The more I think about the recent Convention, the more it seems like an emormous missed opportunity. As I’m sure you have noticed, the country faces some pretty difficult challenges: a foreign war, a terrorist threat, a $7 trillion national debt, an annual deficit of almost half a trillion dollars, an aging population, 44 million people without health insurance, global warming, two million people behind bars (with all the crime and wasted lives that that figure represents), and a continuous loss of manufacturing jobs because developing countries have finally made up enough technological ground that their workers can compete directly with ours. I followed the Convention closely through newspapers and blogs, and I didn’t learn anything new about how the Democrats would address any of these issues.

Right now, some liberal bloggers seem eager to show that Kerry gained support as a result of the convention. Conservative bloggers stress the stability of the poll numbers, which is pretty evident if you look at the Rasmussen daily tracking poll. I predict that the discourse will soon change. Unless the Republicans mess up their Convention, they will probably gain a few points of “bounce” in late August, thereby putting Bush/Cheney slightly in the lead for the fall. At that point, all the progressive pundits, bloggers, and grassroots activists will start complaining about the Democratic ticket and its failure to put forward convincing ideas about at least two or three major issues (for instance, Iraq, the deficit, and jobs). I believe it would be better to start that discussion sooner rather than later, and to do it in a constructive way. It’s not simply Kerry-Edwards’ fault that the Democrats are short of convincing proposals; the whole left-of-center hasn’t been adequately focused on policy. They’ve depended to much on the manifold weaknesses of the Bush Administration.

I’m still brooding about Sunday’s New York Times Magazine article on Harlem Children’s Zone (see my previous comment). HCZ is a nonprofit that provides a wide range of services to most of the kids in Central Harlem. City governments often provide similar combinations of services for their residents. But governments always fail, whereas HCZ is successful–right?

Actually, there is very little outcome data available for HCZ. I cited the test scores of kids leaving its preschool program, because these data are listed on the HCZ website (see this report, p. 5). There are a few other outcome measures in the same document. For instance, the rate of health insurance coverage rose from 95% to 97%. This is not exactly earth-shattering. And most of the other data in the report concern “performance” rather than “outcomes”: 1,982 children were screened for asthma, 2,150 books were “made available,” etc.

Any municipal government could assemble much longer lists of this type and also cite compelling “outcome” measures for some of its programs. So why does HCZ rate a cover-story in the Times Magazine? Perhaps …

The point of this list is not to criticize Harlem Children’s Zone, nor am I interested in arguing that local governments do a better job than is generally recognized. In my own thinking, I have incorporated the assumption that traditional welfare programs and schools are largely broken, at least in the inner cities. My concern, therefore, is not ideological but epistemological. I am worried that we do not have reliable ways to understand the performance of local governments, whether they work well or badly. Even people who specialize in social policy must rely on middle-brow publications like The New York Times for a general picture of what’s going on across the whole range of social issues. And such publications generally do a poor job in describing and assessing all social programs, but especially those in the public sector. They mainly cover public agencies when officials are indicted, sued, or otherwise enmeshed in the legal system, because reporters have easy access to police and court records. Insightful stories about day-to-day work in local government are extremely rare. And again–I don’t want more good news, just more substance.

Everyone now recognizes the failures of the mainstream media, and many people hope that the Internet will fill some important gaps. In particular, one would expect that left-of-center bloggers would rush to describe the government programs, nonprofit associations, social movements, and unions that are usually overlooked in major newspapers. They would want to report good news, because they have an interest in countering the dominant assumption that government programs always fail. And they would would want to report failures, because they have an interest in creating better programs. However, there is very little such reporting in the “blogosphere.”

I can sometimes get the attention of the Web’s big guns if I opine on political philosophy in relatively general terms. Such editorializing can get me mentioned on Volokh, Crooked Timber, the Decembrist, or Matthew Yglesias. But when I write about day-to-day social work, such as this interesting experiment in municipal government in Washington, no one in the blogosphere seems to notice. Clearly, the reason could be my lack of reportorial skill; I’m no journalist, and I don’t know how to make these examples vivid. However, the important question is not about me; it’s about the whole range of leftish blogs. Where are the Web-based chroniclers of the public sector? Who’s visiting charter schools and telling us how they work? Who’s reporting from welfare offices and health clinics? I would trade a hundred pages of rants against George W. Bush for one site that kept me informed about what works and doesn’t work “on the ground” in our inner cities.

[Added on June 25: Anna (in a comment) links to “Respectful of Otters, a blog that reports from the frontlines of social work. I’m sure there are other examples.]

