Bernard Chazelle: Saving the American Left ... The Case for a New Progressive Creed
[Bernard Chazelle is a professor of computer science at Princeton University.]
... By virtually any measure, the United States is the least progressive nation in the developed world.(1) It trails most of Western Europe in poverty rates, life expectancy, health care, child care, infant mortality, maternity leaves, paid vacations, public infrastructure, incarceration rates, and environmental laws. The wealth gap in the US has not been so wide since 1929. The Wal-Mart founders' family owns as much as the bottom 120 million Americans combined.(2) Contrary to received opinion, there is now less social mobility in the US than in Canada, France, Germany, and most Scandinavian countries.(3,4) The European Union attracts more foreign students than the US, including twice as many from China. Its consensus-driven polity, studies indicate, has replaced the American version as the societal model to which the developing world aspires.(5)
And yet could America be a right-wing nation of closet lefties? A Zogby poll reveals overwhelming support for rehabilitation over incarceration for young offenders. In an NES survey, those who want “government to provide many more services even if it means an increase in spending” outnumber backers of spending cuts by 2 to 1. A Pew study cites the same ratio of people who consider corporate profits excessive. It also finds that a majority of Americans believe “government should help the needy even if it means greater debt.” (6)
Democratic leaders, bless their souls, believe no such nonsense. They'll warn you incessantly that any public policy leaning a nano-angstrom to the left is a suicide pact. They'll brush off any talk of raising the top marginal tax rate of 35% to anything approaching the 70% of the Nixon years.(7) Yes, the progressive Bill Clinton expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit and signed the Family and Medical Leave Act. He also increased extreme poverty despite high economic growth.(8) He extended the death penalty to non-homicides and oversaw the largest increase in incarceration rates in the 20th century (double what it was under Reagan).(9,10) He exacerbated inequalities, gave up on Kyoto, and, by his own Labor secretary's account, presided over “one of the most pro-business administrations in American history.” (2,11) His signature social policy, welfare reform, dismantled one of the pillars of the New Deal: the federal cash assistance program for 9 million poor children (AFDC).(12)
By contrast, the conservative Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency, extended the Clean Air Act, introduced the Supplemental Security Income program (to assist the elderly and the disabled), launched the Minority Business Development Agency, signed the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and implemented the first federally-mandated affirmative action program.(13) Nixon was a “Southern strategist” and a right-wing crook: he was also to the left of Bill Clinton.
The senior Democratic senator from New York, the “ultra-liberal” Chuck Schumer, recently killed efforts to raise the tax rate of hedge fund managers to that of his cleaning lady: a nice government handout to overpaid bankers that is worth, annually, half of the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children.(14,15) “I am not a populist,” said Schumer.(16) (Maybe just an opportunist.) During the 2008 presidential campaign, the New York Times gently mocked John Edwards's unauthorized concern for the poor as “raw populism.” (17) That word again. The other P-word, poverty, has acquired in the liberal mind the cosmic permanence of gravity. Much like in the Middle Ages, short of killing the poor, the thinking goes, one cannot kill poverty—even in the richest nation on earth. This capitulation to imaginary laws of economics marks the ascendancy of neoliberalism as the dominant dogma of the ruling class. This is a worldwide phenomenon but its origins are uniquely American. One may wonder: if it's worked against the interests of so many, how then did it happen?...
Read entire article at http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/politics
... By virtually any measure, the United States is the least progressive nation in the developed world.(1) It trails most of Western Europe in poverty rates, life expectancy, health care, child care, infant mortality, maternity leaves, paid vacations, public infrastructure, incarceration rates, and environmental laws. The wealth gap in the US has not been so wide since 1929. The Wal-Mart founders' family owns as much as the bottom 120 million Americans combined.(2) Contrary to received opinion, there is now less social mobility in the US than in Canada, France, Germany, and most Scandinavian countries.(3,4) The European Union attracts more foreign students than the US, including twice as many from China. Its consensus-driven polity, studies indicate, has replaced the American version as the societal model to which the developing world aspires.(5)
And yet could America be a right-wing nation of closet lefties? A Zogby poll reveals overwhelming support for rehabilitation over incarceration for young offenders. In an NES survey, those who want “government to provide many more services even if it means an increase in spending” outnumber backers of spending cuts by 2 to 1. A Pew study cites the same ratio of people who consider corporate profits excessive. It also finds that a majority of Americans believe “government should help the needy even if it means greater debt.” (6)
Democratic leaders, bless their souls, believe no such nonsense. They'll warn you incessantly that any public policy leaning a nano-angstrom to the left is a suicide pact. They'll brush off any talk of raising the top marginal tax rate of 35% to anything approaching the 70% of the Nixon years.(7) Yes, the progressive Bill Clinton expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit and signed the Family and Medical Leave Act. He also increased extreme poverty despite high economic growth.(8) He extended the death penalty to non-homicides and oversaw the largest increase in incarceration rates in the 20th century (double what it was under Reagan).(9,10) He exacerbated inequalities, gave up on Kyoto, and, by his own Labor secretary's account, presided over “one of the most pro-business administrations in American history.” (2,11) His signature social policy, welfare reform, dismantled one of the pillars of the New Deal: the federal cash assistance program for 9 million poor children (AFDC).(12)
By contrast, the conservative Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency, extended the Clean Air Act, introduced the Supplemental Security Income program (to assist the elderly and the disabled), launched the Minority Business Development Agency, signed the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and implemented the first federally-mandated affirmative action program.(13) Nixon was a “Southern strategist” and a right-wing crook: he was also to the left of Bill Clinton.
The senior Democratic senator from New York, the “ultra-liberal” Chuck Schumer, recently killed efforts to raise the tax rate of hedge fund managers to that of his cleaning lady: a nice government handout to overpaid bankers that is worth, annually, half of the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children.(14,15) “I am not a populist,” said Schumer.(16) (Maybe just an opportunist.) During the 2008 presidential campaign, the New York Times gently mocked John Edwards's unauthorized concern for the poor as “raw populism.” (17) That word again. The other P-word, poverty, has acquired in the liberal mind the cosmic permanence of gravity. Much like in the Middle Ages, short of killing the poor, the thinking goes, one cannot kill poverty—even in the richest nation on earth. This capitulation to imaginary laws of economics marks the ascendancy of neoliberalism as the dominant dogma of the ruling class. This is a worldwide phenomenon but its origins are uniquely American. One may wonder: if it's worked against the interests of so many, how then did it happen?...