Four Touchstones for My Progressivism

I am a product of luck and privilege.

First, I was born white. Second, I was born in the trough of 20thC US births, 1933 – 1936; there were only 2 million of us born in ’34. Twenty years later, births boomed to over 4 million per year for the next decade.  Third, I was born of college-educated parents with solid middle-class values, in particular, the importance of public service and education.

By 1952, when around 120,000 of us were looking at colleges, colleges were eagerly looking at us. The flood of 8.2millions on the GI Bill had ebbed; 300,000 per year had come and gone from four-year colleges and universities. The new classrooms, labs, dorms and student housing they had built stood partially empty. We were a scarcity. I could get into practically any college I wished, schools I wouldn’t have stood a chance of entering just 10 years later.

My political journey.

By the early ‘60s, living in Minneapolis and despite having voted in ’60 against Nixon (because of family history re House and Senate investigations & harassment of the AEC) I was drawn by Representative Bill Frenzel into Republican party work. In ’64, I was a Rockefeller delegate to the county GOP convention but ambition to sail on to the state convention ran aground on Goldwater reefs.

The social issues of the ‘60s drew me increasingly toward Democrats though I described myself as a Progressive Republican a’ la Teddy Roosevelt or as an Independent when Republican candidates grew increasingly odious. Then came Viet Nam, Nixon’s redux, the ’68 Chicago riots, MLK and RFK assassinations, the Chicago riot; I explained myself as a moderate Democrat. And now I’ve morphed into a Progressive Democrat – not radical but espousing major change. (I regret how “progressive” has come to be re-defined as “radical.” It shouldn’t mean that. Progressive is to seek improvement; a willingness to welcome change; an open mind to experiment.

Four books have armed me with rationale and a structure into which to fit my positions; they serve as touchstones for my progressive political beliefs and socio-economic concerns:

In The Spirit Level, 2009, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett chart the stunning correlations in industrialized nations between income inequality and social dysfunction – whether talking crime, health, education, juvenile delinquency, divorce, teen pregnancy, obesity, suicide, whatever. The greater the income disparity between quintiles of population, the weaker and more dysfunctional a society.

In Capital in The Twenty-First Century, 2014, Thomas Piketty (thom-ah peek-eh-tee) argues that wealth disparity is a more meaningful metric than income disparity. Moreover, he shows that increasing wealth disparity between haves and have-nots is an inherent outcome of our capitalist system of enterprise and taxation. Wealth grows whenever, as almost always, the yield on capital is greater than the growth rate of GDP. With capital concentrated in the upper 20% of a population, wealth inevitably accumulates in the upper tier; the middle class stagnates.

In Blind Spot, 2013, Mahzarin Banaji and Tony Greenwald dramatically show that we carry hidden biases that affect our judgements of others no matter how well-intentioned or rational we think ourselves to be. Our challenge, in this increasingly diverse society with increasingly frequent contacts with others unlike ourselves, our tribe, and clan, is to learn to act despite these biases. The first step to that is to recognize and acknowledge them. Until we do, our society and economy will be wounded by a zero-sum mindset of we vs. they, of us vis-a-vis those others.  

                                                                                                                        

Lastly, The Sum of Us, 2021, is Heather McGhee’s brilliant and thoroughly researched (more than one-hundred pages of footnotes!) exploration of how deeply rooted racism and the threat of “being replaced” undermines the collaboration and solidarity necessary to raise underclass boats -- white, brown or black. Populist politicians exploit such fears and suspicions to keep us apart, denying us what McGhee calls the “solidarity dividend.” She calls for affirmative, reparative justice.

A fifth book is for me an engine of urgency.

Those four give me my progressive principles. This fifth creates anxiety and impels action. In How Democracies Die, 2018, political scientists and historians Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt report on their case studies of democracies that have succumbed to populist autocrats, including such as Turkey, the Philippines, Venezuela, Hungary, Egypt, mid-century Italy and Germany, Argentina, Chile, and on and on. A remarkably consistent pattern emerges, a step-by-step process of replacing democracy not necessarily by force or coup but by lawful, populist dismantling and subversion of democratic “guard rails” and the ideals and principles of democracy: equality of voice and participation, rule of law, equity, equal access to opportunity, protection of the minority, and inherent rights. The urgency? In America today this pattern of facilitating autocrats has emerged in state legislatures, in voter suppression, in rigid political polarization, in unabashed racial, ethnic, and religious intolerance. Ours is a fragile structure; there are those who wish to replace it with strong-man dictates; autocracy can happen here.

On issue after issue, I rely on these touchstones to keep me grounded and my thinking coherent. Is it fair and equitable? Is it communal? Am I respectfully listening and learning and acting despite my inherent biases and awareness of others' otherness? Am I consistent with the promise of a Solidarity Dividend for the benefit of all of us?