Generally speaking, anyone alive and using the Internet today is among the wealthiest fraction of human beings ever to walk the earth. We have so much stuff but our gratitude is often misplaced.
A college professor and mentor liked to put things into perspective by asking me to imagine the typical day of a medieval royal, a person who, in his time, counted himself among the most fortunate mammals in history. Take a royal in medieval England, who might wake up in a September morning cold. For breakfast, he may eat his fill of salted herring and wash it down with wine--the only beverage he could trust not to give him cholera (only the most wretched drank water). I am no royal, but I will wake up tomorrow to shower in some of the cleanest water known to man, heated effortlessly with fuel pulled from deep underground and shipped across the sea. I enjoy a cup of coffee from another climate and ride a bicycle down a beautiful network of streets and stop-lights--hundreds of thousands of us running in all different directions each day with virtually no problems. I trust--not naively--that everyone respects the rule of the red lights, and ride ceaselessly through the green without concern for my life. I ride to a job that secures my livelihood with little risk or effort (Imagine what it would mean to hunt these hills or till these fields or fish this bay.). And if I fail at my job--or if my job fails me--I am comforted by a safety net that ensures that I will live better than the royals of yesterday could imagine. Compared to almost anyone who has ever lived, my life is indulgent... and I still haven't told you about the iPhone.
If we are not grateful to our parents for their sacrifices and investments then we are either ingrates or fools. But the true source of our material wealth is our good fortune to live in a place where a civil order prevails. It's only in the comforts of that order that we make progress. All of my gratitude comes back to this. I live in a place where I have the comfort of knowing that you will stop on your red light; the comfort of knowing that a primitive lock will protect my bicycle while I work; the comfort of knowing that if I loose my job the safety net will save me; the comfort of knowing that if my bank fails, my savings are secure; the comfort of knowing that even when the fiber of our economy is rattled by crisis, the greatest intellectual resources are coming to the helm to restore it because I live in a place where I have the comfort of knowing that when I vote the old order out of office, they will leave peacefully on January 20th.
I should begin by clarifying that I advocate same-sex marriage on a normative basis and as the correct interpretation of the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution. I was therefore disappointed by Proposition 8's success in California. While plenty of arguments have been offered to defend Proposition 8 on moral, natural, and familial grounds, it seems clear that the only honest motivation was religion (and perhaps the popular defense, "yuck").
The most common religious defense is that homosexual marriage threatens the institution itself. The tragedy is that many people do feel that the state recognition of homosexual marriage changes the nature of their own marriages, they have good reasons, and it's our fault for not being crystal-clear about the separation of church and state.
American Protestants have enjoyed centuries as the cultural and political heirs to the United States: The nation was founded and (until this century) owned and operated by White Protestants. And while Protestantism is hardly the only religion to blur the distinction between church and state (the Catholic Church is just as active in lobbying to change public school curricula, for example), I believe marriage is an issue over which Protestants feel uniquely entitled because they have no need to distinguish a political marriage from a religious marriage: the United States has largely codified into law the Protestant institution.
Other groups—for example Catholics and Orthodox Jews—have religious practices which are not codified into statute (Catholics do not believe in divorce but have their own church process for Annulment, Orthodox Jews have no divorce but men may grant a get). These differences remind those groups that a political marriage differs from a religious marriage.
Catholics and Protestants had very different opinions about Proposition 8. Most White Catholics in California opposed Proposition 8; White Protestants supported it with an overwhelming 85%. My explanation is that Protestants understandably feel that the recognition of homosexual marriage threatens their institution of marriage because they are rarely reminded that these two institutions are not the same thing. I believe them when they say that this will change the foundation of their marriage from one with a basis in a moral code to one with a basis in civic bureaucracy. Protestants, in short, grew too comfortable with the idea that a political and a religious marriage where the same thing.
This is hardly a decent argument against gay marriage; it has no more merit than the argument that the U.S. is a Protestant nation—or California a Protestant state—and we are therefore committed to Protestant traditions. Instead, it should be a reminder of the political problems that are created when we allow church and state to be blurred. Generally speaking, it's easy to disparage a strict secular tradition: I don't think a nativity scene in a public school in a 100% Christian community offends anyone subjected to it. That's not why I would oppose it. I oppose it because we confuse people.
