Leaders Carry Lamps
Yesterday Matt Miller had a thought-provoking op-ed in the Financial Times pointing out how ridiculous the fear-mongering about
"populism" in the U.S., is-- especially compared to mainstream thinking in the U.K.:
Miller used Edwards supposedly “populist” proposals as an example:
"Mr Edwards wants to lift the minimum wage substantially, and to boost wage subsidies for low-income work besides. But the outer limits of Mr Edwards' ambition would leave low income work less generously compensated than the minimum wage and subsidy blend enacted by Britain's New Labourites Tony Blair and Gordon Brown - arrangements Conservative party leader David Cameron says suit him just fine."
"The fact that a Thatcher-Cameron-[Warren] Buffet agenda can be hyped as ‘populist’ says more about propaganda success and media norms thananything else,” Miller continued.
“Over three decades, America's conservative movement has so deftly shifted the boundaries of debate to the right that even modest
adjustments to the market system can be cast as the second coming of Marx without anyone blushing. Today's phony populist fears also remindus that the real problem with the media is not ideology but stenography. If official sources call something ‘populist’ often enough, it is."
Miller went onto suggest that, in the U.S., progressives “fall into the same trap, worrying that a Thatcher-Cameron agenda in America will frighten suburban swing voters, rather than asking themselves how they might win the argument over the direction America needs to take. At this rate, Americans will be lucky to catch up a decade from now to today's social policy consensus in the UK. Meanwhile, Brits and others will have moved forward on a new generation of ideas to help citizens find security and opportunity in a global economy. "
In that last paragraph Miller zeroes in on a question that liberals have been debating: should they try to mirror public opinion or should they be leading public opinion? Those who fear “frightening suburban swing voters” say that we should take the public’s temperature before proposing anything too startling in the way of health care reform, a new immigration policy or changes in the tax code. They are concerned that if reformers stray too far from the center they will lose centrist voters.
Others argue that public opinion is malleable and constantly shifting. Liberals should take advantage of that fluidity, they say, and lead the way—-much the way FDR and LBJ led the way on social security, civil rights and Medicare. Moreover, they make the point that, today, what politicians call “the center” has shifted so far right that it may not even reflect what the majority would want if someone gave them the chance to think about the issues.
Certainly, if you step back and look at the U.S. from an international perspective, our social policy is conservative and even elitist not only when it comes to minimum wages, but taxes (with huge tax breaks for unearned income and inherited wealth), higher education (consider the cost of college education in the U.S. compared to countries like Canada where superb universities like U. Toronto and McGill are well within the reach of lower-middle class kids), and, of course healthcare.
If you read publications like the Financial Times and the Economist, or watch BBC, you begin to gain a real perspective on just how much of an outlier our society has become in many areas of social reform. (And FT and the Economist are hardly liberal publications.) These news sources also are much more likely to question the received wisdom on everything from the stock market bubble of the 1990s to the war in Iraq today. By contrast, many U.S, journalists do, indeed, seem to have become stenographers.)
Those who think that Democrats should be wary of wandering too far from mainstream opinion ignore the fact that since 1980, our culture has been shaped, more and more, by the centers of wealth and power that favor freedom (to become rich, to be free of government regulation) over equity---and the rights of the individual (to accumulate and protect that wealth) over the needs of the society.
Is our minimum wage so stingy because Americans simply aremore selfish than the British? I don't think that's necessarily the case. In the 1950s and 1960s there was a much greater sense of "we" among Americans of different classes (albeit the sense of community usually included only white Americans).
But 1980 proved a cultural watershed. The greed born of the bull market that began in 1982, the rise of the for-profit corporation, soaring executive pay (which set the bar much higher for what doctors and other professionals felt they should be paid), a widening income gap, the "bubble-wrapping of children" (moving them out of the city so that they wouln't see homeless people, driving them to school . . .) and finally white flight from urban life (as Jane Jacobs described it) to the isolation and ceaseless competition of the suburbs--all of this has taught Americans to think in terms of "doing what's best for me." (Soon that would become the mantra of the 1980s.)
In that era, CEOs became celebrities. Financial and business leaders such as Michael Dell, Steve Case and the maestro, Alan Greenspan, served as models for Americans to emulate. In their own way, they shaped minds and hearts. Rather than majoring in English and history, the brightest college students began majoring in business and economics.
But that was the end of the 20th century, ripe with fin de siecle excesses. In this first decade of the 21st century it seems to me that we need progressive leadership that reminds Americans of something that healthcare economist Rashi Fein once said:"We live in a society, not just in an economy.” Politicians need to tell Americans that we’re all in this boat together, and we need to pull together.
Finally, we need journalists who write, not what people want to hear—or what “official sources” tell them--(i.e. that the war in Iraq is going better), but what they need to know.
