Mark Schmitt

Making Tax Cuts Permanent, and Nonpartisan debate

Two good questions that came up through the comments:

1. Nell Lancaster (who may be the original and most reliable reader of this weblog) asks, for the second time: "What is the timetable for the inevitable fight over whether the Bush tax cuts expire? Is there a mechanism in the law itself that gives any timing framework, or is it utterly up to Rove?"

The simple answer is, no, there's no automatic, statutory point at which the choice must be made, so, yes, it's up to whoever is calling the shots. It's also worth remembering that these "sunsets" were not enacted with the idea that Congress should in a few years come back and look systematically at the results and decide thoughtfully whether to renew them, as was ostensibly the case with older sunsetted provisions like the Research and Development Tax Credit. All the many and overlapping sunsets in 2001 and 2003 were blatantly gimmicks, designed to make the cost of the tax cuts seem lower or to fit within the budget rules that allowed the majority the tax cuts through with limited debate, limited amendments, and only 50 votes in the Senate.

Making the cuts permanent, however, cannot be pushed through under those rules. One of the provisions of the "Byrd Rule" governing these expedited budget bills is that they cannot include anything that increases the deficit in the "out years," that is the years beyond those foreseen in the current budget window, whether that's five or ten years.

There's plenty of reason to do it sooner rather than later, though. Most significantly, the extension will appear to cost more within the current budget "window" the longer you wait. So, for example, if you score the the 10-year cost of making the cuts permanent starting in 2006, five of those years won't be very different from current law. (Most of the tax cuts expire in 2010, though some expire earlier, and some, like the child tax credit, partially expire then come back then expire again.) The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has a nice paper up showing that the cost of making the tax cuts permanent is $2.1 trillion over the 2005-2015 period, including interest costs, while the cost over the following decade, 2016-2025, would be $7.2 trillion. (Just to put that number in perspective, that's the entire GDP of Japan, Germany and the UK, the world's second, third, and fourth largest economies, combined.)

Here's a graphic from the Center's report:

If Frist doesn't have sixty votes to make the cuts permanent, he could do a ten-year budget bill, and extend everything until 2015. It is astonishing, though, that there seems to be some doubt about this. As recently as December, there seemed to be very little doubt that the Republicans had the 60 votes to make the cuts permanent. Obviously, the Social Security fight intersects with this in a way that is unhelpful to the Republicans. For one, it is eroding the command-and-control system in Congress, for another, raising the alarm about the financing "crisis" in Social Security and suggesting that there is no choice but to cut benefits makes for a tough environment in which to give away another $9.3 trillion. Democrats are in a good position now to suggest that instead of more tax cuts, we should "save Social Security."

There is another political possibility, which my wife suggested last night: The minute they make the tax cuts permanent, that's the last tax cut they'll ever deliver. A political strategy founded on "a tax cut every year" would come to an end. And the money that politicians can raise from interests seeking tax breaks would largely dry up. In other words, members of Congress would probably be happier to be in a position to extend the cuts for another year, every year. That's what they've always done with the R&D tax credit, and it makes for a nice little gravy train of corporate money.

That's the cynicism you develop after three months in Washington!

2. Nell also says, "If you can answer only one question, please make it ellen1910's." I don't think I'm limited to answering one question, though. Ellen's question was, "How do you make this debate nonpartisan?" This is in the context of my post about foundations, which must avoid the taint of "partisan" politics.

For me this question isn't that complicated. Just because a debate breaks down along party lines doesn't make it partisan, in the sense that I'm thinking of it, which is the sense that foundations have to worry about it. If my intention is to ensure that this country has adequate revenues for the challenges we will face as a nation in the decade ahead, pursuing that objective is not partisan just because the only people who think otherwise, at this particular moment, are Republicans. At other times, the issue has been much more bipartisan and in the future it will be again.

If my intention is to use issues any way I can in order to elect Democrats and destroy Republicans, that's the kind of partisanship that foundations have to worry about, and that's real partisanship. And that's baaad. But it's not hard to see the difference. Real partisans avoid any possibility of bipartisanship or sharing credit; they try to set up the starkest, sharpest contrasts possible. Those who really care about the larger goals embrace allies, seek common ground, etc.

I've just seen a superb example of this: The Center for Community Change -- a great progressive organization -- sent me an e-mail encouraging me to send a "thank you" to Senator Voinovich of Ohio, a Republican, for expressing opposition to further tax cuts. I haven't even been able to find exactly what Voinovich said, but by embracing him as an ally, they show beyond any doubt that their interest is in having adequate revenue to deal with future social needs, not beating up or defeating Republicans. That battle is very much a political one, but it does not have to be a partisan one, and even if Voinovich scurries back into Bill Frist's amen corner like he did in 2003, they have demonstrated that they are not making it one.

