Welcome to National Marriage Equality Week. After today’s Supreme Court hearing on the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8, marriage equality has been the topic du jour, and will remain so after tomorrow’s companion hearing on the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). I certainly hope the Court sees these discriminatory laws for what they are, but even if it doesn’t, the battle for marriage equality has been won: public opinion has swung strongly and, given the numbers among young Americans, likely irreversibly in favor of marriage equality.

Anti-equality advocates, like Princeton professor Robert George and his co-authors, are attempting to cast this movement as an attack on the venerable institution of marriage. While these arguments don’t pass the smell test, more level-headed conservatives are right to point to a battery of statistics to suggest that the institution of marriage is in crisis for reasons quite independent of marriage equality.

The “marriage in crisis” framing generally leads to discussions about what could be done to save marriage as it exists today. But there’s a prior question: is the dominant, traditional vision of marriage really something we want to save? And if not, what would replace it?

If we assume that deep cultural forces are eroding the traditional, one-size fits marriage model based around norms like permanence and exclusivity, we should start talking about alternatives. That starts by imagining a way to preserve marriage’s social benefits while making it a more fundamentally freeing institution; developing a liberal vision of married life oriented around free choice and equal, mutually life-defining partnership. This move will require a shift in both government policy and social norms, but if we think the marriage crisis is, in fact, a crisis in need of addressing, developing an attractive vision of the institution is a necessary first step.

Taking philosophical stock of marriage requires first figuring out what, in fact, individuals and society need out of marriage. From the point of view of individual adults looking to get married, that’s clear: a defining relationship that allows them to chart the course of their life with a person they cannot imagine living without. According to a 2011 Pew survey, love is almost universally (93 percent) cited as a reason that people get married. A similarly large number of Americans cited a “lifelong commitment” (87 percent) and “companionship” (81 percent) as reasons to get married, suggesting love’s bond is seen as something more thoroughgoing than an emotional connection. Marriage, it seems, is something more like a fundamental and encompassing commitment to another person, a statement that two people want to be partners in all of life’s most important and difficult endeavors, ideally forever. It’s a loving tie, but one beyond mere love — call it commitment, for lack of more emotionally accurate word.

But the strong, seemingly innate human desire for commitment in this sense alone isn’t a good reason for the state to legally recognize marriages and sanction them with special tax benefits and legal privileges. The only plausible defense of civil marriage is that it promotes the health of children by giving them a stable environment to grow in. There’s some extremely strong evidence that, all things being equal, children raised in married homes are more likely to be better off; the American Association of Pediatrics (which recently endorsed marriage equality) believes the bulk of the evidence suggests marriage makes adult life less risk-prone, as a consequence creating a safer, healthier environment for kids to grow up in. There’s even some evidence that marriage lowers violent crime and gender inequality. This body of research makes me leery of calls to get rid of marriage outright or de-couple it from the state. Absent a clear idea of what would replace marriage, reform rather than outright replacement seems like the safer bet.

So to make marriage work, we need to develop a vision that allows adults to define their partnership in the way that matters to them while at the same time keeping home life solid and stable for children. How might that work?

Absolute free choice and open communication should be our lodestars. Instead of defining marriage by a specific set of norms, we should see it as an institution where two adults develop a shared, uncoerced vision of the good life, working out a mutually agreed upon ideal life on terms that both partners find fulfilling. This liberal view of marriage encourages marriage to be a place for, in John Stuart Mill’s memorable phrase, “experiments in living,” where couples chart their own course as equal partners, burdened only by social expectations that 1) neither partner forces the other to live on unacceptable terms and 2) that, if they choose to have children, they make sure to place the kids’ welfare first.

You might think that this liberal view is generally how people see marriage today. That may or may not be true, but making this ideal explicit in the public marriage debate (which it certainly isn’t now) helps us see just how far we are in terms of public policy and social norms from making it a reality.

The political barrier towards realizing the liberal marriage ideal is the most obvious: the fundamentally patriarchal character of contemporary heterosexual union, a reality sustained by public policy. It’s a point feminists have been making since the women’s movement began, but it still hasn’t been solved. Hangover social norms from the bad old days put a disproportionate onus on women to raise children, limiting both women’s ability to work outside the home and men’s ability to work inside it. This disparity, together with broader workplace sexisms like unequal pay, combine to put women in an economically weaker position, putting the marriage on unchosen, unequal terms. This creates what feminist philosopher Susan Moller Okin calls “a cycle of socially caused and distinctly asymmetric vulnerability” wherein women are, through neither partner’s free choice, funneled into an economically subordinate position.

