I’ll have more to say on this later, but Nate Silver raises issues that deserve a thorough hashing out. As just a preliminary thought, it pays to think about the two progressivisms in terms of our history. The prior Progressive Era’s two greatest accomplishments were granting female suffrage and enacting Prohibition. We can add the federal income tax and the direct election of the Senate.
In other words, the original progressive movement involved both populist and repressive ingredients. That remains true today as progressives combine concern with civil liberties with policies that fund SCHIP exclusively through cigarette taxes and that emphasize smoking bans.
Progressivism has always balanced the desire to achieve concrete societal benefits and to preserve liberty. I’m with Upton Sinclair. He was my kind of progressive.
If you are referring to Prohibition as “repressive”, than you really have no idea what alcohol consumption was like during that era.
I’ve gone from a country with Prohibition (the US) to one without (Australia), and the effects are marked.
To give you some historical background, the average consumption of alcohol in the 1900’s was on the order of 5 to 6 times greater than today. The late sighteen century was the start of the era of cheap alcohol, which ushered in an culture where working men went straight from the factories/mines/etc. to the pubs/bars and consumed their entire pay packets. At the time alcohol was considered a major contributor to poverty and violence, and especially for women and children.
It was because of the devistating effect of ‘demon drink’ that New Zealand, and then Australia, became the first countries to grant women suffrage. It was believed that if women could vote they would vote for prohibition. Unfortunately, they didn’t in enough numbers, and both countries continue to have binge drinking cultures with much higher than average alcoholism, and alcohol related fatality and injury rates.
Much like the Birth Contol movement (see Margaret Sanger), which adopted eugenic aguments, Prohibitionist made allies with moral crusaders, but the overall impetus was far more egalitarian that repressive.
Prohibition is the US broke that cycle for the masses. So that drinking for the vast majority of people US became less of a bar and binge culture and more of a controlled activity.
I may be glad that Prohibition ended, but I’m gladder still that it happended in the first place.
Excellent point. Truly – we can’t look at history through the context of the present. We have to evaluate events in the prism of their original context. Thanks for providing that. Much needed.
Plus, without “speakeasies”, the US would never have fomented the American Jazz culture. Marginalizing certain activities can create the kind of critical mass that gives rise to counter-cultures.
Besides, where would Joe Kennedy have gotten his money to promote JFK without bootlegging?
you can argue the merits of the prohibition of alcohol just as easily as you can argue the merits of prohibition of public smoking, trans-fats, and heroin dealing.
There are merits to using the law to discourage unhealthy behavior. On the other side, there are those like me that would use education and rehab not fines and subsidies to make the point.
I think you are missing the point. This was a period of unpresidented change, and the working class in particualar just was not coping. Cheap alcohol was their “way out”.
This wasn’t “unhealthy behavior”, this was drinnk fualed violence and murder reported in every day’s paper, public drunkeness, etc, on a level that you and I can’t really envision.
The people of that age were daily faced with the horrific effects of drink, and responded.
“Eduction and rehab” sound well and good when you’re coming from a position of relative distance and comfort, but some societies don’t have that luxury. I’m thinking in particular of some of the Native American reservations, as well as some Australian Aboriginal townships that have chosen to be “dry”. It’s a form of intervention on the only scale that works. And it is usually driven by the women who are trying to save their men and children.
Like the so-called “anti-sex feminists” (as if) who are too close to the ravages of prostitution to see it as a simple matter of choice, women drove and continue to drive workable ground-level interventions. Even if that puts us (educated types) at odds with our philosphical ideals. This isn’t nobles oblige, this is survival.
Which is why we women will always have an uneasy relationship with whatever political force is in power. Because no matter how well meaning the men in power are, they will always assume that they can take what feels “real” to them as the truth. When in fact the whole of our world is set up precisely to keep such men blissuflly ignorant (emphasys on the bliss). Oh sure, they can dip their toes into the underbelly (which they do), but it’s not the same as living there, which they don’t.
I have the same argument with the Greens here. So many of the lefty men want it to be our party platform that Australia should decriminalize drugs completely. Precisely because those same well-off men want to be free to use them. Because they have lives that allow them to use drugs recreationally, they think that is the reality of drug use. Which is a joke. Sure, I’d take more aspects of drug use out of criminal justice system (which is our current Greens policy), but wholesale decriminalization would be a nightmare for the communities and families already most at risk.
