AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman. Will progressives dominate the coming era in politics? Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne thinks so. While some see the GOP capture of Congress in ’94 as the beginning of right-wing dominance in Washington, Dionne says the pendulum will soon swing toward liberals. He spoke with Pacifica national affairs correspondent Larry Bensky,

LARRY BENSKY: Thank you, Amy. E.J. Dionne is with me today. E.J. Dionne, he of the clever book titles. Why Americans Hate Politics came out in 1991, and now we have They Only Look Dead: The Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era.

Welcome to Pacifica Radio, E.J. Dionne,

E.J. DIONNE: Thanks for having me.

LARRY BENSKY: In the book Why Americans Hate Politics, which, of course, a lot of people immediately picked up because they want to know why Americans hate politics, you wrote that in the 1990s there was a struggle to define the new political center, which was essentially an effort to create a majority coalition for a new era of reform. Now five years later, you’re not writing about finding a new political center. You’re talking about trying to find a progressive space in the United States. What changed in those five years that made you stop looking for a center and started looking for something more progressive?

E.J. DIONNE: I think, above all, the 1994 elections, that when I was trying to define a center back in why Americans hate politics, my assumption is that that center would exist within a broadly progressive framework. What I’m arguing in this book is that really the progressive tradition — and we can talk about the word “progressive,” but the progressive tradition has really been the dominant political tradition in our country, that liberals and progressives and the left, I think, almost have allowed — have accepted the definition of themselves that Newt Gingrich offers as somehow not normal Americans, whereas I think the progressive tradition is the normal American tradition.

I think what happened, in 1994 especially, is that the progressive tradition came under a sustained attack that it had not faced even from Ronald Reagan, that Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey and the new Republicans, especially in the House, are really quite honest in trying to roll back government to a level that really predates the Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson period. And so, I think it’s very important for people who believe in democratic — the democratic capacities of government to sort of defend that project. And I think you’ve got to defend that project before anything else can happen.

LARRY BENSKY: You say, however, that politics is now discredited. And I’m reading from your new book. “Politics lies discredited, and with it the hope that democratic government can respond effectively to change. The responsibility for this failure is widely shared and encompasses new Democrats, who said they would revitalize the government; traditional liberals, who claim to speak for average Americans; moderate Republicans, who now face a choice of being isolated in their own party; and a left that lost its way in the controversies surrounding multiculturalism, etc.” And then you say, “The demand for a new progressive project, therefore, will not go away.” On what do you base that conclusion?

E.J. DIONNE: Well, I think — let’s sort of look at what’s happened just in the last six months. I mean, the Republicans, I think, misread the mandate they got in 1994. I think the 1994 elections were a referendum on the Democrats, and the Democrats had failed, that if you look at 1992, the Democrats had what I think was their own implicit Contract with America, which involved healthcare reform to reach for universal coverage, welfare reform designed not to cut aid to the poor but try to move more welfare recipients into jobs, political reform to try to reduce the influence of special interest money on politics, and all the job training and education, things that President Clinton talked about a lot in the campaign, to help ease people’s transition to the new economy. At the end of the last Congress, healthcare reform failed, welfare reform failed, political reform failed, and all those nice initiatives got shrunk in the budget fight. I think the Republicans won because of that, not because the country wants to move to the right. Indeed, I don’t think the country — a lot of voters don’t think in those terms anyway.

LARRY BENSKY: Well, how about getting from there to progressive, though?

E.J. DIONNE: Well, then what happened is the Republicans misread their mandate and started moving well to the right of where the country was on issues like Medicare, Medicaid, the environment and education programs, the Democrats’ new mantra. And I think that one of the reasons — you know, that is the central reason why the popularity of the Republicans sank. In addition, I think it turned out that the country did not respond to the government shutdown as many Republicans expected. Phil Gramm was quite candid about it, saying, you know, shutting down the government’s a good thing, because government itself is a bad thing, when, in fact, the public said, “Wait a minute. We think it’s lousy the people running the government don’t know how to keep it going, shut down the services, and that the government doesn’t pay people.”

I think what that suggests is that the country is not looking for small government. It’s looking for better government. And in particular, I think that after that fight, it’s a lot harder to have some abstract debate about small government or balancing the budget in seven years on CBO numbers, not exactly a breakfast table topic of conversation. I think it’s much easier to try to shift the argument, and for progressives and liberals to be candid that they don’t have the same view of government as Dick Armey does, that their view is the Democratic government is different from, say, government in Nazi Germany. The Democratic government has the capacity to do things and liberate the capacities of individuals. It did it sort of with programs like the GI Bill, that sent millions of people to college. It did it with civil rights laws, which lifted a huge burden off the backs of African Americans and said African Americans should compete, be able to compete and gain ground and become self-sufficient, just like everybody else.