Both in politics and in the press, leaders carry lamps, not mirrors.
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Hear Hear! Citizens not consumers!
August 7, 2007 1:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
Excellent post. I love when conservatives talk about so-called conservative European politicians like Sarkozy or Merkel or Cameron as if they bear any resemblance to the American right.
August 7, 2007 2:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
For some reason, this brings to my mind the AMC series Mad Men. In particular I see a group of ad men sitting around a table trying to find ways to tell people that cigarettes aren't bad for you by telling you how good they are. Perhaps we should all just eat cake in between puffs. I'm now visualizing Marlboro Antoinette! (I know, she is only popularly credited with the quote!)
August 7, 2007 2:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
Great post, Maggie! My view of leadership is that you can only lead if you are in front of "the troops", not trailing along behind. And, you can only lead if you don't get so far ahead of the troops that you become irrelevant.
Todays politicians don't lead at all, let alone worrying about getting too far ahead. They trail along way behind the masses, worrying that they might stray from the path set by the masses. This causes otherwise sane congressmen to vote to allow the president to go to war with pretty well anyone he wants to, for any reason he wants to use. It also causes those same congressmen to shy away from even thinking about the "I" word, for fear they will look up and suddenly notice that the masses are over there and not right in front.
The news media is a similar group, so afraid of publishing something critical of Republicans that any bad thing, no matter how serious, done by Republicans has to be reported as if both parties always do whatever it is. Again, the media are following the people, careful never to get out in front.
Even Saint Reagan governed by telling us that whatever we wanted to do was the right thing to do, whether it harmed society or was neutral.
Looking over the Presidential candidates available today, I'm sorry to say, I don't see much to encourage me that a leader is in the group.
Hoppy in Sacramento
August 7, 2007 3:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
Maybe it is time to also accept that just because a movement is populous that it is not necessarily bad. The populous movements of the late 19th century would for the most part have attracted our political predecessors. The free silver aspects, the antisemitism and racism would have been off-putting, but we would have identified with much of their programs.
August 7, 2007 3:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
The political center in American politics has been shifted so far to the right by the corporate button counters and their Madison Avenue professional propagandists running the once free press and political campaigns that Attila the Hun is starting to look a bit Liberal.
They have Orwellized the meaning of Liberalism and other political and social terms to the point Joseph Stalin would pass for a liberal in the eyes of the middle class morons who have joined the Republican Party and thereby committed economic suicide. The working class people of this country have had their hot buttons pushed by the purveyors of plastic and chrome junk morphed into political advisors that those citizens are scarcely sane voters let alone caring, humane folks anymore.
The fools who have provided this sorry arsed cheaply painted yellow brick road ought not be too surprised when they get carried along on it to hell with the suckers they have cozened into desensitized and unstable hollow shells of men and women.
August 7, 2007 4:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
My fellow Americans, I announce my intention today to run for president of the United States. I make this declaration because it is time, in fact past time, that a president represents the people.
Now when I say represent the people I mean the majority of people in this great country that have not been represented, the folks who have been taken for granted by your government for too many years. You know who you are. You are too varied to characterize so I will just say who you're not.
This is easy to do. You're not the people who have been favored for too long by the government with sweetheart tax rebates, susidies, contracts, trade deals and other shenanigans which enrich the few at the expense of the many.
Fellow Americans, the United States has fallen way behind other developed countries in many categories such as health care, to include infant and maternal mortality, wage justice, consumer credit interest rates, a sensible foreign policy and transportation, in great part because we have been emphasizing corporate welfare instead of the general welfare.
In short, I intend to enforce the preamble of the US Constitution which requires the government to promote the general welfare. Let me repeat that: Promote the general welfare. Not the welfare of the few, not corporate welfare, not tax breaks for the rich, but the general welfare, to include peace, decent wages, racial justice, education and health care for those who want and need them.
Think of it as we the people, not they the corporations.
I'll be laying out the specifics of my programs shortly, in the meantime I ask for your support. I ask you to tell me what we can do better and I also ask for your financial contributions. You can imagine how much the elite are going to contribute to this campaign for the people, so I do need your help. Just go to people.com for more information. Thank you!
August 7, 2007 5:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
Great start. Look forward to hearing more of your platform after which I will think about making a contribution. I just hope you don't intend to use it and any others to buy people.com from its current owners. :-)
August 7, 2007 6:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
"In that last paragraph Miller zeroes in on a question that liberals have been debating: should they try to mirror public opinion or should they be leading public opinion?"