This vulnerability limits the ability of heterosexual couples to define their relationship on their own terms, forcing them to live in socially defined boxes rather than negotiating the contours of their work/life balance on their own terms. This is a place where government policy can help: equal pay legislation and universal childcare are strong first steps towards freeing marriage.

But another aspect of marriage that requires rethinking is more of a cultural than political issue: sexual exclusivity. There’s good reason to believe that sexual exclusivity isn’t what all humans are naturally inclined towards; that while lifelong commitment, or “social monogamy,” is a basic human need, many people feel an equally basic need for a diverse set of sexual partners. If that’s true, then non-monogamy could be good for some (not all) couples for two reasons: 1) if both partners prefer non-monogamy, then it’s wrong for society to coerce them into being monogamous; 2) socially sanctioned non-monogamy could lower rates of infidelity and hence divorces caused by the breach of trust created by cheating.

Instead of shaming couples who choose non-exclusivity, we should recognize that, under conditions of clear and free consent, it’s healthier for some (not all) marriages to remain sexually open while emotionally closed. The majority of couples (I suspect) who find sexual monogamy integral to a meaningful relationship will remain free to do so, but those who feel the reverse should be equally liberated to live life on their terms.

This matters not because most marriages *should* be non-monogamous: to be clear, I actually think the vast majority of couples would, given the choice, remain monogamous. Rather, it’s that partners who feel like their marriage would be on better footing if they could have honest conversations about non-monogamy should be able to do so without fear of social pressure. Given rising adultery rates, there’s at least some reason to think more openness would address one cause of divorce.

But more importantly, it’s a matter of principle. If marriage really is about mutual self-definition, then partners should feel free to define the terms of their relationship in whatever way they see fit as long as they don’t hurt each other or their children. We should stop shaming non-monogamy not because we see it as our social ideal, but because it’s some people’s individual ideal. If marriage is to broadly be a Millian “experiment in living,” then non-monogamy should be one of the individual tests.

There’s a seemingly obvious contradiction here: if heterosexual marriages are currently unequal power relations, it might seem that lowering the level of shame surrounding non-exclusivity simply frees up men to coerce women into accepting their “need” to sleep around. That’s a real concern, and it’s why we need to retain social norms around marriage, but center them on consent rather than a defined set of rules. Social shaming should be directed towards people that coerce and bully their partners. Non-consent must be made into be the foremost marital ill in society’s eyes.

These suggestions only skim the surface of the ocean of questions surrounding marriage. But advancing the liberal marriage ideal is a critical task in making our society a better, freer place. Hopefully, a Court ruling in favor of marriage equality will help point the way.

People often ask what, exactly, do progressives believe?  Over the past few years, we’ve worked with a great group called the American Values Project, representing a cross section of leaders from think tanks, philanthropic organizations, and environmental, labor, youth, civil rights, and other progressive groups, to try to distill progressive beliefs and values into clear language in one digestible resource.

The result of this collective effort is called Progressive Thinking: A Synthesis of Progressive Values, Beliefs, and Positions.  The document is free and we encourage you to read, review, critique, and pass it around to others.  As the handbook states, the central progressive message is one of fairness and equality:

Our approach is simple to summarize and is built upon the ideas of generations of progressives from Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Barack Obama:  everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does his or her fair share, and everyone plays by the same rules. As progressives, we believe that everyone deserves a fair shot at a decent, fulfilling, and economically secure life.  We believe that everyone should do his or her fair share to build this life through education and hard work and through active participation in public life.   And we believe that everyone should play by the same set of rules with no special privileges for the well-connected or wealthy.

The book is divided into sections outlining the overall progressive story, foundational beliefs about government, the economy, and national security, and the application of this framework to contemporary issues.  It also includes a number of useful speeches and essays that show progressive values and beliefs in action throughout our nation’s history.
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In conservatives’ preferred vision of America, we are a white Christian nation. And it is true that in the not too far distant past, we were, at least in numerical terms, an overwhelmingly white Christian nation.  In 1944, 80 percent of adults were white Christians.  But things have changed a lot since then.  Today only about 52 percent of adults are white Christians. By 2024, that figure will be down to 45 percent. That means that by the election of 2016, the United States will have ceased to be a white Christian nation. Looking even farther down the road, by 2040 white Christians will be only around 35 percent of the population and conservative white Christians, who have been such a critical part of the GOP base, only about a third of that—a minority within a minority.

Part of this of course is the inexorable march of race-ethnic change.  The white share of the population is declining at a rate of about a half percentage point a year and is expected to continue to do so for the next several decades.  But the other part of the shift away from white Christians is less well-understood: the rise of religious diversity.