LARRY BENSKY: Now, are you talking about something that you hope will happen or something that, as a reporter, which you were for years with The New York Times and, later, The Washington Post, you’ve observed happening? Because you do write in your book that the mass movements of the mid-1990s, which we’re still in, are on the right — the Christian conservatives, the gun owners, the tax limitators, the shut down immigration people, the term limits people, etc., all of these mass movements being on the right. What do you see on what you conceive to be the progressive side that is coming up to balance or exceed this?

E.J. DIONNE: One of my favorite critiques of my book came from my wife, who said sometimes she thought it read like a thriller, because — that had a surprise ending, because I was describing all of the advances of the right and why I thought conservatives had made the progress, and then said in the end, “However, this is going to end this way, with the progressive era.” And my sort of — you know, am I saying what I want or what I think will happen? I say both. You know, I don’t have to say why I want this to happen. I came to this sort of view after '92 and ended up, as I was writing the book — I started writing the book before the ’94 elections and was writing it in that period. And it seems to me there's a basic logic to the idea that voters are going to turn to this different kind of politics.

The core argument of the book is that this period most closely resembles the period that led up to the last Progressive Era, sort of the Gilded Age, say, 1870 to 1900. Then, the country was going through a vast transformation, a movement from agriculture to industrialism, from the small town to the big city, from the shop, the small shop, to the factory, and that people at that time, as Robert Wiebe describes in his very interesting book, The Search for Order, they felt that the country was in chaos, both economically and morally. They thought that democratic values were in danger from these new industrial combinations, and they wanted someone to come along to sort of create new rules that they saw as preserving democratic values and also to give them some help to find their footing in the new economy. Well, I think that’s exactly what’s happening now. And what’s striking, looking at this Republican presidential campaign, is that the Republicans almost seem to have sent out to David Bonior or people further left for speeches on class warfare. Pat Buchanan is the most explicit. He talks about Wall Street the way Jesse Jackson does. But even Bob Dole has started talking about the dangers to workers whose pay is going down 5%.

LARRY BENSKY: Well, this is one of the things you write about in your book, which is the preemption of dialogue on the part of the Democrats, especially Bill Clinton, of the Republicans’ language in some cases, and now the — this is one of the most valuable things in the book — the fact that the Republicans, being so badly split, have, in some cases, tried to pick up some of the so-called populist language from the Democrats. But what I wanted to get you to talk about for a moment, if you would, is that — how political movements, in your mind, start and grow, because one of the things you don’t write about in your book is the power of alternate leadership. You talk very eloquently about Newt Gingrich and what he was able to do through his willpower. You talk very eloquently about Ronald Reagan. You don’t talk about anybody on the progressive side. Is it going to take a charismatic leader or leaders to do this? And can those leaders really come from something like the Democratic Party?

E.J. DIONNE: Well, I guess I — maybe this goes back to sort of going to college in late '60s, early ’70s. I've always been skeptical of charismatic leadership as the solution, in that I always thought that even if you take somebody like FDR, who definitely was a successful and charismatic leader, a lot of the New Deal, in fact, was created in the 1920s by a group of progressives in Congress, people like La Guardia and George Norris and La Follette, and that Roosevelt picked up that program and enacted a lot of its pieces as the New Deal. And that is sort of my notion of how change happens in a democracy. There are movements, there are individuals, and then a charismatic leader may be necessary to bring the movement to sort of a conclusion, but I think —

LARRY BENSKY: Well — 

E.J. DIONNE: But let me — let me answer the question you asked — 

LARRY BENSKY: Sure.

E.J. DIONNE: — which I think is a good one. There is a real problem, if you will, of agency in this right now, and that my friend Harold Meyerson, who edits the LA Weekly, is working on a very interesting book called The Disorganization of America. And what he’s specifically talking about is the decline of the organizations that used to empower, essentially, working people. We used to call them the working class; now we call them the working middle class, but the vast number of people who do not have a lot of money or power. And you had — for them, you had the trade union movement and a fairly powerful Democratic Party. You also had a healthy civil rights movement. Now the trade union movement is in trouble. The Democratic Party is hardly an organized party. The civil rights movement has been in trouble, too, although I think there’s some rebirth.

What I see happening now are some signs of life in all of these popular organizations. I think the changes going on in the AFL-CIO suggest some real ferment there and some possibility of progress. You know, we’re not going to get back to Sidney Hillman, but something is happening there. I think you have some movement in the civil rights organizations with some new leadership there. You saw the environmental movement in this Congress really energized and become much more politically effective, I think, as a result of the challenge this Congress put to them. And then, finally, and I think this isn’t talked about enough, there was a real kind of community service movement out there, especially among young people, that AmeriCorps tapped into that, but it goes beyond AmeriCorps, and that this generation coming up, I think, is quite different than the generation described as the Reagan generation. And it’s not necessarily pro-government, and it’s not particularly ideological, but it is oriented toward solving social problems.