Part of the problem, as I see it, is that many of our lawmakers and presidential candidates don't even mirror the public opinion, never mind try to lead/shape it. It's as if they're waiting for 100% spontaneous consensus before they can be persuaded to shift their thinking half an inch. Just see the recent polls and how they are *not* mirrored by the votes in Congress. 55%, 65%,70%, including those magical "swing voters"... But it still doesn't seem to be enough. They won't even prod from behind (also a useful herding technique)
It's really very discouraging.
August 7, 2007 6:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
Although I agree with the conclusion, I do have a reservation about the USA before 1980. The claim was always that Americans are individualistic and members of communities. I believe that Americans tend to be selfish, not individualistic, and members of communities when those communities have an added value. Furthermore, the reason that Americans appear to be more religious than the Brits, (another facet of the liberal/right wing dichotomy) is that most of us believe that the faith community adds value. (Watch the fundamentalist support for Guiliani - it's clearly not that religious.)
August 7, 2007 9:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
Excellent piece. I have been lamenting for a while the reluctance of politicians on the left, not to mention journalists, to attempt to shape public opinion, or at least make suggestions that attempt to poke holes in what is surely a very simplistic conception of public opinion, rather than capitulate to it.
August 7, 2007 10:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
As usual, we're in your debt.
I like to think there's another, less static way to look at this. There's a kind of intricate dance between the public and the political class, and the more skilled each is, the more successful the interaction. I hesitate even to use the phrase "political class" because that is too static for my ideal. When dancers are really attuned to each other, onlookers can't really tell who is "leading". At its best, maybe democracy is a little like this. Public opinion shapes leadership, leadership shapes public opinion, and together there's something very organic about the process/situation.
I read the above paragraph and perform a bit of mental arithmetic, subtracting 1 from each number. It works! (I'm teaching a course on the 1890s in the fall). So maybe there's a reason for hope...and our up an coming generation of progressive leadership can take inspiration from Jane Addams, John Dewey, Ray Stannard Baker, Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir, Walter Reed, Walter Rauschenbusch, Jacob Riis, and others of that very remarkable generation. How few of the important progressives were Political with a capital P. But all of them were political in the larger sense.
aMike
August 8, 2007 6:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
I went back to edit it to WeThePeople.com but I was a day late, just like my "campaign". The devil is in the details.
August 8, 2007 8:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
August 8, 2007 9:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for your comments.
Libra, Koshembos, amike and everyone else--
I agree with most of what all of you are saying. Libra sums it up: "It's as if they're waiting for 100% spontaneous consensus before they can be persuaded to shift their thinking half an inch. Just see the recent polls and how they are *not* mirrored by the votes in Congress. 55%, 65%,70%, including those magical "swing voters"...
You are right; it is very discouraging. I'm not sure how or why liberals became so timid, but I think the media has something to with it.
In particular, I'm thinking of the media's overreaction to Howard Dean's supposed "howl."
The media saw Dean as too extreme, too smart, too different. In other words, he wasn't the creation (creature) of a PR person. I'm not sure that he would have made a wonderful president; I didn't get to see enough of him before he was pushed off the stage. But I definitely didn't like the way the press pushed him off.
Koshembos--I agree that "American individualism" has often been used as a cover for mere, sheer selfishness. While things were better in the 50s and 60s (as long as you were white)Americans were not as generous as they might have been.
Nevertheless many Americans did respond to the horrors of the war in Vietnam (young Americans and Vietnamese dying, the destruction of a country, war-time atrocities) with more compassion and outrage that they are displaying in their response to the war in Iraq. Even the death of so many young Americans hasn't sent people marching in the streets. There seems to be a general feeling that, yeah probably they should probably bring the troops home but, as long as it's not my son, brother, husband, nephew. . . .
And when you see the pictures of the Americans who are dying over there, it is a very distinct sub-set of working class and lower-middle class people from rural areas. Not quite an underclass, but a class that the majority of Americans don't know.
ULtimately I think 1980 did mark a turning point where suddenly it became okay to say "the world is all about me." Our interest in the rest of the world shrank as we concentrated on
self-realization and pefecting our bodies ("by body, my hobby"). I also remember hearing someone say "Of course I have to do what's best for me" with a straight face for the first time sometime in the late 1980s.. (The person who said this was in the process of betraying a friend.)
l
amike- Yes, I do think the parallel between the 1890s and the 1990s is real, and that it is a fin de siecle phenomena. This gave me hope as I
basically waited out the nineties. . .
And I even think (perhaps too optimistically) that, if elected, one of the Democratic condidates might actually try to lead the country in a truly progressive direction. I have some hope that HRC is trying to appear more centrist than she really is, and if she makes it to the White House might decide to
"get even" for what the Republicans did when Bill was in office. She is a pretty determined woman . . . As for Edwards, he might make his war on poverty into something akin to Johnsons'
"Great Society." When it comes to Obama I don't
have as much sense of who he is, but I think people woule expect him to take a different direction (both becuase he is young and because he is African American) and perhaps he would seize the opportunity.
