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Americans seem to be experiencing a kind of political schizophrenia. Our economy is strong, we are told, and yet insecurity and inequality continue to gnaw at the fabric of our society and at the hearts of many of its members. Picking up our "First Principles" series, Cornel West and Roberto Mangabeira Unger argue that "rigid ideological grids often overlook the complexity and experimental impulse of American life." What we need, the authors insist, is a politics of progressive "tinkering ... improvisational reform, of jazzlike public action," for which American citizens have demonstrated a genius in the past. --The Editors of The Nation The oldest element of American life is the religion of individual and collective possibility: the belief that citizens can remake themselves and their society, that they can make everything new. The American dream includes a middle-class standard of living for everyone, with economic independence and security, as well as opportunities for children to achieve what their parents failed to accomplish or obtain. Today, however, at the apogee of the country's world power and in the midst of a thriving economy, most working Americans feel more squeezed than ever and are convinced that life will be harder for them than it was for their parents. Even politically active and educated elites feel incapable of addressing, much less solving, many of the basic problems of the country, from inadequate healthcare and education to the social and racial apartheid of inner-city poverty; from increasing inequality of wealth and income to abstention from the vote and indifference to politics. The practical consequence of this national failure is that Americans despair of collective solutions to their collective problems, and alternate between resenting the incapable politics of their country and blaming themselves for failure to succeed at a game that so often seems rigged against them. At the same time, faith in the power of the individual to better his or her life--against all odds--is the most prominent element in the American religion of possibility. That religion also includes something more basic and ambitious: a belief in the unlimited potential of practical problem-solving and a faith in democracy as a terrain on which ordinary men and women can become strongly defined personalities, in full possession of themselves. The United States is a country of tinkerers. To believe in the American religion of possibility is to hold that each of the problems that oppress, weaken and frighten us as individuals can be confronted, problem by problem, through human effort and ingenuity. Americans resist seeing particular problems as manifestations of hidden, hard constraints. They believe that the terrors of vast problems yield to the effects of many small solutions. Motivated, sustained and cumulative tinkering with institutional arrangements is an indispensable tool of democratic experimentalism, of improvisational reform, of jazzlike public action. Americans, however, have been willing to use this tool only under the extreme pressure of crisis and catastrophe. There have been three great periods of institutional innovation in American history: the foundation of the Republic, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the New Deal. In each, national leaders won support for institutional experiments from an energized majority. Nonetheless, ever since the first of these three periods of collective creation, the country has been attracted to the idea that it came close to the natural and necessary form of a free society. There were ordeals to undergo--the terrible burden of slavery and its aftermath, a massive economic failure and the outbreak of war in Europe--and crisis might require adjustment. But such innovations as were needed would result mainly from the independent initiative of people in their businesses or the voluntary association of individuals in their communities. Exceptions like the GI Bill or the Civil Rights Act--triggered by grassroots groups like the American Legion or black churches--prove the rule. A small number of major thinkers like Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Henry George, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and John Dewey tried to convince Americans to lift the exemption from experimentalism they accorded to their institutions, and to trade in some bad American exceptionalism for some good American experimentalism. Their message, however, was only selectively heard, even by progressive movements whose rigid, ideological grids often overlook the complexity and experimental impulse of American life. If American progressivism is to be reborn today and to carry forward its work, if it is to keep the religion of possibility alive and loosen the constraints that racial and gender oppression and class hierarchy impose upon our democracy, it must hear that message of democratic experimentalism more clearly. Progressives must present to the country a reform program that looks neither backward to the perpetuation of the liberal social programs nor sideways to the softening of the conservative free-market agenda but forward to a practical vision of the re-energizing of democratic politics and the democratizing of the market economy in America. Americans should use the tools of institutional experimentalism to rethink and rebuild each strand in their religion of possibility: the hope of social opportunity and mobility for the individual; the hope that practical ingenuity can resolve, one by one, the problems people face; and the hope that under democracy individual men and women can achieve the largeness of vision and experience that less democratic civilizations have reserved for the exceptional few. But Americans have traditionally gone about solving problems one at a time. They have been distrustful of the idea that their problems at any given time fit into a single scheme. Thus, the temper of progressive movements in the United States has been simple and sincere: majorities against minorities, poor against rich, powerless against powerful. Such a sensibility is impatient with the idea of combined and cumulative institutional change. The obstacles it is willing to recognize are visible: forceful interests rather than hidden assumptions or unchallenged arrangements. The attitudes of practical progressives are mirrored in the self-image of many a practical politician. They distrust, as romantic or dangerous, talk of ideologies, institutional alternatives and citizens' action. The policy discussion permitted by such a mentality takes the established institutions of the country for granted. Without ideas about institutional alternatives and without the political mobilization of once-passive majorities, politics degenerates into inconclusive bargaining among organized interest groups. Such a politics is incapable of addressing, much less solving, any of the major acknowledged problems of the country. When American radicals have broken with the tradition of the sincere progressives and the disillusioned politicians, they have sometimes embraced a view that is equally paralyzing. It is the belief, recommended by European theories like Marxism, in the existence of a system out there--capitalism, for example--with its driving laws, its inner logic and its indivisible unity. Either you change the whole system, or you merely try to soften its harsh effects through reformism. The idea of fundamental social change has been associated with the picture of decisive crisis, triggering the total substitution of one way of organizing society by another. We reject the