There are two components to the rise of religious diversity: (1) increasing numbers of Americans who practice a non-Christian faith; and (2) increasing numbers of Americans who are secular or unaffiliated with any religion.  A recent Pew report sheds light on these important trends.

The Pew report aggregates data from their surveys between 2007 and 2012.  They found that those of non-Christian faiths have gone up from 4 to 6 percent over the time period, while those who are religiously unaffiliated have gone from 15 to nearly 20 percent of adults.  This is an astonishing rate of change, particularly for the unaffiliated who, according to some projections, were only supposed to hit 20 percent around the middle of the next decade.  This group’s growth is clearly way ahead of expectations.

Part of the reason for this rapid growth is generational.  Pew’s study notes that, among the youngest Millennial adults—those born 1990-1994, over a third (34 percent) have no religious affiliation.

There are significant social and political implications to these trends.  Pew and other data consistently show how liberal the unaffiliated are, particularly on social issues.  And they vote that way: in the 2012 exit poll, the unaffiliated supported Obama over Romney, 70-26.  In addition, those of non-Christian faiths supported Obama by 72-27.  To add to conservatives’ woes, their strongest group, white evangelical protestants (78-21 Romney) actually declined by 2 percentage points in the 2007-2012 time period.

Even conservatives should be able to do the math.  It’s time to give up on America as a white Christian nation and fully embrace its diversity–race-ethnic and religious.

In mid-2009, I published a report called The Coming End of the Culture Wars.  Four years on, how is my prediction holding up?

First, let’s review some history.  The term “culture wars” dates back to a 1991 book by academic James Davison Hunter who argued that cultural issues touching on family and religious values, feminism, gay rights, race, guns and abortion had redefined American politics.  Going forward, bitter conflicts around these issues would be the fulcrum of politics in a polarized nation.

For a while, it did look like he might have a point.  Conservatives especially seemed happy to take a culture wars approach, reasoning that political debate around these issues would both mobilize their base and make it more difficult for progressives to benefit from their edge on domestic policy issues like the economy and health care.  This approach played an important role in conservative gains in the early part of the Clinton administration, the impeachment drama of the late 1990’s, which undercut progressive legislative strategies, and, of course, the 2000 and 2004 victories of conservative George W. Bush.

Lately, though, these issues have been conspicuous by their absence.  Looking back on Barack Obama’s historic victory in 2008, culture wars issues not only had a very low profile in the campaign, but, where conservatives did attempt to raise them, these issues did them little good.  Indeed, they were probably more hurt than helped by such attempts–witness the effect of the Sarah Palin nomination.

Since then, attempts to revive the culture wars have been similarly unsuccessful.  Sarah Palin’s bizarre trajectory, culminating in her surprise resignation from the Alaska governership, only made culture wars politics appear even more out of touch.  And culture warriors’ shrill attacks on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor conspicuously failed to turn public opinion against her.

More recently, the air has been running even faster out of the culture wars balloon.  Take the culture warriors’ signature issue of opposition to same sex marriage.  Back in 2009, I noted that support for same sex marriage, while a minority position, was increasing steadily at a rate of about a percentage point a year.  In the last four years, that rate of change has accelerated to more than 2 points a year, so that we now see plurality and frequently majority support for same sex marriage in public polling.  Indeed, the 2012 exit poll found a 49-46 plurality in favor of legalizing same sex marriage, support that extended, as a recent report has noted, across a wide range of demographic groups.

Of course, in the actual 2012 campaign, culture wars issues were “the dog that didn’t bark” as candidate Romney attempted to stay far, far away from these issues.  This was despite President Obama’s historic decision to come out in support of legalizing same sex marriage. Romney, despite his party’s continued opposition to freedom to marry, did not feel he could safely push that opposition in a general election context.

The culture wars as we have known them are therefore likely coming to an end.  Demographic change is undercutting both the level and salience of conservative cultural views, thereby reducing the effectiveness of such politics. And no, abortion rights is not an exception: in the 2012 exit poll, 18-29 year olds were 2:1 pro-choice on abortion, the highest of any age group.

These changes will not prevent conservative activists around particular culture wars issues from continuing to press their case.  Indeed, reaction to their current desperate plight may lead them to intensify their efforts in some states, especially where demographic change has been slow or where local right wing culture wars institutions retain strength.  But there will be diminishing incentives for politicians to take up these causes for the very simple reason that they are losers.

