Alan Greenspan, acolyte of Ayn Rand, free-marketer extraordinaire, famously revealed his crisis of faith:
REP. HENRY WAXMAN: The question I have for you is, you had an ideology, you had a belief that free, competitive -- and this is your statement -- "I do have an ideology. My judgment is that free, competitive markets are by far the unrivaled way to organize economies. We've tried regulation. None meaningfully worked." That was your quote.
[...]
Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?
ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, remember that what an ideology is, is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to -- to exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not.
And what I'm saying to you is, yes, I found a flaw. I don't know how significant or permanent it is, but I've been very distressed by that fact.
REP. HENRY WAXMAN: You found a flaw in the reality...
ALAN GREENSPAN: Flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak.
REP. HENRY WAXMAN: In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working?
ALAN GREENSPAN: That is -- precisely.
One can only imagine how painful, for a conservative, such a revelation must be. Or maybe we don't have to imagine it. Maybe we're having one of our own.
Conservatives believe in free market principles, and to be sure there are some benefits to that approach. But the fatal flaw in their ideology is that they believe in a perfect free market, not the compromised, colluding, crony capitalist free market we actually have. Their policies fail because those policies only work in a idealized system, not in a real one.
Liberals believe in government action, and to be sure there are benefits to that approach. But a flaw in our ideology may be that we believe in a perfect government, not the compromised, colluding, crony capitalist government we actually have. For decades, we imagined that when we finally got around to doing HCR, we would get it done, certainly not perfectly but at least well. We believed we would produce reform that would garner wide approval across large swathes of the population, that with the stroke of a pen our government would resolve one of the great difficulties of modern life.
But that...didn't happen. At least not in the way we envisioned it.
Clearly, many of us view this as an anomaly - things would have worked out IF Obama had pushed harder or IF Reid had gone to reconciliation or IF we weren't stuck with a turd like Lieberman or IF we hadn't made a deal with Big Pharma or IF the Republicans weren't united like the Greeks at Thermopylae. That's the view that assumes things will be better "next time" - when we have Campaign Finance Reform, and a more Progressive President, and a Senate full of Sanderses, and a Liberal Fox to carry our water. In that view, massive, effective social reengineering is well within the capability of our government - it just didn't work this time. There is Real Change at the end of that rainbow.
Of course, an alternative view is that the concept of ideal government is just as flawed as the ideal free market. In this alternate view, any worthwhile large-scale goal (say, preventing another Enron) will result in deeply flawed legislation (aka Sarbanes-Oxley) simply because our legislative process is ill-suited to producing optimal large-scale policy.
Conservatives believe in an unbridled free market, and are deeply distrustful of government. Liberals believe in sweeping government action, and are deeply distrustful of corporate power. Ironically, it may be in our respective skepticism that each side shows the greatest wisdom, and in our respective faiths that each side experiences the most baffling defeats.
In many ways, Progressives are bound by that old adage: "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". Our hammer, our single solution, is writing laws. Even those of us who are disenchanted with the process want to start a new Party - so they can write laws. Will we continue to pursue social justice and equality by simply trying to write The Big Law, or will we expand our palette of techniques, and rethink our strategies?
When the Palestinians were starving, Cynthia McKinney didn't push for a new law. She got her crazy ass on a boat to bring them food. For all that I think she is an awful legislator, she went outside the box and took direct action to achieve change. One McKinney was just a rather embarrassing news item. A thousand McKinneys...who knows?
Consider Bill Clinton. His achievements as President were far from Progressive. Even sitting in the Big Chair, he couldn't get The Big Law done. Social justice eluded him. Now, consider his achievements in the Clinton Global Initiative:
Because of the efforts of CGI's members:
* More than 10 million children have gained access to a better education
* More than 650,000 people have learned new professional skills
* The equivalent of 60 million metric tons of CO2 emissions have been cut
* More than 33 million acres of forest have been protected or restored
* Enough clean energy has been generated to power more than 400,000 homes
* 48 million people now have access to better health care
* More than 12 million people have access to safe, fresh drinking water
* More than $150 million has been invested in new medical research
* 34 million people have access to treatment for neglected tropical diseases
* Nearly nine million people have new jobs or income-generating opportunities
* More than $600 million has been invested in or loaned to small and medium-sized enterprises
* More than three million people have better access to information technology
* Almost three million micro-entrepreneurs have been empowered through microfinance
From a Progressive viewpoint, what he did in office pales next to what he has done outside of it. The same could be said of Al Gore. The same could be said of Jimmy Carter. Maybe, just maybe, there is a lesson here for Progressives. Perhaps we, like Greenspan, have found a flaw in our ideology. We don't know how significant or permanent it is, but we're clearly very distressed by that fact.
The big question is, how will we move forward?