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Determinants of social policies
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Toward a Popular Progressive PoliticsAuthor(s): Theda SkocpolSource: The Good Society, Vol. 7, No. 3 (FALL 1997), pp. 22-23Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20710834 .
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^ SYMPOSIUM ^^^B two-thirds of each house of Congress." A Balanced Budget Amendment would be a nice complement to this, but not a necessity. Of greater use, would be a more stringent version of my proposal that would limit the federal government to 15 percent of any house
hold's income, from all types of taxes. This would prevent our cre
ative politicians from imposing a national sales tax or a value-added
tax to keep Leviathan's stomach full. Leviathan would try to print
money and preserve its corpus by inflation, but that has its natural
limits, as the 1970s demonstrated.
Would Leviathan wither and die? Unlikely, but it would have to
cut off some appendages and set priorities. No more phony plans to
balance the budget in X number of years, with no real cuts in out
lays, as our Congress now "balances" the budget. The central defect of American democracy, in sum, is that
Leviathan's appetite consumes too much of the lifetime and produc
tivity of every American. Its tentacles must be loosened and our
energies released. We must feel that we are, once again, in control of
our lives. The remedy: head off Leviathan at the trough by amending the Sixteenth Amendment.
Ellen Frankel Paul is Deputy Director of the Social Philosophy and
Policy Center and Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at
Bowling Green State University.
Endnotes
1. Life expectancy for Americans at birth in 1900 was 47 years; in
1995, it was 75.8 years.
2. That is, claims by states of the right to nullify federal laws.
3. The United States's first income tax was levied during the Civil War and was in effect between 1862 and 1872. An income tax passed
Congress in 1894 but was overturned by a Supreme Court decision the fol
lowing year.
4. These calculations from the Tax Foundation, a Washington, D.C.
think tank, include the family's share of federal and state corporate taxes,
which could be considered a debatable inclusion, under the assumption
that all taxes are ultimately borne by individuals. (The median family, thus,
faced a tax burden of about $22,000 on income of slightly over $53,000.) The U.S. Census Bureau's calculations of "Historical Income Tables:
Experimental Measures" massages the figures in the opposite direction,
and with a whole set of far more dubious assumptions, trying to show that
the median family, after taxes and government transfer payments, hardly
loses anything in the bargain.
Toward a Popular Progressive Politics Theda Skocpol
Public life in America is now so dominated by the clash of nar
rowly organized, privileged groups that we are evolving into a
"democracy" in name only. The problem is not simply the role of
big money in electoral politics, although that is a key symptom. More broadly construed, we now have a system in which centrally
organized interest and advocacy groups clash among themselves in
national centers of power?Washington DC, New York City, and a
few major centers in the West and Southwest?without much incen
tive to communicate with anyone else. Some of these interests are on
the right, and advocate tax cuts and deregulation for businesses and
the rich. Others are supposedly more toward the left, and advocate
narrow measures to promote elite careers in government, universi
ties, and non-profit organizations. Left and right each have moral
causes, too, advocated by staff-dominated single-issue groups.
Apparently, there is a wide range of difference of opinion. But no
one is really speaking up for the security of families of modest
means.
Over the past several decades, so much of the focus of the left has
been on issues of racial and gender equity that we may have lost
track of the major trend in this period?toward separating off the
most privileged Americans, businesspeople and managers and elite
professionals alike?from everyone else, including most of the mid
dle class and working class. The top fifth of the society lives differ
ently and relates politically very differently from everyone else. Not
just the poor, but those in the middle, are losing ground economi
cally. And they are increasingly objects of manipulation by media,
political, and economic elites, who have no incentive to mobilize
broad popular participation or shared communication in public affairs.