The winding down of the culture wars will also not end the clustering of those with progressive and conservative cultural views at the progressive and conservative ends of politics.  It will still be the case that voters will be attracted to the political “home” where they feel culturally most comfortable.  Conservatives will attempt to capitalize on this by giving a cultural overtone to non-cultural issues like taxes and government spending.

Sound familiar?  That, of course, has been the conservative playbook for the last several years.  But the aggressive use of specifically cultural issues to divide voters will become less and less common.  And the country will be a better place for it.

This is part 2 of a series on RFK and the Obama coalition.  Part 1 is here.

The potential of the new Obama coalition is truly impressive, given its 2012 performance and how many of its constituent parts are likely to grow in numbers over the course of the decade.  But the word “potential” should be stressed.  There is no guarantee that turnout and support levels will stay as high as they have been going forward.  And there is definitely no guarantee that these constituencies will remain active and involved in the legislative battles that must be fought to turn progressive policies into law.  Thus, implementing a progressive agenda will, to a large extent, be dependent on the mobilization level of the Obama coalition both in future elections and between those elections.

This is a big challenge, but Obama and his team have taken some significant steps to address it.  These steps have been driven by the recognition that the best way to maintain enthusiasm and support is to deliver for the groups that put you in office.  Thus, the administration has been aggressively pushing a number of policy priorities that resonate with the concerns of different groups in the coalition:  immigration reform, curbing gun violence, same sex marriage, climate change and universal pre-K.

This strategy is a good one.  These fights are all substantively important in policy terms and may, with luck, result in some important victories.  And they should indeed pump up enthusiasm levels as different groups in the coalition see how strongly Obama is willing to fight for their priorities.  Nor does it seem likely that a big political price will be paid for touching on issues that have a social dimension; the country has moved rapidly in a progressive direction on most of these issues and these issues lack the power they once had to elicit a backlash.

However, the strategy has to be supplemented by efforts not just to mobilize the Obama coalition but to expand it.    And among the chief targets here is the white working class, just as it was for Bobby Kennedy in 1968.

The white working class was the key force behind the Republican landslide in 2010 — Democrats lost the group by 30 points.  And they were a glaring weakness for Obama in 2012, when he lost them by only a slightly more modest 26 points.  These voters, despite their declining numbers, will be an ever-present threat to progressives in elections and to progressive governance as long as they remain so hostile to progressive principles and policies.

The solution is to bring a significant segment of these voters over to the progressive side.  It does not have to be a majority of these voters.  The Bobby Kennedy coalition can be dominant with a strong minority of the white working class, but one that is committed to progressive policies and large enough to derail the super-majorities among the voters that conservatives rely on.

Such a coalition would make the task of progressive governance far easier by breaking up the mass base for conservative counter-mobilization.  And it should greatly reduce the threat white working class voters pose to progressive fortunes when rising constituencies falter or fail to turn out at high levels.

But how can this be done?  It is no doubt a substantial challenge, but one that can and must be addressed.  At CAP, we are launching a project—the Bobby Kennedy Project—to do just that.  The goal is to figure out how to reach both the white working class and more progressive-leaning demographic groups through unifying values, policies and messages.

Our initial work suggests that a successful approach will require a relentless focus on social opportunity for all people and an economic agenda that puts the interests of working- and middle-class families first.  In particular, the burgeoning research and policy agenda around “equity and growth” provides a good model for policies that can successfully unite a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, cross-class coalition.  The evidence is increasingly strong that rising inequality has inhibited growth and that higher growth in the future is more likely with policies that broadly diffuse opportunity.  These policies are America’s future and also perhaps the glue that can finally join a critical segment of the white working class to America’s rising demographic groups.

The rise of the Obama coalition has already changed American politics.  Expanding this rising coalition into a Bobby Kennedy coalition could transform our politics for a generation.

This is part 1 of a 2 part series on RFK and the Obama coalition.

Forty-five years ago today, Senator Robert F. Kennedy announced his candidacy for the President of the United States promising to lead a moral and political uprising to end the war in Vietnam and to fight the corrosive poverty afflicting American cities and rural areas.  Affected greatly by the legacy of his brother President John F. Kennedy, his growing alignment with the Civil Rights and anti-war movements, and his work to fight the war on poverty, Sen. Kennedy sought to do what no liberal politician before him had been able to accomplish—unite African Americans, Latinos, young people, and liberal intellectuals with blue collar whites to advance progressive causes and give political voice to the disenfranchised in American society.

