There are now several standard views about how progressives should recover from the 2004 election. One approach is to develop “new ideas.” That phrase, however, can mean various things, from innovative policy proposals to grand rhetorical statements that might unify the standard laundry list of progressive policies. James Carville and Bob Shrum are seeking a progressive “narrative” to counter the dominant conservative story about America. That sounds like a good thing to me, but I don’t believe it will be credible unless progressive candidates can also explain exactly how they will implement their vision. Policy ideas are indispensable.

Let me suggest, however, that we don?t need proposals as much as models. A proposal is something that a professor, a think-tanker, a Member of Congress or a congressional staffer, or a columnist might invent on the way to work. It?s an ?idea? in the basic sense. Examples include auctioning the broadcast spectrum to pay for free online material, giving all high school graduates cash, or (from the other side of the aisle) privatizing Social Security. Such ideas can make a difference, although it?s relatively hard to think of progressive proposals that have actually come to pass and achieved their intended goals. I think it?s easier to implement libertarian proposals, because ideas like privatizing or tax-cutting don?t require new institutions or cultural changes. Much more than ideas are needed to create institutions and change cultures.

Indeed, all the great moments of American progressivism have occurred when national leaders have ?scaled up? concrete experiments that had first developed at the local or state level. In other words, they haven?t relied on proposals as much as real-life models. For instance, it?s not too much of an exaggeration to interpret the New Deal as the New York State welfare system writ large; and New York State had built its system by expanding settlement house programs that had been pioneered earlier by the likes of Mary Simkhovitch at Greenwich House on the Lower East Side. Simkhovitch and her colleagues had ideas, but they also had concrete experiences.

Greenwich House (like Hull-House in Chicago, or like a good charter school today) was a problem-solving institution embedded in a cultural and social context. It was much more complex than any idea that could be written on a chalkboard. It couldn?t be replicated automatically in other places. Any persuasive analysis of why it was successful would be a long story about many individuals and their overlapping and conflicting goals. But even if Greenwich House couldn?t be cloned and distributed to other communities, it did serve as an inspirational model, an opportunity to develop leaders and learn relatively general lessons, and a node in a politically powerful network. Whereas ideas cannot implement themselves, institutions can grow and spread.

Building experimental institutions is a much slower process than dreaming up new proposals. In the short-term, clever ideas would probably help progressives to win elections. But we don?t have ideas that can actually tackle our deepest problems, such as the lack of satisfactory jobs for high school graduates, our awful incarceration rate, global warming, or the “Red State”/”Blue State” cultural divide. If national policies are to address such problems, they must be built on concrete experiences and networks of citizens. That?s why I think that short-term electoral defeats?and victories?are much less important than most people believe. Long-term, patient, self-critical, participatory experimentation is the road to progressive revival.

The purpose of politics is to address problems, not to win elections. George W. Bush is likely to make some problems worse. Above all, he is likely to undermine further the fiscal condition of the federal government. But John Kerry had no plan or possible mandate to solve our deepest problems. So let’s keep our eyes on the real target and not allow ourselves to be distracted by what happened last Tuesday.

To what extent would a strong defense of the “knowledge commons” or the “public domain” increase economic equality? Some libertarians are enthusiastic proponents of the commons, so there could be an interesting coalition of left-liberals plus libertarians for the public domain, if it turned out that free knowledge helps the poor. This could be a global coalition, since information that is free is free for everybody.

Today’s population has a gigantic advantage over our predecessors. We are able to produce many times more real value per hour of work than ever before. The main reason is a set of discoveries and inventions bequeathed to us by human beings from the past. Since we did not achieve these advances ourselves, we ought to share their fruits. However, even though most of our wealth and income is a result of inherited knowledge, it is held by a small minority of the population. One percent of Americans own 40% of the nation’s wealth; and the world’s richest 200 individuals own $1 trillion worth of stuff, roughly the same as the poorest 500 million people put together (pdf).

Why do some people benefit from accumulated knowledge so much more than others? I see three explanations, which are not mutually exclusive:

1) To make money from knowledge, you must have it in your head. Thus education is crucial for wealth-generation in today’s knowledge economy. In order to increase economic equality, we need to improve the education of less advantaged people–paying attention not only to their schools, but to their whole environments. This is very difficult to do. Money is a necessary but not a sufficient condition.

2) To make money from knowledge, you must own equipment or organizations that embody knowledge: factories, firms, computers. It doesn’t even matter what you know, if you are lucky enough to inherit a substantial share of a profitable firm. To the extent that this is true, there is nothing especially new about the “knowledge economy.” People still need real property that generates wealth for them–but now the best objects to own are computers and supply chains instead of cattle and acres of land.

