TheMillerCircle.org

Do you have a snap of the fingers definition residing in your brain about what a progressive is? Do you have some idea of the history of the progressive movement in America? Are you a progressive, a liberal or a conservative? Do these designations have any meaning or do they serve as ad hoc words for coffee breaks and tea parties? What resonates in your brain when you try to explain what a progressive is or what it is that progressives have done for America? Is the progressive label a worn-out word ready for discard? Writer Michael Lux has taken on these issues with a delightful book, “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came To Be.” Lux is involved in OpenLeft and Progressive Strategies and other liberal organizations and consultant groups.  He worked at one time in the Clinton administration on the failed healthcare effort; he is unabashedly a progressive and committed to progressive causes and the transformation of America by relying on its traditional progressive history. This  is not a work of deep scholarship, though he quotes more scholarly citations throughout the book.  Progressive Revolution has a single purpose: to identify, extract and simplify contributions of progressives throughout the history of the United States and demonstrate their successes and failures while taking a stab at delineating the reasons why they did either or both. His basic, take-home message is that America has advanced its Democracy only through progressive movements, fine-tuned by public demands and influence and that we have not had a big progressive push since Lyndon Johnson’s triumphs on civil rights, together with the passage of Medicare and Medicaid; we are long overdue for another progressive revolution, for which he believes the country is now prepared and hopeful. In fact, he believes that the country is far ahead of the current wave of politicians, particularly the Democrats, who are too timid and cautious, so much so that they could fail by not identifying the mood of the country and the public receptivity for dramatic change. On that subject, I am in complete agreement with Lux–the country is ready for change. The polls reflect their impatience with the status quo and the need for a dramatic left turn on many social issues, including healthcare. They are ready for a massive reform movement and no longer fear government programs.  Indeed the majority of our citizens believe that government can do good things. So where are the Democrats that recognize this national mood for dramatic change? That’s the problem. So far, those that are enthusiastic for progressive change are not yet in the majority of Congress and we have a timid President who needs pressure from external forces to galvanize his spirit and drop the nonsense of bipartisanship. When FDR passed Social Security and saved American seniors from falling into abject poverty, every Republican voted against the bill. Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with (on) America” intended to gut Social Security, until his mother warned him against doing so. But, we get ahead of the story.

Lux’s book traces the history of the progressive changes that have made our country advance its basic concepts of freedom, democracy and equality, including the huge anti-slavery movement and civil war of the 1860s, a war that was brought about by the failure to democratize our Federal government when the constitution was first written in 1787.  While the road to achieve these basic principles was bumpy and uncertain, it was entirely driven by the progressives of the eighteenth,  nineteenth and twentieth centuries. None of the great historical achievements, including civil rights of the 1960s, was done without controversy and challenge, and every step of the way, these movements were opposed by the conservatives. Even today, Southern Republicans would vote for a restoration of white-supremacy laws if they could get away with it (it would be hidden in arguments about state’s rights). The Progressive Revolution (PR) identifies the major progressive periods in our history and emphasizes the fact that it is punctuated with spurts of progress, followed by retractions and failures; most of our heroes along the way also had flaws in one way or another that made them less than perfect leaders. LBJ with civil rights vs the Vietnam War for example.  And the progressive advancements, while largely and most recently championed by the Democratic party, at times owed their origins and success to Republicans, such as Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. The uniting theme of the PR is that of democracy, or ruling by direct majority, with an emphasis on the development of the country as an interdependent community. Conservatism on the other hand, that brand that is still with us today, favors representative democracy, rather than direct democracy. The conservatives dominated the constitutional convention and gave us the electoral college because they didn’t trust a direct popular voting option, something that has plagued the country ever since. The electoral college is the system that makes people living in Utah for example, feel that their Democratic vote is meaningless, as the state always votes for the Republicans and their platform. But, a popular election would eliminate that limitation and give every citizen a sense that their vote could have an impact. The conservatives are the traditional party of racism, statism  and corporatism of our past, present and future. And yes, you would have to throw in the party of corruption, where the evidence abounds that conservatives, right down to the era of GWB, brought corruption to a new high with no-bid contracts in Iraq given to friends of Bush and Cheney, and incompetents put into positions of importance in our government, with Katrina and FEMA leader Brown as one glaring example, but there are many others, including government suppression of science.

Lux’s book begins with an appropriate quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The two parties which divide the state, the party of conservativism and that of innovatioin are very old, and have disputed the world ever since it was made. Now one, now the other gets the day, and still the fight renews itself as if for the first time, under new names and hot personalities.” Lux emphasizes that the Founding Fathers did not create a country out of whole cloth. They were inspired by the Greeks, Romans and the Magna Carta. What made the American revolution unique was that it began with a single idea and threw off the shackles of colonialism, which forced them to invent their own government and do so on the fly. The great liberals identified by Lux are segregated along the timeline of progressivism and include, at the beginning, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. Without Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published in 1776, Lux argues that Thomas Jefferson could never have written the Declaration of Independence, a far more “democratic” document than the Constitution that followed many years later.  It was Paine, a British citizen by birth, who inspired ordinary citizens to think about the possibility of climbing out from underneath British colonial rule and establishing a new country in which every citizen would enjoy freedom, equality and opportunity. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence was a liberating document, but due to his absence in Philadelphia, when the Constitutional debate was underway, a much more conservative document came about that was mired in fear of the public and written to preserve slavery as an official government  institution. But, even in his absence, Jefferson’s influence helped pass the Bill of Rights to insure a level of individual freedoms that were opposed by the conservatives of the day.

