Back in mid-December, Ed Kilgore wrote a piece
"Taking Ideological Differences Seriously". The piece was useful in that it argued that differences among "progressives" were not simply differences over political strategy, but also over ideology. It's a pretty basic idea, but one it seems that most folks have paid far too little attention to.
However, the piece ran into trouble when trying to describe the ideological differences. Indeed, it never even attempted to describe both sides of the divide. Rather it focused on the so-called "Third Way" and on distinguishing it from conservative approaches. Chris linked to it precisely for this reason. But because it fails to even attempt to describe both sides, this approach is more justificatory than explanatory--though it certainly does explain how Third Way types would like to be seen. The explanation itself is presented in terms of policy mechanisms--specifically, the Third Way "strategy of deploying regulated and subsidized private sector entities to achieve progressive policy results" But this completely avoids the more fundamental question: what about differences in ends, not just means? What if one person's "progressive policy results" are another person's "not so much"?
I first tried to do that myself, by responded to Kilgore's piece with a diary "What's Wrong With The Third Third Way" which described how historically this was the third such "compromise" between naked capitalism and an oppositional alternative. The first "Third Way" was democratic socialism, the second "Third Way" was the market-supporting "liberal" welfare state in the typology of Gosta Epsing-Anderson's The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, and the third "Third Way" is--despite frequent disavowals--largely a repurposing of the market-supporting welfare state for politically conservative ends, but with
"competent" centrist Democrats in charge. I'm afraid that this analysis was too far-flung for some. So I want to take another stab, first at providing a more down-to-earth set of test-points, and only after that by presenting yet another grand vision sort of overview.
Here, again is Kilgore's central presentation of Obama's "Third Way":
To put it simply, and perhaps over-simply, on a variety of fronts (most notably financial restructuring and health care reform, but arguably on climate change as well), the Obama administration has chosen the strategy of deploying regulated and subsidized private sector entities to achieve progressive policy results. This approach was a hallmark of the so-called Clintonian, "New Democrat" movement, and the broader international movement sometimes referred to as "the Third Way," which often defended the use of private means for public ends. (It's also arguably central to the American liberal tradition going back to Woodrow Wilson, and is even evident in parts of the New Deal and Great Society initiatives alongside elements of the "social democratic" tradition, which is characterized by support for publicly operated programs in key areas).
Does It Work?
The problem here, as I see it, is that Kilgore is avoiding the central concern for populist (as opposed to, say, corporatist) progressives: Does it get the job done? I'm sure that Obamaphiles would say, "Yes it does!" but that only brings us down to the real bottom line: what exactly is the job? When it comes to healthcare reform, there's plenty of room for disagreement, but a fairly good starting point might be "reducing overall system costs to something close to the OECD median while improving overall health outcomes to something close to the OECD media." There's nothing particularly ideological about this formulation, at least in the commonplace meaning of the word, which Third Way types like to use in dismissing populist progressives. It's just (a) quite commonsensical, and (b) rendered in measurable terms that ought to appeal to the purported wonkiness of Third Way types.
This doesn't require a single-payer approach, since not all OECD countries use such an approach. For my part, one could be completely agnostic about what mechanisms to use. But one should be realistic about path-dependency constraints--as any true "realistic" policy wonk should agree. This is why folks tend to gravitate to single-payer: because it builds on an already-existing long-functioning American institution: Medicare. While we theoretically could rely on regulated private insurers, their culture-unlike that of insurers in Switzerland, for example--is just too deeply ingrained in doing things in ways that would never allow anything like the cost savings we need. Such path-dependency logic also explains the genesis and logic of the public option: It was conceived by Jacob Hacker as a pathway toward single-payer that took account of those tens of millions of privately insured individuals who are more or less satisfied with their existing private insurance. The public option thus conceived is not designed to "keep private insurers honest"--if only for the simple reason that "honest" private insurers in the current American environment are uninterested in and incapable of driving down costs to OEDC median levels while also improving outcomes to OECD median levels.
This is, in short, a perfect rational, pragmatic argument for single-payer and/or the public option as a transition to single-payer. And it shows that the difference with Obama's "Third Way" logic revolves around having substantially different goals. Indeed, it drives home the fact that Obama's goals are, in fact, much more aligned with his plan's historical roots in the Heritage Foundation's anti-Hillarycare plan, as well as Mitt Romney's Massachusetts plan.