The Republican polarization campaign has many purposes, discussed here before, including the desire to compromise as little as possible. But one aspect of it is that, by making issues appear to be partisan, they scare off foundations and encourage the Samuelsons and Kristofs of the media to treat the whole thing as sordid. But there's nothing inherently partisan about these debates.

The Career-Ending Post

I mentioned in a previous post that I would say something about the role of funders -- mostly foundations -- in promoting the kind of "policy literalism" that the "Death of Environmentalism" authors appropriately attack.

I originally decided not to get into this, because it is inside baseball, but one of the most disturbing things about "The Death of Environmentalism" is that, while it was presented at a conference of environmental funders, it seems to hold funders exempt from its sweeping critique of the movement, and in fact to indulge them in some obsequious flattery. While the environmental leaders are indicted categorically without the benefit of being named so they can rise to their own defense, foundation program officers are singled out: For example, "Pew [Charitable Trust]'s Josh Reichert deserves credit for...funding campaigns that achieve results."

I have no opinion about whether Pew's funding on environmental projects is good or bad, successful or not. It's not my field. I know that Reichert is extremely well respected. I also know that Pew is one of the largest, if not the largest environmental funder. It does seem sort of logically implausible that the movement could "have strikingly little to show for" all its efforts, and yet at the same time the movement's biggest funder "achieves results." One of these things probably isn't as true as the Reapers make it sound, but which one?

The fact is that foundations bear a good deal of the responsibility for the narrowness and "policy literalism" that infects progressive advocacy, whether on the environment or other issues. This tends to be more true the larger, the older, and the more professionally managed the foundation is. Generally foundations tend to stake out a fairly general policy goal -- reduce poverty, build housing, improve K-12 education, encourage arms control -- set up a staff, a budget and a grantmaking program in that specific field and then fund projects that meet certain criteria within that policy field. To use the specific example referred to before, if they started funding health care projects or campaign finance reform as solutions to global warming, they would be -- appropriately -- accused of overstepping their mission.

There's nothing wrong with that; it's a perfectly natural way to operate. And for much of the 20th Century, it worked well. Policy change could be promoted through several well-established channels, including litigation and legislation, but also -- the classic modus operandi for foundations -- setting up innovative demonstration programs to test new educational ideas or ways to reduce drug addiction or financing schemes for housing, and then hoping that successful schemes would be picked up by government and expanded. I credit my friend (and occasional commentor here) Michael Lipsky, who spent almost a decade at the Ford Foundation, with helping me understand that, and of course, Ford's great-but-flawed "Gray Areas Project" of the mid-1960s is the classic example of the transmission belt between foundations and public policy.

But in the current climate, those channels are broken. Government isn't out there right now looking for "best practices" in social policy, and if they did, they wouldn't have the money to fund them anyway, partly because of tax cuts and partly because so much is going to empirically proven "worst practices." Litigation is a very limited avenue for change, as is legislative lobbying, at either the federal or state level.

Older and more professionally established foundations are, as I said, slower to grasp the magnitude of these changes, although that's not always the case. The Ford Foundation understands how much has changed, and according to the Reapers, so does Pew. But generally, it is smaller foundations that have been able to adapt to a climate in which those traditional channels of effectiveness are gone. The foundation where I used to work, the Open Society Institute, is newer, and so not trying to escape from models of change from the 60s, and unafraid of controversy, but still often followed these categorical, policy literalist lines, sometimes with success, though often broke out of them.

The alternative is something that might be called more "political," although that is a loaded word, especially with foundations, which absolutely must avoid any taint of partisan politics, for a hundred reasons. But by political, I mean something close to what is meant by the word in the Death of Environmentalism: understanding that the best way to solve one problem may involve a broader perspective on other problems. For example, if your goal as a foundation is to improve the well-being of children, you can advocate for small increases in programs like Head Start or school lunches or children's health care, or you can try to model programs that deliver those programs more effectively. But all those efforts run up against the reality that in a very few years, if federal revenues remain at 16% of GDP, there won't be any children's programs. So if you're not joining the debate about taxes, and connecting the debate about taxes back to children, you're not really dealing with the problem. And the debate about taxes is part of a bigger debate about government, individuals, and the economy.

(For a little more on this, see the article I wrote last summer about the politics of children, in the American Prospect.)

