A Winning Vision for Progressives
June 24, 2009
by Phil Cafaro
Since the 1970s, progressives have had a steady diet of losing. We’ve lost when we’ve lost: when Ronald Reagan came to power in 1981, or Newt Gingrich and Company in 1994, or George W. Bush in 2001, they used that power to undermine progressive causes and advance their own conservative goals. The rich got richer, environmental laws were weakened, etc. And progressives have lost when we’ve “won.” Bill Clinton captured the presidency in 1992 with a mandate to provide Americans with guaranteed universal health care; his running mate, Al Gore, was one of the most powerful and outspoken environmental leaders in the country. For all that, we wound up with pep talks about school uniforms.
Progressives have gotten so used to losing that we have a hard time imagining really turning things around. It seems like a victory when we keep things from getting worse. As an environmentalist, I can’t count the number of times I’ve received breathless fund-raising letters telling me of the latest whisker-thin defeat for oil drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. Not its permanent protection as a wilderness area or national park, mind you: just the news that we won’t be trashing it next year:
Dear Philip:
Hey, great news from Congress! We didn’t lose there last week! Please grab your checkbook and help us keep from losing next year, and the year after that, and the year after that . . .
That’s loser thinking.
Or take the ecstasy that greets Democrats’ periodic success in raising the minimum wage. This is about the only economic victory we get these days in funneling money to working-class Americans. It only affects our poorest workers, and in any case the minimum wage has fallen way behind inflation over the past forty years. Nevertheless, you can be sure that Democrats will trumpet this “success.” When I recently asked an aide to a Democratic Senator what Democrats had accomplished for working people in the past few years, out came old reliable. “We raised the minimum wage!” What else have you done? I asked, and what’s your next step to help the majority of working people? “Um, uh . . . well, we did raise the minimum wage . . ..” As near as I can tell, national Democrats have no comprehensive game plan on how to reverse falling wages and stop increasing income inequality. They’re spooked on the issue of raising taxes and unlike Republicans, largely incompetent at rewarding their own supporters.
There are many reasons why progressives have become losers and a variety of prescriptions for turning the situation around. But certainly part of what’s needed is a searching look at the structural factors that are working against us, as we fight for progressive goals. One such structural feature appears to be mass immigration.
Mass immigration ensures that our population will continue growing at a rapid rate. That means that environmentalists will always be playing catch up. Ten, twenty, fifty, or a hundred years from now, we’ll still be arguing that we should destroy this area rather than that one, or that we can make the destruction a little more aesthetically appealing—instead of holding the line on the destruction. We’ll be trying to slow the growth of air pollution, or water use, or carbon emissions—rather than cutting them back. After all, as we’ve learned to say: “you can’t stop growth.”
Except that you can. Many other industrialized nations’ populations are hardly growing at all. The U.S. population would quickly stabilize without mass immigration. We can stop growth—without coercion, without elaborate re-education efforts—simply by returning to pre-1965 immigration levels.
Imagine an environmentalism that wasn’t always looking to meet the next crisis and that could instead look forward to real triumphs.
Imagine if we achieved significant energy efficiency gains and were able to enjoy those gains in terms of less pollution, less energy development on public lands, and an end to oil wars—because those efficiency gains weren’t swallowed up by growing populations.
Imagine if the push to develop new lands largely ended and we could focus on buying and restoring previously developed lands as good wildlife habitat. Imagine a society where habitat for other species increased year by year, rather than decreased—and where a culture of conservation developed around restoring and protecting that habitat.
Imagine if our demand for fresh water leveled off. Instead of fighting new dams, we could put in more efficient appliances and agricultural processes and use the savings not to provide water more efficiently for more people—but to leave more water in our rivers!
A similar dynamic holds for the division of wealth in this country. If we continue to allow mass immigration weighted toward less skilled immigrants, the prognosis for working-class wage earners is dismal. A flooded labor market will work to reduce wages. It will do this directly, through the law of supply and demand. And it will do it indirectly, by making it harder for workers to organize and challenge employers; by reducing the percentage of poor workers who are citizens and thus able to vote for politicians who favor the poor; and by limiting the sympathy between the haves and have-nots in this country, who under mass immigration are more likely to belong to different ethnic groups. Because mass immigration benefits wealthy Americans (who hire immigrants) and imports poverty, inequality will continue to increase. Over time, America may more and more come to resemble the countries so many immigrants are fleeing, with a few very rich people at the top of the pyramid and lots of poor and increasingly desperate people squatting below.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. While we encourage Democrats to be less timid about challenging “the wisdom of the market,” we can also get labor markets working for working people in this country, by tightening them up. Combined with other good liberal egalitarian measures—universal health care; a more progressive income tax, with the proceeds weighted toward helping the poor—we might even begin to reverse current trends, and really start to win.
Imagine meatpacking plants and carpet-cleaning companies competing with one another for scarce workers, bidding up their prices.
Imagine unions able to strike those plants and companies, without having to worry about scabs taking their members’ jobs.
Imagine college graduates sifting through numerous job offers, like my father and his friends did fifty years ago, during the last “great pause” in immigration, instead of having to wait tables and wait for something better.
Workers and middle-class Americans could start to take home larger and larger amounts of the wealth generated by the American economy—a wealth they are entitled to, since they help generate it and it is only fair that they benefit from their own hard work.
Children in our inner cities would no longer be looked on as a problem, to be warehoused in failing schools, or jails, but instead as the solution to labor shortages in software companies and engineering firms. Without an endless stream of knowledge workers from India and China, these children would become an indispensible resource, and start getting the attention and training they need to make it in the 21st century economy.
These are inspiring, hopeful, winning visions. They could lead us toward a more just, egalitarian and sustainable future.
Well, why not? Why are progressives always playing catch up? I think it is because we are immobilized before the status quo, including the immigration status quo. Immigration just has to continue on as it always has. “We’re a nation of immigrants,” right? Except immigration doesn’t have to continue at current levels, which aren’t set in stone and which were much lower as recently as a few decades ago.
Now, in one way, all this is beside the point. No matter how bad things get for workers, or for nature, or for the average citizen, some of us will still stick up for their interests. We’re called “progressives.” Whether we are winning or losing, and whether or not we have a sensible immigration policy, there will still be recognizably progressive positions to take and progressive goals to fight for. Ukrainian environmentalists have good reasons to work to clean up Chernobyl’s devastation; humanitarians in Sao Paolo and Recife have good reasons to try to protect their street children. No matter what, progressives will still try to fight the good fight. But, but, but . . .
Progressives don’t just want to fight. We want to win! We want to achieve our goals and drive the agenda! But we will not win without an inspiring vision for a better society—or with an immigration policy that makes that vision impossible to achieve.
My fellow progressives! Let’s be winners, not losers!
