Steve Burns: Progressive? Liberal? What's the difference?

Progressive, not liberal

Writing on the BobFest website, WNPJ member Steve Carlson (left) reports on his visit to the 7th Congressional District Democratic Party convention as a delegate of the Washburn County Democrats. Steve observed that a resolution urging President to advocate for a "progressive agenda" seemed to get hung up, at least in part, on confusion about the meaning of the term "progressive", prompting Steve to ask: "What does it mean to be a progressive? And how does a progressive differ, say, from a liberal?"

Steve answered the question with several specific examples, including "Progressives vote against unnecessary war-making, and endless war funding, no matter who is in the Oval Office" and "Progressives would like to see clean energy/jobs legislation debated without tying it to an overturn of Wisconsin's nuclear moratorium law."

I suppose there may be as many answers to Steve's question as there are progressives (and I encourage you to add your own definition in comments below) but here's my attempt at an answer:

The fundamental difference between progressives and liberals is in how they react to the most salient fact of our political system today, the overwhelming dominance of corporate power over our government. Liberals, in general, seek to avoid direct challenges to corporate power, preferring to take a "carrot and stick" approach, by which they attempt to channel corporate power in a less destructive direction through a combination of modest regulations and generous government incentives.

Liberal thinkers take corporate dominance of government as a fact of life, and may even pride themselves on their acceptance of this fact. In their minds, getting our corporate overlords "on board" for a given piece of legislation is an example of "smart politics", and "knowing how to work the system."

No better example for the liberal mindset can be found than the Obama health care plan. Taking corporate power as a given, President Obama worked hard to get the insurance industry and drug industry on his side from the beginning, buying their support through an "individual mandate" that forces us to buy the insurance industry's overpriced and defective products, and a secret deal with Big Pharma to limit cost savings from prescription drugs. Proposals such as the "public option", that would have presented some mild challenge to corporate control of our health care system, were taken off the table and were actively squelched when the public pressed for their consideration.

Closer to home, liberal politicians and interest groups in Wisconsin began their work on a state-level climate-change bill with a desperate search for goodies to get the utilities "on board," finally settling on an offer to repeal Wisconsin's decades-old requirement that builders of new nuclear plants be able to certify that there's a safe place to put the plant's highly radioactive waste. Complain about this, and you'll be told, in a quite condescending way, that you shouldn't "let the perfect be the enemy of the good", that "you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs", and perhaps even that "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" (in the ongoing battle between liberals and progressives, liberals have a big lead in the cliche department.) Don't expect the level of condescension and "we know how to get things done" smugness to be diminished in the least by the fact that this compromise, in fact, failed to produce a bill. Liberal advocates of compromise will be back next year, arguing for even greater give-backs to industry, while assuring us that this is how you "get things done."

I don't dispute that it's a "smart" strategy for a politician to work with (or even for) the corporations rather than challenge them, in the same way that it's a "smart" strategy for citizens living under a repressive government to keep their heads down and not speak out against the regime. Challenging the powerful may be the right thing to do, but it's seldom the "smart" thing to do.

The problem with these "smart" liberal tactics is that we've now reached the point where corporate power is so dominant that corporations have no reason to make any meaningful concessions at all. Instead, they've now turned our government into an engine of corporate subsidies, with few, if any, benefits "trickling down" to the rest of us. When a system becomes as rotten as ours, knowing how to "work the system" is a recipe for failure rather than success. And it's not only a recipe for policy failure, it's a recipe for political failure too. President Obama should recognize this as well as anyone, as his turn from a populist outsider candidate into a "know how to get things done" Washington insider caused a corresponding drop in his approval ratings.

But enough about liberals. As a card-carrying progressive, I claim that progressives base their work on the following ideas: 1) the root cause of most of our problems is corporate power, 2) corporate power must be challenged rather than accommodated and 3) the only way to effectively challenge corporate power is with mass people power. Rather than attempting to "work the system", progressives seek to organize mass social movements that challenge and change the system. Progressives aren't necessarily against compromise -- in a democracy, nobody gets everything they want -- but progressives never raise compromise in itself to a virtue, don't see willingness to compromise as a measure of political savviness, and are willing to walk away from a deal when it's clearly a bad deal. If the balance of political forces isn't with them at the moment, progressives are willing to put off political deal-making, go back to the public to win greater public support for their position, and then come back with an even stronger set of demands.

Since I put President Obama's health care plan forward as an example of corrupt liberal deal-making, let's look at how a progressive President Obama would have approached the task. First, he would have exercised the progressive tendency to go to the root of a problem, identifying the for-profit nature of our current "system" as the central cause of our sky-high spending and lack of coverage for tens of millions. Next, he would have named corporate control of Congress, and especially the Senate, as the fundamental block to real reform. Making use of his high approval ratings when first elected, and the low approval ratings of the for-profit insurance industry, Obama would have gone directly to the public, calling for a true mass movement to overcome the corporate lock on Congress. Progressive President Obama would have said, "In two months, I'm going to send to Congress a bill to make a transition from our current profit-based system to a nonprofit 'Medicare for all' system. I need your help to put two million Americans on the Mall in Washington on that day, to remind members of Congress who they work for." Can anyone doubt he would have gotten two million people in D.C. in support of his plan? A few months of this treatment, and the insurance industry and their bought-and-paid-for Congressmen would have been begging for a public option.

No, I can't guarantee this strategy would have produced a bill. That's the thing about challenging the powerful: You can't be sure ahead of time that you'll be successful, any more than those who marched with Dr. King in Selma could be sure they would be successful. But, unless we're willing to live in a state of perpetual corporate servitude, we will need to take on corporate power sometime. Why not now? When will we have a better issue with which to challenge the corporate state than health care?

Why didn't President Obama follow this strategy? It's clearly not that I'm a smarter political tactician than he is (let's remember who's President and who's not). Rather, Obama's goals are not mine. He's not a progressive, he's a liberal.

Steve Burns is Program Director of Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice.