I've participated in a few TPM Cafe book clubs now, and here's something I don't recall saying before: Buy the book. Read it. Enjoy it. We have talked about plenty of books that are basically policy or political strategy arguments, and the 2,000 word version of the 80,000 word argument is often sufficient. But The Argument is mostly not an argument, but a real narrative. I missed my stop on the subway yesterday while reading it. I know some bloggers and I know some billionaires, and Bai's portraits of their large personalities and the dance of misunderstanding that characterized their interactions, is by turns hilarious, acid and tragic. Bai's profile of Howard Dean is the first I've seen that catches just how ordinary, mainstream and adaptable he is, and his sketch of SEIU president Andy Stern, probably the most appealing figure to Bai, catches the dilemma of the progressive pulled in a million directions – toward running an organizing-based union, toward developing an alternative political structure on behalf of working people, toward developing a blue-sky new idea structure – and pushing forward despite the fact that there are only 24 hours in a day and some of these objectives don't fit well with one another.

I don't know if Bai intended to perform a public service to the progressive movement, but he did so by shining some light into the operations of the Democracy Alliance, the collaborative of donors whose secrecy did far more to insulate those donors from creative ideas and common sense than to protect their deliberations.

The consequences of the first couple years of the Democracy Alliance, the expectations that were created, the vast amounts of money that were essentially locked up awaiting decisions that never happened, and some of the funding choices that were made and not made, has had lasting consequences, many of which are invisible because they take the form of things that could have happened but didn't, such as the creation of strong progressive coalitions and think tanks at the state level. (Bai's account of the Democracy Alliance is somewhat too influenced by its founder Rob Stein – but then, another consequence of secrecy is that, as in a Bob Woodward book, journalism often reflects the perspective of the sources who make themselves available. I do, however, strongly agree that the D.A. would have been more successful early on if it had been what many people now claims they always wanted it to be: an open-ended bazaar to connect organizations and donors, rather than a structured fund in which people who had never heard of any of the organizations involved would make decisions about which ones to fund.)

If I have a serious misgiving about the book, it would probably follow the lines of Kevin Drum's review in the Washington Monthly: that the “argument” in the second sense of the word -- Bai's thesis that for all the funding and all the collaboration, progressives don't realize that what they really need is an idea, a vision, or a policy argument suitable to the “post-industrial economy” -- is sketchy and unconvincing, especially compared to the strong and detailed personality profiles. (I think I made a similar point a year or so ago regarding an article of Matt's in a rather impolite way, so let me take the occasion to apologize for that and try to state the point more diplomatically here.)

I've been struggling with how to express this reaction. It's not that I reject Bai's argument out of hand, or hold the view – best expressed by Jonathan Chait a couple years ago – that we don't need no stinkin' ideas. Yes, liberals need both better ideas and better ways to piece them together into a vision. For me, the idea of a social contract that's vested in individuals, that provides the security that people need to navigate and take advantage of opportunity in a dynamic economy, is a pretty big idea and the Clinton/Edwards/Obama health care plan (the distinctions between the three candidates' plans are irrelevant compared to the similarity) gets one 75% of the way there. There's still a tendency to talk in narrow and programmatic terms – about health policy rather than economic security and opportunity – but we're getting there. And there are lots of people doing good work on ideas, even if they could use more money to do it, from the blogs of the “wonkosphere” such as this one, to the journals such as Democracy and The American Prospect to a full range of think tanks that are shifting from technocratic analysis of short-term policy to imaginative rethinking about the long term.

Another reaction I had is that Bai should at least say something about what kind of big idea he has in mind. If there's not some actual thing that needs to be said or be done, then we're just talking about New Coke. The closest Bai comes, I think, is on page 206, where he says that the Center for American Progress “had been careful of challenging Democratic orthodoxy...What would have happened had CAP floated a proposal to replace, say, Social Security or racial quotas with a more modern, progressive solution? Podesta's funders would have revolted.”

Is this the big idea, then? Replace Social Security? Why? We had a fascinating public battle over that in 2005 (one of the first real policy tests of the growing progressive infrastructure, which Bai doesn't mention) and the outcome was a deeper public and elite understanding that Social Security works pretty well and the only people who want to replace it are reactionaries who have no appreciation that in the modern economy people need a platform of economic security more than ever. “Replacing racial quotas” is not a significant big idea, just pandering, and at any rate, CAP's recent report on poverty is a strong endorsement of a focus on economic rather than racial integration.

Blaming the funders is also inappropriate here. The funders Bai claims “would have revolted” are by no means orthodox Democrats and, especially in the case of Soros, often fund projects that promote different ideas and that challenge one another. (As Bai notes, Soros's foundation supports Democracy, the journal he cites as the kind of thing that should be funded to develop new ideas.) I don't know if they “would have revolted” had CAP proposed ending Social Security, but if they did, it would be because it's a bad idea, not because it's unorthodox. [see update below]

Ultimately, the big idea and the political confidence to put it forward are inseparable. Democrats didn't have an economic agenda of any kind in the past (most notably in 2002) not because they're dumb, but because they were terrified. They were convinced that we live in a deeply conservative country, that the word taxes is a quick ticket to exile, that the lesson of health care in 1993 is that no one wants any kind of change. They adopted narrow, small-bore tactics in the hope of preserving a little ground. They learned in 2002 and 2004 that that is neither good politics nor good policy. The daring, the ambition, the ballsiness that some of the bloggers promote, together with a distinct change in the mood of the country, helps break down some of those mental barriers, and then all kinds of ideas are on the table – such as the campaigns' health care visions – that were available before but too scary to touch.

Here I think part of the mistake is to buy into the same fallacy about the conservative movement that drove the Democracy Alliance – the idea that the right was a tightly coordinated project, in which funders joined to create organizations that in turn developed specific new ideas that swept the country like a dance craze. But there was nothing that made low taxes/small government more of a big new idea in 1980 than in 1960. What the right's infrastructure did was help it develop the confidence to move that old idea, some language and some trusted authorities to promote it, some policy detail, and a kind of atmosphere in which they could reinforce their own convictions and nerve and use their imaginations. And it wasn't nearly as well coordinated as Stein's famous top-secret Power Point presentation suggested (the “Powell Memo” is a myth and the Heritage Foundation was assembled from the wreckage of several false starts.) The secret of the right was simply that after the mid-70s, there was more of it: more opportunity for people to write, more opportunity to make a career, more funders for interesting ideas, and plenty of waste. I'm glad to see that we're beginning to see the same thing – including the waste, because when you care about something you waste money on it – on the center-left.

The Argument, it seems to me, is a snapshot of a moment, and the moment is passing. Everything moves quickly. The Center for American Progress seems to have built out a capacity to develop new policy ideas that matches its rapid-response capacity (the poverty plan and its proposals on how to manage the end of the Iraq War are all well thought-out.) The Democracy Alliance seems to have righted itself, the board is strong and the staff that I've encountered recently seem exceptionally talented and knowledgeable. And as for the bloggers – I went to YearlyKos this year and the atmosphere was quite different from Bai's description of the first, in Las Vegas. It was basically two days of heavy-duty policy seminars. To quote Bill O'Reilly, “there wasn't any craziness at all.” The next book about the emerging progressive infrastructure might not be as entertaining as Bai's, but I think it will be more hopeful.

*[Update: I should have noted, for those not familiar with my background, that I worked for the U.S. programs of Soros's foundation, the Open Society Institute, from 1997 to 2005, and was an advocate there of building progressive infrastructure rather than work on individual issues.]*