thenation--2020-07-20--You’re Only As Free as You Are Wealthy

You’re Only As Free as You Are Wealthy

In early Anglo-Saxon England and until the end of European feudalism , there existed a class of people known as churls , from which we get the adjective “ churlish.
” They weren ’ t called that because they had bad manners ; churls were the lowest class of free people .
They were not bound to a manor like serfs , but neither did they have wealth and own property like nobles .
They were people who possessed freedom to do as they pleased in theory .
In practice , their poverty meant that their “ free ” lives @ @ @ @ @ @ @ serfs .
Economic reality dictated then , as it dictates today , one ’ s freedom .
People are only as free as they can afford to be .
For Americans , lacking guaranteed access to basic necessities like housing , food , and health care ( and with our bank accounts determining access to the good versions of those things ) , this is a constant dilemma .
We place great value in perceiving ourselves as free .
Yet the more we extol this freedom ’ s virtue , the more it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ convince ourselves .
Real freedom would include being free to quit a terrible job without losing access to everything on the bottom level of Maslow ’ s pyramid .
It would include freedom to live where we want , not where “ the market ” decides jobs will be available .
It would include control over our own labor , like negotiating power over our earnings and our working conditions .
In short , it would mean freedom to live the lives we desire , rather than the lives we choose based on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we exercise no control .
In 2008 , then-candidate Barack Obama caused controversy by claiming of working-class voters in the postindustrial Midwest , “ They get bitter , they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren ’ t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
” The “ bitter clingers ” remark stuck throughout the campaign , particularly as he applied it to conservative shibboleths like the Second Amendment and religion .
To many liberals this represents a hard truth , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ example of how a politics that abandons economic populism is an invitation for “ culture wars ” issues to dominate .
In either case , it is a useful basis for understanding why so many Americans find comfort in a misguided notion of “ freedom ” that amounts only to small acts of refusenik-ism , like school kids who rebel against the dress code by untucking one corner of their shirt .
When our economic system takes freedom in a meaningful sense away from the vast majority of the population , people place @ @ @ @ @ @ @ In its current manifestation , this explains part of the vehemence with which some Americans reject orders to wear masks or maintain social distance .
Many factors affect individuals ’ choices , including partisanship and misinformation about the current pandemic , but there is a sadness in hearing people equate going unmasked with human rights and an imagined war against authoritarianism .
“ I will not be muzzled like a mad dog !
” sounds less like a free man asserting his rights and more like an unfree man cosplaying the American Revolution @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is only the latest iteration of this form of petty revolt .
The journalist Daniel Ackerman recently explained in Business Insider how some Americans “ went to war against seat belts , ” and in the mid-1990s the introduction of recycling into the American consciousness was met with an anti-recycling backlash that reframed throwing plastic bottles in landfills as heroic acts of civil disobedience .
The same spirit of disobedience-as-freedom percolates beneath issues like the phony “ war ” over saying Happy Holidays and Christmas-themed Starbucks cups and in the way some Americans @ @ @ @ @ @ @ measure of the freedom they enjoy .
Of course , the appeal of Donald Trump is often attributed to the now-clichéd “ white working class , ” when in fact some of his most die-hard support is found among upper-middle-class suburban Republicans—the small-business-owning conservatives who are well-off but not private-equity rich .
Nation contributor and Roosevelt Institute director Mike Konczal has called them Buddy Garrity Republicans , after the meddling character in Friday Night Lights who wields economic power in his small town because he owns the Chevy dealership .
They aren ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their homes because life offers them insufficient freedom ; on the contrary , they can afford far more than most people .
But the conservative worldview also holds that strict adherence to the law is mandatory for the lower social classes and optional for people who see themselves as being at the top .
Not everyone is a frustrated churl rebelling against masks because they lack choices in life ; some people just see themselves as above the law .
For the majority of us , things like mask requirements represent one of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rule to follow , another inconvenience and discomfort in a daily life already full of them , or an opportunity shaped by partisan and ideological incentives to show that we are in fact as free and independent as we like to see ourselves .
As upsetting as it is to see Americans who refuse to take simple precautions to fight a pandemic , symbolic freedom becomes more appealing when more useful freedoms are not available .
Congress has failed to provide meaningful and lasting income support for people who have lost jobs , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ botched “ support ” plan that proved to be both woefully insufficient and ineptly administered .
Mask wearing would not be universal under any circumstances in the United States , but replacing the feeling of insecurity and panic with a sense that the pandemic is a disruption we can weather would make the medicine of more restrictive rules go down a lot easier .
Instead , the federal government has responded by offering us a combination of Hobbes ’ s state of nature and the Articles of Confederation : Every state , every @ @ @ @ @ @ @ businesses , sports leagues , churches ) should do whatever seems best in an environment of limited , conflicting , and inaccurate information .
The policy amounts to every man for himself , with the devil taking the hindmost .
Under those circumstances , it can hardly be surprising that some Americans cling to a sense of individualism , even if pointless and performative .

Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. The best of the week. Email By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Fridays. The best of the week.
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Repro Nation A monthly newsletter on the global fight for reproductive freedom. Email By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
In early Anglo-Saxon England and until the end of European feudalism, there existed a class of people known as churls, from which we get the adjective “churlish.” They weren’t called that because they had bad manners; churls were the lowest class of free people. They were not bound to a manor like serfs, but neither did they have wealth and own property like nobles. They were people who possessed freedom to do as they pleased in theory. In practice, their poverty meant that their “free” lives were little different from those of unfree serfs.
Economic reality dictated then, as it dictates today, one’s freedom. People are only as free as they can afford to be. For Americans, lacking guaranteed access to basic necessities like housing, food, and health care (and with our bank accounts determining access to the good versions of those things), this is a constant dilemma. We place great value in perceiving ourselves as free. Yet the more we extol this freedom’s virtue, the more it sounds like we are just trying to convince ourselves.
Real freedom would include being free to quit a terrible job without losing access to everything on the bottom level of Maslow’s pyramid. It would include freedom to live where we want, not where “the market” decides jobs will be available. It would include control over our own labor, like negotiating power over our earnings and our working conditions. In short, it would mean freedom to live the lives we desire, rather than the lives we choose based on a curated set of options over which we exercise no control.
In 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama caused controversy by claiming of working-class voters in the postindustrial Midwest, “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” The “bitter clingers” remark stuck throughout the campaign, particularly as he applied it to conservative shibboleths like the Second Amendment and religion.
To many liberals this represents a hard truth, while to the left it is an example of how a politics that abandons economic populism is an invitation for “culture wars” issues to dominate. In either case, it is a useful basis for understanding why so many Americans find comfort in a misguided notion of “freedom” that amounts only to small acts of refusenik-ism, like school kids who rebel against the dress code by untucking one corner of their shirt. When our economic system takes freedom in a meaningful sense away from the vast majority of the population, people place more value on its symbolic expression. Related Article When Centrists Sounded Like Bernie Ed Burmila
In its current manifestation, this explains part of the vehemence with which some Americans reject orders to wear masks or maintain social distance. Many factors affect individuals’ choices, including partisanship and misinformation about the current pandemic, but there is a sadness in hearing people equate going unmasked with human rights and an imagined war against authoritarianism. “I will not be muzzled like a mad dog!” sounds less like a free man asserting his rights and more like an unfree man cosplaying the American Revolution in his head. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann
The mask backlash is only the latest iteration of this form of petty revolt. The journalist Daniel Ackerman recently explained in Business Insider how some Americans “went to war against seat belts,” and in the mid-1990s the introduction of recycling into the American consciousness was met with an anti-recycling backlash that reframed throwing plastic bottles in landfills as heroic acts of civil disobedience. The same spirit of disobedience-as-freedom percolates beneath issues like the phony “war” over saying Happy Holidays and Christmas-themed Starbucks cups and in the way some Americans equate spending money on guns as a measure of the freedom they enjoy. Current Issue View our current issue
Of course, the appeal of Donald Trump is often attributed to the now-clichéd “white working class,” when in fact some of his most die-hard support is found among upper-middle-class suburban Republicans—the small-business-owning conservatives who are well-off but not private-equity rich. Nation contributor and Roosevelt Institute director Mike Konczal has called them Buddy Garrity Republicans, after the meddling character in Friday Night Lights who wields economic power in his small town because he owns the Chevy dealership. They aren’t brandishing guns unmasked in front of their homes because life offers them insufficient freedom; on the contrary, they can afford far more than most people. But the conservative worldview also holds that strict adherence to the law is mandatory for the lower social classes and optional for people who see themselves as being at the top. Not everyone is a frustrated churl rebelling against masks because they lack choices in life; some people just see themselves as above the law.
For the majority of us, things like mask requirements represent one of two things: either one more minor rule to follow, another inconvenience and discomfort in a daily life already full of them, or an opportunity shaped by partisan and ideological incentives to show that we are in fact as free and independent as we like to see ourselves.
As upsetting as it is to see Americans who refuse to take simple precautions to fight a pandemic, symbolic freedom becomes more appealing when more useful freedoms are not available. Congress has failed to provide meaningful and lasting income support for people who have lost jobs, and business owners have received only a botched “support” plan that proved to be both woefully insufficient and ineptly administered. Mask wearing would not be universal under any circumstances in the United States, but replacing the feeling of insecurity and panic with a sense that the pandemic is a disruption we can weather would make the medicine of more restrictive rules go down a lot easier.
Instead, the federal government has responded by offering us a combination of Hobbes’s state of nature and the Articles of Confederation: Every state, every individual, every organization (universities, businesses, sports leagues, churches) should do whatever seems best in an environment of limited, conflicting, and inaccurate information. The policy amounts to every man for himself, with the devil taking the hindmost. Under those circumstances, it can hardly be surprising that some Americans cling to a sense of individualism, even if pointless and performative.


