Bankruptcy "cramdown" reform went down to defeat in the Senate today. Even if Al Fraken had been in the Senate to vote in favor, and even if Ted Kennedy and Jay Rockerfeller had been around to do the same, the bill still would only have had 48 supporters--12 short of the amount needed for passage. Needless to say, replacing 12 anti-cramdown Senators with 12 pro-cramdown Senators will be an extremely difficult task for the 2010 elections, or really any combination of elections during our lifetime. And this is on a compromise to cramdown legislation.
Senator Durbin is correct to say that this defeat shows the financial services industry owns the Senate. It also shows that if you are looking for a progressive transformation of society, focusing on electoral politics and legislative fights is simply not enough.
Even with the Democratic trifecta, the federal government simply is not a leading edge for change in America. Further, that isn't even really the fault of the Democrats who make up the trifecta, but simply an inevitable condition of the institution itself. The federal government has never, and will never be, a leading edge for progressive change in America. The most powerful people in our country are never going to lurch the federal government to the sharply to the left of where either the most powerful institutions in our country, or the majority of the electorate in our country (as we have seen, the federal government is almost always to the right of where the majority of the country is, even right now). The federal government will never, ever become dominated by the left-wing of America.
Looking back at 20th-century presidents from the point of view of progressive reform, you find FDR and an agenda fatally compromised by a corrupt bargain with the forces of white supremacy. You find LBJ and the cleansing of Jim Crow jostling awkwardly side-by-side with Vietnam. And it's downhill from there. Realistically, if the health-care and education proposals in Obama's 2010 budget pass Congress-and there's good reason to believe they will-Obama will have achieved more in a few months than Bill Clinton did in eight years. Throw in a thaw in the Latin American Cold War, important bilateral arms reductions with Russia, an impressive economic-stimulus package, and an end to the Bush torture state and this looks like a very solid 100 Days.
The tragedy is that it may not be enough. The world urgently needs major polluting countries to sharply and quickly reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. And the odds of legislation robust enough to do that obtaining the 60 necessary votes in the Senate look very bleak. That's "political reality" and not a character flaw of the president's. But real-world reality is that the political constraints of the moment are condemning the world to disasters decades-hence that future generations will find difficult to forgive.
While President Obama has not accomplished nearly as much as I would like, he has accomplished a huge amount compared to other Presidents. Further, even if Russ Feingold or Barbara Boxer were President, there would be little or no difference in the legislation that has passed Congress so far this year. The 60-vote rule in the Senate, for which there is little to no momentum for changing, all but guarantees that the United States federal government will indefinitely remain a regressive institution relative to the rest of our culture. It was designed as a regressive (although some call it "deliberative") institution that would slow change, and it remains just that. Getting 60 progressive votes across all issue areas will be virtually impossible. Just because we are facing several enormous crises doesn't change the lack of responsiveness from the Senate.
If you want broad progressive change in America, it is essential to look beyond the electoral and legislative realm. Surely we must maintain our efforts on the political front, but the leading edge of progressive change is coming in other areas. Things like the network neutral Internet, increasing immigration, increasing acceptance of the LGBT community, and shifting religious identification are making the country more progressive than any single or combination of political campaigns over the past two decades.
The best we can hope for from electoral politics is two-fold. First, in the short term (the next three to seven years) we can do a bit better, but not much, on the electoral and legislative fronts. Second, in the long-term, we can make sure that the federal government does not in the way of the long-term engines of progressive change. Whatever immigration reform is passed, it can't reduce the number of people coming into this country. Whatever media reform is passed, the network neutral Internet must be preserved at all costs. And, nearly as importantly, the Employee Free Choice Act needs to be passed someday.
Given that the era of "more Democrats" has ended, progressive activists who are interested in sweeping change would probably be best off refocusing not primarily to "better Democrats," but to culturally progressive feedback loops like immigration, net neutrality, and the Employee Free Choice Act. That is where policy can further the leading edges of progressive change, and that is where we need to be.
