believe that any health insurance program implemented by our government will involve higher taxes, bloated bureaucracies, and burdensome regulation, but will not actually provide better health insurance for anyone. So long as they believe that, their lack of support for any concrete health care plan should not surprise us.

This item, by TDS Co-Editor William Galston, is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Democrats are on the verge of a fateful choice about their agenda between now and the end of the 111th Congress. Whatever its substantive merits, and regardless of how it will be judged once it goes into effect, the health care bill has not gained popular support since its passage, and the Democratic Party has continued to slip in the polls. The key reason, I’d suspect, is that people came to see the health care debate as a long diversion from their central concern—namely, jobs and the economy.
Elementary prudence would seem to dictate that the leadership would quickly pivot to the economy and would sustain that focus through the spring and summer. The small-bore jobs bill was a start, and the far more significant financial reforms will advance the case. But now, the leadership is moving toward, or backing into, months dominated by some combination of immigration and climate change—and of course there will also be a Supreme Court confirmation battle to fight. It is hard to believe that the people will respond favorably.
No doubt strategists on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue will point out that intensity is the key to midterm elections and that right now the intensity gap strongly favors the Republicans. The only way to counter-mobilize a somewhat demoralized Democratic base is to target the issues its components care about the most—immigration for Hispanics, climate change for young people—or so the argument runs.
That sounds too clever by half. In the first place, it’s very unlikely that either immigration or climate change legislation will succeed in this congress. If passing health care did not increase public support for Democrats, why will failing to pass immigration reform or climate change legislation work any better?
Second, Democrats seem to assume that they have nothing left to lose—that all the people who will vote against them this November have already made up their minds—so that focusing on non-economic issues dear to the base will be all gain and no pain. Again, I wonder. Might it not reinforce the message that Democrats are out of touch and unwilling to heed the people’s concerns? Over the past nine months, many independents who supported Democrats in 2006 and 2008 have moved away from the party. More could follow.
No doubt Democrats will try to blunt this reaction by emphasizing the connection between jobs and the economy, on the one hand, and immigration and climate change on the other. Substantive as that argument may be, I still don’t think it will work. In times of deep economic concern, average Americans are more likely to see threats than opportunities. Immigration reform and climate change legislation will always be tough, but they’ll be easier to accomplish when the middle class is feeling less anxious.
Granted, in the long term, the politics of immigration will certainly work in favor of the Democrats. Look at California: Republicans have never recovered from the legislation and rhetoric of Pete Wilson’s governorship. In the short term, however, the issue could push in the opposite direction. While the immigration debate of 2006-2007 divided Republicans, it also divided Democrats, and this year the issue will most hurt endangered Democrats in tough districts.
My skepticism about the Democrats’ emerging strategy has nothing to do with the substance of these issues. What’s been made public so far about the Kerry-Lieberman-Graham bill sounds sensible, and I served as co-convenor of a bipartisan task force that agreed on recommendations for comprehensive immigration reform. I disagree, rather, with the political calculation that seems to be driving this strategy.
Here’s why: 90 percent of the electorate is not Hispanic, and 85 percent is not young. Relatively modest shifts in voter sentiment outside these two groups could easily swamp increased turnout within them and turn all-but-certain Democratic losses into a rout of historic proportions. While the temptation to adopt a strategy of targeted micro-politics is understandable, Democrats should instead espouse a strategy of macro-politics focused on broad-based public concerns. If that means that Senate Democrats will have to choose a new majority leader next January, so be it. At least they’ll still have a majority.

This item, the sixth in the Demos/TDS forum on “Progressive Politics and the Meaning of American Freedom,” is by Mark Schmitt, executive editor of The American Prospect.
While I’m often impatient with a progressive conversation about “values,” abstracted from practice (I’ve sat through enough meetings where half the time gets spent filling a whiteboard with lists of our shared values and nothing of actual value gets done) in this case this forum’s long opening essay by John Schwarz gets well beyond the vacuousness common to such exercises, and it will provoke an important conversation with its claim that “mention of freedom has nearly disappeared from the speeches of most Democrats, except when the issue is civil liberties.”
Matthew Yglesias, in the first substantive response in the forum, points out that attempting to reclaim the word “freedom” from the right wouldn’t necessarily have any value in electoral politics, because the right’s use of the word was never meant to be taken literally – it has about as much meaning as “the American Way.” And of course, there is a deep strain of authoritarianism in the Tea Party right – it’s the freedom of states to deny health coverage or welfare, or of parents to spank their kids, that they would protect. But even if a liberal claim on the word won’t suddenly make the right shut up and go home, it’s worth thinking about whether a richer language of freedom would give a stronger sense of purpose to liberalism, not just for political reasons, but because we actually care about it.