thenation--2020-07-21--When ‘Law and Order’ Means Maximum Chaos

The election is barely 100 days away , and the Signal is that Trump—trailing Biden by large margins in national polls—is pursuing a Hail Mary strategy : ramp up the chaos , and double down on the repression .
In Portland , Ore. , heavily armed federal agents in full military camo are now roaming the streets .
Some , wearing no identification , picked up protesters and bundled them off in unmarked vans .
These federal officers are , apparently , from a range of agencies , including Customs and Border Protection and the US Marshals Service .
Their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ property , and they ’ ve used Trump ’ s executive order about protecting monuments as justification—but in practice , they seem to be treating Portland ’ s streets as legitimate stomping grounds .
On Saturday evening , a 53-year-old Navy vet had the temerity to ask these federal agents why they were violating their constitutional oath .
They responded by savagely beating him with batons—breaking his right hand—and spraying him in the face with pepper spray .
The video , which had been viewed over 11 million times by Monday , is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tilt of this administration as anything I have so far seen .
These actions have produced huge pushback , as surely the Trump administration knew they would .
Oregon ’ s attorney general sued to block the snatch squads from operating this way .
A naked protester stood defiantly between the officers and other protesters .
And scores of local mothers linked arms to form a human shield in front of protesters near the federal courthouse .
Never Mind the Rising Death Toll—the Trump Show Must Go On !
In the days after @ @ @ @ @ @ @ surfaced , the demonstrations have intensified .
Meanwhile , the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security , Chad Wolf , has painted a picture of Portland besieged by violent anarchists and local political leaders who refuse to enforce the law—and Trump has essentially promised to implement in D.C. , Chicago , and other so-called “ Democrat ” cities the repressive tactics now being unleashed in Portland .
At the same time , Trump has ramped up his rhetoric about Biden being a tool of a far-left cabal that Trump claims is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ life .
But for all Trump ’ s Noise about law and order , when it comes to the biggest issues facing the country , he and his enablers are going out of their way to sow as much turmoil as possible .
On the economy , the GOP is pushing to limit unemployment benefits , even as large parts of the US economy have to shutter again in the face of surging Covid-19 infection numbers .
It is seeking to eliminate the Affordable Care Act , even though more than 5 million @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the pandemic .
And as Democratic and Republican congressional negotiators try to hash out another broad pandemic-response package , GOP sources are telling the media that the White House is pushing for zero—yes , zero—additional funds for states to ramp up their novel coronavirus testing and contact tracing capacity ; that it is looking to eliminate $ 10 billion in additional funds for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ; and that it wants to eviscerate Pentagon and State Department foreign aid programs .
There is , quite simply , no way @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Each one of these ugly proposals alone would cripple efforts to gain control of the pandemic and slow its spread .
Put them together in a package , and they are a recipe for letting the virus run rampant .
So , too , is the strategy of defunding the US Postal Service ( which is now being run by a Trump loyalist ) .
A leaked memo suggested that the agency is now on the verge of eliminating all overtime for employees , simply letting mail that can ’ t be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ If this happens , it will do so just as the mail system has become of central importance for voters who are scared of going to polling booths in person to cast their ballots this year .
Likewise for the idea of attacking cities such as Los Angeles for not reopening schools for in-person classes in the fall , while also withholding any real federal investment that would allow states and cities to reinvent the delivery of education—by , for example , taking over parks , parking lots , church grounds , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
With so much attention elsewhere , the administration is also intent on a second go-round on separating immigrant families in detention .
Covid-19 cases are soaring in immigration detention facilities , but the administration continues to stonewall a court order to release detained children who have been held for longer than 20 days .
Instead of complying with the original deadline of last Friday for releasing inmates , administration officials convinced a federal judge to give them until July 27 to come up with a plan that would essentially allow ICE to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ parents in detention .
That ’ s the Signal this week .
Stay engaged , stay righteously angry , and as the late John Lewis—one of America ’ s true heroes—often said , don ’ t be afraid of getting into “ good trouble ” in pursuit of justice and decency .

The election is barely 100 days away, and the Signal is that Trump—trailing Biden by large margins in national polls—is pursuing a Hail Mary strategy: ramp up the chaos, and double down on the repression.
In Portland, Ore., heavily armed federal agents in full military camo are now roaming the streets. Some, wearing no identification, picked up protesters and bundled them off in unmarked vans. These federal officers are, apparently, from a range of agencies, including Customs and Border Protection and the US Marshals Service. Their mandate is officially limited to protecting federal property, and they’ve used Trump’s executive order about protecting monuments as justification—but in practice, they seem to be treating Portland’s streets as legitimate stomping grounds.
On Saturday evening, a 53-year-old Navy vet had the temerity to ask these federal agents why they were violating their constitutional oath. They responded by savagely beating him with batons—breaking his right hand—and spraying him in the face with pepper spray. The video, which had been viewed over 11 million times by Monday, is as clear a demonstration of the fascist tilt of this administration as anything I have so far seen.
These actions have produced huge pushback, as surely the Trump administration knew they would. Oregon’s attorney general sued to block the snatch squads from operating this way. A naked protester stood defiantly between the officers and other protesters. And scores of local mothers linked arms to form a human shield in front of protesters near the federal courthouse. Related Article Never Mind the Rising Death Toll—the Trump Show Must Go On! Sasha Abramsky
In the days after the images of federal agents targeting protesters surfaced, the demonstrations have intensified. Meanwhile, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, has painted a picture of Portland besieged by violent anarchists and local political leaders who refuse to enforce the law—and Trump has essentially promised to implement in D.C., Chicago, and other so-called “Democrat” cities the repressive tactics now being unleashed in Portland. At the same time, Trump has ramped up his rhetoric about Biden being a tool of a far-left cabal that Trump claims is intent on undermining the American way of life. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann
But for all Trump’s Noise about law and order, when it comes to the biggest issues facing the country, he and his enablers are going out of their way to sow as much turmoil as possible.
On the economy, the GOP is pushing to limit unemployment benefits, even as large parts of the US economy have to shutter again in the face of surging Covid-19 infection numbers. It is seeking to eliminate the Affordable Care Act, even though more than 5 million Americans have lost private health insurance during the pandemic. And as Democratic and Republican congressional negotiators try to hash out another broad pandemic-response package, GOP sources are telling the media that the White House is pushing for zero—yes, zero—additional funds for states to ramp up their novel coronavirus testing and contact tracing capacity; that it is looking to eliminate $10 billion in additional funds for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and that it wants to eviscerate Pentagon and State Department foreign aid programs. Current Issue View our current issue
There is, quite simply, no way to put a benign spin on this. Each one of these ugly proposals alone would cripple efforts to gain control of the pandemic and slow its spread. Put them together in a package, and they are a recipe for letting the virus run rampant.
It’s a strategy for creating maximum, deliberate chaos.
So, too, is the strategy of defunding the US Postal Service (which is now being run by a Trump loyalist). A leaked memo suggested that the agency is now on the verge of eliminating all overtime for employees, simply letting mail that can’t be delivered during normal hours pile up. If this happens, it will do so just as the mail system has become of central importance for voters who are scared of going to polling booths in person to cast their ballots this year.
Likewise for the idea of attacking cities such as Los Angeles for not reopening schools for in-person classes in the fall, while also withholding any real federal investment that would allow states and cities to reinvent the delivery of education—by, for example, taking over parks, parking lots, church grounds, and other spaces for outdoor, in-person classes.
With so much attention elsewhere, the administration is also intent on a second go-round on separating immigrant families in detention. Covid-19 cases are soaring in immigration detention facilities, but the administration continues to stonewall a court order to release detained children who have been held for longer than 20 days. Instead of complying with the original deadline of last Friday for releasing inmates, administration officials convinced a federal judge to give them until July 27 to come up with a plan that would essentially allow ICE to release only children, while keeping their parents in detention.
That’s the Signal this week. Stay engaged, stay righteously angry, and as the late John Lewis—one of America’s true heroes—often said, don’t be afraid of getting into “good trouble” in pursuit of justice and decency.


thenation--2020-07-21--Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s Alternative Progressive Vision

What is the way forward for progressives in a time when it seems both centrism and authoritarianism are resurgent ?
What should be the character and scope of a national program that progressives in and outside the Democratic Party can and should embrace ?
There are many places to look for answers to these questions , and no doubt the answers will have many inspirations .
One of the most incisive articulations of an American progressive alternative is that of Roberto Mangabeira Unger , a Harvard Law professor , philosopher , and former Brazilian politician .
He has written over @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of topics , including critical legal theory—which he helped develop—economics , philosophy , and religion .
Given this range , it would be unfair to reduce Unger ’ s work to one core idea .
But perhaps the major theme of his work is summed up in his argument that “ society is made and imagined , that it is a human artifact rather than the expression of an underlying natural order.
” What this means is that nothing in our society—the economy , liberal democracy , the legal order , etc.—is predetermined @ @ @ @ @ @ @ human creations , artifacts whose forms can therefore be challenged , transcended , and ultimately reoriented for the purpose of greater human liberation , individually and collectively .
What makes Unger ’ s progressive vision of society unique are its religious and prophetic elements .
He sees human beings as having a divinelike capacity to transcend their societal circumstances to achieve greatness .
What prevents them from doing so is the false assumption that there can be no substantial alternative to inherited political institutions .
His work exposes this false necessity while providing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ alternatives to it .
In this regard , his work can offer progressives key resources for exposing the false necessity of the American liberal status quo and thinking constructively about a different progressive vision for the United States .
The Nation recently spoke with Unger about his proposal for an alternative progressive track for American politics .
Along the way , we discussed racial injustice in the United States , Donald Trump ’ s election , democratizing new technologies , the future of education , and progressive taxation .
Of pressing importance is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ change , and in turn , whether Unger ’ s vision is impractical .
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length .
aniel teinmetz- enkins : Right now the streets are filled with protesters demonstrating in the aftermath of George Floyd ’ s brutal killing by Minneapolis police .
Progressives have long struggled to confront and overcome racial injustice in the United States .
You have criticized their approach , the dominant approach , to racial oppression .
What is your understanding ?
And what is your proposal ?
oberto angabeira @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this moment for the future of the country , it is useful to begin by distinguishing the immediate background—the failure of the established approach to racial injustice in the United States—from the larger context of which this failure forms a part : the disorientation of American progressives and the long-standing absence in American politics of any program responsive to the needs , interests , and aspirations of the working-class majority of the country , white or black .
The prevailing response to racial injustice in the United States has been the integrationist orthodoxy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ threshold issue , to be addressed before all problems of economic equality and opportunity .
Its signature expression is affirmative action .
It has done little for those who most require protection , the vast number of black people who languish in prisons and dead-end jobs .
This approach has offended the white working-class majority , who believe themselves to be victims of a conspiracy between sanctimonious white elites and the representatives of black workers .
And it has provided a model for the identity politics that has addressed legitimate demands for respect @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from engagement with its structural problems .
There is an alternative .
The alternative is to distinguish individualized racial discrimination from the advancement of the unequipped , the excluded , and the impoverished .
Individualized racial discrimination should be criminalized , as it is in many countries .
Social advancement should be predicated on real disadvantage or exclusion , wherever it is found .
Racial stigma should serve as only one of the standards that , together with other forms of disadvantage , trigger such advancement .
Race should be combined with class @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : How did the country arrive at its present situation , with the presidency in the hands of Donald Trump , after decades in which millions of working-class voters abandoned the Democratic Party ?
Martha Nussbaum Thinks the So-Called Retreat of Liberalism Is an Academic Fad Has Capitalism Become Our Religion ?
RMU : The principal vehicle of American progressives , the Democratic Party , failed to come up with a sequel to Franklin Roosevelt ’ s New Deal .
The sequel would have had to be very different from the original , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ economic empowerment and offers no model for how to bring more American workers into the good jobs of the most productive parts of today ’ s economy .
Let us look coldly at what has happened since then .
Having begun under Lyndon Johnson by treating the poor as an insular minority in need of support and blacks as another insular minority in need of rights , progressives offered nothing to the working-class majority of the country other than later to dissolve them into a series of group identities and special interests .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , under Democratic as well as Republican administrations , they won and wielded power for half a century : combining material concessions to the moneyed class with moral concessions to the moneyless classes .
For this whole period , the United States has had no economic growth strategy other than cheap money , delegated by the federal government to the central bank , and productivity growth has stagnated .
The majority of American workers have felt—and been—abandoned .
Into the expanding vacuum that resulted from these successive abdications came the plutocratic populism of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , given that it has done nothing for the abandoned majority other than to wage war against low-skill immigrants while continuing—it must be acknowledged—to get high employment , with relatively few good jobs , on the basis of the cheap-money policy .
What an opportunity for the progressives , if they had a program .
They don ’ t .
DSJ : What , then , should be the character of a national alternative that progressives in and outside the Democratic Party can embrace ?
RMU : The progressive program the country needs @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the demand sides of the economy , production as well as consumption .
It would seek to innovate in the economic , educational , and political arrangements that shape the primary or fundamental distribution of advantage and opportunity rather than devoting itself solely , as the humanizers of the supposedly inevitable have , to the after-the-fact correction , through progressive taxation and redistributive social spending , of market-generated inequalities .
More generally , the individual should be secured in a haven of capability-assuring educational and economic endowments and of safeguards against private and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , however , should be opened up to contest , experiment , and innovation .
In that storm , the individual , once safe and equipped , can move unafraid .
The storm does not arise spontaneously .
It needs to be arranged .
The true aim of the progressives should be a deep freedom , achieved by changing the structure of social life , rather than a shallow equality .
The struggle against entrenched and extreme inequality is subsidiary to the larger goal , to become bigger together .
And the method @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the established institutional arrangements and ideological assumptions .
Real structural change is not the replacement of one indivisible , predetermined system—socialism for capitalism—by another .
It is fragmentary but cumulative .
The goal of shared empowerment and the refusal to take the established institutional form of society as an unsurpassable horizon are what together oppose the progressive to the conservative .
These generalities mark a direction .
They do not excuse us from proposing the initial steps by which to begin to move in that direction in a particular society and time @ @ @ @ @ @ @ economy , education , and democratic politics would start to give shape to the alternative that the country lacks .
DSJ : You have argued in your most recent book , The Knowledge Economy , that progressives need an approach to the supply side of the economy .
What does such an approach entail for the future of the American economy and the situation of American workers ?
RMU : At the heart of the economic part of a progressive program must be the attempt to develop a socially inclusive form of today @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the knowledge economy , informed by science and devoted to perpetual innovation .
It exists in every sector of the American economy—in intellectually dense services and even in precision agriculture , as well as in the high-tech industry with which we tend , too narrowly , to identify it .
In every sector , however , it appears only as a fringe , a series of insular vanguards of production excluding the overwhelming majority of businesses and workers .
Practices , more than technologies , are what set the knowledge economy apart @ @ @ @ @ @ @ discovery .
The insularity of the knowledge economy results in both economic stagnation and economic inequality .
It causes economic stagnation by denying the most advanced practice to most economic agents .
And it roots economic inequality in a lengthening chasm between the advanced and backward parts of production .
To move toward an inclusive knowledge economy , the country needs to develop a 21st century equivalent to the 19th century system of agricultural extension by which it created , on its agrarian frontier , family-scale agriculture with entrepreneurial attributes .
That would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ producers an intermediate cadre of support centers , with wide autonomy and professional management and financed by a combination of subsidies and fees , to give a wider range of small- and medium-size enterprises broader access to advanced practice and technology , as well as to capital , and to identify and disseminate best practice .
But it is not enough to lift up businesses .
It is also necessary to reach out , by analogous means , to people who have little or no relation to business organizations .
The best place @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the job structure—the part most hollowed out by the economic changes of recent decades—improving the equipment and skills of people such as machine repair technicians and nurse practitioners .
The goal would be to turn them into technologically equipped artisans .
From there , it is possible to move , with similar methods and intentions , both up and down the job hierarchy .
This second wing of the productive uplift effort in turn merges into initiatives designed to strengthen labor in its relation to capital .
No dynamic of inclusive rise in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ low-wage and insecure labor .
In the United States , as around the world , stable employment is ceasing to be the norm .
More and more jobs are temporary , part-time , or otherwise insecure .
The reality of labor performed under decentralized contractual arrangements , rather than as part of a stable labor force assembled in large productive units , can not be reversed .
It results from changes in the forms of production .
But it can be mastered by the law to prevent flexibility from meaning insecurity .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rule .
The counterpart to productive uplift is new labor law—to organize , represent , and protect unstable labor .
DSJ : Progressive politicians like Bernie Sanders and progressive academics like Thomas Piketty have emphasized the role of redistributive taxes—including taxes on wealth—in diminishing inequality .
Why do you resist ?
And what do you see as the proper place of taxation in a progressive program ?
RMU : No progressive program is feasible without a substantially higher tax than the United States now implements .
Comparative fiscal experience reveals the truth about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the fundamental distribution of opportunity and advantage decisively overshadows anything that can be achieved by retrospective redistribution through tax and transfer .
Moreover , in determining the overall impact of the budget on both its revenue-raising and spending sides , the aggregate level of the tax take and how it is spent count for more than the progressive profile of taxation .
A tax that is neutral toward relative prices may make it possible to raise much more public revenue with much less economic trauma , as the European social democracies do through @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tax , and then to spend it on redistributive public services .
That is not a reason to reject the steeply progressive taxation of both individual consumption and wealth , so long as we understand that the redistributive effects of these taxes are likely to be modest unless we have the power and will to radicalize them and to tolerate the resulting economic disruption .
Evidently , many progressive politicians prefer pietistic gestures to transformative effects .
Bereft of a structural program , they simply want to show on whose side they are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ distracted by the pleasant thought that , regardless of special circumstances , they can evade the whole problem by printing money instead of raising it .
DSJ : The economic changes that you propose , including a socially inclusive knowledge economy , seem to have far-reaching implications for education .
What are they , and how can they be reconciled with a class divide that is also an educational divide in America ?
RMU : The United States suffers from a severe form of educational dualism .
Its schools are some of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
There are two tasks .
The first task has to do with the institutional setting of the school system .
In this vast , unequal country , organized as a federation , the priority is to reconcile the local management of the schools with national standards of investment and quality .
Such a reconciliation is incompatible with the exclusive dependence of the schools on local public finance .
And it requires cooperation within the federal system to take over failing schools and school systems , fix them , and return them fixed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ education on a model of teaching and learning that gives primacy to the acquisition of analytic and synthetic capabilities over the mastery of information .
That does so by preferring selective depth to encyclopedic superficiality in dealing with content .
That puts teamwork among students , teachers , and schools in the place of individualism and authoritarianism in the classroom .
And that deals with every subject from contrasting points of view .
This approach is no less suitable to practical , vocational training than to general education , once the focus of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ skills to the higher-order capabilities required by the knowledge economy and its technologies .
But it does depend on the creation of a nationwide teaching career through cooperation within the federal system .
The school under democracy should not be the instrument of either government or the family .
It should be the voice of the future and recognize in each young person a tongue-tied prophet .
DSJ : Can these alternatives in the economy and in education advance unless we remake our political institutions ?
Our democracy was not organized to facilitate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ RMU : A deepening of democracy must accompany , in a progressive project , the economic and educational changes for which I have argued : Political institutions set the terms under which change in all other areas can happen .
The mark of such a deepening is to strengthen our collective ability as citizens to master the shape of society rather than to have it imposed on us by history or necessity .
As a result , it diminishes the need for crisis to serve as the enabling condition of change and weakens @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the future .
Here there are three major focal points for institutional innovation .
The setup of the government , as defined in the Constitution , which powerfully shapes our ability to change society through politics : the pace of politics .
The arrangements that influence the level of popular engagement in political life : the temperature of politics .
And the relation of the national government to the states and towns : the federal system .
A defining feature of the constitutional architecture of the United States is its combination of a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a conservative principle of the slowing down of politics , expressed in Madison ’ s plan .
Americans believe mistakenly that these two principles are naturally and necessarily bound together .
They are not .
They are connected by design to inhibit the transformation of society by politics .
We can reaffirm the liberal principle but repudiate the conservative one , for example , by allowing either of the political branches to call early elections for both branches in the presence of an impasse .
But it is futile to raise this issue @ @ @ @ @ @ @ constitutional setup is revered as part of the national political identity .
Those who have dissented from this view , beginning with Thomas Jefferson , have gone unheard .
Of the other two areas of possible innovation in the arrangements of democracy—the level of participation and the reshaping of federalism , progressives have given priority to the first and dismissed the second as marginal to their aims .
The initiatives that would raise the level of organized popular engagement in political life would reform the relation between money and politics , the terms @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mass communication by political parties and organized social movements , and the electoral regime .
They are indispensable to a progressive program .
Placing them first , however , is a misjudgment .
All are highly contentious , legally as well as politically .
By contrast , the reenergizing of federalism has immense potential appeal , cutting across divisions between left and right and offering a wonderful device for developing the economic and educational alternatives the country needs .
Cooperative federalism , vertically among the three levels of the federal system and horizontally @ @ @ @ @ @ @ serve as the initial stage of determined and broad-based experimentation in American public life .
Contrary to common prejudice , strong initiative by the national government and the empowerment of state and local government are not opposites .
It is possible to have more of both at the same time , so long as we define clearly which responsibilities of each part of the federal system are exclusive and which are concurrent .
Later on and within limits designed to prevent oppression and abuse , parts of the United States should be able @ @ @ @ @ @ @ arrangements in the country and create countermodels of the national future .
Without such a dialectic of dominant and dissident solutions , no vital democratic experimentalism can take hold .
DSJ : Aren ’ t you demanding and expecting more than political reality allows ?
Can ’ t your views be dismissed as utopian ?
For a leftist or any sort of progressive , isn ’ t there a choice in the end between inadequate reform and impossible revolution ?
RMU : I am a revolutionary by conviction as well as by temperament @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I am living in a counterrevolutionary interlude in a long revolutionary period in the history of humanity .
I am determined that my thoughts and actions not be controlled by the biases of the interlude .
But I understand that revolutionary change today must differ in form and method as well as in substance from what it was in the past .
For any program , the direction and the choice of the initial steps are crucial .
It does not matter that the steps are longer or shorter .
It matters that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ right direction .
My criticism of the American progressives is not that the steps they take are too small .
It is that they are steps in the wrong direction , taken under the influence of bad ideas about the future , the present , and even the past .
The notion of a sudden leap into another regime of social life is a fantasy .
Its practical role today is to serve as an excuse for its opposite .
Once its fantastical nature has been exposed , what remains for the disappointed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they have despaired of reimagining and remaking .
DSJ : For the alternative you defend to advance , step by step , it needs a social base , a coalition , that doesn ’ t yet exist .
What base does your program imply ?
And how can it become a majority coalition without winning support from groups , such as the small-business class , that have been mainstays of American conservatism ?
RMU : Every consequential agenda for change in society builds its own base over time .
But that effort has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ communities , and forces that exist .
It must move them to revise , little by little , their imagination of the possible as well as their understanding of their interests and identities .
A program like the one that I have outlined must go in search of a transracial progressive majority .
That convergence needs to include large parts of the blue-collar and white-collar working class , of the racially stigmatized underclass , of the small-business class , and even of the restless aspirants of the professional and business class .
Such @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the alternative direction that I have described is incompatible within any part of this majority .
The single most dangerous bias of the left is its prejudice against the small-business class , which has always had an outsize influence on the country ’ s self-understanding .
That class now shades into the growing legions of the self-employed .
To give up on it and on them is to prepare defeat .
DSJ : Even when you deal with economic and political practicalities , your ideas have a prophetic undertone .
Another recent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the Future .
The country has had its prophets .
Does it really need new ones ?
RMU : When politics is most serious , it is also about who we are and what we can and should become .
It turns into a struggle over consciousness as well as over institutions .
The message of the American prophets—including Emerson , Whitman , and Lincoln—was that the individual shares in the divine attribute of transcendence over context and becomes more human by becoming more godlike .
Under democracy , which puts its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ men and women , this idea comes down to earth and informs the organization of society .
It is not good enough to say that the message has failed to be enacted and that the country should return to its founding ideals .
The message itself should be rethought .
From the outset , it bore a double taint , which compromised and corrupted it .
It misrepresented the relation between self-construction and solidarity , failing to do justice to the presence of the latter within the former .
As a result , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as little self-crowned Napoleons .
The second stain on the prophetic teaching was to exempt American institutions from the reach of challenge and change and hold them up as the definitive form of a free society .
The exemption amounted to a species of idolatry , for which the American republic has paid and continues to pay a terrible price .
The prophetic voice must speak again in the United States .
In breaking its silence , it must also correct its message .

