Progressive Messaging Is Off Point Without Strong Labor Movement

Progressives aren’t well known for their skills at politicking. If Clement Atlee, the British prime minister who implemented national health care in the UK, were our president in 2009, somehow the more quavering members of the left would still question his capacity to win comprehensive health care. Likely we’d end up with vouchers to buy private insurance. Invoking George W. Bush’s shameless self-promotion while the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts were being mailed out, these would at least say, “well, we tried.” You see, English humor is much more reflexive.

It’s mostly baffling how abysmal progressives are at the Public Relations game. Indeed, it took 16 years of Depression economics and a conflagration that spanned three continents to force America onto a center-left diet of (lukewarm) union support and (fairly) redistributive tax policy—apparently we’re a hard crowd to convince.

Robert Kuttner took up the issue yesterday in a book review, wondering why Obama failed “to rise to the challenge that history dealt him.” He scans the biographies of the president so far, and notes most authors have cut the president a lot of slack. Leading political writers such as Jonathan Alter, Richard Wolffe, Bob Woodward, and David Remnick apologized for him, Kuttner complains, saying a deep recession and an obstructionist Senate minority can’t sufficiently explain this administration’s limited success in advancing progressive policy. Eric Alterman proposes a new argument, mainly that big conservative money and an ideologically unfocused Democratic party make it nearly impossible to get any more done than what was achieved.

To Kuttner that’s a bit too generous. He points to FDR and LBJ overcoming difficult economic times and intra-party intransigence to burnish their legacies as champions of social welfare and civil rights.

But here are other historical considerations to keep in mind. When FDR took the presidency in 1933, union membership was on an upswing. Between 1930 and 1940, union membership more than doubled from 12.3 percent to 27.6 percent. Meanwhile, America’s role as chief producer globally was well secured. According to famed historian Eric Hobsbawm in his The Age of The Extremes: 1914-1991, by 1900, the US was responsible for a quarter of all industrial production; 29 years later, the US produced 42 percent of total global output, outpacing Europe’s big three of Germany, England, and France by 14 percentage points. These numbers are relevant because with unions on the ascendancy, a mobilizing political force could be co-opted by the right political leader. FDR was that man. His administration was packed deep with labor loyalists, and his famed kitchen cabinet included the inimitable Sidney Hillman. He was CIO vice president until 1940, and founded the Non-Partisan League to bring in socialists and leftists—of which there were many—under the FDR tent in the election year of 1936. In return for his loyalty, FDR wrote into the law the all-important Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

Today, union membership accounts for less than 12 percent of the work force, and the private work force only has 6.9 percent of its workers organized.

Try to recall how effective SEIU and the AFL-CIO were in corralling the white rust-belt vote for Obama in 2008 after many pundits feared they wouldn’t vote at all without Hillary Clinton on the ticket. And don’t forget just how instrumental labor was in creating grassroots campaigns toward passing comprehensive health care reform. They managed to do all that even as union membership has declined from 20 percent of the workforce in 1983 to its current state.

Maybe the pharmacon necessary is a change in message. Progressive sound bites are notoriously unwieldy. And despite conservatives proposing ideas that are sprung from the family cellar --they’re all rich, you see—the voting public eats it up. Appearing on C-SPAN and telling viewers tax cuts for the rich mean more resources to develop jobs is quite the streamlined approach. And the progressive? She’d stand on a dais, perhaps with a fastidiously detailed chart, and explain how numerous tax holes cause market irregularities that require government oversight and a 1001 little programs to spring the economy back to life. If I didn’t know any better, that’s not the kool-aid I’d be drinking.

I’ve long suspected supply-side economics was a commercial ploy to trick the masses into signing up for a 30-year variable rate mortgage the returns of which were never clear. When the inspiration for the theory comes from a snarky comment made by a Depression era humorist, you know you’ve just consigned yourself to a bad deal. And yet, Americans were livid and confused over the housing bubble of 2007-08 that has left us in the economic doldrums. You’d think paying a greater share of your income to finance the bad deals of a GOP tax policy would prep the masses for equally inane standards over on Wall Street. Some say Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley twisted the Fed’s arm into green-lighting its policies. I say the government showed them how it’s to be done.

And yet this Reagan ruse has currency today. The anti-growth austerity measures of Paul Ryan are an example. Obama is sensible enough to not fire large swaths of federal employees if they strike, but suggesting they accept a five year pay-freeze isn’t that far off.

Perhaps that’s unfair, but the main point is this: Political economics is a cumbersome enterprise and the most potent message is the most threadbare. The GOP has been excelling at cheapening the debate for two decades. But it’s not as if liberals and progressives have morphed into unpleasant big-idea sophists in that same time period. The role of labor wasn’t only an imperative for businesses to pay workers fairly. More importantly, it afforded millions of modestly educated people an opportunity to study progressive economic policy under the aegis of familiar and socio-economically equal people.

Unions would organize meetings for its millions of members, distilling information in a compact format that ivory tower types can’t. Since union’s numbers have been falling, progressives have gotten lost in the details, and its ranks have fled. Industry will always outpace the commoner in political contributions. But an integrated network that explains the policies of the day in lay terms is something big business can never do. We need labor for that, and we need it now.

Mikhail Zinshteyn is a staff writer for Campus Progress. You can e-mail him at mzinshteyn@googlemail.com.

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