The same conclusion is even more readily obvious when it comes to climate change. The Obama targets fall far short of attaining the sort of drastic reductions that the best science tells us is necessary. Both the amount and the speed of CO2 reductions fall far short of what is needed. Although I've argued that cap-and-trade is deeply flawed,it's not so much from an ideological perspective as it is from a pragmatic one: I just don't think it will work, because it's too easily subverted. As with healthcare reform, there is an argument over means, but that argument is grounded in a more fundamental argument about what the ends should be. It's not the means in themselves that I object to, and I very much doubt that most other progressive populists would object either, if the means favored by Obama & his Third Way cohorts were directed toward achieving the ends we have in mind. That might not be possible, of course, but once again, that is a pragmatic problem, not an "irrationally" "ideological" one.
If anything, the situation with financial reform is even more blatantly contradictory to Kilgore's portrayal. The primary thrust of progressive populists is that we need to reinstate past practices, in particular regulations (as opposed to state ownership) that had worked for decades, and prohibit risky activities whose consequences no one can foresee. Even the supposedly radical proposal to "break up the big banks", the ones judged as "too big to fail" is nothing more than an appeal to use classical anti-trust regulations, the sort that even Howard Taft employed 100 years ago. The only way to make Kilgore's purported ideological gap appear in this case is focus on "nationalization"--which was only ever a temporary emergency proposal, just as it had been during the Great Depression.
Things do look different, however, when we look at what progressive populists have suggested regarding home mortgages. Here there were suggestions for direct federal action. But this wasn't a case of government action rather than private action. It wasn't intruding on the private market. It was a case of doing something that private markets had no interest whatsoever in doing. And that gets to the real nub of the difference between the Third Way and progressive populists: the Third Way ideology can only think in terms that are defined by market relationships. This is the basic background context for all Third Way thinking. Progressive populists, on the other hand, can think beyond the marketplace box. They can think in terms of social need, and then look around for ways to meet that need--be they market or non-market methods.
A Big-Picture, Identity-Based View
One thing all the above examples have in common is that "Third Way" approaches don't try to fundamentally challenge the existing status quo. Indeed, preserving it is one of their top priorities, the better to try to avoid bitter political fights, and produce "bipartisan solutions". While Kilgore tried to focus on the means, it was actually this focus on ends that produces the clearest and most insightful dividing line. If American health insurance companies could be tamed to act like well-mannered and well-managed regulated public utilities, the way Swiss health insurance companies do, then populist progressives might very well come to support that approach. Even more to the point, Medicare for All does not entail government hospitals or doctors. It simply gets rid of counter-productive rent-seeking insurance monopolies that have nothing to do with the actual business of providing health care, except to make it much more expensive and less effective and efficient.
All this suggests that an analysis similar to that of Akerlof and Kranton in Identity Economics could be applied here. As I described in my diary introducing their ideas, Identity economics--a major breakthrough? , there is a rational basis for oppositional identities in minority communities. Obama's own personal history helps illustrate how this example is relevant to politics more broadly. In that diary, I wrote:
One illuminating example they explore is why some members of racial minorities behave in seemingly self-destructive ways. This explanation is particularly powerful because it shows how persistent forms of "colorblind racism" and institutional racism create a cost for minorities trying to live according (white) mainstream ideals--something that even very successful blacks experience, for example--and how this in turn creates the condition in which such evidently self-destructive behavior takes place....Being in opposition to the dominant culture makes sense to them, not just in terms of a single economic choice, but in terms of adopting an entire identity, a way of being in the world share with others and creating a shared oppositional "ideal type" in contrast to the mainstream culture's "ideal type" that they have no hope of ever living up to. Behavior that makes no sense in terms of the rejected, unattainable ideal type is perfectly sensible in term of the oppositional ideal type, which allows them to gain utility (satisfaction) from activities that they can do well at.... The authors go on to show how different conditions will lead to different sorts of population mixes--all of it quite rational in terms of two contrasting identity modes....
Of course, there is also the possibility represented by the appeal of groups such as the Nation of Islam, which construct a different kind of oppositional identity. (The same can also be said of black liberation theology--such as practiced by Reverend Jeremiah Wright--which is obviously much more threatening to the white power structure, precisely because its an oppositional identity that allows space for whites to also assume an oppositional identity as well, just as the Civil Rights Movement did.) It's highly significant that such widely observed and studied behavior can be explained by a relatively simple economic model of individual choice, provided that just two different identities are included.