Following the progressive inspiration of Jefferson and Paine, and going through Andrew Jackson, who helped advance progressive economics (but did many other not so great things–like his actions against the Cherokee Indians and the “trail of tears”) we have to jump to Abraham Lincoln and what Lux describes as the “Radical Republicans”, who freed the slaves, established Land Grant Colleges and introduced the Constitutional amendments (13th-15th) that gave emancipation, defined citizenship and the right to vote as a Federal guarantee; these amendments removed these rights from state control. For a while, the conservatives who garnered dominance after Lincoln’s assassination, ignored these amendments and it was not until the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s that these guarantees were more firmly in place. Yet, voting corruption by the Republicans continues to this day. The Republican party of the post-civil war period of reconstruction switched to become the party of big business, the party that we know today. From then on, Republicans were strictly for business interests and wealth accumulation for the few. Republicans of today are only interested in establishing an economic oligarchy, something like what exists in Russia today. In the process of this less than lofty pursuit, Republican administrations have produced the biggest scandals in history, with governments riddled by corruption, deceit and secrecy; the two largest financial scandals since the Great Depression were the Savings and Loan scandal under Reagan and the current crisis generated by GWB.

Teddy Roosevelt was a Republican progressive who took on the robber barons  that emerged in the late nineteenth century and curbed their abusive labor practices, their violation of food safety practices and their complete ignorance and rape of the environment. His work in establishing the national park system, improvements in food safety (inspired by Upton Sinclair’s book “The Jungle“), the elimination of child labor and the curtailment of corporate trusts were milestones of achievement and set a new tone to the Federal Government and its responsibilities to society.  Lux points out that while we give the political leaders of these progressive periods credit for their initiatives, it is always the provocative citizens of the country that ignite and sustain these movements by dogged persistence and creative argument. Thus for example, it was Sierra Club founder John Muir who was instrumental in stimulating Teddy Roosevelt to form the National Park system and intellectuals such as John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen helped formulate the principles leading to progressive social and economic changes. The woman’s suffrage movement was instrumental in gaining the vote for women and in reinforcing the idea that democracy was for everyone. Teddy Roosevelt was followed in the progressive tradition by Woodrow Wilson, who, though he too advocated better conditions for the working class, nevertheless needlessly dragged the country into a costly and draining World War I (not named as such of course until after WW II; until then, this was “The Great War”).

But, the Empire struck back and contraction in the early 20th century began to peel away support for the common prosperity, as democracy and economic fairness gave way to Republicans whose objective was the creation of wealth for the few through the traditional mechanisms of corporate greed, speculation and corruption, which ultimately led to the predictable financial collapse known as the Great Depression. Until GWB was elected President in 2000, our biggest dummy of a President was probably Warren Harding, whose corrupt government led to arguably the biggest government scandal in history known as the “Teapot Dome Scandal.”  But, in traditional progressive fashion, it was a liberal Democrat that saved the country from a complete collapse. FDR was  elected during the depression and helped the country to begin the slow process of recovery, through the “New Deal” by stabilizing the banks, providing relief for the unemployed, stimulating the economy directly and establishing regulatory agencies that helped stabilize our economic system and avoid serious economic declines until the Republicans re-worked their magic again with the Savings and Loan crisis under Ronald Reagan and our current economic collapse under GWB. By the way, the Republicans are always trying to minimize the impact of the depression methods used during the New Deal by insisting that it was WW II that pulled the country out of its depression, not the actions of FDR. But according to Lux, when FDR came into office in 1933,  unemployment stood at 24.9 percent and went down every year but one in the period before WW II, ending at 10% at the start of the war in 1941.  The serious economic downturns we have had in this country, and there were many of them in the 19th century, were given to us by the expertise of conservative administrations that favored business interests over the needs of ordinary citizens.  FDR changed the country for good with the introduction of improved labor practices, Social Security, unemployment, jobs programs and most important of all, he provided a national sense that the government was doing something about a terrible depression. Perhaps no President in history did more to bring economic prosperity more broadly to the middle class while reducing the level of poverty in the country. The GI bill established a new, educated middle class, such that by the 1960s, the economy was working better for most people than it ever had before. The legislation under LBJ established improvements in civil rights and race relations, and pushed through two other landmark legislative actions in  Medicare and Medicaid. Tragically, it was the disaster of the Vietnam war and the rise of Republicans, inspired by Barry Goldwater that cultivated the South, leading to Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and the grip on national politics that the Republican Party has enjoyed for most of the latter part of the 20th century and well into this one. Because of this, no new sweeping progressive legislation has been passed since the days of LBJ. And, we have slipped backwards by relaxing environmental controls and the clean air and clean water acts. Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” played a dramatic role in shifting national attention to environmental issues and the eventual elimination the pesticide DDT, which, among other benefits, saved birds of prey from extinction, something of very little concern to conservatives. Lux also gives great credit to the feminist movement and cites Betty Friedan’s book “The Feminine Mystique” as a galvanizing force for focusing  public attention onto the gender inequities embedded in our constitution and reflected in our political history.

