In today’s New York Times, Michael Lind has a generous and thoughtful review of Freedom’s Power. He takes me to task, however, on one issue in particular: my treatment of the Populist movement of the late nineteenth century. He is entirely right that in discussing the formative influences on modern liberalism, I give the Populists little attention and regard the Progressives of the early twentieth century as more crucial.

Here is what I just wrote in an email in response to a reader who agrees with Lind’s review and thinks I should be more sympathetic to populism:

Many people use the term “populist” these days as a synonym for popular, egalitarian, and democratic. The liberalism I favor is all of those things. But as a distinctive movement in the U.S. and elsewhere, populism has other characteristics that are not so attractive—a penchant for ill-will toward minorities and immigrants and a suspicious, resentful, and sometimes downright paranoid view of education, culture, and finance. It is entirely possible, for example, to favor progressive taxation and oppose special privileges for corporations without adopting a populist worldview. That is why, in my mind, populism is not part of the history of liberalism. It was one of the alternatives liberalism had to overcome. And in much of the world, it still is. You can see this especially clearly in Latin America and other developing regions where populist leaders throw red meat to the crowds and do very little to advance long-term economic growth and social improvement.

My distaste for populism has been a long-running point of disagreement that I have had with many other liberals, including some of my fellow editors at The American Prospect. Here are some excerpts from “Why I’m Not a Populist,” an article I wrote seven years ago in the Prospect to explain my position:

It was just about 100 years ago, after the defeat of William Jennings Bryan in 1896, that the original, agrarian Populist movement collapsed and gave way to the more broadly based Progressivism of the early 1900s that permanently altered American government and society. But Populism, despite its short and checkered history, survives in our political vocabulary, and there are a fair number of people who brighten up at the thought of a populist revival. I am, however, not among them.

From the outset, the populist impulse has been to play upon one public emotion above all: anger. That anger has typically been directed at a diffuse enemy at the top—the monopolies, the interests, or elites of various kinds. The populist mind suspects conspiracies in high places, often in league with foreign influences, and appeals to a kind of insular Americanism that is suspicious of both immigrants and other countries. The grievances that populism taps are no doubt genuine. Its rhetoric and remedies are oversimplified and dangerous.

In the article, I went on to discuss three candidates for president in 2000 who at the time were being described as “populist”: Patrick Buchanan, Ralph Nader, and Al Gore. After noting that Buchanan had become an “asterisk” in public-opinion surveys (albeit a “major-league asterisk”), I had the following to say about Nader and Gore:

As of early September, Ralph Nader was doing better, pulling as much as 4 to 5 percent in the polls, which could be enough to tip the election. Nader's populism is the left-wing variety directed at corporate elites; it starts with legitimate criticism of corporate abuses but fails to provide a persuasive understanding of the economy as a whole. Nearly 30 years ago, as one of "Nader's raiders," I worked for Ralph on a study of Vietnam veterans and the Veterans Administration. Those were the days when Nader was a “consumer advocate” and swore that he had no ambitions for elected office, which was a good idea since he certainly didn't have the temper for it. The irony of Nader's presidential campaign is that if it succeeds, it may enable Bush (and his likely nominees to the Supreme Court) to dismantle the very agencies and policies that Nader himself helped to create in the early years of his public career. This would be success only if you count self-cancellation as an achievement.

The third candidate the media have dubbed "populist" is the surprise of the campaign: Al Gore. Gore earned the label by claiming at the Democratic convention to stand for "the people, not the powerful," and criticizing "big tobacco, big oil, the big polluters, the pharmaceutical companies, the HMOs." It was a critical turn for Gore, helping to reassure the base of the party about his Democratic bona fides. Nader reacted indignantly that Gore wasn't really a populist, and of course Gore isn't. He has no general antipathy to business, much less to the establishment.