What is the way forward for progressives in a time when it seems both centrism and authoritarianism are resurgent? What should be the character and scope of a national program that progressives in and outside the Democratic Party can and should embrace? There are many places to look for answers to these questions, and no doubt the answers will have many inspirations.
One of the most incisive articulations of an American progressive alternative is that of Roberto Mangabeira Unger, a Harvard Law professor, philosopher, and former Brazilian politician. He has written over two dozen books addressing an unusual diversity of topics, including critical legal theory—which he helped develop—economics, philosophy, and religion. Given this range, it would be unfair to reduce Unger’s work to one core idea. But perhaps the major theme of his work is summed up in his argument that “society is made and imagined, that it is a human artifact rather than the expression of an underlying natural order.”
What this means is that nothing in our society—the economy, liberal democracy, the legal order, etc.—is predetermined toward some definitive end. They are human creations, artifacts whose forms can therefore be challenged, transcended, and ultimately reoriented for the purpose of greater human liberation, individually and collectively.
What makes Unger’s progressive vision of society unique are its religious and prophetic elements. He sees human beings as having a divinelike capacity to transcend their societal circumstances to achieve greatness. What prevents them from doing so is the false assumption that there can be no substantial alternative to inherited political institutions. His work exposes this false necessity while providing progressive social, political, and economic alternatives to it. In this regard, his work can offer progressives key resources for exposing the false necessity of the American liberal status quo and thinking constructively about a different progressive vision for the United States.
The Nation recently spoke with Unger about his proposal for an alternative progressive track for American politics. Along the way, we discussed racial injustice in the United States, Donald Trump’s election, democratizing new technologies, the future of education, and progressive taxation. Of pressing importance is the topic of structural economic and political change, and in turn, whether Unger’s vision is impractical. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
—Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins
D aniel S teinmetz- J enkins: Right now the streets are filled with protesters demonstrating in the aftermath of George Floyd’s brutal killing by Minneapolis police. Progressives have long struggled to confront and overcome racial injustice in the United States. You have criticized their approach, the dominant approach, to racial oppression. What is your understanding? And what is your proposal? Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann
R oberto M angabeira U nger: To grasp the meaning of this moment for the future of the country, it is useful to begin by distinguishing the immediate background—the failure of the established approach to racial injustice in the United States—from the larger context of which this failure forms a part: the disorientation of American progressives and the long-standing absence in American politics of any program responsive to the needs, interests, and aspirations of the working-class majority of the country, white or black.
The prevailing response to racial injustice in the United States has been the integrationist orthodoxy. It treats racial injustice as a threshold issue, to be addressed before all problems of economic equality and opportunity. Its signature expression is affirmative action. It has done little for those who most require protection, the vast number of black people who languish in prisons and dead-end jobs. This approach has offended the white working-class majority, who believe themselves to be victims of a conspiracy between sanctimonious white elites and the representatives of black workers. And it has provided a model for the identity politics that has addressed legitimate demands for respect and recognition only by diverting the country from engagement with its structural problems.
There is an alternative. The alternative is to distinguish individualized racial discrimination from the advancement of the unequipped, the excluded, and the impoverished. Individualized racial discrimination should be criminalized, as it is in many countries. Social advancement should be predicated on real disadvantage or exclusion, wherever it is found. Racial stigma should serve as only one of the standards that, together with other forms of disadvantage, trigger such advancement. Race should be combined with class rather than separated from it.
DSJ: How did the country arrive at its present situation, with the presidency in the hands of Donald Trump, after decades in which millions of working-class voters abandoned the Democratic Party? More From Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins Common Sense Fiscal Policy or Austerity by Another Name? July 18, 2023 Another Side of W.E.B. Du Bois May 10, 2023 Christianity's Place in the Left and the Right March 29, 2023
RMU: The principal vehicle of American progressives, the Democratic Party, failed to come up with a sequel to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. The sequel would have had to be very different from the original, which focused on economic security rather than economic empowerment and offers no model for how to bring more American workers into the good jobs of the most productive parts of today’s economy.
Let us look coldly at what has happened since then. Having begun under Lyndon Johnson by treating the poor as an insular minority in need of support and blacks as another insular minority in need of rights, progressives offered nothing to the working-class majority of the country other than later to dissolve them into a series of group identities and special interests. Conservatives responded with the formula by which, under Democratic as well as Republican administrations, they won and wielded power for half a century: combining material concessions to the moneyed class with moral concessions to the moneyless classes. For this whole period, the United States has had no economic growth strategy other than cheap money, delegated by the federal government to the central bank, and productivity growth has stagnated. The majority of American workers have felt—and been—abandoned.
Into the expanding vacuum that resulted from these successive abdications came the plutocratic populism of Donald Trump: a big fat hoax, given that it has done nothing for the abandoned majority other than to wage war against low-skill immigrants while continuing—it must be acknowledged—to get high employment, with relatively few good jobs, on the basis of the cheap-money policy. What an opportunity for the progressives, if they had a program. They don’t.
DSJ: What, then, should be the character of a national alternative that progressives in and outside the Democratic Party can embrace?
RMU: The progressive program the country needs would address the supply as well as the demand sides of the economy, production as well as consumption. It would seek to innovate in the economic, educational, and political arrangements that shape the primary or fundamental distribution of advantage and opportunity rather than devoting itself solely, as the humanizers of the supposedly inevitable have, to the after-the-fact correction, through progressive taxation and redistributive social spending, of market-generated inequalities. More generally, the individual should be secured in a haven of capability-assuring educational and economic endowments and of safeguards against private and governmental oppression. Society all around him, however, should be opened up to contest, experiment, and innovation. In that storm, the individual, once safe and equipped, can move unafraid. The storm does not arise spontaneously. It needs to be arranged.
The true aim of the progressives should be a deep freedom, achieved by changing the structure of social life, rather than a shallow equality. The struggle against entrenched and extreme inequality is subsidiary to the larger goal, to become bigger together. And the method should be structural change—the criterion of depth—change in the established institutional arrangements and ideological assumptions. Real structural change is not the replacement of one indivisible, predetermined system—socialism for capitalism—by another. It is fragmentary but cumulative. The goal of shared empowerment and the refusal to take the established institutional form of society as an unsurpassable horizon are what together oppose the progressive to the conservative.
These generalities mark a direction. They do not excuse us from proposing the initial steps by which to begin to move in that direction in a particular society and time. A combination of innovations in the economy, education, and democratic politics would start to give shape to the alternative that the country lacks.
DSJ: You have argued in your most recent book, The Knowledge Economy, that progressives need an approach to the supply side of the economy. What does such an approach entail for the future of the American economy and the situation of American workers?
RMU: At the heart of the economic part of a progressive program must be the attempt to develop a socially inclusive form of today’s most advanced practice of production, the knowledge economy, informed by science and devoted to perpetual innovation. It exists in every sector of the American economy—in intellectually dense services and even in precision agriculture, as well as in the high-tech industry with which we tend, too narrowly, to identify it. In every sector, however, it appears only as a fringe, a series of insular vanguards of production excluding the overwhelming majority of businesses and workers. Practices, more than technologies, are what set the knowledge economy apart. These practices bring production closer to discovery. The insularity of the knowledge economy results in both economic stagnation and economic inequality. It causes economic stagnation by denying the most advanced practice to most economic agents. And it roots economic inequality in a lengthening chasm between the advanced and backward parts of production.
To move toward an inclusive knowledge economy, the country needs to develop a 21st century equivalent to the 19th century system of agricultural extension by which it created, on its agrarian frontier, family-scale agriculture with entrepreneurial attributes. That would require establishing between the government and the producers an intermediate cadre of support centers, with wide autonomy and professional management and financed by a combination of subsidies and fees, to give a wider range of small- and medium-size enterprises broader access to advanced practice and technology, as well as to capital, and to identify and disseminate best practice.
But it is not enough to lift up businesses. It is also necessary to reach out, by analogous means, to people who have little or no relation to business organizations. The best place to begin is the middle part of the job structure—the part most hollowed out by the economic changes of recent decades—improving the equipment and skills of people such as machine repair technicians and nurse practitioners. The goal would be to turn them into technologically equipped artisans. From there, it is possible to move, with similar methods and intentions, both up and down the job hierarchy.
This second wing of the productive uplift effort in turn merges into initiatives designed to strengthen labor in its relation to capital. No dynamic of inclusive rise in productivity can flourish against the background of low-wage and insecure labor. In the United States, as around the world, stable employment is ceasing to be the norm. More and more jobs are temporary, part-time, or otherwise insecure. The reality of labor performed under decentralized contractual arrangements, rather than as part of a stable labor force assembled in large productive units, cannot be reversed. It results from changes in the forms of production. But it can be mastered by the law to prevent flexibility from meaning insecurity. The free-for-all gig economy must not become the rule. The counterpart to productive uplift is new labor law—to organize, represent, and protect unstable labor.