Kennedy’s straightforward talk about the problems of “the other America” and the need for racial reconciliation and expanded opportunities for all people—across racial and ethnic lines—rallied communities across the country.  Although his campaign lasted only 82 days before he was gunned down in Los Angeles—a few months after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—Robert Kennedy’s forward-looking vision and unique political strategy presaged a fundamental transformation of American liberalism away from its New Deal roots and towards the emergent coalition of minorities, young people, women, professionals, and middle class whites that would eventually elect Barack Obama in 2008 and re-elect him in 2012.

The decades following Kennedy’s presidential run were not easy for center-left forces as progressives faced numerous political difficulties, ideological set-backs, and outright campaign and governing failures.  A resurgent conservative movement that gained strength during the 1970’s and 1980’s successfully shifted ideological discourse and public policy away from New Deal and Great Society liberalism and towards supply-side principles, social conservatism, and aggressive militarism.  At the national level, the Democratic Party lost control of many states, particularly in the South, and a large percentage of its white working class base to an increasingly conservative Republican Party under Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich.

These ideological and political streams eventually converged to cause the most damage during the failed presidency of George W. Bush in the early 2000’s when the United States embarked on series of policy mistakes from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to unfunded tax cuts for the wealthy and the dismantling of federal regulations to protect the environment, public health, and the economy.

With President Obama’s re-election, the tide has clearly turned for progressives as the conservative realignment in American politics has reached its peak and is rapidly declining due to long term changes in America; a new and vibrant coalition in American politics has indisputably arrived.  This powerful Obama coalition, presaged by Kennedy in 1968, has the potential to dominate politics for a generation and usher in a new era of progressive public policy.

But will it?  That depends on the extent to which this coalition can be mobilized and broadened as we move forward.

The strengths of the coalition are obvious, starting with minority voters.  The share of minority voters in the 2012 election increased by 2 percentage points, bringing their share of the voting electorate to 28 percent.  That compares to just 15 percent of voters in 1988.

Overall, Obama received 80 percent support from people of color in 2012 just as he did in 2008.  His support among African-Americans was almost as overwhelming last November (93-6) as it was in 2008 (95-4).  And his support among Hispanics (71-27) improved substantially over its 2008 level (67-31).  In addition, Obama achieved historic levels of support among Asian-Americans, carrying them by 73-26, compared to 62-35 in 2008.

Adding to the power of the minority vote is the certainty of its continued growth.  The share of minority voters in the 2016 election should be around 30 percent and, in the 2020 election, around 32 percent.

Millennial generation (born 1978-2000) voters are also a central component of the Obama coalition.  Young voters in the 18-29 year old age group — all Millennials — defied skepticism about their likely levels of voter turnout, comprising 19 percent of voters in 2012, up from 18 percent in Obama’s historic campaign of 2008.  In addition, since many Millennials are now older than 29, the share of Millennials among voters is significantly underestimated by just looking at 18-29 year olds.  Taking these older Millennials into account, the true share of Millennials in the 2012 electorate was probably around 26 percent.

Millennial 18-29 year olds supported Obama by a 23-point margin in the 2012 election (60 percent to 37 percent). This is strong support, by far Obama’s best performance among any age group, just as was the case in 2008, when Obama performed even more strongly among these voters (66-32).

As with people of color, we will see more and more of these voters in the electorate over the next several elections, as the number of Millennial eligible voters increases by about 4 million a year.  By the 2016 election, Millennials should be about 36 percent of eligible voters and roughly a third of actual voters.  And by the 2020 election, Millennials should be nearly 2 in 5 (39 percent) eligible voters and around 36 percent of actual voters.

Unmarried women are another key part of the Obama coalition.  Obama carried this group by a wide 67-31 margin in 2012, not far off his 70-29 margin in 2008.  Unmarried women were also a larger share of voters, 23 percent vs. 21 percent in 2008.  This trend may continue in the future, since the growth rate of unmarried women is roughly twice that of married women.

While not as strong for Obama as unmarried women, their male counterparts also favored Obama, giving him a healthy 56-40 margin, close to the 58-38 margin they gave him in 2008.  And their share of voters went up even more, increasing by 4 points to 18 percent.  All told, unmarried voters were 40 percent of voters in 2012, up 6 points from 2008’s 34 percent share.

Obama also received strong support from those of non-Christian faiths (72-27) and those with no religious affiliation (70-26).  In addition, voters with a postgraduate education (a good proxy for professionals) supported Obama by 55-42 and residents of large metropolitan areas (54 percent of voters) supported him by 56-42.  Again, all of these groups have been growing and should continue to grow over time.

Obama generally did poorly among white voters but the college-educated were a relative bright spot.  He lost this group by 14 points (as compared to 20 points among all white voters) and did substantially better among white college-educated women, losing them by a modest 6 points.  White college-educated voters have been increasing both as a share of overall voters and—very rapidly–as a share of white voters.  Based on historical patterns and projections of future educational attainment, these trends should continue for some time.