This also means building institutions that can tackle these broader political issues, and adapt to the changing political climate. Progressive foundations are suddenly, predictably interested in joining the fight against Social Security privatization, but do they understand that the Social Security debate and the debate over making the tax cuts permanent are not entirely separate things? Do they understand that creating a separate policy-literalist campaign on each issue is a tremendous waste of energy and guarantees that we'll always be behind the curve?

I think there are trends in both the foundation world, and in the philanthropy of individual givers, many of whom learned a lot about politics in the last year, that will move this in the right direction, and I'll try to say more about this. It's a missed opportunity that the Death of Environmentalism authors, facing a room full of such funders, didn't challenge them as strongly as they challenged their own.

(I'm sorry I keep writing so much about "The Death of Environmentalism" -- it's just a very provocative paper that got my mind going in several directions.)

The State of Working America

My copy of the Economic Policy Institute's biennial State of Working America has arrived.

This always reminds me that when I worked on Capitol Hill, I used to have a reputation in my office as "the guy who can always find the statistic you need." It was a totally out-of-character and undeserved reputation for me to have, since I'm not at all quantitative, know barely anything about Statistics, and have no memory at all for numbers.

My secret was that I had a copy of The State of Working America. That and the Statistical Abstract of the United States covered just about every question that was likely to bubble up. The genius of Larry Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and their co-authors looked like my own.

All this material is on the web now, but it's the rare thing that's still easier to find in a book, if you know the book. I'd like to see someone create a google just for statistics, so that you can put in a query like, "Annual percentage change in child poverty rates, 1999-2004, U.S. and Europe," and it would find just the data, whether it comes from a government source or a report or whatever, and possibly even filter it to match the query. Until then, books like The State of Working America are indispensable.

Whatever Happened to the Liberal Privatizers?

Via Talking Points Memo, I notice that Congressman Rangel said yesterday on Meet the Press, "There is no Democrat in the House of Representatives, on my committee, that this president has reached out for. I'm telling you now, Social Security reform by the president is dead, and he killed it."

It's true -- there really is no "Fainthearted Faction," and while that's a testament to a newfound party discipline among Democrats, it also has something to do with the fact that the White House seems to have done absolutely nothing to nurture the faction, despite knowing well in advance that they would need some Democrats to achieve anything on Social Security.

It suddenly occurred to me that, in addition to the missing Democrats on the Hill, there was also a faction entirely missing from the public debate: the pro-privatization liberals. I'm thinking, for example, of Sam Beard, who I got to know a little bit in the mid-1990s, when he created Economic Security 2000. Beard is an eloquent, engaging former Bobby Kennedy staffer, did economic development work in Bed-Stuy, founded and chairs the National Development Council, and ran for Senate as a Democrat from Delaware in the 1990s. Sam had an exciting, "everyone a millionaire" vision of Social Security, framing it in terms of opportunity, equality and wealth for the poor. I never thought that his numbers quite worked, but leaving that quaint concern aside, it was a hell of a more compelling vision for a low-income or African-American audience than Bush's offensive nonsense about how Social Security is a bad deal for black people because they die young. (A fact he seems to have no interest in changing.)

But where's Beard today? He was on Bush's 2001 commission, and he's on the advisory committee for the Cato Institute's Social Security project, but I don't see anything public in the current debate. No op-eds, nothing in Lexis-Nexis since early 2003. And what about Bob Kerrey, who joined Moynihan to push private accounts in the late 1990s? Yes, he wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, but that was hardly an endorsement of anything like the White House plan, more like a plea to Democrats to put forward a progressive, add-on plan of their own rather than just oppose.

If Bush were serious about passing something on Social Security, he would have started long ago with a list of not only the congressional potential "faint-hearted faction," but also liberals like Beard who were really quite passionate about privatization, and made sure that they felt involved, consulted, rewarded. Why didn't they do it? One explanation is that more than actually enacting changes to Social Security, they wanted to set up the sharpest partisan contrast, even knowing that this was not something they could pass with only Republican votes.

An alternative explanation: The Democrats who served on the Bush 2001 Social Security Commission were so offended at the way they were treated and in particular the way Senator Moynihan was treated that they know better than to get back into that bed with that crowd.

Whether by choice or miscalculation, Rangel's point is correct, and it extends beyond Congress.

No Mission Statements, please

Matthew Yglesias wasn't alone in being unsure what my point was in the post on "The Death of Environmentalism." I didn't really have one, except to say that it was an interesting essay that should be read outside of environmentalist circles and then to comment on various points it raised. Matt concluded that what I was really getting at was the need to develop an "ideology."