DSJ: Progressive politicians like Bernie Sanders and progressive academics like Thomas Piketty have emphasized the role of redistributive taxes—including taxes on wealth—in diminishing inequality. Why do you resist? And what do you see as the proper place of taxation in a progressive program?
RMU: No progressive program is feasible without a substantially higher tax than the United States now implements. Comparative fiscal experience reveals the truth about taxes. Structural or institutional change reshaping the fundamental distribution of opportunity and advantage decisively overshadows anything that can be achieved by retrospective redistribution through tax and transfer. Moreover, in determining the overall impact of the budget on both its revenue-raising and spending sides, the aggregate level of the tax take and how it is spent count for more than the progressive profile of taxation. A tax that is neutral toward relative prices may make it possible to raise much more public revenue with much less economic trauma, as the European social democracies do through heavy reliance on the avowedly regressive value-added tax, and then to spend it on redistributive public services.
That is not a reason to reject the steeply progressive taxation of both individual consumption and wealth, so long as we understand that the redistributive effects of these taxes are likely to be modest unless we have the power and will to radicalize them and to tolerate the resulting economic disruption. Evidently, many progressive politicians prefer pietistic gestures to transformative effects. Bereft of a structural program, they simply want to show on whose side they are. And some of them are now distracted by the pleasant thought that, regardless of special circumstances, they can evade the whole problem by printing money instead of raising it.
DSJ: The economic changes that you propose, including a socially inclusive knowledge economy, seem to have far-reaching implications for education. What are they, and how can they be reconciled with a class divide that is also an educational divide in America?
RMU: The United States suffers from a severe form of educational dualism. Its schools are some of the best and the worst among high-income countries. There are two tasks. The first task has to do with the institutional setting of the school system. In this vast, unequal country, organized as a federation, the priority is to reconcile the local management of the schools with national standards of investment and quality. Such a reconciliation is incompatible with the exclusive dependence of the schools on local public finance. And it requires cooperation within the federal system to take over failing schools and school systems, fix them, and return them fixed.
The second task is to recast education on a model of teaching and learning that gives primacy to the acquisition of analytic and synthetic capabilities over the mastery of information. That does so by preferring selective depth to encyclopedic superficiality in dealing with content. That puts teamwork among students, teachers, and schools in the place of individualism and authoritarianism in the classroom. And that deals with every subject from contrasting points of view. This approach is no less suitable to practical, vocational training than to general education, once the focus of such training shifts from job-specific and machine-specific skills to the higher-order capabilities required by the knowledge economy and its technologies. But it does depend on the creation of a nationwide teaching career through cooperation within the federal system.
The school under democracy should not be the instrument of either government or the family. It should be the voice of the future and recognize in each young person a tongue-tied prophet.
DSJ: Can these alternatives in the economy and in education advance unless we remake our political institutions? Our democracy was not organized to facilitate structural change unless crisis forces transformation.
RMU: A deepening of democracy must accompany, in a progressive project, the economic and educational changes for which I have argued: Political institutions set the terms under which change in all other areas can happen. The mark of such a deepening is to strengthen our collective ability as citizens to master the shape of society rather than to have it imposed on us by history or necessity. As a result, it diminishes the need for crisis to serve as the enabling condition of change and weakens the power of the past to determine the future.
Here there are three major focal points for institutional innovation. The setup of the government, as defined in the Constitution, which powerfully shapes our ability to change society through politics: the pace of politics. The arrangements that influence the level of popular engagement in political life: the temperature of politics. And the relation of the national government to the states and towns: the federal system.
A defining feature of the constitutional architecture of the United States is its combination of a liberal principle of fragmentation of power with a conservative principle of the slowing down of politics, expressed in Madison’s plan. Americans believe mistakenly that these two principles are naturally and necessarily bound together. They are not. They are connected by design to inhibit the transformation of society by politics. We can reaffirm the liberal principle but repudiate the conservative one, for example, by allowing either of the political branches to call early elections for both branches in the presence of an impasse. But it is futile to raise this issue in the United States now. The constitutional setup is revered as part of the national political identity. Those who have dissented from this view, beginning with Thomas Jefferson, have gone unheard.
Of the other two areas of possible innovation in the arrangements of democracy—the level of participation and the reshaping of federalism, progressives have given priority to the first and dismissed the second as marginal to their aims. The initiatives that would raise the level of organized popular engagement in political life would reform the relation between money and politics, the terms of free access to the means of mass communication by political parties and organized social movements, and the electoral regime. They are indispensable to a progressive program. Placing them first, however, is a misjudgment. All are highly contentious, legally as well as politically. By contrast, the reenergizing of federalism has immense potential appeal, cutting across divisions between left and right and offering a wonderful device for developing the economic and educational alternatives the country needs.
Cooperative federalism, vertically among the three levels of the federal system and horizontally among the states and municipalities, can serve as the initial stage of determined and broad-based experimentation in American public life. Contrary to common prejudice, strong initiative by the national government and the empowerment of state and local government are not opposites. It is possible to have more of both at the same time, so long as we define clearly which responsibilities of each part of the federal system are exclusive and which are concurrent. Later on and within limits designed to prevent oppression and abuse, parts of the United States should be able to diverge from the predominant policies and arrangements in the country and create countermodels of the national future. Without such a dialectic of dominant and dissident solutions, no vital democratic experimentalism can take hold.
DSJ: Aren’t you demanding and expecting more than political reality allows? Can’t your views be dismissed as utopian? For a leftist or any sort of progressive, isn’t there a choice in the end between inadequate reform and impossible revolution?
RMU: I am a revolutionary by conviction as well as by temperament. I believe it is likely that I am living in a counterrevolutionary interlude in a long revolutionary period in the history of humanity. I am determined that my thoughts and actions not be controlled by the biases of the interlude. But I understand that revolutionary change today must differ in form and method as well as in substance from what it was in the past. For any program, the direction and the choice of the initial steps are crucial. It does not matter that the steps are longer or shorter. It matters that they be the right moves in the right direction. My criticism of the American progressives is not that the steps they take are too small. It is that they are steps in the wrong direction, taken under the influence of bad ideas about the future, the present, and even the past. The notion of a sudden leap into another regime of social life is a fantasy. Its practical role today is to serve as an excuse for its opposite. Once its fantastical nature has been exposed, what remains for the disappointed fantasists is to sweeten the world that they have despaired of reimagining and remaking.
DSJ: For the alternative you defend to advance, step by step, it needs a social base, a coalition, that doesn’t yet exist. What base does your program imply? And how can it become a majority coalition without winning support from groups, such as the small-business class, that have been mainstays of American conservatism?
RMU: Every consequential agenda for change in society builds its own base over time. But that effort has to begin by engaging the classes, communities, and forces that exist. It must move them to revise, little by little, their imagination of the possible as well as their understanding of their interests and identities. A program like the one that I have outlined must go in search of a transracial progressive majority. That convergence needs to include large parts of the blue-collar and white-collar working class, of the racially stigmatized underclass, of the small-business class, and even of the restless aspirants of the professional and business class. Such a majority is within reach. Nothing in the alternative direction that I have described is incompatible within any part of this majority. The single most dangerous bias of the left is its prejudice against the small-business class, which has always had an outsize influence on the country’s self-understanding. That class now shades into the growing legions of the self-employed. To give up on it and on them is to prepare defeat.
DSJ: Even when you deal with economic and political practicalities, your ideas have a prophetic undertone. Another recent book of yours is called The Religion of the Future. The country has had its prophets. Does it really need new ones?
RMU: When politics is most serious, it is also about who we are and what we can and should become. It turns into a struggle over consciousness as well as over institutions. The message of the American prophets—including Emerson, Whitman, and Lincoln—was that the individual shares in the divine attribute of transcendence over context and becomes more human by becoming more godlike. Under democracy, which puts its faith in the constructive genius of ordinary men and women, this idea comes down to earth and informs the organization of society.
It is not good enough to say that the message has failed to be enacted and that the country should return to its founding ideals. The message itself should be rethought. From the outset, it bore a double taint, which compromised and corrupted it. It misrepresented the relation between self-construction and solidarity, failing to do justice to the presence of the latter within the former. As a result, it tempted Americans to think of themselves as little self-crowned Napoleons. The second stain on the prophetic teaching was to exempt American institutions from the reach of challenge and change and hold them up as the definitive form of a free society. The exemption amounted to a species of idolatry, for which the American republic has paid and continues to pay a terrible price. The prophetic voice must speak again in the United States. In breaking its silence, it must also correct its message.