So was his appeal at the Democratic convention fraudulent? Not at all. On a variety of issues, such as prescription drug benefits for the elderly, a patients' bill of rights,
environmental protection, and the regulation of tobacco, Democrats face fierce, heavily financed opposition from business interests. Setting aside "big oil" (obviously singled out because of the makeup of the Republican ticket), Gore's list underlined a determination to prevail over business opposition on issues that are central to the campaign. In a survey question that quoted Gore's list of specific industries, a Business Week/Harris poll in late August found that Americans agree with the vice president by a margin of 74 percent to 22 percent, but they don't necessarily harbor any deep anger against corporations: 68 percent also agree that American business should be given "most of the credit" for the current prosperity.

The Democrats are not an anticorporate party, but they are more willing than the Republicans to take on business interests to pursue goals that have broad public support. It was important for Gore to make clear that he would do that, not only to consolidate support for November, but also to establish a basis for a mandate afterward if he wins.

As a general approach to politics, populism long ago fizzled. Prosperity today makes an appeal to public anger and suspicion particularly implausible as a winning strategy. But there is still room for a politics that pushes back against corporate influence and seeks to assert the primacy of a public interest. The recent scandal involving Firestone tires is a reminder of the kind of corporate malfeasance that genuinely arouses public support for strong regulation of business. You don't have to be a populist to want political leaders who know when to put business in its place.

Notwithstanding Gore’s efforts to make clear that he would be an effective advocate of popular interests, Nader did tip the election, as I feared. We all know what happened as a result. Liberals ought to be clear: an egalitarian politics, certainly. But populism, no.

Paul Starr

A new column of mine proposing a Young America program appears today in Campus Progress, the online student magazine of the Center for American Progress. The column draws on material from the last chapter of Freedom’s Power and argues that social policy ought to focus resources on the young. As the GI bill provided a tremendous boost to American society after World War II by enabling young veterans and their families to obtain higher education, job training, health care, and mortgages, so we ought today to help the young invest in their own—and thereby the nation’s—future.

The proposal for a Young America program builds on ideas that have been circulating for a while calling for new policies benefiting children. The difference here is more of an emphasis on young adults.

Fifteen years ago, in January 1992, I gave a speech to the National Academy of Social Insurance called “A New Deal for the Young” (a phrase I’ve continued to use). The speech was buried in the academy’s annual conference proceedings, and I didn’t do anything further with it because I was soon preoccupied with health policy in the Clinton administration.

But I’ve now posted “A New Deal for the Young” on my Princeton web site because nearly all of it continues to be relevant.

The key historical point is that the original New Deal and other programs of that era assumed that the traditional family would continue to be the predominant form and did not anticipate the radically different social world we inhabit today. Moreover, the primary legacy of the New Deal, particularly in a fiscal sense, has been the old-age pension system of Social Security as well as the Medicare program added to it in 1965.

After the mid-1960s, federal social spending shifted markedly toward the aged. Children and young adults have been relatively ill-served. As I point out in the column:

A variety of social indicators show the results. Just this past month, UNICEF brought together data on poverty rates, health, social behavior, families, and peer relationships in a study of the well-being of children and adolescents in 21 rich countries. In the overall ranking, the United States came in next to last.

To remedy these failings, we should be doing more to improve early childhood education and other policies affecting young children. But we should also be thinking about their parents—and the young people who will be parents not long from now.

As I did 15 years ago, I continue to argue for basing at least some elements of such a policy in a “norm of reciprocity.” Rather than simply hand out benefits, we ought to make them contingent on one or another form of national service. Where benefits are earned, they have far more chance of being thought legitimate.

This analysis ties in with the general ideas of Freedom’s Power:

The premise of a Young America program would be the inclusive conception of freedom and power that are at the core of modern liberalism. An increasingly unequal America that exposes so many of its young to poverty and insecurity cannot be the strong and prosperous nation all Americans want it to be. Government can be the means for expanding the horizon of freedom, creating opportunity, and making a society both more powerful and more just. The world used to think of America as a country where the young had possibilities unmatched anywhere else. The United States could be that country again.

P.S. For reaction to the proposal, check out what Ganesh Sitaraman has to say at TPM Cafe: "This is a bold idea – and one that could do a lot for the next generation of Americans." There are also more comments there, pro and con.