This is a little convoluted. Prohibition did little to limit alcohol consumption beyond the first few years after it was implemented. Furthermore, you’re describing the symptoms of a physiological disease, Alcoholism, over which societal norms, laws and culture have no effect whatsoever. Alcoholic drinking, including binge drinking, in people above college age occurs in around 12-15% of the population and is due to very specific abnormalities in the way the liver and brain metabolize alcohol and acetone.
Alcoholism is a physical disease, yes. But that doesn’t mean that there are not cultures of drunkeness, which there are. The alcoholism rate, and drinking rate, vary widely form country to county in large part due to cultural acceptance of drinking and drunkeness (lots of cultures accept drinking but shun drunkeness).
Lots of people in Australia get drunk on a regular basis, but are not really alcoholics in the sense that they can drink less, or lots, or none at all without that craving that characterizes alcoholism. In other words, they can give up alcohol at any time, but drink daily (and usually excessively) because that’s the cultural norm.
Drunk driving here is at frightening levels, as are alcohol fueled assault and rape levels. This has less to do with metabolism than it has to do with a culture of “blokes will be blokes (and blokes get pissed)”.
Prohibition did a lot to change the pattern of drinking in the US. Especially for the working classes. It cannot be separated out so easily form the other social justice movements – it was part and parcel of a shift in social concerns that saw the dealing with the many plights of the working poor as paramount.
The Australian government makes consumption statistics much easier to find than the U.S. government. The percentage of the Australian population that engages in what they refer to as “Risky/high risk alcohol consumption” is similar to the U.S: 12-15%. I would imagine, though I don’t know for sure, that if you were to look only at white Americans and Australians of Anglo-Celtic descent, you would find nearly identical rates of “Risky/high risk alcohol consumption.” Cultures with a cultural acceptance of drinking and drunkenness grow up around ethnic groups with higher concentrations of alcoholics in their gene pool.
Also, people who can “give up alcohol at any time,” but who get drunk daily and engage in destructive behavior (drunk driving, rape, etc) as a result, don’t tend to be people who can actually give up alcohol at any time. Otherwise they would. Non addicted people do not regularly consume drugs in such a quantity as to put their own lives and livelihoods in serious jeopardy.
Again, I think that it’s a cultural thing.
The Australian government is still deciding whether or not to tell pregnant women if some drinking is OK or not. Most Australian will define “drunk” as unable to stand-up, as opposed to impaired.
It’s only been in the last year that has binge drinking been defined downward to more than four drinks in a two hour period (from the previous seven for men and five for women). Before that you pretty much had to pass out to be considered a binge drinker.
I remember the big change in the US when the three-martini lunch and driving a bit “tipsy” went from being OK (everybody does it) to being considered anti-social behavior. That was in the 80’s where I lived.
After all the drunk driving ad campaigns lots of people cut down on their drinking before driving (and designated drivers became cool). Except, of course, for the alcoholics and sociopaths. That shift in perception is only just starting to happen here. So it’s still mainly the “average Joe” getting loaded and driving.
A few months ago we just had our very first case in which a bar was found liable for a patron who killed himself trying to drive home drunk. He had gone so far as to give the keys to his motorcycle to the manager early in the evening, and then later, when clearly inebriated had demanded them back. His wife sued. And the bar is appealing the decision.
You should also note that alcohol is about three times as expensive here compared to the US (a cheap six-pack starts at $13), and yet we still consume more per capita.
Upton Sinclair ran for Governor of California on a near Communist platform – a really extreme form of socialism that involved appropriating private property for public programs via his “EPIC” program (EPIC = End Poverty In California).
I wonder how much you really know of Sinclair’s actual proposals. They were extremely radical!
The Progressive Era did more than just ban booze and achieve female suffrage. Its followers were stalwarts in the fight for the abolition of child labor, the movement for public education at public expense (through taxation), pensions for the aged, minimum wages and maximum hours, unions for the working man and woman and many other reforms that we take for granted in this enlightened twenty-first century.
Plus, the Progressives tried to keep a focus on the corrupt activities of the banks and the venal politicians and their nefarious lobbies. The tragedy of our times IMO is that the general public started taking the Progressives for granted and began to listen to the hirelings of the rich (Limberger, Hateity et al) in the mass media as the apostles of truth and good government.
Capitalism would correct its own abuses and we could maintain our lifestyle on credit rather than on productive capacity. What utter economic nonsense. And, now, we are on the edge of a depression. Time for the Progressives to get back into the fray. God knows we sure need them.-
You’re with Nate Silver at 3AM? You are a busy blogger.
Booman I am generally like your insights, but I must disagree with you on this one.
