Do Progressives Have the Wrong Idea About Change?

By Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, AlterNet. Posted October 8, 2007.

Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus have written a book -- Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (Houghton Mifflin, 2007) -- that challenges the way we are used to thinking about solving social problems. The conventional wisdom writ large, especially for progressives, is that when things are bad, people need to be scared into changing their habits, whether it is to protect the 50 million people who lack health care, or the behaviors that contribute to potential climate catastrophe. Most of us assume that we have severely limited resources, that growth is bad, and we need ever-increasing amounts of regulation to save the future.

In their book, Nordhaus and Shellenberger suggest something very different. They argue strongly that scaring people is no way to make change. For example the 250 million people with health care will not be inclined to fight for those who don't have it, unless they feel confident in the future, and that the health system will improve for them too, since people don't want what exists to get worse in the process of expanding care.

The same for climate catastrophe: As Nordhaus and Shellenberger put it: "Cautionary tales and narratives of eco-apocalypse tend to provoke fatalism, conservatism, and survivalism among voters -- not the rational embrace of environmental policies. This research is consistent with extensive social-science research that strongly correlates fear, rising insecurity, and pessimism about the future with resistance to change."

Furthermore, they strongly argue that an enormous investment in green technology, including huge commitments from the military, as in supporting the Internet and computer chips development, combined with unleashing the best of the American "can do" inventive energy is a much more viable approach than the technological fixes, caps on pollution, carbon trading, and all the strategies that put constraints on human activity. This is controversial approach to say the least, and one that flies in the face of much of what progressives have come to believe about growth and regulation.

Needless to say, in a world with enormous problems and challenges facing all of us, and the radically different worldviews that dramatically divide this country, considering new, provocative ideas can cause anxiety. Many simply want to get the bad guys out of power. But if and when that happens, we still need to figure out how to fix the massive array of problems ahead of us. That is Shellenberger and Nordhaus's point. The old ideas are not going to work. We need a new vision, and the authors are offering one, and stirring the pot in the process.

In the end, many readers may not agree with the Break Through thesis, but the ideas the authors present deserve discussion and debate. Progressives are stuck with a lot of conventional wisdom that has not led us to change and the success we need.

What follows is an essay from Nordhaus and Shellenberger, based upon ideas in their book, followed by commentary from writers with strong opinions on the book. A second article on AlterNet today is a review by environmental writer and leader Bill McKibben of Break Through and Bjorn Lomborg's Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalists Guide to Global Warming.

-- Don Hazen, Executive Editor

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American Power: The Case for an Energetic New Progressive Politics

By Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger

Most progressives today are optimistic that, in 2008, Democrats will regain the White House and solidify their majority in Congress, largely on the basis of the country's anti-war sentiment alone. But down this path lies danger, for if Democrats fail to offer a vision for the future that is as large and positive as the war in Iraq is negative, we may take back the White House and Congress and fail to take back America.

A new politics should inspire Americans to grapple with certain existential questions: What kind of a country do we want? How can we achieve it? These questions implicitly contain a question about investment: how shall we invest our wealth and our labor?

With Iraq and the "war on terror," the conservative movement has defined American power as unilateral military force. Progressives have not yet offered a counter-argument and story about American greatness that is capable of challenging the (neo)conservative one.

A new story of American Power begins by acknowledging what our country is great at: imagining, experimenting, and inventing the future. First we dream -- and then we invent.

The time is ripe for progressives and environmentalists of all stripes to come together around American Power agenda for a major investment into clean energy. Not only is a large public investment crucial to bringing down the price of clean energy, an investment-centered agenda will serve the purpose of unifying Americans under a vision for energy independence and economic revitalization, one that will appeal to California and New England progressives and environmentalists and Midwestern Reagan Democrats alike.

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Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger are authors of Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), and founders of American Environics and the Breakthrough Institute.

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