LARRY BENSKY: Well, can any of this — excuse me. Can any of this achieve expression through the tired and extremely flawed vehicle that you portray as the contemporary Democratic Party, or are we talking about the necessity of having third parties, alternative parties, in order to accomplish something progressive?

E.J. DIONNE: I don’t see how third-party movements do anything except isolate the left, because we’re talking here about a third party on the left — except isolate the left and split the constituency that might create progressivism. The Democratic Party has always been a flawed vehicle. I mean, you go back, and the Democratic Party used to be the pro-slavery party, so it’s always sort of been in this position, and it’s always had to reform and renew itself. And William Jennings Bryan brought the Populists into the Democratic Party, and then Franklin Roosevelt really united the progressives, who had been split between the two parties, back into the Democratic Party. I guess it’s a — you know, the old Will Rogers line: “I don’t belong to an organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” My own view is, I still see it as the only available vehicle. And I think it’s a pipe dream to think that some sort of mass movement of the left could form an effective political party, however flawed the Democrats might be.

LARRY BENSKY: But you wouldn’t mind being proven wrong, would you, on that?

E.J. DIONNE: Oh, well, I wouldn’t mind being proven wrong, except that, I mean, my politics and the politics I describe in this book are kind of broad church progressivism, which is, I think, the only way progressives will win. And — 

LARRY BENSKY: Yeah, go ahead and define “progressivism,” as you see it, for our listeners, because when you write a book with a title, They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era, people say, “What’s he talking about?”

E.J. DIONNE: Right. And a lot of people these days use the word “progressive” because they look at the polls, and they see that the word “liberal” or the word “left,” neither word is popular, so they say, “Aha, I’m a progressive.”

I’m using it in a specific sense. I don’t have a problem with the word “liberal,” but I use it to define a movement that began in the turn of the century in our country, that asserted that democratic government can improve society and liberate the capacities of individuals. And I use it almost explicitly as a contrast to a kind of sort of Hayek or von Mises view that government action always puts you on the road to serfdom, the view sort of that Dick Armey probably articulates more explicitly than anyone, and that this movement also, I think, always had a strong moral dimension. I think one of the problems liberals and the left have had is that they have left so much of the moral debate in our country to the religious right. They have not — not only haven’t they wanted to address issues like family breakup or abandoned kids and all of that — they’ve been uneasy about that — but they’ve also let the very definition of moral problems be left to the right. And therefore, until recently, people haven’t talked about how moral issues and economic issues are linked. You know, the parent who has to work three jobs to make ends meet and then worries about how much time he or she has to spend with kids, well, that’s both a moral and an economic issue. The progressives in our history, not always on the right side, I should say, but did have this concern for moral life and individual responsibility, as well as a view of government.

LARRY BENSKY: But the Republicans, again — and we see this in this presidential campaign — are using those very terms themselves and are trying to deal with those very issues. Have they completely preempted the field in this debate?

E.J. DIONNE: No, I don’t think so at all. I mean, you know, everyone said, rightly, that President Clinton was mimicking the Republicans when he said the era of big government is over. And I was struck by the fact that as soon as those words are out of his mouth, he sort of came back and said, “Ah, but we don’t want to go back to the days when individuals were left to fend for themselves.” I think it’s a bad idea, in general, to credit the other side’s rhetoric, because you can end up falling into it yourself.

But what I think is happening now, just in the last couple of months, is this mimicry of the left’s rhetoric. I mean, when Dole talks about the economy in the way he’s talking about it, he’s not even mimicking Clinton. He’s mimicking people well to Clinton’s left in his critique of the economy. Far from being a sign of strength, I think that’s a sign of weakness, because it says that a certain critique about how our economy is working has really penetrated in the country much more deeply than sort of conventional commentators, including me, and the Republicans themselves had thought.

LARRY BENSKY: E.J. Dionne is author of They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era. He’s a columnist for The Washington Post. I’m Larry Bensky for Pacifica Radio in Berkeley. Back to you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Thank you, Larry. And we are still looking for that presidential job description, so we do hope that you’ll write to us with what you think a president should be and do. Our address is 702 Eighth Street Northwest, Washington, D.C., 20001. You can fax it to us at 202-737-3723, or email it to us at democracy@pacifica.org. Democracy Now! is produced by Julie Drizin with assistance from Pat Greenfield. It’s engineered by Kenneth Mason at the studios of WPFW. You can reach us via email. Tomorrow on Democracy Now!, presidential primaries in the industrial Midwest. We’ll look at how NAFTA has affected manufacturing jobs in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois. Also, Salim Muwakkil will be joining us, talking about the 21st Century Party trying to get gang members active in Chicago in electoral politics. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for listening.