(Crossposted at the Change to Win blog, CtW Connect)
Ever since it became clear that Barack Obama was going to win the Presidency, pundits have been frantically trying to spin the idea that no matter how people voted, America is a “center-right” country, more inclined to believe in conservative principles than in progressive ones.
But when you push past the noise of the chattering classes, you see a very different reality: a new progressive consensus has emerged in America -- a consensus that came to life on November 4 and sent shock waves through our politics. And the voters who embrace this consensus believe strong, unapologetic progressive leadership is what will be required to restore the American Dream for everyone.
Learn more about the new progressive consensus after the jump...
Here’s a good mashup from the Center for American Progress showing just how aggressively pundits have pushed the "center-right nation" talking point:
Some of these people can be forgiven for spouting such nonsense, because they are themselves committed conservatives; it can be hard to come to grips with the idea that the ideas you hold dear are profoundly out of sync with the ideas of the people around you. But it’s a bit puzzling why anyone outside the conservative noise machine would buy into this, given the volume of evidence to the contrary.
You don’t even have to consider the election results to see the emergence of a new progressive consensus. Just take a look at our most recent American Dream Survey, where we asked working people across the country what they thought the proper role of government was in restoring the American Dream.
The results were pretty uneqivocal:
- 68% of respondents said that the statement “government has to be part of the solution” is closer to what they believe than is the statement “government is the problem, not the solution”; only 27% disagreed
- 54% agreed that government intervention was needed to resolve the current financial crisis; only 37% disagreed
Additionally, we asked participants to rate a range of proposals from 0 to 10, with 10 indicating strongest agreement that the proposal would help restore the American Dream. Progressive proposals received deep and strong support. Here are the mean scores for some of them:
- Guarantee every American has access to quality, affordable health care: 8.8
- Create a more progressive tax system: 8.6
- Make sure all trade agreements are fair and crack down on corporations who send jobs overseas: 8.8
- Stimulate the economy and create jobs through investment in infrastructure: 8.6
- Make it easier for working people to form unions without management interference: 7.6
And when you look only at respondents under 30, the support gets even stronger. Ratings from young workers:
- Guarantee every American has access to quality, affordable health care: 9.0
- Create a more progressive tax system: 8.7
- Make sure all trade agreements are fair and crack down on corporations who send jobs overseas: 9.0
- Stimulate the economy and create jobs through investment in infrastructure: 8.7
- Make it easier for working people to form unions without management interference: 8.2
These are proposals that the pundits would have you believe belong to the loony left — the “dirty hippie” fringe of the Democratic Party. But as you can see, when you talk to people who work for a living, you find that they are anything but fringe ideas. In fact, they are conventional wisdom.
In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Thomas Frank made the same point:
It is possible, I suppose, that the pundits are right and the public didn’t really mean it when it elected a liberal Democrat president and gave Democrats even larger majorities in both houses of Congress. Maybe America really wants the same nice, reassuring, centrist thing as always.
But it is also possible that, for once, the public weighed the big issues and gave a clear verdict on the great economic questions of the last few decades. It is likely that we really do want universal health care and some measure of wealth-spreading, and even would like to see it become easier to organize a union in the workplace, however misguided such ideas may seem to the nation’s institutions of higher carping.
But if support for things like universal health care and employee free choice is so strong, why isn’t that reflected in our national discourse?
The answer, Frank explains, is simple: those proposals would take power away from those at the very top of our economic pyramid, and give it to those farther down. And those at the top aren’t ready to hand it over.
More unions, in turn, means higher wages, better benefits, more say for workers in business decisions, and all that other awful stuff. If Wal-Mart employees get a union, it’s a pretty fair bet they won’t have to work after they’ve punched out.
Card check is about power. Management has it, workers don’t, and business doesn’t want that to change. Consider the remarks made by Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott at an analyst meeting on Oct. 28, when he was asked about the possible coming of card check: “We like driving the car and we’re not going to give the steering wheel to anybody but us.”
So they dump tens of millions of dollars into misleading ads, slanted think tank reports, and other propaganda vehicles to make it appear that things that are popular actually aren’t, and that the policies that people want, they actually don’t. In other words, to push the idea that a nation of progressives is really a “center-right nation” when all the evidence indicates otherwise.
But once you clear all that clutter away, the underlying reality is still there. Americans want strong, concerted progressive action. That’s why they voted the way they did on November 4. That’s the way they believe the American Dream will be restored for all of us.