U.S. President Barack Obama speaks during a campaign rally in Denver, Colorado October 4, 2012. Reuters/Kevin Lamarque
Much—perhaps too much—has been said about the president and the
shortcomings and accomplishments of his administration over the past
four years. The record is more mixed than either his cheerleaders or
fiercest critics would like to admit.
On the positive side, under this administration we achieved healthcare
reform that will provide coverage to 35 million uninsured people; a
Recovery Act that represents the largest expansion of anti-poverty
programs in more than forty years; financial reform; student loan
reform; the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell”; the Lilly Ledbetter Fair
Pay Act; landmark executive action to protect more than 1 million
immigrant youths from deportation; and an end to the war in Iraq.
On the downside, there were the failures to hold Wall Street
accountable for crashing the economy; to do right by millions of
homeowners facing foreclosure; to reverse the erosion of civil liberties
in the “war on terror”; to halt an alarming increase in deportations;
and to take bold action on climate change. Perhaps greatest of all was
the failure to convey a compelling alternative to market
fundamentalism—an ideology that, notwithstanding its disastrous track
record, continues to dominate policy-making and the public dialogue at
all levels.
Progressives may evaluate the success of Obama’s first term
differently depending on how much weight they assign to each of these
issues. But however we judge the past four years, it is crucial that we
lean into this election without ambivalence, knowing that while an Obama
victory will not solve all or even most of our problems, defeat will be
catastrophic for the progressive agenda and movement.
We confront a conservative movement that is apocalyptic in its
worldview and revolutionary in its aspirations. It is not an
exaggeration to say that this movement wants to roll back the great
progressive gains of the twentieth century—from voting rights to women’s
rights, from basic regulations on corporate behavior to progressive
taxation, from the great pillars of Social Security, Medicare and
Medicaid to the basic rights of workers to organize and bargain
collectively. After the emergence of the Tea Party, the 2010 elections,
the extreme Paul Ryan budget proposal and the 2011 state legislative
sessions (which featured voter suppression, nativism, attacks on
reproductive rights and vicious anti-unionism), there can be no doubting
the seriousness or the ferocity of our opponents. It is also important
to note the deep racialized underpinnings of this movement, which seeks
to entrench the power of an older, wealthier white constituency and
prevent an emerging majority of color from finding its voice. The
battles over the role and size of government, taxes, the safety net,
immigration and voter suppression have become proxies for this
underlying demographic tension. Should Obama lose this election, we can
expect a ruthless effort to dismantle the social contract—including
efforts to use state power to decimate sources of resistance by further
restricting the franchise, destroying unions and attacking any remaining
centers of power for communities of color and workers. All of this was
clear even before, in a leaked video, Mitt Romney made plain his
contempt for nearly half of the American people.
Immediately after the election, we will face one of the most
important social policy debates of our generation. Before the end of
this year, President Obama and Congress must confront the so-called
fiscal cliff—the deep automatic cuts in defense and domestic spending
that have been mandated by the last debt deal unless a new budget
framework can be reached. This discussion of mounting debts and deficits
will take place as the Bush tax cuts are scheduled to expire, setting
the stage for a clash of ideologies from which the victor will enjoy the
spoils for years to come. Winning the elections does not guarantee a
progressive outcome to this debate—far from it—but losing certainly
means that the dark politics of austerity will dominate the country,
resulting in misery on a scale we can’t now imagine.
So the elections—not just for the presidency but for Congress and
statehouses across the country—are job one. But we know winning those
elections is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a revival of
progressive politics. What’s next? In the period following the election,
progressives must remain engaged and mobilized. Given the looming
fiscal debate, we need to step up with an alternative to austerity that
emphasizes three points:
§ We face a jobs crisis. Creating millions of new
jobs—by investing in infrastructure, the green economy, care jobs and,
yes, the public sector—is not just a matter of reducing human suffering;
it is essential to laying the foundation for long-term fiscal stability
and shared prosperity. As progressives, we cannot buy into the “deficit
first” frame. There is no winning if we do not begin to redefine the
problem and break the elite consensus.
§ We need to protect and strengthen Social Security,
Medicare, Medicaid and other critical programs, particularly those
serving the most vulnerable people. It has become conventional wisdom
that we must “reform” entitlements—which is code for reducing benefits
and raising the retirement age, since “we” are all living longer anyway,
aren’t we? This is nonsense. As Paul Krugman has put it: “the people
who really depend on Social Security, those in the bottom half of the
distribution,
aren’t living much longer. So you’re going to
tell janitors to work until they’re 70 because lawyers are living longer
than ever.” Simple measures such as lifting the cap on the payroll tax
threshold would guarantee solvency for Social Security for more than
seventy-five years and allow us to finance more generous benefits for
low-income beneficiaries.
§ To invest in job creation and preserve our social contract, we need to end the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.
This agenda is not in the mainstream of the Beltway discussion. But
we won’t break the austerity consensus without, well, breaking from it!
We must shift the frame of the debate to the left without fear or
apology.
One great lesson of Obama’s first term was that we made progress when
we pushed, and we stalled out when we waited and watched. The LGBT and
immigrant rights movements challenged both Republicans and Democrats and
achieved significant policy wins. Healthcare reform would never have
made it over the finish line without relentless pressure from the
grassroots on moderate Democrats. Only robust campaigns operating
independently of both parties have a chance at putting jobs,
foreclosures, immigration reform and climate change on the agenda.