Oh, it looks bad for the GOP. According to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, Republicans are despairing: 40 percent of them say they expect the Democrats to win the next election, while just 12 percent of Democrats say the GOP will win.

But Samuel L. Popkin and Henry A. Kim have a bracing historical reminder for Democrats in Sunday’s Washington Post:

The last time either party captured the White House two years after wresting
control of both House and Senate in midterm elections was in 1920. Democrats who
think that it is their turn to expand their pet programs and please their core
constituencies have forgotten how quickly congressional heavy-handedness can
revive the president’s party.

As Popkin and Kim point out, there have been four times since 1920 when the opposition party picked up one or both houses of Congress at the mid-terms but then lost the presidency two years later. These were in 1946, 1954, 1986, and 1994. In three of those four instances (all but 1986), the opposition candidate lost to an incumbent president—Truman, Eisenhower, and Clinton—and, in the fourth case, to the vice president, George H.W. Bush. Of course, 2008 will be entirely different. The Republican candidate for president will not come from the Bush White House, though that may well be to the GOP’s advantage given the fiasco in Iraq.

The swing toward the Democrats in recent public-opinion polls is substantial. At first, the numbers may not look that impressive. Charlie Cook recently pointed out in National Journal that, according to Gallup’s aggregated surveys for 2006, Democrats enjoyed a 3.9 percent edge in party ID (34.3 percent Democratic; 30.4 percent Republican; and 33.9 independents); that’s roughly a 5-point swing toward the Democrats from 2002. But when independents were asked which way they leaned, the Democrats’ edge rose to 10.2 percentage points. Says Cook: “That’s the biggest advantage either party has enjoyed since Gallup began pushing leaners in 1991—and it is significant. Leaners tend to end up voting for the party they tilt toward almost as consistently as do voters who say they belong to that party.”

Popkin and Kim are absolutely right, however, that the GOP could still hold the presidency in 2008, even in the face of Democratic gains in public opinion. I have the greatest respect for the two front-runners, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, but I am not yet convinced that they can overcome the obvious obstacles to their election. According to the New York Times/CBS poll, if the election were held now, Americans would choose an unnamed Democrat over an unnamed Republican by a 20-point margin. Nonetheless, both Clinton and Obama have run behind in polls first to John McCain and now to Rudy Giuliani. Are Democrats so sure the country has put sexism and racism to rest that they want to bet the future of the country on that proposition? I wish I felt confident that was true. Perhaps as we get closer to next February I will.

Paul Starr

From a new column at Prospect Online:

The strange thing about the debate in Congress over a deadline for pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq is that the objective political interests of the two parties are the reverse of their stated positions.

Republicans are facing a disaster in the 2008 election if the Iraq War continues unabated. But if the Democratic Congress ties the president's hands and forces a pullout, the Republicans would have an excuse for the war's failure, and their party could move on to focus the 2008 election on other issues. If GOP leaders could act on pure political self-interest, they would be secretly encouraging just enough defections by their own members of Congress to pass legislation requiring a pullout.

Conversely, if Democrats succeed in setting a deadline, they would be taking some responsibility upon themselves for what happens in the wake of a pullout, and they would lose the advantage of focusing the 2008 election on the war. The Democrats' political interest lies in demonstrating a determination to end the war without actually passing legislation to require a pullout.

For the time being, the Republicans are nearly united in playing their appointed roles as lemmings on a fatal march to the '08 precipice. They have sufficient votes in the Senate to stop any pullout requirement, and there is always the backup of a presidential veto. All the major Republican presidential candidates have lined up in support of the war and even of the "surge." But what will they call for after that? Like chess players caught in a trap, they seem to have no good options for their next moves.

The Democrats, in contrast, are in the fortunate position of doing both what they believe is right and what serves their political interest—trying to end the war, but at this point without the votes in Congress that could actually cut off the requisite funds and authority.

For Democrats, the big danger in this situation is the illusion that a pullout from Iraq could end our troubles in the region. The situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating. Al-Qaeda grows in strength in nearby provinces of Pakistan. Iran has become more powerful and belligerent, and there is a risk of a larger regional Shia-Sunni war. Public opinion polls are registering high levels of approval for Democratic proposals in Congress partly on the basis of a mistaken impression that if we leave Iraq, we can put the whole mess behind us.