Yesterday’s New York Times Magazine has a fairly compelling cover story about the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) and its founder, Geoffrey Canada. I don’t have a lot of confidence in the Magazine as an evaluator of social programs. Evaluation is a tricky business, and the Magazine is too focused on personal profiles and anecdotes to be a reliable source. However, it is a good guide to what is currently influential. Marian Wright Edelman and William Julius Wilson are quoted in praise of HCZ, which tells us that important people are watching the program.

Mr. Canada hopes to make a huge difference in the lives of 6,500 Harlem kids for about $4,200 per child per year. If that can be done, then we have no excuse for not doing the same for all poor Americans.

HCZ asserts that 100% of the students in its pre-K classes test as ready for school at the end of the program, compared to a rate of 84% for all American kids. One might suspect that HCZ students are relatively well off to start with, since their guardians have placed them in a voluntary program. In that case, the 100% readiness rate might be a function of the population rather than the program. However, the Times story emphasizes that HCZ works relentlessly to sign up the most disadvantaged children in Harlem. If that’s true (and if the “Bracken Scales of Conceptual Development” are a good measure of readiness for school), then a 100% pass rate is impressive indeed.

HCZ also organizes classes for mothers, afterschool and tutoring programs in public k-12 schools, employment placement services, nutrition services, neighborhood beautification efforts, an asthma clinic, and family crisis counseling. It has recently launched a charter school. In one way or another, its services reach 88% of the kids in Central Harlem.

I can’t quite figure out what’s most significant about the enterprise as a whole: that one institution is providing services to most children in a large urban district; that the institution is a nonprofit with corporate donors, rather than a municipal agency; that its services span health, education, and other fields; that there’s a deliberate effort to reach the worst-off within the ghetto; that the nonprofit has a corporate-style business plan and collects a lot of data; or that Geoffrey Canada is a skilled, committed, and effective individual. We can’t clone Mr. Canada, nor is there enough corporate philanthropy to fund private non-profits on this scale in every city. I hope, therefore, that HCZ is successful because of factors that could be borrowed by local governments.

Yesterday, I responded to a comment by Jacob T. Levy. He has since posted more (including a response to me)–and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. For a month now, influential bloggers have been discussing why liberals don’t seem to prize and utilize their own intellectual tradition as much modern conservatives do. The whole conversation was started in a critical vein by Jonah Golberg.

I think that what we call “liberalism” is not a coherent ideology. It is rather an effort to balance a set of conflicting principles. It combines majority rule, protection for individual rights against the state, a minimum level of welfare to be guaranteed by the government, pluralism and an independent civil society, individual choice, disciplined organizations (such as unions), prosperity (created by allowing the market to allocate investments), some redistribution via taxation, environmental protection, neutrality about the good life, and state sponsorship of scholarship, natural assets, and high culture. Does this combination amount to “intellectually flabby, feeling-based pragmatism”? Or is it defensible?

I think liberalism is highly defensible–indeed, preferable to any purer alternative. It’s the result of more than a century of problem-solving and “experiential learning” by a democratic people. We Americans decided that censorship is a problem, so we invented a solution: the modern First Amendment. We viewed poverty and early death as problems, so we invented Social Security and Medicaid. There’s been a constant cycle of identifying problems, proposing solutions, experimenting in the real world, and debating the results.

Libertarians want to set limits on this debate, perhaps even amend or reinterpret the Constitution to forbid popular state action. Marxists view public debate as badly distorted by inequality. They also see it as unnecessary, because their theory tells them what we need to do. In deliberate contrast to laissez-faire conservatives and Marxists, my heroes in the Progressive Era defined themselves as experimental democrats.

Pragmatism is not an adequate political theory. We can’t just do “what works” without having either (a) criteria for good outcomes, or (b) procedures for deciding what we value. If we opt for procedures, then they must reflect some principles or values other than pragmatism itself. Progressives like Jane Addams, John Dewey, Louis Brandeis, and Robert M. La Follette combined pragmatism with a strong commitment to political equality and freedom of debate.

Even if pragmatism isn’t adequate, it still teaches a very important lesson. As Dewey wrote:

There is no more an inherent sanctity in a church, trade-union, business corporation, or family institution than there is in the state. Their value is … to be measured by their consequences. The consequences vary with concrete conditions; hence at one time and place a large measure of state activity may be indicated and at another time a policy of quiescence and laissez-faire. … There is no antecedent universal proposition which can be laid down because of which the functions of a state should be limited or should be expanded. Their scope is something to be critically and experimentally determined. … The person who holds the doctrine of `individualism’ or `collectivism’ has his program determined for him in advance. It is not with him a matter of finding out the particular thing which needs to be done and the best way, under the circumstances, of doing it.