My inclusion of Jeremiah Wright in that passage was not incidental or accidental. Social revolutions-such as the Abolitionist Movement, or the Civil Rights Movement-are crucially dependent on successfully reshaping the nature of oppositional identities, and the forms of effective personal and political action that flow from such identities. Black liberation theology is a continuation of the religious side of the Civil Rights Movement that preserves and continues to develop a particular subset of those oppositional identities. At one point in his political career, beginning well before he first ran for office, Barack Obama found a place for himself by embracing these oppositional identities. But when he chose to publicly repudiate Wright, he chose to do so by adopting a conventional caricature that profoundly mis-represented Wright's viewpoint--a viewpoint that is virtually identical with that of Martin Luther King. Here's Wright on Bill Moyers Journal, explaining the context of his sermon that was used to demonize him and attack Barack Obama--the context is that of the Hebrew prophets of old:
BILL MOYERS: Yeah. But talk a little bit about that. The prophets loved Israel. But they hated the waywardness of Israel. And they were calling Israel out of love back to justice, not damning-- REVEREND WRIGHT: Exactly.
BILL MOYERS: Not damning Israel. Right?
REVEREND WRIGHT: Right. They were saying that God was--in fact, if you look at the damning, condemning, if you look at Deuteronomy, it talks about blessings and curses, how God doesn't bless everything. God does not bless gang-bangers. God does not bless dope dealers. God does not bless young thugs that hit old women upside the head and snatch their purse. God does not bless that. God does not bless the killing of babies. God does not bless the killing of enemies. And when you look at blessings and curses out of that Hebrew tradition from the book of Deuteronomy, that's what the prophets were saying, that God is not blessing this. God does not bless it- bless us. And when we're calling them, the prophets call them to repentance and to come back to God. If my people who are called by my name, God says to Solomon, will humble themselves and pray, seek my faith and turn from their wicked ways. God says that wicked ways, not Jeremiah Wright, then will I hear from heaven.
Here's the clip itself:
REVEREND JEREMIAH WRIGHT: Where governments lie, God does not lie. Where governments change, God does not change. And I'm through now. But let me leave you with one more thing. Governments fail. The government in this text comprised of Caesar, Cornelius, Pontius Pilate - the Roman government failed. The British government used to rule from East to West. The British government had a Union Jack. She colonized Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Hong Kong. Her navies ruled the seven seas all the way down to the tip of Argentina in the Falklands, but the British government failed. The Russian government failed. The Japanese government failed. The German government failed. And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains. The government put them on slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into position of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing God bless America? No, no, no. Not God bless America; God damn America! That's in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating her citizen as less than human. God damn America as long as she keeps trying to act like she is God and she is supreme!
And here's Martin Luther King:
It is time for all people of conscience to call upon America to come back home. Come home, America. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on." I call on Washington today. I call on every man and woman of good will all over America today. I call on the young men of America who must make a choice today to take a stand on this issue. Tomorrow may be too late. The book may close. And don't let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, "You're too arrogant! And if you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I'll place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name. Be still and know that I'm God."
The Hebrew prophets represent an oppositional identity of tremendous power. And in order to become President of the United States, Barack Obama made a very deliberate decision to mock and misrepresent them and their present-day incarnations. And that mockery and misrepresentation remains at the core of his politics to this day. It is, indeed, a crucial part of the Third Way package.
Okay, that's the identity part. But what does it have to do with economics? That's simple: the model that Akerlof and Kranton provide is one that revolves around choices of activities. The example they use in describing the black community in their initial example is "working" vs. "not-working". The Nation of Islam creates a different oppositional identity, so that working is working for Allah, and for the community defined in terms of their understanding of Islam. Black Liberation Theology makes a different oppositional appeal, which is to the remaking of America, just as the Hebrew prophets called for the remaking of Israel. And the promise here is an entirely inclusive one--it's not just for the black community, as the Nation of Islam is. It is centered in the black community, but not limited to it--as so many other "progressives" tried to limit Martin Luther King when he spoke out against the Vietnam War. It is this difference in identities that stands at the very center of the divide between the Third Way "progressives" and populist progressives. The former wants to work within the system in its own terms. The later wants to transform the system to bring it into line with it's own professed highest values.
Which side are you on?
Answer that question, and you say who you are. Say who you are, and you set the parameters of what guides every choice you make. That's where morality and economics become one, once again.
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