[Mb-civic] IMPORTANT: The Left's Big Ideas - E. J. Dionne - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

The Left's Big Ideas
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By E. J. Dionne Jr.
The Washington Post
Tuesday, April 25, 2006; A23

So Democratic Party leaders met over the weekend in New Orleans, 
gleefully criticized President Bush's stewardship and issued a "vision" 
statement that most pundits and reporters saw as less than visionary and 
not terribly specific.

Perfectly true, which underscores a central fact of American politics: 
"New ideas," "bold visions," "detailed solutions" and "courageous 
policies" almost never originate with politicians, especially 
politicians in the middle of election campaigns. Political consultants, 
with a few honorable exceptions, don't do "vision" either.

Politicians typically pick up their ideas from intellectual 
entrepreneurs, professional visionaries and impatient ideologues who 
wonder why the parties they support seem to stand for little.

Ronald Reagan could not have become, well, Ronald Reagan, if William F. 
Buckley Jr. and his allies at National Review magazine had not spent 
years developing modern conservatism's core ideas -- and if 
neoconservatives such as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz had not 
tweaked the philosophy in directions that brought in new converts.

What has become clear in recent months is that the impatience on the 
center-left with the hopeless endeavor of waiting for workaday 
politicians to come up with ideas -- Godot would deliver faster -- has 
spilled over the barriers of conventional politics. The brooding, musing 
and, yes, thinking since President Bush's victory in 2004 is starting to 
show results.

The biggest change is that moderates and liberals have begun to accept 
the fact that they cannot simply adjust to conservative dominance of the 
political debate and alter their ideas to fit the current consensus. As 
Michael Tomasky writes in the current issue of the American Prospect, 
Democrats and their allies must destroy the current political "paradigm" 
based on "radical individualism" and replace it with a politics of the 
"common good." Only a larger argument rooted in a different conception 
of government and society, Tomasky argues, will allow the party to "do a 
lot more than squeak by in this fall's (or any) elections based on the 
usual unsatisfying admixture of compromises."

In describing his common-good approach, Tomasky notes it has 
implications in challenging Democrats to stand for more than "diversity 
and rights," however valuable these commitments might be. Both diversity 
and rights, he argues, would be better defended in a common-good framework.

There are arguments to be had with Tomasky -- I think he needs to not 
only talk about citizen sacrifice but tell us more about self-interest, 
rightly understood. Progressive ideas do best when a majority of 
citizens believe their own self-interest is implicated in a common 
project, something Tomasky recognizes but doesn't stress enough.

And there are competing organizing ideas for a resurgent center-left. 
John Schwarz, an emeritus professor at the University of Arizona, 
recently argued at the Center for American Progress that the vital task 
for liberals is to steal back the idea of "freedom" from the right and 
broaden its implications.

What's important about Tomasky and Schwarz is that they are 
representative of an awareness on their side of politics that laundry 
lists of policy proposals are insufficient to the task of moving a nation.

Which is not to say that there is a shortage of specific policy 
proposals emerging from liberal and moderate research institutions. To 
mention just one, the Center for American Progress recently put forward 
15 new ideas on subjects ranging from taxes and education to pensions 
and energy.

And a new generation of policy entrepreneurs is doing what Kristol and 
his friends did 40 years ago: reinvigorating old magazines and starting 
new ones to create controversy and forward movement. Democracy: A 
Journal of Ideas, founded by thirtysomething moderate Democrats Ken Baer 
and Andrei Cherny, appears in June. The Web is brimming with impatient 
calls for alternatives to President Bush's philosophy and his policies.

None of this means a new liberalism will soon reign triumphant. It does 
mean that after a long period of reacting to conservative initiatives, 
progressives sense that conservative failures have created a vacuum that 
needs to be filled. The marketplace of ideas is not always efficient, 
but it eventually responds to felt needs.

That is what's happening, even if some of the ideas are still less than 
completely baked, as the political philosopher Dustin Hoffman might put 
it -- and even if it will take a long time for any of the ideas to 
penetrate Democratic National Committee meetings. It has always been thus.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/24/AR2006042401393.html?nav=hcmodule
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