thenation--2020-07-21--Progressives Have a VP Short list: Barbara Lee, Nina Turner, Karen Bass

Progressives want Joe Biden , the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee , to pick a running-mate who will mobilize the tens of millions of potential voters who want not only to beat Donald Trump but also to initiate bold structural change in the politics and the governance of the United States .
That ’ s a tall order , but one of the largest blocs of delegates who will participate in next month ’ s Democratic National Convention has prepared a progressive short list of vice presidential prospects that includes a trio of Black women who have long track records of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ racial justice , as well as saving the planet and refocusing foreign policy on peace and diplomacy rather than war and militarism .
In an open letter to Biden released on Monday , California delegates who were chosen as supporters of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders wrote : In order to meet this historic moment , Democrats must select an exceptional progressive Vice Presidential candidate who will both inspire the 90 million Americans who did not vote in 2016 to cast a ballot this November and lead America into a new era of equality @ @ @ @ @ @ @ As 2020 DNC delegates representing progressives of California , the state with the largest delegation to the presidential nominating convention , we enthusiastically recommend as nominees for Vice President : Representative Barbara Lee ( D-CA ) , former State Senator Nina Turner ( D-OH ) , Representative Karen Bass ( D-CA ) .
Biden has said he plans to name a woman to the ticket , and a new USA Today/Suffolk University poll finds that 72 percent of Democrats think it ’ s important that the ticket include a woman of color .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ on a handful of prospects , including California Senator Kamala Harris , 2018 Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams , former United Nations ambassador Susan Rice , and Florida US Representative Val Demings .
Senators Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Duckworth are also mentioned as prospects , as is Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer .
John Lewis Never Stopped Bending the Arc Toward Justice Why the Hell Is the Supreme Court Allowing a New Poll Tax to Disenfranchise Florida Voters ?
Austin , Texas , Just Voted to End the Drug War But the Sanders delegates @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the March 3 primary and secured the largest block of the state ’ s 495 delegates , the largest delegation to the convention , are arguing that Biden and the party need a proven progressive in the number-two spot .
“ Recent efforts like the Biden-Sanders ‘ Unity ’ task forces have begun the important work of bringing the party together to defeat Donald Trump , ” explains Igor Tregub , who has a long history of activism in the California Democratic Party and Californian Young Democrats .
“ Selecting Barbara Lee , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ our Party ’ s running mate would help create a singular Democratic voice , ensuring we , progressives , are heard inside the halls of the White House.
” Progressives have raised concerns that Biden will select a nominee with a centrist record , like his own , that would fail to excite potential voters who want to see big bold structural change on issues ranging from systemic racism and criminal justice reform to monopoly power and the climate crisis to war and militarism .
“ To maximize our chances of success at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and to send a clear signal to the American people that the Democratic Party will not only unseat the 45th president of the United States but will fight for the 99 percent , we must select a progressive Vice President who will lead us out of the wilderness of criminality , bigotry and corruption , ” argue the California Sanders delegates in their letter .
“ Together with Joe Biden , any one of these leaders—Lee , Turner , or Bass—would champion transformative change to improve the lives of all Americans , renew @ @ @ @ @ @ @ community , represent our nation ’ s diversity , and engender compassion where hate , intolerance , and indifference now fester .
”

Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. The best of the week. Email By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Fridays. The best of the week.
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Repro Nation A monthly newsletter on the global fight for reproductive freedom. Email By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
Progressives want Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, to pick a running-mate who will mobilize the tens of millions of potential voters who want not only to beat Donald Trump but also to initiate bold structural change in the politics and the governance of the United States.
That’s a tall order, but one of the largest blocs of delegates who will participate in next month’s Democratic National Convention has prepared a progressive short list of vice presidential prospects that includes a trio of Black women who have long track records of advocating for economic, social, and racial justice, as well as saving the planet and refocusing foreign policy on peace and diplomacy rather than war and militarism.
In an open letter to Biden released on Monday, California delegates who were chosen as supporters of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders wrote:
In order to meet this historic moment, Democrats must select an exceptional progressive Vice Presidential candidate who will both inspire the 90 million Americans who did not vote in 2016 to cast a ballot this November and lead America into a new era of equality, compassion, and economic justice. As 2020 DNC delegates representing progressives of California, the state with the largest delegation to the presidential nominating convention, we enthusiastically recommend as nominees for Vice President: Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA), former State Senator Nina Turner (D-OH), Representative Karen Bass (D-CA).
Biden has said he plans to name a woman to the ticket, and a new USA Today/Suffolk University poll finds that 72 percent of Democrats think it’s important that the ticket include a woman of color. Attention during the selection process has focused on a handful of prospects, including California Senator Kamala Harris, 2018 Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, former United Nations ambassador Susan Rice, and Florida US Representative Val Demings. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Duckworth are also mentioned as prospects, as is Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. More From John Nichols A GOP Debate Without Trump Is the Definition of Pointlessness August 11, 2023 A Win for Abortion Rights, a Win for Democracy: Ohio Voters Reject Issue 1 August 9, 2023 The Biggest Threat to Donald Trump Could Be the Constitution Itself August 4, 2023
But the Sanders delegates from California, where the senator won the March 3 primary and secured the largest block of the state’s 495 delegates, the largest delegation to the convention, are arguing that Biden and the party need a proven progressive in the number-two spot. “Recent efforts like the Biden-Sanders ‘Unity’ task forces have begun the important work of bringing the party together to defeat Donald Trump,” explains Igor Tregub, who has a long history of activism in the California Democratic Party and Californian Young Democrats. “Selecting Barbara Lee, Nina Turner, or Karen Bass as our Party’s running mate would help create a singular Democratic voice, ensuring we, progressives, are heard inside the halls of the White House.”
Progressives have raised concerns that Biden will select a nominee with a centrist record, like his own, that would fail to excite potential voters who want to see big bold structural change on issues ranging from systemic racism and criminal justice reform to monopoly power and the climate crisis to war and militarism.
“To maximize our chances of success at a time when many have lost hope and to send a clear signal to the American people that the Democratic Party will not only unseat the 45th president of the United States but will fight for the 99 percent, we must select a progressive Vice President who will lead us out of the wilderness of criminality, bigotry and corruption,” argue the California Sanders delegates in their letter. “Together with Joe Biden, any one of these leaders—Lee, Turner, or Bass—would champion transformative change to improve the lives of all Americans, renew the confidence and faith of the international community, represent our nation’s diversity, and engender compassion where hate, intolerance, and indifference now fester.”


thenation--2020-07-21--Trump’s 2020 Campaign Strategy Is Already an Impressive Train Wreck

Support independent cartooning : join Sparky ’ s List—and don ’ t forget to visit TT ’ s Emporium of @ @ @ @ @ book and plush Sparky !

Support independent cartooning: join Sparky’s List—and don’t forget to visit TT’s Emporium of Fun, featuring the new book and plush Sparky!