(Part 2 of the series will examine strategies for connecting diverse constituencies with the white working class.)

The Republican Party retains, as its soul, its opposition to government intervention in the economy. On Friday afternoon, two CPAC panels demonstrated that the party can take this core commitment in two directions: either further down the dead end of applied Austrian ideology, or towards an problems-oriented application of free-market principles, one that responds to political issues in evidence rather than divining solutions from on high.

The GOP’s conventional economic wisdom was well on display at the panel entitled “The Europeanization of America.” Two European Parliament members huffed warnings (representative line: “you could compare Greece with California”), while two Republican members of the House treated the Continent as if it were being autopsied before the audience. Nowhere was there an attempt to seriously grapple with Europe — its across-the-board higher living standards and minimal economic inequality — or really do anything other than crow about the superiority the American economy to its European competitors. One couldn’t have imagined a better demonstration of the staleness of GOP economic doctrine.

But a panel directly afterwards — on whether we are “back on the road to serfdom” — offered two ways forward. Following the first, however, likely wouldn’t take the GOP to a place it wanted to go. Brian Domitrovic, a professor at Sam Houston State University, advocated the abolition of progressive income taxes and the Federal Reserve and a return to the gold standard. He surmised that, had we never left the gold standard, our GDP would be double its current size today. Res ipsa loquitur, I suppose.

The second speaker, The Washington Examiner‘s Tim Carney, developed a far more persuasive vision of conservative economic policy. Carney’s well known for his critique of crony capitalism, the fusion of government and business interests to the detriment of both, but what made his presentation interesting was its development of that theme into a broader guiding philosophy for conservatives, one that even some progressives might find something to like in.

On Carney’s picture, the central problem afflicting today’s political economy is its total penetration by big business. Businesses (he used General Electric, Boeing, and Microsoft as examples) devote extraordinary resources to lobbying, because, in its current state, the political system makes it a quick, if not necessary, path for prosperity. There are innumerable pathways to get tax breaks and legislative protections for one’s patented products through federal legislation, and corporations with means, being rational enough to recognize this, exploit them.

For Carney, this isn’t just one economic problem: it’s a fundamental one. The government-business nexus crushes what entrepreneurial “virtue,” it makes success not so much about hard work but ascending to the top of the corporate ladder inside a company whose advantages are guaranteed by federal fiat. People aren’t encouraged to innovate so much as conform, damaging both economic productivity and the moral character of people who attempt to participate in business. Or, in Carney’s words, “When you become a beggar, you become something slightly approaching a serf.”

Progressives concerned with the growing power of big business in our society should find a lot here. Carney didn’t propose much in the way of solutions, but a generalized vision of markets as a zone of society that all people, not just the powerful, should have access to is a radically anti-corporate one — one whose implications could be far more egalitarian than Carney would likely want. At the very least, it’s a conservative economic vision oriented around a real threat to our free market system — and not the imagined spectre of European socialism.

We’re told the Republican Party is in the midst of internal upheaval, that conservative intellectuals are waging a fierce battle over their party’s future. It’d be great if that were true.

But if this intellectual free-for-all is having an effect on the party, it’s hard to spot without a microscope. Reformist conservative intellectuals admit that Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budget is merely a tired reiteration of his previous offerings. The party’s great new hope, Sen. Ted Cruz, is tilting at the Obamacare repeal windmill as opposed to offering a viable alternative health care vision. And CPAC, the marquee conservative conference that began yesterday, offers Sarah Palin and Donald Trump as star speakers.

The sad truth is that the reformers are outgunned, outnumbered, and outfunded. There’s no serious constituency with clout that believes the GOP needs to substantively reform its political institutions. Until that changes, the talk from conservative thinkers is just that.

Consider how the Republican Party, which once claimed Dwight “military-industrial complex” Eisenhower as its standard bearer, became captured by the conservative movement. Many use the words “Republican” and “conservative” interchangeably today, but that would have seemed bizarre just forty short years ago. The modern conservative movement began as, odd as this may seem to progressives, an anti-establishment movement: William F. Buckley Jr. and the National Review crowd were rebelling against the perception of a milquetoast GOP. What we now understand as modern conservatism’s guiding principles (economic libertarianism, a concern with preserving “traditional” social mores, and foreign policy hawkery) were originally formulated as challenges to the contemporary Republican consensus.