First, employing binary language like Silver does to discuss differences within Progressivism is simplistic and (perhaps unintentionally) dishonest. you can’t reduce progressives to two camps of any kind, especially two named optimistic and pessimistic. it is polarizing language,from someone who calls himself a rational incrementalist!
Second, his approach overlooks huge segments of history, and seems more of a stereotype than a study.
Third, he doesn’t understand, and therefore dismisses, marxist critique.
btw, is keeping the public healthy (smoking bans in public spaces) really a repressive idea?
This is the point on which I run into problems with the “progressive movement”: While I consider myself to be well to the left of most Democrats on economics, on the social side there’s a certain culture on the left of “I know what’s best for you” and “I should be free from anything I don’t like even in public” that I find ridiculous.
The SCHIP expansion funded by tobacco taxes is, in the end, okay by me, because I care more about kids getting health care than I do about people having to pay more for cigarettes, but let’s not pretend this is some great liberal way of doing it. I smoke, and I’m of the middle class, so it doesn’t hurt me, but I think you’d find smokers skew heavily towards the working class and the poor. There’s something sick about taxing poor and working-class people to pay for middle-class people while leaving the rich sitting pretty.
(Not that that’s anything new. We’ll be doing that with the housing crisis.)
I find it sad that the Democrats were too gutless, as they often are, to pay for the SCHIP expansion through progressive taxation and instead chose to beat up on smokers, but it sells, because a not-insignificant number of people on our side of the aisle have a certain hatred for smokers for what are quite often — to put it very charitably — dubious reasons from a scientific and economic perspective.
The “progressives” should stick to the economics and stop attacking people’s habits.
Or at least make the fat people pay for two seats on the plane.
When one person’s freedom impinges on another, facts need to enter the debate.
It is a fact that second-hand smoke harms people even in small quantities. So it makes sense that the smoker’s freedom would be limited because the smoker is choosing to ingest harm, and the nonsmoker’s freedom would be expanded because the nonsmoker is harming no one by their behavior.
And where, may I ask, is your freedom being impinged by smokers?
Second-hand smoke – the non-smoker’s choice is overridden.
My step-father’s smoking (including in a closed car with us kids in the back) gave me asthma – which I have to treat daily.
In the absence of laws, the strong are free to harm the weak. Which is to say that people who are in a position to control their breathing space will keep smokers at bay, and the rest of us will suffer because it costs us too much of our limited resources to try and change the situation.
I have long been against sin taxes to fund items that the public government should just pay for anyway. Tying health care to cigarette taxes or education spending to gambling revenue are messed up methods of accomplishing public policies.
DC recently raised the cigarette tax 2 dollars to fund Health care programs but then tabled the programs and still kept the tax. 10 dollars for a pack of smokes in Chicago and New York City is beyond obscene. The way ABC stores control hard alcohol in some states is borderline criminal.
Since we have tuns of obese people in our country, what is stopping us from high taxes bad foods or soda? Under the same policy logic, we could pay for nutrition programs with the money.
For a while.
I was a 2004 Edwards supporter. I think Axelrod put it most succinctly; he just couldn’t close the deal. It happens. So he (and I) moved on to other candidates for 2008. It was also blindingly obvious that without money he was running for VP or a cabinet slot. I certainly would have supported him in that. As it happened, developments were not necessarily to his advantage.
There was something about his 2008 core support, guys like Sirota, Trippi, Krugman, heck even Tim Robbins that rubbed me the wrong way. I couldn’t put my finger on it till I saw the collective orgasm over the “Weeping Bubba on the Cross” commercial. There was NO way in hell that ad gets cut with a Latino woman or black man. It became clear to me Edwards supporters wanted their white privilege. They wanted 1958 and the ability to spout platitudes about equality and labor solidarity while being safe in the knowledge that the were earning more and doing less than minorities and women.
Nate does real radical progressives like Trumka a disservice. He knows the score; women and Latinos will be the core of 21st century labor. So he is working towards that end. That’s some heavy lifting in an institution as hidebound as big labor. Sirota and his ilk are a bunch of cranks and crackpots who have zero self awareness of the bitter fruit they’re selling. Just yap, yap, yap at the heels of whomever has violated the party line that day.
(If there’s one candidate who I feel I know less now than at the beginning it’s Edwards. Was this a core instinct? Cynical manipulation Clinton style? Is he just a complete idiot? Did he go nuts after his wife’s diagnosis but continued an ill advised the run? What the hell happened??)
Can you clearly define the line between Progressivism versus Socialism? It seems that’s going to be an important distinction that will come up a lot, what with the Repugs’ thoughtless tactic of (dis)loyal opposition.