Center right at best. But that’s in the cultural sphere, not necessarily in the political sphere. This is a reality that the progressive netroots seems not to grasp. They talk themselves into believing that on the issues most Americans support them, and in their heads most Americans might, but in their guts they don’t. It doesn’t matter how high the intellectual wattage of progressive policies, intelligent policy has very little to do with the way politics get done. Most people vote with their guts, not their heads.
I think that a more radical forward-moving politics could be promoted by factions whose cultural values are more conservative. It’s a similar logic to the old truism that Nixon could warm relations with China while a lib like Hubert Humphrey could not.
But the broader point is that traditional populist politics has always had conservative cultural values coupled with left leaning politics. The problem for American politics lies in that this populist configuration, while traditionally the province of the Democrats was lost by the Dems in the 70s when the party tacked left on cultural values. The Republicans saw the opportunity, coopted the populist cultural narrative by articulating a scorn for coastal liberal cultural values while promoting the interests of Big Money. The Democrats have been at a loss trying to tack right on political issues while staying left on cultural issues, and as a result alienating the ordinary folks in the middle on both counts.
I’ve been saying for years now that we can go forward only by retrieving authentic traditional values (as contrasted with zombie traditional values), and it’s clearly an idea whose time has not come. But my basic premise has been that many intelligent Middle Americans who, even if they don’t read or think through the issues very thoroughly, would be very receptive to a serious critique of American economic and power arrangements and a traditional populist remediation of those arrangements, if it could be presented in an idiom that doesn’t come across as the product of pointy-headed, elitist, secular intellectuals. It’s certainly beyond my pointy-headed powers to package such a critique and program, but I think that eventually something like this will emerge. Although it is nowhere in sight at the moment, I think that such a political/cultural constellation is inevitable. And nothing much of lasting value will happen until it does.
The point is that secular liberals, although they have a significant
influence in the cultural sphere, still compose only about 15% of the
American population. We are a culturally conservative society, that’s not going to change, and if we accept that as a given, secular progressives will never have the committed
support they need to make much happen in the political sphere.
Their program will be too easy to neutralize so long as most Americans feel ambivalently about it.
Take health care as an example. You can argue the details, but I am convinced that a single-payer healthcare system along the lines of the Canadian system is the sanest, most practical approach, but there is simply no broad-based political constituency to make creating such a system in the U.S. plausible. Something has to be done, and changes are coming in the next cycle, but we’ll most likely come up with a patchwork remediation of the current irrational system that will create as many problems as it solves.
I could be wrong about that, but I think that in our current fragmented political environment little more is possible–even with Democrats in the White House and with congressional majorities. I think we can reasonably expect legislation that will not be as absurd as the Medicare Prescription Bill, but we’ll have a bunch of bills dealing with different aspects of the healthcare system along those lines.
Something has to emerge out of the radical center if there’s any hope
of developing a culture-wide consensus for desperately needed change in the political and economic spheres. There’s a part of me that hopes that Obama might be the kind of guy to get the ball rolling in this direction, but he can’t make it happen by himself. No one individual or political faction can do that. Not much can happen until the culture is ready for change, and right now it just isn’t. Obama could be the guy who rises to the occasion to be the leader the nation wants if some crisis precipitates the need for a radical adjustment. It’s interesting to think how different things would have been had he or someone like him been president in the aftermath of 9/11. What a disastrously blown opportunity. It’s heartbreaking to contemplate it at this late date.
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