That's an obvious one-word summation of where I was going when I said that the most interesting part of the essay was the proposal that, instead of trying to force higher mileage standards onto the auto industry through legislation, should instead consider that the cost of retiree health care is the biggest burden on the auto industry, and try to cut a deal: health care for mileage standards. In other words, instead of boxing everything up in categories like Environment, Health, Labor, Women's issues, etc., look across issues for a coherent progressive perspective.

But I chose not to use the word ideology, deliberately. It's not that I don't think having a coherent ideology isn't a good thing. I'm just not quite sure how you get there, or that "we" on the left-of-right don't generally have one. I'm pretty doubtful that Marx and Engels said, "We need an ideology," and then Engels said, "I've got it: Let's start with, 'A spectre is haunting Europe.'" (That's for all of you who think I've never read any Marx.)

The actual process of trying to contrive an ideology tends to run in either of two directions. One inolves trying to state some principles or ideals that would constitute an all-encompassing progressive/liberal ideology, incorporating all the different threads that go into that worldview. The result could be the sixty different topics covered by the House Democrats' shoot-me-now "New Partnership for America's Future," or it could be a more concise formulation such as that suggested by a commentor here, Community, Opportunity, and Responsibility, or cooperation, government is good, etc.. It could also be more specific, such as universal health care, cut the child poverty rate in half, etc. All good ideas, they're great, but they have no edge, they draw no distinction about how to achieve those goals, especially against a form of conservatism that uses liberal ideals such as Leave No Child Behind loosely. I tried my hand at a definition like this a few months ago, and a colleague who read it said, kindly, that it was no better and also no worse than any other such attempt.

The other direction is to try to define an ideology in a sharper, more divisive way that separates it not just from the current right-wing ideology, but potentially from other allies. An anti-corporate ideology, for example, is an appealing approach, with an edge, one that I've heard suggested. But even if that's my ideology, how do I build a majority around it? It would leave out plenty of people who are uncomfortable with the right-wing agenda but not (curren with corporate power; indeed, many might think that massive disinvestment in the public sector, dangerous levels of income inequality, and huge budget deficits leading to future tax increases are bad for corporate America. Or consider the proposal that started this: to develop common ground with the biggest corporations over their problem with health care costs, and bargain to leverage change on auto mileage standards. Adherents of a purely anti-corporate ideology will be in a hard position to make that bargain. On the other hand, an ideology that's more about dynamic capitalism with a safety net or finding a grand bargain with business probably doesn't have the vigor to capture some of the most enthusiastic younger voters and others. In other words, these edgier ideologies are formulas for factions, not for a serious, majoritarian governing party. (We can all be part of factions, though, within a larger, majoritarian party that mutes and blends our factional preferences.)

Rather than a manifesto, or more likely, a long boring argument about a manifesto, I see more utility in developing Institutions and Ideas. By institutions, I mean the kind of organizational structures that can help put together ideas or visions that cut across traditional definitions of issues. As the Reapers (the nickname for the authors of "The Death of Environmentalism") point out, there's no place in our politics for a solution such as a grand bargain on retiree health care/pensions/mileage standards because there's no organization that is in a position to either develop such a solution or bring political power to bear on its behalf. Environmental organizations have to develop and pursue environmental solutions, health organizations pursue health solutions. For the big membership groups, their members joined an environmental group for a reason, and it will always be a great stretch for those groups to devote more than a small fraction of their energy or political capital to a tangential issue, whether it is health care or campaign finance reform. Groups that don't have members are typically funded by foundations, and that's an issue that I'm going to comment on in my next (potentially career-ending) post.

In either case, what the Reapers refer to as "policy literalism" is a problem in the structure of organizations, of membership and of funding, and it comes with a real price. We tend to see a problem, define it into a particular category of problems, and look for the solution in that category. But very often the solutions to a problem are elsewhere, or are connected. Stagnating wages, for example, might be a problem of labor markets and unionization, but it might also be related to the workings of financial markets, cost-cutting pressures, health care costs, and various other factors. These issues are not neatly separated in people's lived experience, either. But we don't have many think tanks, membership organizations, public interest lobbyists or litigators who can afford to look for solutions outside of their own playing field.

Among think tanks, some progress has been made in the last five years toward national policy organizations that can take a broad cross-issue perspective, notably the Center for American Progress, New America Foundation, Demos, and the Institute for America's Future. We still need more similar progressive institutions at the state level (the right's State Policy Network includes 92 organizations, most much less specialized than the much smaller, less organized number of liberal groups.) The emergence of groups like moveon.org, that not only construct membership in a more transactional way, but also don't try to force them to lock themselves in as environmentalists, civil libertarians, pro-choice, etc., is also a very healthy development.