But modern conservatism didn’t take over the Republican Party by sheer force of Buckley’s will. It took a cadre of politicians like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, support from the then-young Heritage Foundation, and a major on-the-ground organizing effort to uproot the GOP old guard. As Jonathan Yardley put it in a review of the widely acclaimed history of moderate Republicanism Rule and Ruin, “one of the central things about moderates — and one of the best things — is that they are, well, moderate. Whether they call themselves Republicans, Democrats or independents, they don’t get up on soapboxes, they don’t spend six hours a day glued to Fox News, and they don’t pour out in overwhelming numbers to vote in party primaries. This last factor, more than anything else, is what explains the demise of Republican moderation and the victory (for now, at least) of Republican extremism.”

By my count, that history suggests there are four critical battlegrounds for GOP reform: political leaders, Republican-aligned think tanks, the conservative press, and grassroots movements (assuming, reasonably enough, that capitalists and lobbyists aren’t the reform-minded types). The problem, as a quick survey of the current state of these four areas will attest to, is that there’s no faction any of those sectors influential enough to spearheading a change in the Republican Party’s political instincts or policy preferences:

Political leaders: While there’s ideological conflict among elected Republicans, the issue appears to whether the status quo leadership is ideologically rigid enough for the insurgent’s liking. Take Sens. Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Mark Lee — who are described in a National Review profile as “key defenders of liberty and the Constitution,” stepping up “[a]t a time when the Republican party, and the conservative moment in general… is still reeling from an electoral drubbing in November and lacks coherent leadership.” These three Senators all propose pulling the GOP further to the right of the American public; all three, for example, think the wildly popular Violence Against Women Act is unconstitutional. All of them also embody the GOP’s bad intellectual habits and ideological rigidity. Cruz has a proven record of McCarthyite intellectual dishonsty. Paul isn’t the challenge to GOP orthodoxy on civil liberties and foreign policy that people say he is, and he has a particularly revanchist economic agenda. Lee admitted to using the threat of default on our debt in an attempt to rewrite the Constitution along radically federalist lines. The anti-establishment contingent in the House is famously to Speaker Boehner’s obstructionist right. And while there are a few Governors who are marginally more intellectually alive, none of them appear to command the support of a major national reform movement. The Republicans challenging the party leadership are symptoms of the problems GOP reformers are diagnosing, not its cure. The most important source of institutional juice in translating the reform debate into political change looks to be, if anything, militating against reform.

Think tanks: Aside from the libertarian Cato Institue, whose influence among conservatives is almost definitionally circumscribed by its ideology, the two major conservative institutions are the aforementioned Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Heritage’s new President is former Senator Jim DeMint, famous for being one of the Senate’s hardest of hard-liners and helping fund primary challenges to Republicans who didn’t toe the party line. Conservative pundit Jennifer Rubin (not known for her intellectual independence) wrote that by hiring DeMint, “Heritage, to a greater extent than ever before, becomes a political instrument in service of extremism.” AEI’s President, Arthur Brooks, believes President Obama’s policy views are functionally identical to Marxism and that 92 percent of economists “are not supporters of free enterprise.” The institution’s idea of bipartisan reform on foreign policy is Joe Lieberman, who, of course, already agrees with neoconservative orthodoxy.

Conservative publications: If one wanted to make the case for optimism, conservative publications would be the place to start. Most major publications have at least a handful of intellectually serious and/or reform-minded writers: National Review, despite often hewing to the party line editorially, is the bright spot here, employing challenging thinkers like Reihan Salam, Ramesh Ponnuru, and Yuval Levin. Conservative writers at more mainstream publications, like Ross Douthat, Conor Friedersdorf, and David Frum, are all persuasive critics of the party’s status quo. And a young publication (by magazine standards), The American Conservative, is a vital clearinghouse for critiques of the GOP and ideas for its transformation (full disclosure: they’ve even gone so far in the name of intellectual diversity as to have published me). However, Fox News still dominates the conservative information infrastructure alongside radio personalities like Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin. New popular outlets like The Daily Caller and Breitbart News have notoriously low, ideologically driven journalistic standards. Sadly, the more reflective publications can’t seem to get the signal through this noise: Jonathan Martin reports that “there is virtually no evidence that these impassioned appeals for change are being listened to by the audience that matters — Republican elected officials.”