Schwarz’s main argument, bolstered by a thorough reading of American political rhetoric with a particular emphasis on Lincoln, is a classic defense of “positive liberty” – the familiar concept that real liberty requires not just the absence of state interference, but a minimum set of goods that get one to the starting line of life – basic sustenance, shelter, education, and, in Schwarz’s proposal, job retraining – to ensure “that satisfactory economic opportunity will be available to every person who is willing to work and act responsibly.” Schwarz calls it “a community of equal liberty,” which he contrasts with “individualistic liberty.” In this sense, the document is of a piece with “communitarian” critiques of rights-based liberalism, such as Michael Sandel’s, which were valuable correctives in the 1990s.
As a political strategy, what this amounts to, then, is mostly reframing by renaming – make basic minimal egalitarianism more politically acceptable by calling it freedom, rather than letting the right call it socialism. That’s accurate, of course, just as the principles and metaphors that stem from it – such as that government should guarantee equality of opportunity but not of result, or the image of an even starting line – are generally agreeable, comfortable aspects of both conservative and liberal rhetoric. But they don’t make political problems or conflicts go away – there’s rarely agreement about where “opportunity” ends and “results” begin, or where in life the “starting line” is found.
It’s also a surprisingly thin vision of freedom, casually setting aside much “individualized freedom” in favor of “mutual obligation and shared sacrifice” and minimal economic equality. Schwarz says that liberals don’t talk about freedom “except when the subject is civil liberties,” but how much falls into that poignant “except”? Freedom of expression, freedom to love who you want to love, freedom from unjust imprisonment, privacy rights, the right to leave an oppressive marriage, the right to worship as you please or not at all– these are “individualistic” forms of freedom, to be sure. (They are also “negative freedoms,” in that they are infinite – everyone can possess them without choices about allocating resources.) But they are absolutely central to any progressive vision of freedom, just as they are to a political party that has built its coalition on individuals whose first claim was to freedom, on waves of immigrants who came to the U.S. seeking freedom and often had to fight for it, and on women’s rights. A robust vision of “freedom” has to build on those individual rights, and show a passion for them, in the manner of the Four Freedoms, not just dismiss them and replace them with a common economic vision.
The real opportunity to take the language of freedom back from the far right is to recognize the distinction between an optimistic, bright vision of human possibility and fulfillment in all dimensions of life – material and non-material – versus the narrow, dark vision of freedom from an oppressive government. The right’s language of “freedom,” in their fight against the modest Obama agenda, is all the dark side – “freedom from” government rather than the Reaganite vision of vast human possibility. The progressive alternative, then, is not a comparable small vision of freedom from economic scarcity and desperation, but a bigger, optimistic vision of what people can achieve – individually and together – when their rights and dignity are protected, and with a base of security that allows them to take risks. (As a text for this vision, consider John Maynard Keynes’ lovely and eccentric 1930 essay, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” which is really not about economic possibilities at all, but the possibility that a future generation might have enough abundance to get beyond the problem of scarcity and “to live wisely and agreeably and well.”
As recently as a few years ago, conservatives tried to draw a contrast with liberalism in which they stood for opportunity while liberalism stood only for security — liberalism was for society’s losers, the people who needed protection, while conservatism was for winners, who took chances and dreamed big. Social Security privatization was their most aggressive bet at putting this contrast into political practice, but it’s failure in 2005 showed that voters were smart enough to understand that a certain measure of security was essential to creating opportunity.
Now the right has fallen back on a cramped, fear-based vision of freedom in which takes refuge in the security of the status quo. However much we dislike what we have, this rationale goes, whatever government offers can only be worse. This fear-based vision of freedom creates an opening for liberals to reclaim a vision of freedom that is not based on blind optimism – hard to sustain at this moment anyway – but a clear vision of economic growth and opportunity for individuals to make the most of their talents and dreams, protected both by rights and by public goods that help everyone, not just the very poor.
Real positive liberty isn’t just a guarantee of a safety net for the poor. My old boss, Senator Bill Bradley, used to quote in almost every speech a line from D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature: “It is never freedom until you find something you positively want to be” – a vision of freedom that’s not just about minimal economic well-being, but about aspiration and purpose. Lawrence may have been as eccentric as Keynes, and neither one is as American as Lincoln, but theirs is the appropriate language for the left in American politics, not just because freedom is a political winner, but because we actually care about it.