Mike Lux: Progressives, re-start your engines
Carla Axtman
As we progressives commence to the pushing and prodding of these folks we worked our asses off to elect, author Mike Lux has written about the way the progressive movement has evolved in America. Last week I interviewed Mike about his his new book: The Progressive Revolution.
(FYI: You can see Mike (along with Steve Novick and me) at the "This Is Your Brain On Politics" discussion at Bipartisan Cafe-7901 SE Stark Street, PDX, this Sunday at 2PM).
I asked Mike about the way progressives frame the discussion around policy, and how we can be more effective. Lux said, "It's important to show what our values are in our message. We've become used to speaking in 'DC-ease', acronyms and bill numbers." Lux cited the use of the word "stimulus". "People don't know what that is", he said. "But they know what a job is".
Lux also noted that progressives must consistently use words that demonstrate what they care about and what they understand. We must speak to why we care about these things using values language and language that people can relate to.
When discussing how to bring more folks into the progressive movement, Lux was thoughtful. "Good organizing starts with people who relate and want to get things done in their lives. Those are building blocks. This is how new people are won over." But he maintains that we can't try so hard to appeal to 51%. It's the 10% who are exceptionally passionate on an issue that make the difference.
To emphasize this point, Lux reached back to the Clinton health care policy debacle of the 90s. "What drove the Clinton health plan into the ditch were rightwingers, insurance companies and businesses that were passionate. They talked to everyone they knew about it. Those of us who supported the plan lacked that same passion". He said that the President must keep this in mind when leading on an issue: he needs passionate people to survive, especially when he gets into trouble.
Lux's book talks about some of the groundbreaking eras in U.S. history and in the progressive movement that he talks about in his book. I asked about the patterns he noticed for the movement in these eras. "Understand that opportunity for real change doesn't happen often", Lux said. "We have to be aggressive and seize while we can. We can't just organize for maximum power because it never comes." History has it's "carpe diem" moments and now is one of them, according to Lux.
Lux also went on to talk about the patterns of crisis in our nation's history. "Crisis happens because conservatives have power for too long", he said. "Right wing power always creates crisis culminating in economic collapse (i.e. The Civil War, The Great Depression).
So what can progressives do now?
Lux says we can push the folks in Congress to break out of their "culture of caution". Democratic leaders are used to getting beat up so they cut deals with big business, etc. Lux says we must hold Democrats and Obama accountable. "They told us to give them a majority and they'd do stuff", Lux said. Now they need to do that stuff they promised.
We can also organize, Lux said. Progressives have historically been incredible innovators when it comes to that. The abolitionists, the suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, according to Lux, had amazingly innovate ways of organizing themselves and getting their message out.
In the end, these groups managed to get their message to penetrate and resonate with the rank and file, which lent their movements incredible energy and passion.
Which is how we win both with campaigns and with policy.
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Jul 16, '09
[Off-topic comment removed. Use Google to find what you're looking for. -editor.]
Jul 16, '09
The July issue of Harper's magazine (harpers.org) has an interesting article by Kevin Baker likening Barack Obama to Herbert Hoover. Baker essentially agrees with this from your post:
"'Understand that opportunity for real change doesn't happen often", Lux said. "We have to be aggressive and seize while we can. We can't just organize for maximum power because it never comes." History has it's "carpe diem" moments and now is one of them, according to Lux."
The problem looks like Obama could be repeating Hoover's mistakes. "Hoover—like Obama—was almost certainly someone gifted with more intelligence, a better education, and a greater range of life experience than FDR. And Hoover, through the first three years of the Depression, was also the man who comprehended better than anyone else what was happening and what needed to be done. And yet he failed."
The article continues with a summary of Hoover's much more progressive resume. Further along is this paragraph:
"Much like Herbert Hoover, Barack Obama is a man attempting to realize a stirring new vision of his society without cutting himself free from the dogmas of the past—without accepting the inevitable conflict. Like Hoover, he is bound to fail." It would appear that, economics-wise at least, Rubin, Summers and Geithner are Obama's "dogmas of the past."
