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.]