"Merely liberal"

I was wrong about Progressives, a reader wrote me. 

He said Progressives are not  just "very liberal." They are not liberals.

Progressives want to change the power structure.  Don't think left-to-right. The real scale is vertical: bottoms up change, or top down perpetuation of the status quo.

Dale Borman Fink

Three days ago this blog compared Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar and the other Democratic candidates by positing a scale of progressive to very liberal to merely liberal to moderate. 

This scale is one of the conventional ways to think of the twenty-plus candidates. Left-right.

Dale Borman Fink is a college classmate. He said conventional thinking was wrong. "Mere liberals," he said, try to improve and reform the social order. Progressives want something very different, he said. Bernie Sanders, and perhaps others, want bottom up fundamental change with the power structure, something which comes from grass roots social movements, not the shuffling of people within the top of the power structure.

During the 2016 campaign this blog had warned that the Democratic prescription under Hillary for getting into or staying in the middle class was to go to graduate school and get a professional degree. The implication: Join the top, if you can, because they have the power and are going to keep it. Improve yourself. 

This was a loser argument, I wrote, and a thinly disguised insult to working people. Everyone cannot go to law school. We all can't be pharmacists. Liberals thought they were advocating for working Americans, but what they were really saying was that being a worker was a dead end, so stop being one. Become a professional. A great many workers felt abandoned by Democrats, because they were abandoned.  So they voted for for Trump, as I had feared and predicted. 

Dale Borman Fink told me Progressives have a different prescription. Working people don't need to change. They need to unionize. They need to use their numbers to seize power and make live better for the working people doing the essential blue and pink collar work of the nation by demanding a bigger share of the economic and political pie. It's a bottoms up approach, and it values those people for being exactly who they are, individually and as a group: working people in a democracy.

Dale grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he lost the student council presidency of his public high school to Mitch Daniels, later to be known as "Governor Daniels."  After graduating from Harvard in 1972, Dale worked for many years in day care and early childhood education, and was a leader of the Boston Area Daycare Workers Union (BADWU), one of the first efforts in the country to unionize workers in childcare.  Currently, he is a tenured professor at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.

He commutes to work on a bicycle.

Guest Post by Dale Borman Fink

In a recent post, Peter Sage used the term "merely liberal" to contrast to "progressive." This is not a critique of Peter but what I see as  a teachable moment.  Millions of voters do not relate to the (oft promoted) concept that these terms are on a spectrum, with the latter being a bit farther out from the center than the former.  Many voters who call themselves progressive or democratic socialist reject liberalism and don't see it as just a more tepid version of ourselves.  

In polls, Bernie Sanders does not do that well with voters who call themselves "very liberal."  IN fact, I recently read that he draws over 20% as the first choice of those watching Fox, while he draws fewer than 15% of those watching MSNBC. MSNBC is liberal and leaning "very liberal" but Bernie is not. Nor am I. Nor are millions of those who supported him in the 2016 primaries.  He went to Trump country (invited by Chirs Hayes of MSNBC if I recall accurately) in West Virginia in the early months of the Trump presidency, and drew a huge throng and talked about Medicare for all, union rights, corporate greed, criminal justice reform, miners' benefits, and drew a great response--not because they saw him as a liberal but they saw him as a fighter for the people, against corporate America. 

What I would like classmates to entertain is the idea that "liberal" translates to "corporate." I would also use the term "top-down."  Those characterizing themselves as liberals largely have ideas about "improving people's lives" by tinkering with policy and legislation from the top. Progressives recognize that social movements, grass roots movements, civil rights and labor movements are what moves the needle, from the bottom up. Of course liberals and progressives should ally with one another--as John Lewis, the young radical SNCC organizer, to some degree allied with LBJ, the liberal (on certain issues) on civil rights legislation). 

I don't think many voters saw Hilary Clinton as desirous of upending the corporate or political establishment from the bottom up. They saw her accurately as a "corporate top-down liberal."  They did, for better--and mostly worse--see Trump as upending the system: a one-person billionaire wrecking crew.  Many liked the "wrecking" part of that equation even if not the man. 

I believe voters do see Sanders, Warren, and to some degree Castro wanting to empower people from the bottom to restructure the system.  Maybe DeBlasio too on a good day.