Then there are, as Baker puts it: "Instead, we have seen a parade of aged satraps from vast, windy places stepping forward to tell us what is off the table. Every week, there is another Max Baucus of Montana, another Kent Conrad of North Dakota, another Ben Nelson of Nebraska, huffing and puffing and harrumphing that we had better forget about single-payer health care, a carbon tax, nationalizing the banks, funding for mass transit, closing tax loopholes for the rich. These are men with tiny constituencies who sat for decades in the Senate without doing or saying anything of note, who acquiesced shamelessly to the worst abuses of the Bush Administration and who come forward now to chide the president for not concentrating enough on reducing the budget deficit, or for “trying to do too much,” as if he were as old and as indolent as they are."
We must hope that Kevin Baker's analysis proves to be wrong, but given many obvious factors it would take a Pollyanish attitude to expect that to happen.
Paul Craig Roberts has a pessimistic article at counterpunch dot org that is in line with Baker's.
The encouraging point from this post is the indication that Democrats recognize if Obama is to live up to at least some of his promises progressives will need to apply whatever pressure is needed.
Jul 17, '09
"What drove the Clinton health plan into the ditch were rightwingers, insurance companies and businesses that were passionate. They talked to everyone they knew about it. Those of us who supported the plan lacked that same passion"
And thank God for that. That's because they know that government can't do anything efficiently or effectively as the private sector. And forcing a government-run healthcare program will only exacerbate the problem in the long-run.
I believe reform is needed, but not from the government.
Jul 17, '09
Jason, do some basic research outside of the little world of your own mind, and you'll find that government, for all its faults, does a great deal very well. The private sector has a much greater ability to hide its waste and failures, and has accountability to and oversight by far fewer entities. I've worked in the private and the public sectors, starting in the 1950s and continuing until just a few years ago, and have seen tremendous inefficiency and ineffectiveness in the private sector. Conversely, much of the similar failings I've seen in the public sector stem from trying to be too accomodating to (or adopting) private sector ideology, such as the religious belief in the so-called free market system.
Jul 17, '09
Lux: "Right wing power always creates crisis culminating in economic collapse (i.e. The Civil War, The Great Depression). J: Yeah, that classic leftwinger Stalin was such a brilliant success along with Mao and Castro.
Carla Axtman So what can progressives do now? J: Do you homework first. Get your facts right before you propose a policy. You didn’t do that when you proposed getting people out of their cars and got a transit system that costs three times the cost of driving and emits more CO2 per passenger-mile. You didn’t do that when you proposed high density to solve congestion and got more congestion. You didn’t do that when you proposed high density to reduce housing cost and progressed Portland from one of the most affordable cites to one of the least.
Carla Axtman Lux says we can push the folks in Congress to break out of their "culture of caution". J: Lets try something really bold like shutting off all current sources of electric power (dams, nuke and coal) and replace them with things that don’t work like solar and wind. (They only work on a small scale) Oh, I forgot, that is what progressives want.
BTW, Carla, how does someone who know nothing of science, figure out who is right on things like what are the practical, potential future sources of power? How to reduce cost of living? How to reduce energy usage, affordabley?
Jul 17, '09
Lux: "Right wing power always creates crisis culminating in economic collapse (i.e. The Civil War, The Great Depression).
jamie: "Yeah, that classic leftwinger Stalin was such a brilliant success along with Mao and Castro."
jamie makes a classic false comparison by equating totalitarian/dictatorships with democracies. When you look at the most successful democracies they are progressive powerhouses and also happen to be the least religious. (which makes perfect sense)
Jul 17, '09
Lux makes excellent points regarding framing. The language we use is much more significant than most realize. Progressives often commit suicide by using right-wing frames such as, "anti-abortion" which of course infers that those who are pro-choice are pro-abortion. George Lakoff is a renowned progressive linguist who has written several very good books on this subject.
Jul 17, '09
"We must speak to why we care about these things using values language and language that people can relate to."
Ben Westlund did this in his speech to Marion Demoforum.
He is a great example of how to use language.
Jul 17, '09
"And thank God for that. That's because they know that government can't do anything efficiently or effectively as the private sector. And forcing a government-run healthcare program will only exacerbate the problem in the long-run."
What simplistic claptrap.
A number of government-run health plans work much better than the corporate-driven ripoff we have here in the United States. Check the World Health Organization Report for Year 2000 on which the U.S. came in 37th for overall care while France and Italy were first and second. Despite being under a severe and cowardly embargo, Cuba managed to come in at 39th.
The problem with the American government is that Congress is run by the banks, the military-industrial complex, the medical-insurance-pharmaceutical complex, the oil companies and, until recently, by Big Tobacco and Big Auto - the last of which had to appeal to the government for help to soften its crash landing. Who did the banks and insurance companies turn to for help after their insatiable greed brought them near total collapse?
By the time the M-I complex and Big Oil run the U.S. into the ground in Iraq and AfPak we might have to sell off all of Washington, D.C. to pay the interest on our debts.
9:40 p.m.
Jul 17, '09
Where does Lux stand on health care reform? The "passionate 10%" sounds to me a fair bit like my comrades in the struggle for a tax funded public health care payment system ("single payer" a term that Lux no doubt rightly hates, so do we advocates, come to it).
The "Progressive Era" of 100 odd years ago was a decidedly mixed bag. The "progressives" of the day often were middle class people trying to stave off the threats of social conflict posed by working class and farmer organizing, including Populists, Socialists and the IWW. They blamed more conservative people for rigidity that gave rise to such conflict. They achieved substantial reform, and in many ways the New Deal was the realization of the implications of T. Roosevelt's Progressive Party ("Bull Moose") platform in 1912 (he got more votes than R incumbent president W. H. Taft).
But the "progressivism" of that day was also shot through with racism - the "progressive" Woodrow Wilson showed the powerful racist pro-Klan film "Birth of a Nation" in the White House, T.R. was also a scientistic racist. In the day that included Southern and Eastern European "races" and Jews as a "race," and, combined with class prejudice and ambivalence at least toward workers, contributed to phenomena such as "progressive" eugenics, efforts at social control and blame-the-victim culture of poverty arguments similar to those of conservatives today (but also Clintonites and to a degree Barack Obama), and the racist immigration reform law of 1924 that gave preference to N & W Europeans (with odd loopholes for Mexican farm workers and Filipinos and Puerto Ricans who lived in U.S. colonial "commonwealths").
Never forget that the conservative DLC calls its think tank The Progressive Policy Institute.
9:57 p.m.
Jul 17, '09
Completely unregulated markets give rise to boom and bust cycles of great severity as was seen in the U.S. repeatedly from the 1830s to the 1930s. They also result in tendencies to monopoly and to the externalization of costs onto the commons or socially and politically weak groups.
But even when better regulated, markets tend to the maximization of monetary wealth in the system as a whole, without regard either to issues of distribution which bear on social well-being and "general welfare" i.e. broad and stable prosperity in economic terms, or to non-monetary values that also contribute to the conditions of good lives.
At a less systemic level, markets are relatively "efficient" for purposes where it doesn't matter, or matter much, if people are excluded from access by virtue of cost, or lack of "competitiveness" (n.b. too the apparent but not real paradox that excessive competitiveness tends to suppress actual competition).
<h2>But markets and "the private sector" are less efficient than public provision, or non-profit cooperative action, for goals where what is sought and needed is universal inclusion and relative equality. That's why we have "socialist" public schools, fire departments, police departments, public power in many places, and why "public utilities" even when contracted out are not handled in "free market" ways -- those ways are less efficient to the ends sought.</h2>