But that won't be possible. One of the reasons against invading Iraq was that the war would divert resources from the fight against al-Qaeda and perversely increase the risks of terrorism. One of the reasons for disentangling ourselves from Iraq is to pursue the fight against al-Qaeda more effectively. That is why a pullout has to be part of a more comprehensive diplomatic and military plan—which, barring a miraculous turnaround before then, only a new president elected in 2008 will be able to carry out.

Paul Starr

In an article written on February 11 for the March issue of The American Prospect, I remarked, “If the Democratic tide in 2008 threatens to reach tsunami-like proportions, even a Republican thought to have a safe seat, such as Pete Domenici of New Mexico, could feel the heat.”

At the time, I had no particular reason to focus on Domenici, and few observers thought his seat would be in play. But the heat is already on. With the disclosure of his pre-election telephone call to federal prosecutor David Iglesias about pending corruption cases, the Democrats’ chances for taking the New Mexico seat have increased dramatically. The immediate effect will be to encourage a strong Democratic candidate (Bill Richardson? Tom Udall?) to get into the race. Look for Senator Domenici, who will be 76 in 2008, to decide it’s time to retire.

Paul Starr

I plan to have more to say about the legacy of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., but just a note about some of the commentary that has appeared in the week since his death at the age of 89.

In today’s New York Times, Sam Tanenhaus hails Schlesinger as the “last great public historian.” Like Russell Jacoby’s 1987 lament The Last Intellectuals, such praise of a departed generation implicitly disparages those who now practice the craft. I didn’t agree with Jacoby then, and 20 years later I don’t accept what Tanenhaus says. The public intellectual and public historian are not figures who have disappeared from our midst.

Schlesinger’s death takes from us a man with singular gifts, but he left us a gift too—his example. As E.J. Dionne writes in the Washington Post, it is a mistake to think that Schlesinger’s liberalism is being buried with him. And it is a mistake to believe that the seats that he and other historians ably filled in the public arena lie vacant.

Tanenhaus mentions two others besides Schlesinger—Richard Hofstadter and C. Vann Woodward—who qualified as great public historians. All three were important in defining the liberalism of the post-World War II era, though neither Hofstadter nor Woodward came close to matching Schlesinger in political prominence or sheer output.

If we take Hofstadter and Woodward as reasonable standards of comparison, I don’t think we lack for public historians who measure up to those of the mid-twentieth century. By public historians, I mean historians who engage the great public issues of their time and write about the past for the general public with authority and literary skill. Alan Brinkley, Sean Wilentz, and Garry Wills do this today, and there are others.

We no longer have Arthur Schlesinger, but the work goes on, not least of all because he showed us how to do it.

Paul Starr

I have a new column just out, "Congressional Battleground," from the March issue of The American Prospect, arguing that to get the additional votes in the Senate needed to change policy in Iraq, Democrats and opponents of the war ought to focus on states with vulnerable GOP senators up for reelection in 2008. I wrote this piece on February 11, before the Senate vote on the 17th that fell three votes short of the margin needed to close off debate.

In arguing that this winter's debate on the war is just a rehearsal for a major confrontation with the president to come later this year or early next, I was assuming that Democrats would not be able to get the support in the next several weeks or months to limit the war through an appropriations bill, which would need only 51 votes in the Senate. We'll see whether that expectation turns out to be right.

Advice to Barack Obama: There is a right way to take advantage of your youth, and there is a wrong way—and you seem close to taking the wrong way.

It’s silly to argue that the baby-boomers as a generation are responsible for America’s polarized politics and that you can overcome the nation’s divisions because you came of age after the 1960s.

Polarization is the result of two distinct but related developments—neither of which is generational in origin.