And by Ideas, I don't mean "fairness" or "everyone should have health care," but more specific ideas that seem plausible to people, that seem fresh enough, that connect the pieces. I won't go into this here, at risk of another overlong post, but the Apollo project discussed by the Reapers is one good example, but hardly the last word.

The call for "an ideology" to me is like saying, "we need a mission statement." It's been my experience that you can appoint a committee and spend a lot of time writing your organization's mission statement and debating the relative priority of "community" or "tolerance," or you can get back to work.

The Privatization Tax

I am in awe of the work that various analysts, but particularly Jason Furman of NYU and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities have done to figure out exactly how the Bush Social Security plan would work, in the absence of any official details proposal, by just drawing on what's available and from on-background briefings by senior adminstration officials. (And speaking of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, congratulations on a new website and a new logo. It looks great. And how fitting that it should arrive at this moment when the Center's contribution is even more critical than usual.)

And I'm glad that the Senate Democrats could so quickly grab the import of Furman's work proving that the entire value of one's private account is likely to be taken away at retirement and dubbed it "the privatization tax." This isn't just a bit of clever pejorative framing, though. In the article I linked to a couple days ago from 1983, "Achieving a Leninist Strategy," in which two Heritage Foundation staffers advocated a long-term "political strategy" for Social Security privatization, there is a weird passage in which they discuss an "opting-out tax" as part of the system.

This comes in the context of a discussion of Great Britain's newly Thatcherized pension system, which had a secure part and an optional part. (not a good analogy, as the optional/private part was more comparable to our own private pension system and the guaranteed part that remained was more like Social Security -- in other words, Thatcher moved them to something more like the U.S. system.) The Leninists argue that the British system works because workers who opt out still have to pay some tax to support the public system. They write, "It does seem that the price people are willing to pay to leave Social Security is substantial."

That's a pretty odd thing to say. Do they really mean that they believe people are so eager to be "out" of Social Security that they would actually pay a price, in the form of the "opting-out tax," to do it? They would actually favor it if they were objectively worse off?

In other words, something like the privatization tax or the opting out tax seems to have been a part of this scheme for 23 years. But it's hard to imagine it's a political winner. I'm often amazed at the sloppiness of the privatization advocates. They seem not to have thought through most of the big technical and political questions they're dealing with. That generally reinforces my view that this is a little bit of a political show. But it is awfully weird to realize from the 1983 article that they've had the basic plan for almost a quarter-century but haven't bothered to work on it.

I Am SO Happy to Learn This

Yesterday, in my long post on "The Death of Environmentalism," I mentioned that the cover of the report features the predictable aphorism that "the Chinese character for Crisis equals Danger + Opportunity."

I can't stand that phrase. If someone ever needs to torture me into confessing to just about anything, all you have to do is tie me down and repeat that to me for an hour. I'll crack. I think it's because I associate it with two of the most vapid people I've ever known, both of whom would repeat it predictably in any meeting as if it was a profound insight personally discovered by them through their deep immersion in the inscrutable Orient.

And just last night I was walking home, and I started thinking, "I wonder if it's even true. I bet it's not even true..." I was thinking of posting the question, seeing if any of the many Decembrist readers who happen to be fluent in written Mandarin could help.

Then today I was directed to the blog at Grist Magazine, http://grist.org/gristmill, and in the middle of a lengthy discussion of "The Death of Environmentalism," there it was, in a comment: "you are repeating myths, not facts, about Chinese characters. First, Chinese characters do not represent an ideographic writing system. Second, "crisis" does not equal "danger" + "opportunity"."

The user links to this article, which seems authoritative enough. The author has me cheering:

A whole industry of pundits and therapists has grown up around this one grossly inaccurate formulation. A casual search of the Web turns up more than a million references to this spurious proverb. It appears, often complete with Chinese characters, on the covers of books, on advertisements for seminars, on expensive courses for "thinking outside of the box," and practically everywhere one turns in the world of quick-buck business, pop psychology, and orientalist hocus-pocus.

The author actually goes even further than I would:

Those who purvey the doctrine that the Chinese word for "crisis" is composed of elements meaning "danger" and "opportunity" are engaging in a type of muddled thinking that is a danger to society, for it lulls people into welcoming crises as unstable situations from which they can benefit. Adopting a feel-good attitude toward adversity may not be the most rational, realistic approach to its solution.