What to do about it? As Stanley Greenberg and I argue, along with a dozen others, in our new book The New Majority: Toward a
Popular Progressive Politics (Yale University Press, September
1997), the Democratic Party needs to be revitalized and reformed
from within by popularly oriented progressives willing to champion the needs of working families of ordinary prospects. Building on
unions, religious congregations, and community groups, progres sives need to break out of cause or identity politics and find ways to
link up with broad alliances of working-aged adults, especially par
22 The Good Society
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^ DILEMMAS OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
ents striving to raise children in an increasingly unforgiving econ
omy and individualistically libertine culture. Progressives need to
realize that the defense of Social Security and Medicare as shared
security programs is vital. The most prominent policy trend of our
time is the pulling away of elite people from shared, publicly funded
programs; and as soon as programs get defined as "welfare," they can be gutted even further. Progressives should worry less about
avant-guard values, and speak up for the value concerns of ordinary
people?about fighting crime, protecting children from inappropri ate cultural messages, and improving the quality of education. A
politics that combines economic justice with middle-of-the-road
family values is what progressives should espouse. And there must
be a concerted effort to build majoritarian politics, to find new ways to engage millions of citizens, even if the immediate goals of such
involvement seem "square" to sophisticated leftists.
As we argue in The New Majority, the revitalized union move
ment led by the AFL-CIO under John Sweeney is an important part of a new majority popular politics, within and beyond the electoral
arena. But popular, progressive Democrats also need to engage
family-oriented community and religious groups to build a network
of engaged citizens that extends beyond unionized industries and
communities.
The United States faces a fork in the road as the new century dawns. If conservatives (in both major parties) have their way, all of
our tax and social policies will soon be reconfigured to facilitate
elite separation from everyone else. We will have private, market
based opulence for the top fifth, and more and more private and pub lic squalor for everyone else. The popular progressive alternative to
this must be boldly and comprehensively conceived to win majority
support. Progressives must continue to speak up for minorities and
women, of course. At the same time, they should pursue a new
majority politics centered on the shared values and needs of the vast
majority of Americans who work for a living and strive to raise fam
ilies and build communities at the same time.
Theda Skocpol is a Professor of Government and Sociology at
Harvard University and is the author 0/Boomerang: Health Reform
and the Turn Against Government (W.W. Norton paperback version,
1997) and Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of
Social Policy in the United States (Harvard University Press, 1992).
Race and the Limits of American Democracy at Century's End Linda F. Williams
As the worldwide movement for democracy from Eastern Europe to Asia, Africa, and beyond has gathered steam over the last decade, some high-level hand-wringing about the health of democracy in its
most oft-cited paragon, the United States, has been taking place. Some point to the decline in the ethic of civic responsibility and the
winnowing of civic association. Others wax nostalgic about a time
in which local governments were more vibrant and powerful. In
short, both popular and academic discussions are awash with the
rhetoric of "reinvigorating" American democracy.
Ironically, however, fewer and fewer analysts concerned with
"renewing and deepening" American democracy bother even to dis cuss its most steadfast Achilles heel: the enduring crucible of race.
Apparently in most high-brow discussions in the late 1990s, racial
equality is not one of the political and economic requisites for hav
ing a serious democratic experience in the United States. Yet, as rec
ognized at least since de Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America,1 the attention one gives to race and its treatment, perhaps more than
any other factor, continues to substantially influence the degree to
which the United States should be considered to be a full democ
racy; just if and when it became one; and how long it will remain one. From the birth of the nation onward, America has seemed most
democratic if one avoids the glare of race and least democratic if
one closely examines it.
Although the civil rights movement was perhaps the most ambi
tious and successful social movement of twentieth-century America,
today its achievements seem ambiguous. Not surprisingly, the gains were uneven. For example, middle-class people of color benefited
more than did poor ones. African Americans gained more jobs in the
public sector than did Latinos. Middle-class Cubans who fled Cuba
after the revolution and the Vietnamese elites who fled Saigon at the
end of the Vietnam War found an America far more hospitable than
that encountered by the Laotian and Cambodian refugees of the
same period, the later "Marielito" immigrants from Cuba, or the
Haitians, all of whom arrived with nothing and discovered an
America paved, not with gold, but with concrete.2 Yet the gains since
the 1960s made a dent in occupational and educational segregation and advanced democratic rights across the board.
Federally sponsored remedies aimed at integrating public schools
and universities and expanding access to economic opportunity and
political representation have been steadily eroding since at least the
1980s. The deeply racialized content of public debates about social
welfare and criminal justice reveals the failure of conventional poli tics to bring blacks and whites together in a truly meaningful sense.
Public figures of all stripes are flattening the historical landscape as
they rail against "reverse discrimination," welfare, and "law and
order." Political leaders cloak themselves in the language of "racial
Volume 7, Number 3 23
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