As I’ve documented in this book, movement conservatism has been antidemocratic, with an attraction to authoritarianism, from the beginning, when the National Review praised Francisco Franco and defended the right of white Southerners to disenfranchise blacks. That antidemocratic, authoritarian attitude has never gone away. When liberals and conservatives clash over voter rights in America today, liberals are always trying to enfranchise citizens, while conservatives are always trying to block some citizens from voting. When they clash over government prerogatives, liberals are always the defenders of due process, while conservatives insist that those in power have the right to do as they please. After 9/11 the Bush administration tried to foster a deeply un-American political climate in which any criticism of the president was considered unpatriotic—and with few exceptions, American conservatives cheered.
I believe in a relatively equal society, supported by institutions that limit extremes of wealth and poverty. I believe in democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law. That makes me a liberal, and I’m proud of it.
Many people deeply involved in actual politics share the beliefs I’ve just described, yet prefer to describe themselves as progressives rather than liberals. To some extent that’s a response to the decades-long propaganda campaign conducted by movement conservatives, which has been quite successful in making Americans disdain the word “liberal” but much less successful in reducing support for liberal policies. Polls generally show that relatively few Americans, usually less than 30 percent, identify themselves as liberals. On the other hand, large majorities of Americans favor policy positions we would normally call liberal, such as a guarantee of health insurance for every American.
Yet “progressive” isn’t simply a new word for what “liberal” used to mean. The real distinction between the terms, at least as I and many others use them, is between philosophy and action. Liberals are those who believe in institutions that limit inequality and injustice. Progressives are those who participate, explicitly or implicitly, in a political coalition that defends and tries to enlarge those institutions. You’re a liberal, whether you know it or not, if you believe that the United States should have universal health care. You’re a progressive if you participate in the effort to bring universal health care into being.
One of the important changes in the U.S. political scene during the Bush years has been the coalescence of a progressive movement that in some—but only some—respects resembles movement conservatism. Like movement conservatism it’s a collection of institutions that is associated with, but not the same as, a major political party: Many Democrats are progressives, and most progressives support Democrats, but the movement extends well beyond the party. It includes parts of the old New Deal coalition, notably organized labor, a variety of think tanks, and novel entities like the “netroots,” the virtual community held together by bloggers and progressive Web sites like Daily Kos, which now attracts regular postings from leading Democratic politicians. In other respects, however, there are sharp differences between the progressive movement and movement conservatism. There’s far less centralization: Although right-wingers see the hidden hand of George Soros behind everything, the reality is that there’s nothing comparable on the left to the coordinated funding of movement conservatism. Correspondingly, there’s nothing like the monolithic unity of views enforced by the funders, the implicit oath of loyalty sworn by movement conservatives.
What makes progressive institutions into a movement isn’t money, it’s self-perception. Many Americans with more or less liberal beliefs now consider themselves members of a common movement, with the shared goals of limiting inequality and defending democratic principles. The movement reserves its greatest scorn for Democrats who won’t make a stand against the right, who give in on Social Security privatization or escalation in Iraq.
During the Clinton years there wasn’t a progressive movement in this sense—and the nation paid a price. Looking back, it’s clear that Bill Clinton never had a well-defined agenda. In a fundamental sense he didn’t know what he was supposed to do. When he arrived in office, his advisers were obsessed with the idea of a trade confrontation with Japan, something that never made much sense, was never thought through, and had no real base behind it. There were many reasons Hillary Clinton’s health care plan failed, but a key weakness was that it wasn’t an attempt to give substance to the goals of a broad movement—it was a personal venture, developed in isolation and without a supporting coalition. And after the Republican victory in 1994, Bill Clinton was reduced to making marginal policy changes. He ran the government well, but he didn’t advance a larger agenda, and he didn’t build a movement. This could happen again, but if it does, progressives will rightly feel betrayed.
To be liberal is in a sense to be a conservative—it means, to a large extent, wanting us to go back to being a middle-class society. To be a progressive, however, clearly implies wanting to move forward. This may sound like a contradiction, but it isn’t. Advancing the traditional goals of liberalism requires new policies.
Take the case of adding prescription drugs to Medicare, which was arguably a conservative policy that maintained the program’s original mission. Medicare was always supposed to cover major health expenses. Drugs weren’t included in the original program, because at the time they weren’t a big expense. When drug treatment for chronic diseases became a huge cost for many of the elderly, Medicare’s original focus on hospital coverage was out of step with its mission—and adding prescription drugs became necessary to maintain the program’s original intent.
You can say something similar, with a little less force, about universal health care. The Social Security Act of 1935 established retirement benefits and a federal-state system of unemployment insurance, but its larger purpose, says the Social Security Administration’s official history, was “to meet some of the serious problems of economic insecurity arising in an industrial society.”[2] Protecting families against severe health care costs fits in very well with that purpose. In fact, FDR considered including health insurance in the act but backed off for political reasons. Achieving universal care would, then, be a completion of FDR’s legacy. Furthermore, health care is to social insurance as drugs are to Medicare: It was once a relatively small expense, but today insecurity over medical expenses is arguably the single biggest financial risk working Americans face. And if we consider our goal to be sustaining a middle-class society, guaranteed health insurance is essentiaclass="underline" Employment-based insurance may have been good enough for most people thirty years ago, but it’s woefully inadequate today. A society in which 40 percent of the population either has no insurance or has inadequate insurance that forces them to postpone medical care because of its cost isn’t middle-class.[3]
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