This is especially urgent in the case of racial justice. The real
unemployment rate for African-Americans is now above 22 percent,
including part-time workers who want full-time jobs and those who gave
up looking altogether. That’s nearly twice the rate that white workers
face, and it amounts to a catastrophic depression in cities like
Cleveland, Detroit and Buffalo. People of color have seen a generation
of progress in building wealth wiped out by the recession. Median white
wealth is now nearly $100,000, compared with under $5,000 for blacks and
Latinos. Whatever the real or perceived constraints on the president’s
ability to engage the confluence of race, poverty and economics, those
constraints do not apply to us.
It is also critical that we push for an agenda to strengthen
democracy in 2013 to combat the growing power of organized money.
Measures to strengthen unions, expand the franchise and provide a path
to citizenship for immigrants are not just good public policies; they
also empower working people. The right used its takeover of state
governments to shrink democracy, as in Wisconsin, which passed harsh
anti-union and voter suppression laws. If and when we have a chance to
use power to expand democracy, whether through immigration reform or
executive actions to strengthen unions or enforce voting rights, we must
do so—not just because these measures are important in themselves but
because they are levers that can push the other changes we seek.
If 2008 was a time for the audacity of hope, the years ahead are a
time for sobriety, determination, patience and resilience. The problems
we face are deep enough that there will be no quick fix. The most
important question for progressives is how to build a movement for
economic justice—a people’s movement that can topple the elite austerity
consensus and overcome the massive money and energized conservative
movement on the other side. The real crises facing the country are
barely being discussed inside the Beltway, and rarely are the solutions
proposed commensurate with the problems at hand: more than 106 million
people—one in three Americans—are facing material hardship (defined as
living under 200 percent of the poverty line); 20 million are living in
extreme poverty; 12.5 million are officially unemployed; and wages and
working conditions are in decline for a majority of Americans. The new
framework for shared prosperity developed by Jacob Hacker and Nate
Loewentheil, endorsed by a broad swath of labor, community and civil
rights groups, spells out an alternative to austerity with the capacity
to address these crises—but only an organized constituency can give such
ideas life.
Part of the task before us is to build a deep alliance of movement
forces—labor, community, women, faith, civil rights, immigrants and
others—behind a broad social vision. No part of the movement has the
resources or strategic capacity to solve its problems by itself. The
other part of the task is to reach out to Americans who do not already
agree with us, or who perhaps haven’t heard from us. An insular left
that deludes itself into thinking we are stronger than we are, that
talks mainly to itself and is not constantly creating new on-ramps to
participation, will fail dismally to meet the challenges of this
historic moment.
This recruitment challenge presents some hurdles for progressives.
Most Americans hold complicated and sometimes contradictory views about
the economy, but there has been a turn away from public solutions and
toward private ones. As Ronald Brownstein observed in
National Journal
earlier this year: “One theme consistently winding through the polls is
the emergence of what could be called a ‘reluctant self-reliance,’ as
Americans look increasingly to reconstruct economic security from their
own efforts, in part because they don’t trust outside institutions to
provide it for them. The surveys suggest that the battered economy has
crystallized a gestating crisis of confidence in virtually all of the
nation’s public and private leadership class—from elected officials to
the captains of business and labor. Taken together, the results render a
stark judgment: At a time when they believe they are navigating much
more turbulent economic waters than earlier generations, most Americans
feel they are paddling alone.”
Those changes in perspective, together with the attack on and decline
of unions—where habits of community, reciprocity and collective action
have historically been nourished—mean that we face a very steep climb in
making the case for public, collective action. We will have to
experiment with new ways of building power and giving voice to working
people. Such experiments are, in fact, already under way in diverse
settings around the country. What they have in common is reconstructing
the role of paid organizers, putting volunteers front and center,
aligning people behind deeply meaningful visions instead of short-term
issue transactions, and combining deep education and relationship
building with creative action. There is nothing new about any of these
methods—they have powered all the great movements that have changed
America—but we must recommit ourselves to them. The patient work of
movement building lacks the seductive power of many of the strategies in
vogue among progressives, but there is no substitute for it—and there
is a huge appetite for it in working-class communities across the
country.
Perhaps the most resonant line of President Obama’s Democratic
National Convention speech was when he said, “So you see, the election
four years ago wasn’t about me. It was about you.” If we ever thought
that an Obama presidency would by itself produce dramatic change, we are
wiser in 2012. Our progressive history is a history of getting our hope
fix from movements, not just from individuals. The extraordinary
example of Brazil—which has defied world trends, lifted 40 million
people out of poverty, reduced inequality and passed major affirmative
action legislation—demonstrates the power of social movements today.
Over many years, Brazilian leaders aligned key movement sectors around a
transformative vision, focused on recruiting the unorganized, engaged
in politics and changed a country. There are signs of movement right
here at home—in senior centers in Akron, in housing projects in
Charlotte and churches in Phoenix, where ordinary people are coming
together to talk about how we got into this mess, what it has meant to
them and the people they love, and what we can do to get out of it. They
are working tirelessly in this election because they know just how much
it matters, but they are clear-eyed about the organizing work that must
continue after election day. That’s change we can believe in.
Replies
Dorian T. Warren: “
Go for the Jugular”
Frances Fox Piven and Lorraine C. Minnite: “
Movements Need Politicians—and Vice Versa”
Saket Soni: “
We Need More than a New President”
Bill Fletcher Jr.: “
Defeat the Reactionary White Elite”
Tom Hayden: “
Obama’s Legacy is Our Leverage”
Ai-Jen Poo: “
A Politics of Love”
Robert L. Borosage: “
Re-elect Obama—But Reject His Austerity”
Ilyse Hogue: “
Time to Rewire”
