Democrats As The Party of Freedom

I like Mike Konczal quite a lot (a shared affinity for the late pragmatic theorist Richard Rorty may be part of that) and I appreciated this rhetorical program he had a hand in for a re-invigorated Democratic Party more equal to the peril and promise of our moment and the rising diversifying secularizing planetizing majority that needs a better partisan instrument to implement our vision of the common good and redress our many legitimate grievances. Quite a lot of the message here is yet another effort to articulate a "positive" conception of liberty against the facile "negative" conception beloved of libertarians (of the market and cyber varieties especially), a return to the New Deal vision of The Four Freedoms yet again. At least this time around, the familiar refrains (and they are not wrong for being familiar) are woven ever-more insistently into the emancipatory anti-white supremacist anti-patriarchal history and urgency of abolition democracy (prison-poverty-pollution abolition), even if even this more radical language is not yet as radical as my own would be, seeking as it does to mobilize a diverse diffuse continent-scaled nationally-viable electoral coalition. The whole piece is at TPM:

With the current political system in turmoil, we face a generational opportunity to redefine liberalism and the Democratic Party. Over the last decade, once-fringe arguments about how we organize our economy and society, and on whose behalf, have moved into the mainstream. Today, vocal and powerful progressive constituencies are pushing the spectrum of these debates well beyond the status quo...

With Trump’s ascendance to the head of their party, Republicans moved towards the past, the jingoistic, and the nativist. But liberals need to move left not only to match the Right. They need to move because the ideological assumptions controlling liberalism over the past decade have collapsed, as we’ll outline in this essay, leaving people searching for new alternatives, which we’ll also describe. Progressives now have an opportunity to propose not just a new set of policies, but a new set of values... [W]e believe there is a clear organizing principle that provides a path forward: freedom. And history provides a guide.

From abolition to the fight against segregation and Jim Crow, from women’s suffrage to the fight for women’s liberation, from the establishment of the minimum wage to the push for democracy in the workplace and greater protection from economic insecurity, a vibrant and critical element of progressive movements has always been freedom. Throughout our nation’s history, we have fought both ideological and actual battles over the definition of freedom, how it is achieved, and for whom it is offered. These have gone hand-in-hand with fights over how we structure our economy and who it serves.

We can take this moment to expand the idea of what what it means to be truly free. Progressives can reclaim a long history of American political thought that ties economic power to political and personal freedom. We can demonstrate that progressive economic policy is essential to creating the conditions in which individuals can have agency and power over their lives.

To accomplish this, liberals need to embrace three key ideas and goals:

Guarantee the public provisioning of truly universal goods.

Ensure a level and quality of jobs that provide autonomy and dignity.

Curb corporate power.

These three commitments, we believe, are essential to structuring an economy in which Americans across gender, geography, race and class can thrive. Our vision is rooted in the idea that our economy should indeed entitle individuals to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. It harkens back to an older version of the Democratic Party, lead by such presidents as Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, that recognized that the government can be used as a tool that secures this freedom.

This essay is not meant to give the specific agenda, full of bullet points and specific budgetary projections. It instead sets boundaries and provides a compass.