"A danger to society"? I'm not sure about that. It's certainly no worse than Crossfire. But it is annoying. And I'm really glad to know that it's not even true. Please use this knowledge to stop this awful phrase whenever possible.

"Too Many Evenings"

One of the questions that the "Death of Environmentalism" authors don't address at all, but should have, is, the issue of membership in environmental organizations. What makes someone consider themself an "environmentalist" and join, say, the Sierra Club? They portray an environmental movement as if it is made up of the technical experts who work for the mostly non-membership groups like Environmental Defense, Natural Resources Defense C, etc. But the political power, or lack thereof, of the environmental groups depends more than anything else on its ability to move large numbers of people -- voters -- to act politically on behalf of these issues.

In the environmental world, the big membership bases are the Sierra Club, Audubon Society, the World Wildlife Federation and then the "hook and bullet" groups: Trout Unlimited and Ducks Unlimited. All these groups have a certain amount of the technical expertise that the Reapers deride, but their main activity is managing their members. The League of Conservation Voters -- an incredibly effective organization -- has members of its own and organizes some of the political activities for the other groups.

A good movement has both agile advocacy or idea-generating organizations that don't have to worry about members, and membership organizations, but its dangerous to get too far ahead of where members want to be. In the case of environmental issues, this is easy to see. A lot of the strength in the base has come from the hook and bullet groups, and LCV has helped to encourage those members to vote as environmentalists. But that doesn't mean that those members are ready to consider themselves "progressives" on every issue from health care to labor rights. Indeed, it may be that these members, primarily motivated by their own community concerns with clean water or air, or open space, also hold the movement back in dealing with the more cosmic and long-term issue of global warming.

In any case, membership, and the question of what makes someone decide to join or not join an environmental organization or another is inseperable from the questions raised in "The Death of Environmentalism." To some extent, the essay reads like an assault on identity politics, in which individuals cluster into narrow groups that are too small to have influence and can't act collectively. But "environmentalists" aren't identities like Latinos and gays; they have all chosen to make this their priority; they have often been marketed to by the environmental movement. That the movement has claimed more people in this way than any other grouping is probably its strength and weakness. The weakness comes because the most visionary leaders on the environment just can't get too far out ahead of where the members are.

I've been interested in the question of membership before, and I've suggested that the big phenonenon here is that the basic nature of membership itself has changed, from deep, dues-paying loyalty to a more transactional relationship, such as people have with moveon.org. It's been a long time since an organization like the Sierra Club, Common Cause, or NARAL was launched and built up its main membership base; it's unrealistic to expect that that will happen again or that aging members will become young again.

In the very good new quasi-blog, Personal Democracy Forum, edited by Micah Sifry, former Dean campaign official Zephyr Teachout takes up some of the questions of membership that have interested me. In fact, she uses the same two examples: the Democratic Party and the American Civil Liberties Union. But her argument is almost the polar opposite of mine. I believe that the era of mass membership organizations that Theda Skocpol identifies in Diminished Democracy (a book Teachout draws heavily on) is actually ending and that we have to think what's next. Teachout, on the other hand, thinks that there is a longing for "ritualized, secular societies that meet pretty regularly, weekly and monthly." She proposes that organizations using the web be much more aggressive in calling attention to local activities, and in effect, encourage something like Dean's "meet-ups."

My own view is that membership in the modern world is defined by giving people things to do. One of those things might be going to local meetings, but while that worked for the young and single people who populated the Dean campaign, it's not as likely to work for those of us who have a little more going on in our lives. I shouldn't use myself as an example, because I get more than enough political stimulation during the work day, but it would take a lot of loyalty for me to join anything that meets "weekly and monthly." That's not something my cohort, made up of very likely voters, is going to jump into. Teachout refers to both Robert Putnam's and Theda Skocpol's analyses of the changes in participation; I have always thought that the key variable that explains the decline of face-to-face, local organizations like the Elks, which Putnam identified, is workforce participation. Dad doesn't go to the Elks' meeting (or whatever) because Mom's working late, or vice versa.

I think Teachout's effort to use the internet to restore a sense of the local to both national organizations such as the ACLU and to the Democratic party is admirable. But I don't accept, or see any evidence for, the proposition that people are just dying to join some organization such as the ACLU if only they could attend a lot of meetings. I think that the ACLU should instead dramatically lower the bar to someone considering themselves a "member," and encourage much more micro-transactions (signing a petition, seeking out information on an issue, looking up candidate endorsements) that will slowly draw individuals into the organization.