choice between a view that would promote popular interests without reimagining and remaking institutional arrangements, and a view that sees such arrangements as pieces of a take-it-or-leave-it system. To understand the truth about political possibility, we need to jumble these categories, combining the idea of step-by-step reform with the idea that institutions matter. We have it in our power to reimagine and remake them. The institutions of a society are its fate. Transformative politics is, like art, an antifate, restoring to us a freedom we have renounced or forgotten. Progressives do not need to create a blueprint to map out a path. The steps along the way can and should be described both at points close to present circumstances and at points farther away. The direction--and its effect upon people's understanding of their interests and identities as well as upon their practical problems--is what matters. Only when we fail to hold in our minds a credible view of social change do we fall back on a fake, surrogate standard of political realism: that a proposal is realistic according to its proximity to what exists. It is easy to be a realist when you accept everything. It is easy to be a visionary when you confront nothing. To accept little and confront much, and to do so on the basis of an informed vision of piecemeal but cumulative change, is the way and the solution. There is broad consensus in America about what the basic problems of the country are. The economy has failed to achieve growth in productivity that is either inclusive of all citizens or rapid enough. The innovative practices of the best firms--the turning of production into permanent innovation—have remained within relatively isolated, advanced parts of the economy. Vast wealth, privilege and power have accumulated in the hands of a tiny and self-serving corporate elite, which pays itself proportionately more--and pays workers proportionately less--than in any other industrial democracy. The present systems of education and healthcare impose a burden on growth and prosperity as well as upon social welfare. In politics, where solutions must begin, there is less agreement about problems. Progressives, if not yet many of their fellow Americans, see problems with how money and moneyed interests exert an inordinate influence upon the outcome of elections and the direction of policy, an influence occasionally sanctified by the judiciary as if the ability of money to talk, magnifying the voices of the few and crowding out the voices of the many, were a principle rather than a wrong. Recent conservative administrations have succeeded in convincing Americans that they have little to hope for from the government or from political work. Progressive forces, in and outside the Democratic Party, have willingly resigned themselves to the humanization of the Republican as the outer limit of their transformative ambitions. The politically active minority of the country generally agrees that this surrender is the straightforward expression of political realism rather than the self-fulfilling consequence of a failure of ideas and nerve. Only in moments of deep crisis--the Civil War, the Great Depression, the civil uprisings in the sixties--have Americans pursued national politics with democratic, innovative energy. When things have seemed under control, they have derided national politics as a barely respectable sideshow to their personal responsibilities. Americans must resolve their ambivalence about politics if they are to fashion the institutional improvements that would allow them to solve the admitted problems of the country and begin to address the major features of the emerging world economy that have made many of these problems both more urgent and more intractable. The work of American progressivism today is to build the link between political reforms intended to quicken democratic politics in America and economic reforms designed to challenge the stark divisions between vanguard and rearguard--between advanced and backward sectors of the economy. The program we support opposes such economic divisions, and proposes a deepening of democracy: strengthening the tools for the collective discussion and solution of collective problems. It is a productivist program, rooting a bias toward more equality of income and wealth in a set of economic arrangements and a strategy of economic growth, rather than merely attempting, through retrospective and compensatory tax-and-transfer, to undo part of what the economy has wrought. It rejects the simple contrast between governmental activism and free enterprise, not because it wants to have a little of each but because it insists upon having more of both. Here, for example, are a few of its elements: (1) We should develop a broad-based and market-friendly effort to lift up the economic rearguard. One component of this would be the broadening of access to finance and technology through the establishment of independently administered venture-capital funds chartered to invest in the rearguard and to conserve and grow the resources with which they would be endowed. Experience suggests that, with accountable but independent management and properly diversified investment portfolios, such funds can achieve high rates of return on their endowments. Different regimes of private and social property and decentralized initiative would begin to coexist experimentally within the economy. The outcome of such experiments is not the suppression of the market; it is the democratizing and diversification of the market. (2) The law should develop standards to give a special push in schooling and employment--and therefore in admissions and hiring--to those who suffer from an accumulation of forms of disadvantage from which they cannot be expected to escape on their own. Prominent among these sources of subjugation are class, race, gender and handicap. Placed in this context, the offer of preferment loses its invidious, narrowly racial character. (3) Society should be independently organized outside the government—a simple idea with complicated and controversial implications. One major site of organization is work. Labor laws need to be strengthened, not to deepen divisions between a minority of relatively privileged workers in traditional industries and everyone else but to facilitate unionization everywhere, particularly in the expanding area of temporary work. We must resist the entrenchment of stark divisions between insiders--relatively privileged, organized workers with jobs in the capital- and knowledge-rich sectors of the economy--and outsiders with unstable, dead-end jobs in the capital- and knowledge-poor sectors. To advance such a program, we must encourage the master practice of democratic experimentalism: motivated, sustained and cumulative tinkering with institutional arrangements of the government and the economy, relying on a more engaged and informed citizenry rather than on a more enlightened technocratic elite. The gradual emergence of a lasting, transracial progressive majority in American politics is both the condition and the consequence of such democratizing changes. Ultimately, this project will move us not toward the humanization of the inevitable, but toward the alternative to an unnecessary and unacceptable fate. This
article is adapted from The Future of American Progressivism: An Initiative
for Political and Economic Reform (Beacon). Roberto Mangabeira Unger, a
professor of law at Harvard University, is the author of Democracy Realized: the
Progressive Alternative (Verso). Cornel West, who also teaches at Harvard, is
the author of the best-selling Race Matters (Vintage). |