When we mix religious and political traditions and space, we allow people to forget which traditions are religious and which are political. This can lead even the most liberal of electorates to deprive individuals of basic human rights.
I can think of two possible origins of "progressive" as an ideology. First, Theodore Roosevelt’s “Progressive Party,” which was founded on egalitarian principles in 1912. The second comes from economics: a “progressive” tax is a tax scheme that burdens in the wealthy more heavily than a proportional tax. These two uses are consistent, and this etymology speaks to the unifying progressive principle: active egalitarianism.
In America, two major principles have emerged as touchstones for egalitarian progress. The first comes from the 18th to the late 19th century, the equality of opportunity. That principle accepted inequality of income, health, and other circumstances as natural but maintained that people of low-status could rise to the top through industry. Abraham Lincoln, before his first inauguration, said that that the principle that held the union together was the promise that “all should have an equal chance.” This principle was appropriate for a nation that was largely agrarian and in which an empire of land lay unexploited, cheaply available on the frontier.
Three constraints ultimately limited the upward mobility of Americans. First, owing to new technology and larger markets, the scale of American industry expanded dramatically with the rise of the steel, railroad, and oil industries and new workers could no longer expect to one day own their businesses. Second, increased immigration from Europe lowered wages in cities. Most importantly, the Frontier was declared closed in the 1890s and with that went the once infinite source of possibility--the West, which had enabled opportunity for centuries. Equality of opportunity was a false promise shortly after the civil war.
These constraints gave raise to a new principle whose touchstone was equality of condition rather than of opportunity: this was the birth of the progressive movement, in my mind. Greater equality of conditions was largely to be achieved through government policy (restricting child labor, limiting the work week, restricting immigration, and strengthening unions). Income was also to be transferred from the rich to the poor through progressive income tax. Abraham Lincoln signed Revenue Act of 1862, which instituted the first federal income tax--before being overturned by the Supreme Court some thirty years later. William Jennings Bryan and his Populist Party fought for a more progressive income tax in the late 1890s, Theodore Roosevelt founded the Progressive Party (Bull Moose Party) in the election of 1912, and in 1913 Congress passed the 16th Amendment, which enabled a non-apportioned federal income tax.
The progressive movement’s legacy is not simply an emphasis on redistribution; it was the realization that the old ethos did not work for the modern economy. So to me, what distinguishes a progressive is not the lonely and simple goal of “more redistribution” to the extent of the modern welfare state (that’s not Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressivism), nor even a strict defense of equality of condition. Rather unifying principle is an adapted notion of egalitarianism that recognizes that the promise of equality of opportunity will no longer be fulfilled by an abundance of wealth and capital beyond the frontier. Rather, the state must actively enable equality of opportunities.
More recently, the older, do-it-yourself version of egalitarianism has come back to favor, enabled by a marriage of convenience between a wealthy elite who are not interested in egalitarianism, and a coalition of evangelicals whose faith emphasizes personal responsibility. All I can say for the former group is that their politics are consistent with their interests. As for latter, who have become the most powerful political coalition in American politics, their emphasis on personal responsibility is based on the insane and willfully-dishonest notion that equal opportunity is possible without government support. The most important plank of progressive ideology rejects this laissez-faire approach to egalitarianism.
So we've been asked why we are here. For me, the answer is easy: I'm humbled by the aptitude, passion, and creativity of the group. Creative people with strong opinions are reason enough for me. No one knows what will come of the project, but I think on that basis alone it aims to fill a space that needs filling.
To be sure, the world -- the Internet! -- is not short on commentary, but there is a paucity of collaborative, diverse commentary. CNN's self-proclaimed "best news team on television" doesn't do it for me. This project isn't staged to create predictable, talking-point conflagration à la Hannity and Combs, nor are we here because we already agree. I think of it as an unscripted conversation -- which, aside from being far more enjoyable and enlightening, is somehow unique, even on the web.
As a note for this personal blog, I hope to use it in part to continue the main-page discussion and in part for general current-event analysis or otherwise interesting-to-me thoughts.
Anyway, these are exciting times and there are important things to understand. I look forward to what follows.
RSS Feed