In short, I've always tried to remember Oscar Wildes' comment that "the trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings." But read Teachout's very well-informed analysis. Maybe she's right.

The Death of ____ism

I've begun to doubt my own comments on Peter Beinart a couple days ago, when I said that I thought subtle distinctions on policy questions, or efforts to redefine debates, whether on Iraq, Social Security, or taxes, were irrelevant in the current political context. Am I really that nihilistic? And my thoughts were further fueled by reading the "Leninist Strategy" on Social Security from 1983, referred to in my last post, which advocated giving up on the "nuances of policy" to pursue a long term "political strategy" to phase out Social Security.

Now I want to turn to a more recent essay that has not received much attention outside of the circle it was originally directed to, although it's caused huge turmoil within it: "The Death of Environmentalism." Michael Schellenberger and Ted Nordhaus (now known as "The Reapers") presented this at the Environmental Grantmakers Association, commissioned by my friend Peter Teague of the Nathan Cummings Foundation. The essay, lengthy responses, an interview with the authors, and other background is available at www.grist.org, the online environmental magazine.

There's a lot in this essay, and in the responses, some of it right on, some of it a bit crazy, some of it vacuous and new-agey (particularly the epigraphs about death opening each section, and of course that insufferable management-consultant aphorism that the Chinese ideogram for "crisis" is a combination of danger and opportunity), some of it beyond my capacity to evaluate, but all very much worth reading. (If you don't have time to read the 27-page essay, the interview with the Reapers is a start.) It's written to provoke, and provoke it did.

(All the more so because it was presented at a conference of foundation program officers and donors. One of the rules of the non-profit world, one that I am painfully aware of from the other side, is Thou Shalt Not Air a Movement's Dirty Laundry In Front of the Funders. Never mind that funders already know the dirty laundry, and probably are responsible for two-thirds of it, and that it's in no one's interest to keep them ignorant, it Just Isn't Done. Carl Pope of the Sierra Club quite pointedly started his fierce reply to The Reapers, "Dear Environmental Grantmaker," and charged that "the not so hidden agenda is 'fund us instead.'")

Those of us who aren't environmentalists by profession or priority might be able to read the essay with some perspective and get more out of it, because we're not the targets of its venom. Yet as Nordhaus says in the interview, "A critique similar to the one we've made on environmentalism could be made of many other movements -- women's rights, abortion rights, anti-war, criminal justice, labor, and so on. Each of those so-called movements has turned itself into a special interest in defining the problem narrowly and offering technical policy solutions instead of an inspiring vision."

The Reapers' basic argument is this: "The environmental community's narrow definition of its self-interest leads to a kind of policy literalism that undermines its power... Environmentalists closely scrutinize the policies without giving much thought to the politics that made the policies possible." They argue that the movement as it exists, filled with technical experts, must "die in order to be reborn."

In the interview, Nordaus says, "The very DNA of these institutions was constructed around a particular idea and model of doing politics, largely based on successes that the environmental movement had in the early '70s. They were developed to use scientific and legal expertise to identify a problem, craft a very specific technical policy solution to address that problem, and then go hire communications specialists and lobbyists and organizers to go sell that technical policy solution."

That approach no longer works, they argue, because the current problems, especially global warming, are bigger and more complicated than the classic Clean Air/Clean Water/Endangered Species problems that were addressed by technical policy solutions and legislation in the 1970s. And it also no longer works because the underlying political climate is massively unfriendly, and the system of policymaking in which the environmental movement leaders worked -- litigation under the Clean Air/Water and Endangered Species Acts, or lobbying in Congress for incremental improvements -- is gone. Both these points are surely true, and correspond to what environmentalists I know have been saying for years.

The alternatives The Reapers propose are basically three:

1. To confront the politics more directly. They suggest that instead of defining the problem of global warming as "too much carbon in the atmosphere," we identify it as, "The radical right's control of all three branches of the U.S. government...overpopulation...The influence of money in politics...poverty." They ask author Ross Gelbspan about what it would take to enact his sweeping plan to reduce worldwide carbon emissions by 70%: "I don't see any answer short of real campaign finance reform...the alternative is massive climate change."

Well that's interesting. Having spent a lot of time working on campaign finance reform, I appreciate the plug, but it's a pretty big promise, and I've always been very doubtful of statements that promise that after campaign finance reform, we find ourselves in a liberal paradise. And you can be sure that everything the Reapers say about environmentalists as pursuing small-bore technical fixes, letting themselves be defined as special interests, etc. is equally true of 95% of the campaign finance reform movement. This is exciting, but it also feels a little bit like redefining the problem into someone else's box. The day you can enact "real campaign finance reform" might just be the day when you can also enact the Kyoto Agreement -- a lot would have to change for either one to happen.

