| Fivethirtyeight's Nate Silver, whose statistical analyses I respect greatly, has been essentially making the case that because lots of Progressive Caucus members in the Congress voted for the Wall Street bailout, a vote for the Wall Street bailout was, therefore, a vote for the progressive agenda.* That's not his whole argument, but that's the basic thrust, and it's forwards an elegantly self-fulfilling kind of circular logic: Whatever the Progressive Caucus does is the progressive position, period - regardless of the underlying substance of the legislation being voted on.
This, of course, leaves you with the same unsatisfied feeling you have when you look up a word in the dictionary, only to find that the dictionary defines the word using the same word. And more troublingly, it cloaks a powerful and condescending kind of government authoritarianism in seemingly rational empiricism. It suggests that if, by rudimentary arithmetic, a majority of a certain set of government officials votes one way, then that way is The Only Way that a principled grassroots movement must follow, because we are too stupid and too powerless to be able to judge things on our own.
Coming from someone as smart as Silver, such vapid reasoning is just downright silly. |
| The fact is, members of Congress - even Progressive Caucus members - are moved by a whole set of pressures and forces (campaign contributions, desire to get elected, aspirations of moving up the party leadership, etc.) that shift their votes and have nothing to do with the progressive agenda. Not surprisingly, those distorting pressures and forces tend to be most acute when it comes to bills like the Wall Street bailout that explicitly deal with money and corporate power.
Likewise, many Progressive Caucus members call themselves progressive because of their positions only on certain issues - some of which that have nothing to do with economic issues. As just one example, if you are a congressperson representing a liberal district but want to raise lots of corporate cash, it's easy to join the Progressive Caucus based on your pro-choice positions on abortion, while also voting for Wall Street bailouts and corporate-written trade agreements. This means, though, that the caucus's overall votes on those economic issues - issues that some caucus members don't define themselves as progressive on - can't be cited as scientifically representative of the progressive movement as a whole. When the Progressive Caucus's majority votes for something all it means is that the Progressive Caucus's majority voted for something - nothing more, nothing less. Sure, it's one metric that may perhaps have something to do with a bill's substantive progressivism - but it's one metric among scores of metrics, and it's not even close to the 100% scientific proof of progressivism that Silver portrays it as.
Silver is certainly right that just because one person says a position is "progressive" doesn't make it so. But that's the same principle for a set of legislators. Just because they votes one way doesn't mean that vote is automatically the progressive position, either. And what Silver seems to miss is that not everything can be boiled down to numbers and congressional votes (I know, a tough truism to swallow if you are a mathematician) - and that there can be pretty clear consensus on what is - and is not - a progressive position, based not on one voice, but on a movement's collective voice.
So, for instance, when it comes to the bailout - it wasn't just me or OpenLeft advocating against it. It was organized labor, consumer groups, progressive economists/activists like Naomi Klein, Dean Baker and Robert Reich, and millions of self-described liberal/progressive Americans who told pollsters they were opposed to the bailout, just to name a few.
And more importantly, on the merits, a vote to continue giving Wall Street billions of dollars of taxpayer money in an unregulated and non-transparent fashion while simultaneously underfunding health care and education is just not in line with anything the progressive movement has ever advocated in its history. Additionally, nobody has made any kind of substantive argument that the bailout is "progressive" in any way - not even Obama, and even more notably to this argument, not even Nate Silver himself. The closest bailout proponents have come is in their arguments that the bailout is necessary - but nobody has stood up and said it represents progressive ideals. Why? My guess is because even bailout proponents know it clearly doesn't represent progressive ideals - not even close.
Because a bill gets lots of Republican or Blue Dog support doesn't mean its automatically conservative in nature, and because a bill gets lots of Progressive Caucus support doesn't mean its automatically progressive in nature. Why? Because those pressures and forces that have nothing to do with ideology often play decisive roles in congressional votes. Yes, progressives should certainly look with initial suspicion at bills that Republicans support - and yes, progressives should certainly be a bit more inclined to initially assume good things about bills the Progressive Caucus supports. But upon deeper substantive review of specific bills, it's obvious you can't make sweeping ideological generalizations based ONLY on those metrics, especially when that particular metric is subject to so many other distorting forces and impulses.
Indeed, in the Bush age, we've seen Republicans destroy the conservative brand by following the logic Silver seems to support. Rather than stick to verifiably conservative principles like limited government and balanced budgets, Republicans in Congress and the White House exponentially grew government through the Pentagon and Homeland Security department and created record-setting deficits in the process. When they tried to slap the "conservative" label on these moves - when they effectively tried to equate GOP party loyalty to ideological conservatism - they destroyed the very meaning of the conservative brand, and therefore undermined not just their electoral majorities in Washington, but the entire conservative movement as a whole.
Now, sure - we can follow Silver's path and do the same thing. We can take every vote that a certain set of Democrats cast and slap the label "progressive" on those votes, regardless of the underlying policy, regardless of where consensus is in the major institutions and voices in the grassroots progressive movement, and regardless of the agend the progressive movement has been fighting for for generations. But I think that's a huge mistake, not just because Republicans have shown us how politically perilous that is, but because it effectively says we, as a movement, must take orders from politicians, rather than giving them.
Democracy is not built on movements saying "yes sir, may I have another" to politicians. Democracy is not built on citizens assuming that Great All-Knowing Politicians are so much smarter than us that we must defer to their positions and not judge merits on our own. Democracy is not built on movements simply cheering on the kleptocratic or immoral votes of politicians, just because those politicians call themselves one thing or another. If it was, the great movements of the past - from labor to civil rights to feminist movements - wouldn't have been making constant demands on Congress. They would have, instead, simply sat back like wimps and applauded, even when they were getting stomped on. And you know what? Those movements wouldn't have achieved the radical changes we now take for granted.
No, democracy, as Mike Lux's new book shows, is built on constant struggle - and progressive progress is built on movements that make demands, not movements that accept the word and votes of politicians as the word and votes of an Almighty Ideological Arbiter.
I think a healthy, substantive debate on the merits of what is - and is not - progressive is really important to building a strong and vibrant movement. That's one of the reasons why we sometimes debate that in a meta sense here at OpenLeft (and I frankly wish Silver would have made even a small attempt to debate the progressivism - or lack thereof - of the bailout on its merits, rather than on his policy-free analysis of congressional votes). But we get distracted when we embrace the kind of authoritarian Dear Leader-ism that says whatever politicians tell us is what we must support in the name of progressivism. We hurt ourselves when we declare that if Republicans vote for something, it can't be progressive, or alternately, that if Progressive Caucus members vote for something, it must be progressive - substance and merits be damned. That kind of reductionist thinking is a cheap, ignorant substitute for an informed analysis - and a strong movement.
* Note that Chris Bowers makes the convincing argument that, even by Silver's overly narrow vote metrics (that I take issue with in this post), the picture isn't so clear. |
