Progressives Have a Chance to Dominate American Politics for the Next 40 Years

By Sara Robinson, AlterNet. Posted June 10, 2009.

The first step in any change process is understanding that you have a problem. I think most of us get that by now. The next step is understanding exactly what the problem is. It's only after that that you can start looking at solutions and next steps. It's understandable that the new president doesn't want to waste his precious time and political capital. But on this he's putting his needs ahead of the needs of the entire progressive movement and our future.

These stories need to be told now, while they're fresh. Former Vice President Dick Cheney is already out there trying to rewrite history. The conservatives are unbelievably good at this, and they'll succeed if we don't get out there and stop them. We need to claim the next narrative for our own about what happened.

The second objective is restoring America's trust in the basic competence of its government. FDR faced this same problem, and he solved it by instituting Social Security, which saved an earlier generation, whose retirement had also been wiped out in a Wall Street feeding frenzy. I can understand that particular gift a whole lot better now.

But Social Security did more than that. It also shut up the economic royalists, and it reintroduced Americans to the value of social contracts and the belief in the common good. And it worked.

America had accepted these ideas so completely that liberals were able to seize control of the entire political discourse, and they dominated it for the next few decades. On most issues, the conservatives were there, but they had no choice but to accommodate themselves to what the progressives wanted.

In our generation, this teachable moment will be passing universal health care with a public option. The right wing is absolutely terrified about this because it knows that once Americans realize how much government can deliver, their whole political narrative will be exposed as a colossal lie.

Fifteen years ago, in the heat of the 1993 Hillary-Care debate, conservative political analyst and commentator Bill Kristol wrote a famous strategy memo in which he argued that "the passage of the Clinton health care plan in any form would be disastrous. It's success would signal the rebirth of centralized welfare state policy at the very moment such policy is being perceived as a failure in other areas."

Conservatives are acutely aware that if we get health care that works, they're going to be shut out of power and out of the conversation for decades to come.

They've worked very hard to break the trust between Americans and the government. Once people realize that government can solve this problem, that trust is going to return. And Americans will start to think about what else we might be able to accomplish if we pull together. From that point on, the dominant narrative will be ours.

The third objective wont' be news to most of you -- like I said, it's all one thing. The problem at the root of every other problem we face is campaign-finance reform. There are piles of studies now proving that upwards of 70 percent of Americans generally support progressive values. But no matter what your issue or concern is -- education, the environment, social justice, economic reform, anything -- the fact is that as long as money does the talking, those voices aren't going to be heard.

As progressives, we tend to think about this issue as an afterthought just because it's so big and exhausting -- something that might be nice if we can get to it one day. But it's not. It's the very first thing -- the one cause that makes every other effect possible.

The Democrats don't want to put this on the national agenda. But for us as progressives, public financing options are a non-negotiable prerequisite. If we don't do this, we're not going to be able to govern the way we want to, and we're probably going to run out of power a lot sooner than we should.

There is, of course, a lot more to be said about these ideas. ... But I encourage you, in closing, to take heart. The tides of history, demographics, and just the way the world works are on our side. So is the national mood.

If we can write an accurate history of the Bush years, restore the trust between Americans and their government, and get back to a place where votes speak louder than money, there's no reason we can't keep the conservatives in limbo until we've all exited stage left, and it will be our grandkids’ turn to deal with them.

The above is a transcript of Campaign for America's future fellow Sara Robinson's speech to the America's Future Now! conference panel, "Kick Them When They Are Down? How the Right Plans to Come Back and What Can Be Done About It." It has been edited for clarity.

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Sara Robinson is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future, and a consulting partner with the Cognitive Policy Works in Seattle. One of the few trained social futurists in North America, she has blogged on authoritarian and extremist movements at Orcinus since 2006, and is a founding member of Group News Blog.

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