Letter to Members on the July 31st meeting

From Heide Kober, President PDNC

Dear Progressive Democrat:

Thank you for coming to the PDNC meeting on Saturday, July 31. Your contributions to our conversation were absolutely vital as we explored the reasons why we are both Progressives and Democrats —even if the two sometimes seem contradictory -- and what our goals are, both in the short- and long-term, and what next steps need to happen to move us forward. The minutes of the meeting are on our website at http://www.progressivedemocratsnc.org/blog/node/556#comment-244

We hope that we can continue this very important conversation on November 13 when we will come together again for our Annual Meeting and have all day to discuss in more depth what we touched on when we met on Saturday morning. In the meantime, please use the blog on our website to continue this important dialogue.

I was heartened to see the passionate commitment to continue the struggle against the corporate take-over of our democracy. It’s obvious that we are the ones who still take the whole “change thing” seriously despite our many disappointments and that we remain committed to seeing it through.

When we challenge the Obama and the other Democrats, we do it in the spirit of calling on their better angels. The source of our criticism is the desire to see President Obama and Democrats succeed by passing progressive policies that actually help working people and protect our planet and our democracy, rather than failing by passing compromised, toxic “bipartisan” policies that leave most of us out in the cold wondering who is on our side.

Tony Judt, historian, social thinker, essayist, and Professor of European Studies at New York University, died last Friday, August 6, 2010, at the relative young age of 62. The Los Angeles Times' tribute is well worth reading: http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-et-judt-20100809,0,3145839,prin...

Excerpt:

"Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today," Judt said. "For 30 years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest.... The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears 'natural' today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric which accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth."

"I think what we need is a return to a belief not in liberty, because that is easily converted into something else ... but in equality. Equality, which is not the same as sameness. Equality of access to information, equality of access to knowledge, equality of access to education, equality of access to power and to politics. ... It is another way of talking about injustice. We need to rediscover a language of dissent."

In his last book, Ill Fares The Land, dictated by him as he struggled with the growing limitations of his illness, he reflects on why social democracy has failed to offer effective resistance to the onslaught of late 20th century feral capitalism, let alone create viable alternatives. As he states in the following excerpt, this disorder is affecting not just the US but Europe as well. Clearly, the scope of the conversation about the values we need to build into our economies, our social institutions, our communities, and our politics if we are to regain control over our lives and have a future worth passing on to our children and grandchildren, is much greater than the reach of our little group here in North Carolina. Yet we are an integral part of a multi-dimensional global conversation that hums from community to community, from country to country, exploring new ways of being and new ways of doing, and developing a brand-new language for telling the next chapter of our human story. None of the old “isms” can accurately describe the future that is unfolding all across the globe.

But paradigm shifts do not happen on their own: they are triggered by events and by those who know how to translate these events into the momentum that is necessary to create a sustained movement. The greatest obstacle to a paradigm shift is what’s often called paradigm paralysis: the inability or refusal to see beyond the current models of thinking --all we have to do is look at Congress to see the meaning of the term played out.

Creating a powerful, coherent progressive narrative will be our first task when we meet again on November 13 to continue this conversation. Creating a communication system to get this narrative out will be the next. I was glad to see that the young people who attended our meeting are already addressing this great need and presented some good ideas on how to use social media effectively and at minimal cost. We really need to hear more from them!

I leave you to think about the role PDNC needs to take on to be a catalyst for change, both within and outside the Democratic Party, and these words from the late Tony Judt:

Excerpt:

Most critics of our present condition start with institutions. They look at parliaments, senates, presidents, elections and lobbies and point to the ways in which these have degraded or abused the trust and authority placed in them. Any reform, they conclude, must begin here. We need new laws, different electoral regimes, restrictions on lobbying and political funding; we need to give more (or less) authority to the executive branch and we need to find ways to make elected and unelected officials responsive and answerable to their constituencies and paymasters: us.
All true. But such changes have been in the air for decades. It should by now be clear that the reason they have not happened, or do not work, is because they are imagined, designed and implemented by the very people responsible for the dilemma. There is little point in asking the US Senate to reform its lobbying arrangements: as Upton Sinclair famously observed a century ago, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” For much the same reasons, the parliaments of most European countries—now regarded with sentiments ranging from boredom to contempt—are ill-placed to find within themselves the means to become relevant once again.

We need to start somewhere else. Why, for the past three decades, has it been so easy for those in power to convince their constituents of the wisdom—and, in any case, the necessity—of the policies they want to pursue? Because there has been no coherent alternative on offer. Even when there are significant policy differences among major political parties, these are presented as versions of a single objective. It has become common- place to assert that we all want the same thing, we just have slightly different ways of going about it.