2. To define bigger, more visionary solutions. Here they contrast the small-bore, technical legislative approach to global warming -- the McCain/Lieberman bill -- with the Apollo Alliance, a major plan for job creation in new technology to reduce dependence on imported energy, with a labor/enviro partnership.

I like the Apollo project, which I've mentioned before, and Pope actually co-chairs it, so the generational distinction the Reapers implicitly draw is a little awkward. More importantly, it's a stretch to portray Apollo as if it is an example of a success and McCain-Lieberman or other incremental approaches as failures. Apollo is not well known outside of DC progressive circles, and it has nothing to show for itself yet. It may turn out to be a great success, and I'd put money on it, but the Reapers claim too much for it.

3. To form more productive alliances with labor and other constituencies. This is hardly an original thought. Yesterday I was meeting with a veteran, very respected leader in progressive circles, who mentioned that earlier in her career she had organized "community/labor energy coalitions," a dated phrase but a staple of progressive politics in the Northeast and Midwest in the late 1970s. Many of the responses to the Reapers point out that the enviros have been "meeting with" labor leaders for years, that the old tensions over Clean Air legislation have eased, and that the major efforts in the election year -- Americans Coming Together, America's Families United, National Voice, and other collaborations both partisan and nonpartisan -- were basically labor-environmentalist partnerships with other constituency groups supporting them.

But the Reapers are not looking for meetings or traditional coalitions around particular shared interests. They want something bigger. In the course of a recondite discussion of the politics of CAFE standards for automobile mileage, they suggest that instead of thinking of it as purely an environmental issue, with the auto industry and its unions as targets, one should think more broadly about the health of the auto industry. "The high cost of health care [and pensions] for its retired employees is a big part of what hurts the competitiveness of American companies...Because Japan has national health care, its auto companies aren't stuck with the bill...And yet if you were to propose that environmental groups have a a strategy for lowering the costs of health care for the auto industry, perhaps in exchange for higher mileage standards, you'd likely be laughed out of the room...because 'Health care is not an environmental issue.'"

That gets to the outlines of the Grand Bargain that I've always been interested in. The problem is, who is in the position to cut such a deal? The auto companies aren't going to make a deal with environmental groups, or a minority of Senators, about health care that the enviros can't deliver on anyway. And why should an environmental group, whose members joined for a reason, suddenly devote a lot of energy and resources to health care?

That's where I find the best argument for blowing up the whole "movement," along with the others. We can't possibly find ways to move society forward as long as everything is put neatly into boxes labeled "environment," "health care," "campaign finance reform," "low-income programs," "pro-choice," etc., and the coalitions that exist are made up of representatives from those movements. Trying to force environmentalists to think about health care doesn't solve the problem either. We need a whole new structure, built around a convincing narrative about society and the economy, and a new way to fit these pieces together.

We'll come back to that, often, but this is long enough as it is. What's true in "The Death of Environmentalism" is true for all of progressive politics, and I mainly wanted to make sure that the essay was better known outside of the limited circle it was addressed to since that's the whole point of it.

The Days of Wine and Reagan

Perhaps in the mistaken belief that I was alive at the time*, the American Prospect asked me to write about the question, "How did the Democrats fight Reagan on Social Security?"

I didn't know the answer, but as I looked into it, the answer was basically, those were different times and Reagan was basically an honorable man. Read the article here.

Unfortunately, it wasn't until after I'd finished writing this that I read the article from the Cato Journal in late 1983 entitled "Achieving A 'Leninist' Strategy." This is a good coda to my article, because it shows that the thinking that led us to the brink of privatization today actually began immediately after the tremendous bipartisan consensus around the Greenspan commission plan, which the article refers to as "the fiasco of the last 18 months." Almost every word out of Bush's mouth now comes from this 22-year-old article, including instructions to offer "assurance to those already retired or nearing retirement that their benefits will be paid in full," to "educate young people" that the system is doomed, and to hold out Individual Retirement Accounts as a model. It also recommends a long and patient campaign, which has certainly been the case.

The Cato Journal authors -- Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis, then both at the Heritage Foundation -- conclude "Social Security can be reformed only by treating the issue primarily as a political problem. There is little point in arguing over the nuances of theoretical plans if the political dynamics are not altered."

Later today I intend to post some thoughts on very similar thinking today on the liberal side.

*I'll admit, I was alive, but not really paying much attention.