August 8, 2007 9:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
Love the Yeats, and I've slouched toward Bethlehem a few times, but in the interests of total honesty and reducing the needs for podiatric services, I'm afraid in my case it is knowing the dancer from the dunce. (Fred Astaire is the dancer).
aMike
August 8, 2007 12:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
He is also the kind of orator who could use the bully pulpit like no president we have had since FDR. The people would folow where he leads.
August 8, 2007 2:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
Larry Greater--
I totally agree about Obama's oratorical
skills--- and that was key for leaders like FDR
or Churchill.
Though today, Edwards (who, over the years, has managed to persuade a huge number of juries) might be just as popular with a more conversational style.
But Edwards hasn't been that impressive in the debates. I think he's probably distracted by
his wife's illness, and the pressure of having become the underdog among the top 3 . . .
August 8, 2007 3:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
This appears to me to be mind-numbing nonsense. Margaret Thatcher finally was taken down when she attempted to institute a head tax, as I recall reports at the time. Even the wackiest nutjobs among the wingers in this country wouldn't go that far. At least I don't think so. Ron Paul might think that is a fab idea but he is a Libertarian by rights. He is farther out of the mainstream than Mike Gravel.
Comparing cultures, including political cultures is a most delicate task.
Certainly Edwards' proposals for alleviating the vast distortions between the few at the top in this country and the lumpenproletariat are modest compared to those of most any European country but it is good to start at the beginning rather than at the end.
Rather obviously we have the very model of Margaret Thatcher running for election as a Democrat.
What does that do to the picture? :-)
Best, Terry
August 8, 2007 11:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
Terry--
Miller's point was that while Thatcher moved the U.K. to the right, she was moving a culture that was far enough left before she came to office that it remained in a place that we would describe as "left of center" or even populist.
. This is an example Miller gave: Mr Edwards wants to return marginal rates for high earners from 35 per cent to the 39.6 per cent level that existed under Bill Clinton - rates slightly lower than those in force after Mrs Thatcher got through cutting them."
In other words, even after Thatcher's cuts, the rich paid higher taxes in the U.K. than
Edwards is proposing under his supposedly populist plan. And of course, even under Thatcher, the U.K. still had national health insurance.
I agree with you that Edwards proposals are
a good start. And I see how you might compare
HCR to Thatcher (they are both very determined
personalities, smart, hard-working and shrewd
politicians) but ideologically, I think they
are worlds apart. "It takes a village" just
isn't Thatcher's mantra and I think Hillary really does believe that. (Though on many issues she is still far too moderate and far too ready
to compromise for my taste.)
August 9, 2007 8:19 AM | Reply | Permalink
I understand that but comparing right and left in different societies is often like like using numbers that only have meaning in the material world when attached to some object.
I have always found it amusing that the scientist most responsible for establishing the scientific method as a standard, Sir Isaac Newton, was prouder of being a leading alchemist in his day than a physicist. His theological beliefs, if expressed openly, would have surely led to a fatal encounter with an ax.
In many ways this country is far more liberal than Margaret Thatcher's England.
- Despite the raucous political scene in England, the tough libel laws must surely be very intimidating.
- There was hardly the uproar in England over torture and dispatching of Irish rebels that there has been in this country over the atrocities in Iraq.
- The contempt the upper crust in England shows openly towards the working classes and assorted minorities has to be disguised by the DLC in this country in order to elect any faux Democrat.
JMO.
Best, Terry
August 9, 2007 8:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
But "the contempt that the upper-crust in England
shows openly toward the working classes and
assorted minorities" is more than matched by the
"contempt that the upper-crust in America shows
openly towared the working classes and assorted
minorities." And Americans are much
ruder about it.
I've seen young men in suits returning home from
Wall street on NYC subways taunting homeless people. Class consciousness here is, of course,
less about who your parents were and more about
how much money you have (though old money in places like Connecticut does still look down its
nose at new money.)
And on libel laws--the U.K. has such tough libel laws because it's journalists actually have the
backbone to exercise their right to free speech.
And in the process, some of the tabloids do go
over the top --so they need those libel laws.
But it's nice to know that in the U.K. the press
is not simply in bed with the establishment, as it is here.
As for the torture of IRA prisoners vs. Iraq
prisoners, I know quite a bit about the Irish
situation, and there was an outcry in the U.K.
as well as in Ireland. Moreover, from what I
know the torture was not nearly as barbaric in
the U.K.--not the same level of sexual torture and atrocities, though certainly many IRA prisoners were held without sufficient evidence for years.
On the other hand, at least they got trials. And
lawyers, which is more than you can say here.
August 9, 2007 10:30 AM | Reply | Permalink