But this is simply false. The rich do not want the same thing as the poor. Those who depend on their job for their livelihood do not want the same thing as those who live off investments and dividends. Those who do not need public services—because they can purchase private transport, education and protection—do not seek the same thing as those who depend exclusively on the public sector. Those who benefit from war—either as defense contractors or on ideological grounds—have different objectives than those who are against war.

Societies are complex and contain conflicting interests. To assert otherwise—to deny distinctions of class or wealth or influence—is just a way to promote one set of interests above another. This proposition used to be self-evident; today we are encouraged to dismiss it as an incendiary encouragement to class hatred. In a similar vein, we are encouraged to pursue economic self-interest to the exclusion of all else: and indeed, there are many who stand to gain thereby.

However, markets have a natural disposition to favor needs and wants that can be reduced to commercial criteria or economic measurement. If you can sell it or buy it, then it is quantifiable and we can assess its contribution to (quantitative) measures of collective well-being. But what of those goods which humans have always valued but which do not lend them-selves to quantification?

What of well-being? What of fairness or equity (in its original sense)? What of exclusion, opportunity—or its absence—or lost hope? Such considerations mean much more to most people than aggregate or even individual profit or growth. Take humiliation: what if we treated it as an economic cost, a charge to society? What if we decided to ‘quantify’ the harm done when people are shamed by their fellow citizens as a condition of receiving the mere necessities of life?

In other words, what if we factored into our estimates of productivity, efficiency, or well-being the difference between a humiliating handout and a benefit as of right? We might conclude that the provision of universal social services, public health insurance, or subsidized public transportation was actually a cost-effective way to achieve our common objectives. I readily concede that such an exercise is inherently contentious: how do we quantify ‘humiliation’? What is the measurable cost of depriving isolated citizens of access to metropolitan resources? How much are we willing to pay for a good society?

Even ‘wealth’ itself cries out for redefinition. It is widely asserted that steeply progressive rates of taxation or economic redistribution destroy wealth. Such policies undoubtedly constrict the resources of some to the benefit of others—though the way we cut the cake has little bearing on its size. If redistributing material wealth has the long-term effect of improving the health of a country, diminishing social tensions born of envy or increasing and equalizing everyone’s access to services hitherto preserved for the few, is not that country better off?

As the reader may observe, I am using words like ‘wealth’ or ‘better off’ in ways that take them well beyond their current, strictly material application. To do this on a broader scale—to recast our public conversation—seems to me the only realistic way to begin to bring about change. If we do not talk differently, we shall not think differently.

There are precedents for this way of conceiving political change. In late 18th century France, as the old regime tottered, the most significant developments on the political scene came not in the movements of protest or the institutions of state which sought to head them off. They came, rather, in the very language itself. Journalists and pamphleteers, together with the occasional dissenting administrator or priest, were forging out of an older language of justice and popular rights a new rhetoric of public action.
Unable to confront the monarchy head-on, they set about depriving it of legitimacy by imagining and expressing objections to the way things were and positing alternative sources of authority in whom ‘the people’ could believe. In effect, they invented modern politics: and in so doing quite literally discredited everything that had gone before. By the time the Revolution itself broke out, this new language of politics was thoroughly in place: indeed, had it not been, the revolutionaries themselves would have had no way to describe what they were doing. In the beginning was the word.
Today, we are encouraged to believe in the idea that politics reflects our opinions and helps us shape a shared public space.

Politicians talk and we respond—with our votes. But the truth is quite other. Most people don’t feel as though they are part of any conversation of significance. They are told what to think and how to think it. They are made to feel inadequate as soon as issues of detail are engaged; and as for general objectives, they are encouraged to believe that these have long since been determined.

The perverse effects of this suppression of genuine debate are all around us. In the US today, town hall meetings and ‘tea parties’ parody and mimic the 18th century originals. Far from opening debate, they close it down. Demagogues tell the crowd what to think; when their phrases are echoed back to them, they boldly announce that they are merely relaying popular sentiment. In the UK, television has been put to strikingly effective use as a safety valve for populist discontent: professional politicians now claim to listen to vox populi in the form of instant phone-in votes and popularity polls on everything from immigration policy to pedophilia. Twittering back to their audience its own fears and prejudices, they are relieved of the burden of leadership or initiative.

Meanwhile, across the Channel in republican France or tolerant Holland, ersatz debates on national identity and criteria for citizenship substitute for the political courage required to confront popular prejudice and the challenges of integration. Here too, a ‘conversation’ appears to be taking place. But its terms of reference have been carefully pre-determined; its purpose is not to encourage the expression of dissenting views but to suppress them. Rather than facilitate public participation and diminish civic alienation, these ‘conversations’ simply add to the widespread distaste for politicians and politics. In a modern democracy it is possible to fool most of the people most of the time: but at a price.

We need to re-open a different sort of conversation. We need to become confident once again in our own instincts: if a policy or an action or a decision seems somehow wrong, we must find the words to say so.
Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt was published by Allen Lane (Penguin) in March 2010.