For most conservatives, Ronald Reagan is the gold standard of the modern Republican President. Here’s what a gold standard Republican looks like: he kicked off his political campaign in Philadelphia Mississippi in 1980,  the town where the three civil rights workers were murdered fifteen years earlier. Reagan’s message to the white supremacists was clear: I am one of you. What did Ronnie do? Well one thing he did was to bring supply side economics to the country, as he attempted to demonstrate the famous Laffer curve effect in which too much taxation was impeding economic growth and an immediate large tax cut would actually stimulate the economy and lead to near instantaneous new revenues.  But Reagan’s tax cuts did nothing of the sort. They pushed the country into huge deficits, sharply escalated interest rates and brought us a very profound and deep recession.  Reagan’s tax cut was distributed such that low-income Americans received 16 percent of the dollar savings, while the top earners received 84 percent. Reagan turned us from the biggest creditor nation in the world to the biggest debtor nation in the world. Reagan weakened the unions which further eroded middle class income levels and he shredded public safety nets. I lived in St. Louis at the time and was told by one of my physician friends that Reagan’s cuts in healthcare programs for the inner cities would result in a rise in the infant  mortality rate because of reduced prenatal care and that’s exactly what happened. I watched the numbers grow each year. Reagan’s ideology was that of a Social Darwinist. He would have voted to stay with the British in 1776. He slashed Social Security Disability Insurance and school lunch programs. He was a free marketeer from the get go and didn’t hesitate to plunder the country into clandestine wars that were illegal under US law.  When he was first elected, he took down a portrait of Jefferson from his office and replaced it with one of Calvin Coolidge. This seemed like an odd choice on the intellectual and importance scales, but Reagan made the change to remind everyone and himself that he wanted to return the country to a simpler time, when business had a free reign and he began to shut down the vestiges of the New Deal. Carter had started deregulation with the airlines, but Reagan would pursue deregulation with a vengeance. We are still stuck with many judges appointed in the Reagan era that hold firmly to deregulation and free market principles as an ideology.

Imagine meeting a conservative friend for lunch at a cafe in Boston in 1776. You convey your enthusiasm for Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” and talk about your new found vision for a country free from British rule, one in which opportunities would be available to all citizens of the country, while freeing the new nation from burdensome taxes and harsh, arbitrary  rules. As soon as you say goodbye to your friend, he marches straight to the British Magistrate’s office and reports you as a suspicious revolutionary. You are promptly arrested and either publicly flogged, imprisoned or hanged, depending on the degree to which the magistrate considers your potential for revolutionary zeal. In one very real way, the Republican party of today is an alien organization in America. They are the party that stood with the British in the revolutionary war, the party of slavery, states rights, Jim Crow, Jesse Helms and they are the party of the most dangerous terrorist organization in the history of the country–the Klu-Klux-Klan. Seeking bipartisan solutions with this party will only serve to weaken the Democratic bills and further disenchant the American public. Obama and the Democrats need to wake up to the new mood of receptivity that the country is in right now for dramatic, progressive change. Going down the bipartisan route is a sure way to lose their votes and diminish their enthusiasm.

While I don’t agree with everything that Lux expresses in his book, he gives us a nice time line description of the major events that shaped our history. I think Lux is naive about the evil threat from communism that we faced with the Soviet Union immediately after WW II. He wants to give Truman credit for facing down the threat of communism. I think of Truman as a fool for exaggerating the threat of communism and siding with the hardliners. Lux  seems not to understand that it was Truman and the hard liners around him that started the Cold War, aided and stimulated by militarists in the government at the time who were only there because of WW II. The Soviets were in fact demobilizing after WW II, not preparing for global hegemony. And, the American Communist Party that our government went after, largely because of the cross-dresser J. Edgar Hoover’s paranoia, and that of the House and Senate members he persuaded, was largely a joke–no one could tolerate the militancy of the party, which, at its peak probably had no more than a few tens of thousands of members; many of them had joined the party to give aid to the Spanish Government in the 1930s, since our own government refused to offer assistance, at a time when Germany and Italy were provided horrendous military assistance and direct participation to ensure a Franco victory.

If you consider yourself a progressive or liberal, you will enjoy Lux’s book. It’s a short read, only 224 pages and, if you have those stripes, it’s one of those books you can’t put down. This book should make you more enthusiastic for the overdue changes we need to make in order to overcome what, at the moment, seems like a confused, weird, self-destructive country.

RFM