The first is a polarization of the two major parties resulting the realignment of the south. The Democrats used to have more southern conservatives, and the Republicans used to have more northern liberals and moderates. But as the south has flipped to the GOP, the two parties have become more ideologically consistent and farther apart from each other. As a result, there are fewer members of Congress who cross over in their voting from one party to the other. This aspect of polarization is likely to be a long-term change.

The second development is the shift to the right of the Republican Party, partly resulting from the influx of southern conservatives. Polarization has not been symmetrical. The Republicans have moved much farther to the right than the Democrats have moved to the left; indeed, the Democrats continue to occupy much of the center: That was why Democrats were able to capture independent voters in 2006. This may or may not last.

Before the last election, Republicans seemed to benefit from the deliberate strategy of polarization promoted by Karl Rove: playing to their base rather than reaching into the middle. If Republicans shift to a less polarizing politics, it will be because the Rovian strategy has stopped working for them—not because of any generational turnover.

Of course, John F. Kennedy touted his age and presented himself as the leader of a new generation. So I can see, Barack, what example you may have in mind. But Kennedy didn’t make his case by criticizing the generation that preceded him.

In today’s New York Times, writing about your appeal (“Shushing the Baby Boomers”), John M. Broder quotes Eric Liu as saying to the baby-boom generation: “Thank you, here’s your gold watch, it’s time for the personal style and political framework of the 1960’s to get out of the way.”

Liu is identified as a speechwriter in the Clinton White House “who now runs a mentoring program in Seattle.” I take it he is not mentoring political candidates.

The baby boomers remain a large voting bloc. Insulting them by suggesting they share a dysfunctional “personal style and political framework” is just plain dumb.

But, Barack, there is a way for you to make a progressive generational appeal.

Many of the problems that Americans face today hit young people especially hard. I’m referring not only to the high rate of child poverty, but also to the difficulties faced by young adults in their twenties: high college costs; lack of access to jobs with good health benefits; the high costs of buying into the housing market. We need a Young America program to help create the kind of opportunities that the World War II generation enjoyed under the GI Bill.

Now that’s a generational appeal that not just the young, but their parents could go for.

Paul Starr

What is liberalism’s relationship to America--to its traditions and to the vision of the United States as a great nation that can be a force for good in the world? For the past several years, these questions have been at the heart of a debate among American liberals about how they see themselves and what they stand for.

In a recent article in the Nation arguing that liberals need not just intelligent policies but a compelling story of America, Bill Moyers calls my forthcoming book Freedom’s Power “a profound and stirring call for liberals to reclaim the idea of America’s greatness as their own.”

Moyers is alluding to a theme that runs literally from the opening to the close of the book. In the first paragraph of the Introduction, I write: “The proposition that each of us has a right to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ remains as good a definition as anyone has ever come up with of liberalism’s first principle and America’s historic promise.” And the final paragraph ends:

The story of America is of a nation that has grown greater and stronger by becoming more diverse and inclusive and extending the fruits of liberty more widely among its people. American liberals do not have to invent something new or import a philosophical tradition from abroad. They have only to reclaim the idea of America’s greatness as their own.

The idea that liberal purposes are closely tied to “the promise of American life” has been a recurring theme through American history. The leaders of the Progressive era, the New Deal, and the New Frontier—TR and Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and John F. Kennedy, as well as many other public figures—conceived and framed their ideas about the future with a keen sense of how to ground them in America’s traditions and build on its achievements. And not all of our politicians have forgotten how to do this: Barack Obama’s June 4, 2005 speech at Knox College is a brilliant and inspiring contemporary example.

But for a long time American liberalism has seemed to distance itself from a vision of America as a great nation. In the opening salvo of his effort to formulate a national greatness conservatism—a speech at the Library of Congress, published in The Weekly Standard in March 1997 as “A Return to National Greatness: A Manifesto for a Lost Creed”—David Brooks implicitly threw down a challenge to liberals.

“For much of this century,” Brooks wrote, “liberals possessed high aspirations and a spirit of historical purpose. Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the New Deal, John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier—these were efforts to aim high, to accomplish some grand national endeavor. Liberals tried to use American preeminence as a way to shape the world, fight communism, put a man on the moon. But then came the 1970s, and suddenly liberalism became a creed emphasizing limits. Small became beautiful. A radical egalitarianism transformed liberalism, destroying hierarchies and discrediting elitist aspirations. An easygoing nihilism swept through academia, carrying away any sense of a transcendent order.”