I think this kind of pragmatism is fundamental to the Progressive Era and the New Deal–what we call “liberalism.” If “liberals” are highly pragmatic, then it is no wonder that they rarely cite great theoretical works in making their arguments. Thus I disagree in part with Jacob Levy. He explains that conservatives and libertarians were forced to refine their theories because they were “shut out of power” for a half century, while the center-left could put its energy “into actually doing stuff in government or on the courts.” I think that “doing stuff” is the essence of what we Americans called “liberalism” during the 20th century. Progressives and New Dealers were pragmatic experimentalists even in periods (such as the twenties) when they were shut out of power. Meanwhile, the American center-right has been consistently concerned with political theory, because what we call “conservatism” is heavily influenced by classical liberalism, which is a coherent (if unrealistic) political theory.

(By the way, our terminology is a nightmare. Today’s conservatives are actually classical liberals, and modern liberals make Burkean conservative arguments in favor of preserving the welfare state.)

In a blog posting and an article in The American Prospect, Mark Schmitt (“the Decembrist”) lists some thinkers whom liberals should read today: Herbert Croly, John Dewey, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, and Daniel Bell. [Revision, 4/28: I don’t think that Mark means this list to be a canon of the greatest liberal thinkers, nor is it a syllabus that liberals ought to work through; Mark simply offers a few examples to demonstrate that there are major historical thinkers on the center-left who continue to provoke constructive thinking. With that in mind, let me discuss his examples briefly …]

I’ve cited Dewey here. He’s a frustrating writer–vague just want you want him to be precise–but he epitomizes the spirit of experimentation and learning that is central to Progressive politics. Croly was influential mainly for arguing that America needed a strong federal government and a concomitant sense of national community. I don’t see Croly’s nationalism as essentially leftist; there have been Progressive proponents of localism as well as conservative centralizers (such as John Ashcroft). Therefore, as important as he was historically, I wouldn’t cite Croly as a great Progressive or expect today’s left to learn much from him. Schlesinger, Galbraith, and Bell are all concrete thinkers rather than abstract philosophers–a virtue, in my opinion.

Finally, Rawls has come up a lot in this conversation, starting here. Here’s my take. By the time Rawls wrote his Theory of Justice, liberals had engaged in 70 years of debate about the proper role of the state power in a modern economy. They had developed a miscellaneous set of institutions that were sometimes in fruitful conflict, ranging from an activist Supreme Court to an alphabet soup of regulatory agencies to the AFL-CIO. Rawls was like a rapporteur who observed the results of this long conversation and said, “This is what you mean, in essence.” His contribution was important, but it could never replace the history of experimentation and adjustment that had created a liberal society in the first place.

Finally, I’d like to say that my own complaint about modern progressivism is not its weak basis in political theory, but rather its flagging commitment to pragmatic experimentation. Such institutions as public schools and labor unions are starting to have “inherent sanctity” for liberals, which betrays the spirit of 20th century Progressivism.

Although I don’t usually blog on weekends, I can’t resist responding to Jacob Levy’s comments about why liberals don’t seem to understand–or care about–the intellectual tradition of their own movement.

I see modern liberalism as an eclectic mix of institutions and principles: an expansive First Amendment; cultural pluralism; public education; labor unions; welfare entitlements; a strong private sector; environmental protection; campaign finance reform; and more. After the fact, John Rawls managed to make all the ingredients of the modern liberal state appear to flow from a few fundamental principles. His effort was valiant and skillful, but it came too late to influence actual liberal institutions, which were already in decline. (As usual, the Owl of Minerva flew at dusk). Besides, Rawls did not identify the psychological and cultural roots of the institutions that he defended. Liberalism didn’t spring from abstract principles, but rather from experimentation, experience, accommodation, and compromise.

Libertarians constantly return to an impressive canon of major theorists, because libertarianism is the application of a few simple theoretical concepts to reality. Likewise with Marxists. Even Christian conservatives have modern theorists who help them to interpret their biblical sources. Modern liberalism is fundamentally different. It is pragmatic and eclectic rather than theoretical, and I think that is its great strength.

Moreover, liberals do have classic texts to which they constantly return for guidance and inspiration. These aren’t theoretical treatises, but rather chapters in the history of experimentation from Reconstruction through the Progressive Era and the New Deal to the Great Society. The “primary sources” of liberalism are speeches by leaders like FDR, JFK, and MLK Jr.; the biographies and autobiographies of Jane Addams, Robert M. La Follette, Eleanor Roosevelt, Fiorello LaGuardia, Ralph Bunche, Hubert Humphrey, and many more; and major judicial opinions. The “secondary sources” are histories of the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Movement, and other efforts to push back Darwinian capitalism, Marxism, and ordinary bigotry. The importance of these “secondary sources,” by the way, means that historians, rather than political theorists, are often the most influential liberal authors.