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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

questioning progressivism « Previous | |Next »
June 16, 2010

In Against Despair in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas Michael Tomasky questions the progressive liberal reading of history in the US in the context of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. It is rather sobering because it involves questioning the progressive assumptions of social democracy.

Tomasky says:

Too often, when progressives think of American history, we think only of the snapshots: those glorious moments when a historic bill is signed into law, or when the great progressive leader thunderingly confronts the forces of reaction. It’s good to remember those; they are our lodestars. But they are moments. Actual history is slower, more tedious, and certainly less uplifting. It’s not for Obama’s sake, but for liberalism’s over the long haul, that we need to consider this reality and proceed in full awareness of it. It’s only by seeing this fuller picture that we can know how history actually unfolds in real time and place our present experience within that context. We don’t do nearly enough of that. Cable news and op-ed pages and websites are a kind of modern-day camera obscura, giving us an image to be sure, accurate in a way, but upside-down.

Tomasky says that post welfare state liberals grew up with a set of assumptions. If you were born in the United States between, say, 1945 and 1965, you were raised in a basically liberal political culture when liberalism was the default position:
This is how it is. This is America. We were once a conservative country. But that was then. We’ve put it away. Progress–progressive progress, if you don’t mind the redundancy–was inevitable...When Reagan came, you thought: aberration. Maybe we did go a bit overboard here and there, and, let’s face it, Jimmy Carter was not an effective president. So this is a corrective. Temporary. Things will sort themselves out...three or so years ago–I started to ask myself: What if all these presumptions I grew up with were wrong? What if Reagan wasn’t an aberration? What if Roosevelt and Johnson were the aberrations?

Maybe the New Deal was more of an historical aberration–a byproduct of the massive crisis of the Great Depression–than the linear triumph of the welfare state.

Tomasky refers to Nick Salvatore and Jefferson Cowie paper in 2008 in the journal International Labor and Working-Class History called "The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History", where they argue that:

on three crucial fronts–labor, race, and religion–the New Deal and the Great Society both represented abnormal (and extremely fleeting) moments of commonality in an arc of American history that otherwise bent strongly away from any notion of a common good and toward the primacy of the individual. Of the Reagan era, they wrote that "it might be more accurate to think of the ‘Reagan revolution’ as the ‘Reagan restoration,’ a return to a more sharply conservative, individualistic reading of constitutional rights and liberties prevalent before the New Deal."

Tomasky says that in our time we’ve experienced the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s, and the only mass movement to emerge from that reality is a right-wing populist one. The argument is that progressive change is hard in the United States: It doesn’t happen quickly, it always faces intense opposition, it is in no sense inevitable.

Is it the same in Australia? Certainly the change to a more sustainable economy is going to be blocked by the conservative forces aligned with the Coalition, and it will encounter difficulties inherent in trying to effect this change, involve a readiness to accept half a loaf, and the regular reassurances sent to the moneyed classes that the liberals hadn’t taken over the candy store. It's going to be a mixed bag.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:10 PM |