Is Liberalism Dead?

By Lakshmi Chaudhry, AlterNet. Posted December 8, 2004.

Adam Werbach is used to making a splash. He was a mere 23-year-old when he became the president of the Sierra Club, one of the biggest environmental groups in the country. He went on to co-found the Apollo Alliance, an organization that offers a bold, innovative plan to energy independence: strategic investments in fuel-efficient technologies that will create jobs, reduce consumption, decrease oil imports, and therefore reorient U.S. foreign policy. Yes, Werbach is a man of Big Ideas.

So it's hardly surprising that within days of the 2004 elections, Werbach was calling for a dramatic transformation of progressive politics. He circulated a short but powerful pamphlet titled, "November 3rd Theses," calling for "a new progressive politics for the new century." It soon became a clarion call to arms for the many progressives angry and disillusioned with the Democratic Party.

But Werbach is not done. Tonight, he will deliver a speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco titled, "The Death of Environmentalism." But it's not just the environmental movement in Werbach's crosshairs. According to him, the entire liberal project has simply run out of gas. To succeed, progressives must first, to use his words, kick the dead body out of the car, before they can begin to create something new.

He spoke to AlterNet from his home in San Francisco.

Why do you think the Democrats lost to Bush?

The first point is that they lost, and lost big. I don’t want to minimize that point because many of our compatriots are still in denial.

You mean the stolen election stuff.

Do the Republicans cheat? Yes. If we focus solely on that do we miss the point? Yes. What we’re seeing right now is denial from the leaders who are saying some combination of the following three things. First, they’re saying we won (laughs). Even though the election results turned out poorly, everything we did was right. That’s delusional. So there’s a lack of accountability there. Second, they’re saying it was a mechanics problem, so we almost won. If we just tried a little hard or had been a little more organized. So it’s a matter of just a little bit of tweaking, around the edges. And then third, they’re saying it's money. This is the first election in my lifetime where we had a comparable amount of money to the Republicans, so I think it’s specious to say that.

So the first thing is to understand that the Democrats are now a minority party. To understand that we’ve been losing for a long time. We haven’t won the majority popular vote since Carter. Most importantly, we need to accept that the underlying moral intellectual framework of the Democratic Party – liberalism – is dead.

I’m talking here of the Depression-era, New Deal project, which Democrats championed, and that was liberalism. And it has been incredible. The liberal project created minimum wage, the 40-hour workweek, Social Security. It was muscular militarily and ended fascism. It led toward civil rights. That’s our heritage. But in my mind, it was betrayed in the late '70’s and early '80’s, and at this point is a ghost. It’s exhausted. So that is the point of the election. And that is, in fact, more frightening.

The theory was that if we took all the Democratic interest groups and turned them out, if we took all the people who agreed with us on the issues, we would win. We turned out all those people and the interest groups – we still lost.

One of your November 3 Theses says that "the failure of the Democratic Party to connect with America’s desire for fulfillment is political death.” Is that why liberalism is dead?

Well, the liberal project was largely an economic project. It said people are rational economic actors and if you give them survival-based services, they will vote for you. Most Americans today are not survival-oriented; they’re fulfillment-oriented.

In a sense, you’re saying we’re a victim of our own success?

Yes, yes, that’s well said. We have changed the circumstances for most Americans and now we find ourselves unable to speak to them.

So what is this desire for fulfillment now?

It’s exactly what’s going on what I imagine in your life and my life, but we sort of patronizingly believe that the people we advocate for don’t have those same concerns. People are looking for something to believe in. They’re looking for meaning in life. They’re looking to be part of a broader project.

Democrats sort of imagine the poor as an "other" and objectify their needs, and wants, and desires.

As in we imagine them as these poor struggling souls who are basically trying to make ends meet and put food on the dinner table …

Right before they go clean chimneys. It’s patronizing. First of all, very few people define themselves as poor. Most people define themselves as middle-class. And people who define themselves as poor, for example, suffer more from obesity than starvation.

The way you hear this the most is that people voted against their self-interests. You hear that all the time. It exposes a defect in our thinking, which sees your self-interest as based on your economic status. It gives no credence to your fulfillment interest – this desire to believe in something.

Lakshmi Chaudhry is senior editor of AlterNet. This is the third in a series of interviews that AlterNet plans to publish as part of its "Take America Back" coverage, which tries to make sense of the 2004 elections and put forward the best ideas on how to move ahead. Read the other interviews with Tom Frank and Adrian Wooldridge.

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