3) To make money from knowledge, you must have effective access to it. You must be able to walk into a library or museum or log onto the Internet, find answers to your questions, and create new inventions or artistic expressions based on what you’ve found. To the extent that this is true, we need a very robust “public domain” consisting of free information. In order to “incentivize” new creativity, we must allow people to monopolize their own inventions for limited periods, so that they can profit from what they have made. But as quickly as economic efficiency permits, their ideas should become public.

If (3) is important, then the obstacles to equality include corporate efforts to extend copyright backwards, to patent business methods and software, and to block the use of legitimate public-domain works by shutting down networks for the sharing of files. Government secrecy is another problem, as is the patenting of government-financed research results. Still another problem is the poor condition and funding of libraries and museums. But there are also great opportunities, such as the Internet itself and open-source software.

The most radical libertarian/egalitarian program would involve: relaxing legal controls on intellectual property; abolishing all ownership and control of the broadcast spectrum and allowing people to share it freely with an Internet-style wireless communications system (Yochai Benkler’s proposal); and relaxing or even abolishing professional monopolies. Instead of requiring people to attend medical school and hold licenses to practice medicine, we could create “distributed” systems for evaluating people who provided various forms and aspects of medical care.

[PS: Those interested in the defense of the commons should check out at least these two sources: Commons Blog, edited by Rick Emrich, and David Bollier’s On the Commons.]

[On the plane returning from the American Library Association meeting in California]. The American Library Association (ALA) is committed to protect and expand the “public domain” or “knowledge commons”?that vast and growing heritage of information, ideas, and culture that has traditionally been free, but that is now threatened with excessive control as companies try to copyright old material, patent new software, and develop technology to block the lending and sharing of ideas. The public domain is a classic example of a public good?it benefits everyone to a fairly small and intangible degree, but a few special interests benefit much more from controlling it. Therefore, it is extremely difficult to mobilize a mass constituency to preserve it.

The same could be said of most causes I work on, especially political/electoral reform, civic renewal, and civic education. Since the 1970s, the progressive national organizations have developed a toolkit for mobilizing people in favor of these public goods?and other ones, such as environmental protection. Their classic tools include: boiling down a complex message into a short slogan or statement, testing that statement in focus groups, advertising it, finding celebrities to endorse it, persuading allied groups to promote it, identifying cases and examples that boldly illustrate it, attacking enemies who oppose it, incorporating it into school curricula, and scaring people into thinking that it’s a crucial cause. At a more practical and operational level, their toolkit includes mass mailings to raise funds, grants from foundations, mini-research reports, conferences, websites, bumper-stickers, news alerts, and lobbyists.

I have ethical objections to this approach; I find it manipulative and often arrogant (because the promoters of a message assume that they know the truth about their issue). But even if my ethical qualms are overly squeamish, there is another problem with the standard progressive toolkit: it no longer works. True, the environmental movement used all the tools I’ve mentioned and succeeded in changing Americans’ thinking and public policy. But we have only so much attention and time, and environmentalists now occupy a big piece of it. There is less room for other public interests.

An alternative strategy is to encourage and organize ordinary people to experience public good directly and creatively. For example, the base of the environmental movement consists of people who know and love nature from personal experience. The base of the movement for better civic education is social studies teachers. Likewise, we need to get people organized to enjoy?and contribute to?the public domain of knowledge and information. If we are successful, people will not have to be mobilized, but will seek out a “message” and a “policy agenda” from groups like the ALA. They will have enough direct experience that they will be able to analyze and criticize this message and agenda; thus the national organizations will be accountable to them. If people at the grassroots accept the message, then they will be motivated, knowledgeable, and organized enough to promote it effectively.

This strategy depends upon institutions with deep roots in communities. Libraries are perfect examples. That is why I (as a non-librarian) am interested enough in the ALA to have attended several meetings. It is also why I would be disappointed if the ALA put its scarce resources into “messaging” instead of organizing people to create public goods in libraries.

Update: Brad Rourke made a similar argument in the Christian Science Monitor recently. And be sure to check out Harry Boyte’s comment on this post. Frederick Emrich has an interesting and persuasive reply to this post.

I yield to no one in my commitment to the core moral principles of the center-left. In fact, I will support radical ideas if I am convinced that they will work. However, nothing annoys me more than sloppy argumentation and bad faith on the part of people who vote the same way I do.