Brooks was so dismissive of contemporary liberalism that he said that it should not even be expected to propose any vision of national greatness. And he criticized conservatives too for being so hostile to the federal government that they were unable to conceive of it as an instrument to carry out important national missions, which historically had included “settling the West, building the highway system, creating the post-war science faculties, exploring space, waging the Cold War, and disseminating American culture throughout the world.”

There was nothing in Brooks’s article, nor in a September 1997 Wall Street Journal op-ed with William Kristol, that pointed to foreign affairs, much less war, as the avenue for reasserting American greatness. Indeed, Brooks was a little vague about the mission he had in mind: “It almost doesn’t matter what great task government sets for itself,” he wrote, “as long as it does some tangible thing with energy and effectiveness. The first task of government is to convey a spirit of confidence and vigor that can then spill across the life of the nation.”

The fate of national greatness conservatism shows that, in fact, it does matter “what great task government sets for itself.” With Brooks and especially Kristol cheering him on, George W. Bush has certainly set a great task for America: promoting democracy in Iraq and throughout the world. Rather than inspiring “confidence and vigor,” however, the Iraq War has backfired against the nation, his own presidency, and the Republican Party.

Originally, national greatness conservatism was identified with John McCain and his campaign for the 2000 presidential nomination. But the very notion of a national greatness conservatism—like McCain’s own political career—has now become inextricably linked with Bush’s disastrous, missionary foreign policy.

In using the phrase “national greatness,” I am not suggesting that liberals ought to adopt a belligerent nationalism or the aggressive promotion of democracy favored by neoconservatives and some liberal hawks. In a 2005 TNR article, “The Case for National Greatness Liberalism,” Noam Scheiber writes that Democrats have to “convince voters to trust them on national security,” which I agree with. But Scheiber then goes on to say, “We’re not just talking about calling for a larger military, but something dramatic to signify the shift—like a plan to strike an Iranian or North Korean nuclear facility if need be.” The last thing Democrats ought to do, however, is to show that they can be just as reckless as the Republicans have been in starting wars.

Other liberals have responded more sensibly to the intellectual challenge of restoring greater energy and ambition to American liberalism. In a short 2005 book, Return to Greatness: How America Lost Its Sense of Purpose and What It Needs to Do to Recover It (Princeton University Press), Alan Wolfe distinguishes between two ways of thinking about common purposes. On the one hand have been those who have been deeply distrustful of national power and conceived of a good society primarily in local and voluntary terms. On the other are those who have embraced the nation as a positive force and conceived of America as capable of advancing freedom and equality both at home and in the world.

My view of liberalism falls into the second category. I believe that liberals ought to aim high: to set ambitious goals in reforming our society and in seeking to uphold liberal values internationally. That requires a strong and capable national government, bearing in mind, however, that America achieves its strength partly through the protection of our liberties.

Conservative leadership has not only recklessly plunged us into a failed war but weakened those liberties at home and done incalculable damage to America’s good name in the world. And it has utterly defaulted on the problems of climate change, rising inequality, stagnant or declining incomes for the middle class and the poor, increased health costs, and a long-term fiscal crisis threatening programs Americans want to preserve and seeming to rule out new measures in their common interest.

A new leadership will need to confront those problems instead of denying them. At home its program ought to concentrate on creating a shared prosperity and restoring the respect for our freedoms, the integrity of our democracy, and the competence of our government that the Republicans have abused or neglected. Internationally, it ought to rebuild a broad democratic partnership with other nations based on mutual recognition of our shared fate and common interests in prosperity, security, and survival. The Republicans have had their shot at a “return to greatness,” and they have blown it. But it would be a mistake for Democrats to settle for a politics of small ambitions. Liberalism has provided the high aspirations that have galvanized America in the past. America needs that leadership again, and the rest of the world needs that leadership from America.

Paul Starr