A case in point is Joseph Epstein’s “Mystery in the Heartland” from the Oct. 7 New York Review of Books. This is a review of Thomas Franks’ What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, a book that I have not read. (Thus my criticism is solely directed at Epstein, not at Franks.) The puzzle that Franks poses is why people in America’s very poorest county, which happens to be located in rural Kansas, should vote for George Bush by 80%. Epstein’s answer is that they hate and demonize “the latte-drinking, school-bussing, fetus-killing, tree-hugging, gun-fearing, morally relativist and secularly humanist so-called liberal elitists, whose elders have been ‘soft on communism’ while they themselves coddle criminals, women, and same sexers, eat brie, drink chardonnay, support Darwin, and oppose capital punishment in defiance of the ‘moral values’ of ordinary, God-fearing, flag-waving, assault-gun-carrying Americans.”

Why should people adopt this picture of the world? According to Epstein, deeply cynical conservative elites have fooled them into it, most recently by following Goering’s advice at Nuremberg. Goering said:

people don’t want to go to war…. But, after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a parliament or a communist dictatorship…. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger. It works the same way in any country.

Epstein invokes Goering’s spirit in his critique of conservatism. There is also a huge photograph of the Reverend Fred Phelps to illustrate his review (in the print version). Phelps is an elderly Kansas pastor who holds a “God hates fags” sign.

But Epstein thinks that the real problem is deeper than cynical elites and hate-mongering reverends. In times of peril, people always turn to fundamentalism, to absolute certainty and stark moral simplicity. In such circumstances, liberalism tends to lose, because, as Learned Hand wrote, the spirit of liberty “is not too sure that it is right. … [It] is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women.” Liberals understand what Keats called “Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”

I wonder if it has occurred to Epstein that he is absolutely certain about the advantages of mid-twentieth-century liberalism. He is a perfect fundamentalist who sees his opponents as wicked and ignorant and his own program as self-evidently superior to theirs. On point after point, he fails to understand the minds of his fellow Americans or to concede any possibility that he might be wrong. Viz …

Surely a liberal in the tradition of Learned Hand would start by asking what’s wrong with liberalism, before he excoriated his opponents in such a way as to make his side look completely blameless.

(continuing yesterday’s thought …. ) Whoever wins in November will face the following dilemmas, I believe. It can be politically suicidal to discuss such grave challenges during an election. However, a candidate could lose a contest like the current one for failing to address the nation’s most serious problems. And if he won, he would have no mandate to govern effectively. Therefore, at least in private, the candidates should be thinking about these dilemmas:

1. The fiscal crunch. The American people are demanding?and Kerry is promising?a balanced budget, major federal action on health care, and no tax increases for middle-income families. We can’t have all three. Therefore, Kerry should be thinking about which two promises he’ll actually fulfill. He should then decide whether he’s going to make that choice now (and how he’ll explain it), or whether he’ll obscure the choice during the election and try to finesse it next spring. For his part, Bush has essentially chosen: no new health benefits and a lot of borrowing. Kerry’s failure to present a truly convincing budget will make it easier for Bush to run on his indefensible platform. Even if Bush gets away with this and wins the election, he should be thinking about how he can govern for the next four years with huge deficits.

2. the manufacturing crisis. We have been losing manufacturing jobs since 1980 or even earlier. The slope has been smoothly downhill, regardless of tax policy (see this pdf. p. 24, table 619; or cf. the graph on this pdf, p. 3). Neither tax cuts nor tariffs are likely to fix the problem. Education is a solution in theory, but not an easy one to achieve, especially given the fiscal crunch described above. Remember that we’d need to retrain millions of adults, not just educate the next batch of kids better. Community colleges are the closest thing we have to an infrastructure for adult education, and they now handle about 11 million Americans annually. That’s just 4 percent of the population?mostly not people who previously worked in heavy industry.

3. Iraq. I have no business speculating about how Iraq will look in six months or a year. I do believe that the hope of getting substantial assistance from foreign countries or the UN is unrealistic. They have other moral priorities: above all, Sudan. This doesn’t mean that they will do anything about Sudan, but it gives them a pretty solid excuse for not helping with Iraq, where we’ve already committed our own blood and treasure. Besides, the US intervention is so unpopular that foreign leaders will take big chances if they support it. I’m sure that many would like Iraq’s condition to stabilize and improve. But there are a lot of things they would like, and Iraq is one problem that they are happy for us to handle on our own.

(Nick Beaudrot’s critical response to yesterday’s post is well worth reading.)