Grassroots movements: The big force here is obviously the Tea Party. While the initial impression was that the Tea Party was a libertarian movement, a view some libertarians still hold, the evidence that the Tea Party isn’t offering an alternative vision to the status quo GOP is mounting. Polling data suggests Tea Party members hold social views virtually identical to those of conservative Republicans, leading a group of Harvard scholars to conclude “the Tea Party is a new incarnation of longstanding strands in US conservatism.” This perception is borne out by the candidates it supports; the head of the Tea Party Caucus in the House is Michele Bachmann, and Ted Cruz is one of the Senators most closely identified with the movement. If anything, this suggests that the Tea Party has been an anti-reform voice, as they’ve been active in supporting the sort of leader that’s holding reformers back; that’s why Brigitte Nacos, an expert on the Tea Party at Columbia University, predicted that “there will be something like a civil war within the Republican Party, with the extreme right of Tea Partyers and the Christian right on one side, and those who were formerly the GOP’s mainstream on the other.”

So the GOP reformers have a daunting task ahead of them: they need to expand out from their media base and start influencing conservatives in the grassroots rank-and-file, think tanks, and the political class if they want to replicate the initial conservative movement’s success in transforming the Republican Party.

I’ll be tracking this effort at CPAC for TP Ideas, drawing out the best policy ideas and most interesting portents of change inside the conservative movement from its annual showcase to see if this gloomy situation might be brightening a bit. The first report should drop later today; stay tuned!

Every era has its historical debates. Yet divergent views of the past — from both the left and the right — seem to be colliding at a rapid clip in the age of Obama.  Given the inevitable confusion this causes among Americans, here is a modest proposal: both progressives and conservatives should agree to a set of informal standards for fairly and accurately employing historical interpretations in our contemporary ideological debates.

Nietzche’s famous essay on the subject, “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” (in his Untimely Meditations), put forth the idea of a “trinity of methods for history” – what he labeled monumental, antiquarian and critical history. Nietzche writes:

If a man who wants to create greatness uses the past, then he will empower himself through monumental history. On the other hand, the man who wishes to emphasize the customary and traditionally valued cultivates the past as an antiquarian historian. Only the man whose breast is oppressed by a present need and who wants to cast off his load at any price has a need for critical history, that is, history which sits in judgment and passes judgment.

Nietzche believed there were good uses and poor uses of history to help shape and guide “the living.” For example, holding up strong models of leadership from the past can easily degenerate into “mythical fiction” (like the rising nationalism of the late nineteenth century) while proper reverence for past values and ideas can lead us to make old customs and political beliefs “immortal.” In both cases, the misuse of historical memory inhibits people in the present from making necessary adjustments to balance old ideas with new ones. Similarly, with critical history, Nietzche writes, “A person must have the power and from time to time use it to break a past and to dissolve it, in order to be able to live. He manages to do this by dragging the past before the court of justice, investigating it meticulously, and finally condemning it.” This is a useful and necessary process. But it can also be “dangerous” in that we risk denying the past and replacing it with “weaker” ideas in the present.

The left’s focus under Obama has mostly been on versions of monumental history. There were many debates among progressives during the first term about whether Obama was living up to the boldness of the New Deal and the Great Society in addressing the nation’s economic challenges, advancing civil rights, fighting climate change, and dismantling Bush-era war policies. Michael Tomasky summarized and critiqued these arguments quite well in his 2010 Democracy article, “Against Despair”:

Too often, when progressives think of American history, we think only of the snapshots: those glorious moments when a historic bill is signed into law, or when the great progressive leader thunderingly confronts the forces of reaction. It’s good to remember those; they are our lodestars. But they are moments. Actual history is slower, more tedious, and certainly less uplifting. It’s not for Obama’s sake, but for liberalism’s over the long haul that we need to consider this reality and proceed in full awareness of it. It’s only by seeing this fuller picture that we can know how history actually unfolds in real time and place our present experience within that context. We don’t do nearly enough of that.

In Tomasky’s view, progressives were guilty of turning our past successes into myths that failed to acknowledge the limits of progressive power, the structural deficiencies of our constitutional system, and the limits of Barack Obama himself, thus leading to unwarranted despair and apathy.

In an example of a more critical historical method on the left, Sean Wilentz and Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick have been duking it out in The New York Review of Books over the latter’s book and ten-part Showtime series, The Untold History of the United States. Wilentz argues that Stone and Kuznick are purposefully “cherry-picking” history to make a case against the policies of United States from Truman and the Cold War to Bush and Obama in Iraq and Afghanistan. Stone and Kuznick, in turn, claim that Wilentz is misusing history himself in order to justify the hawkish and imperialist views of politicians he supports like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

It’s all a bit confusing and flush with details that require lots of fact checking but the debate raises important questions about the direction of U.S. foreign policy and the current stands of the Obama administration on Bush-era policies like torture and drones.

On the right, the uses and abuses of history have focused more on antiquarian and critical methods. The most obvious example of the antiquarian method is the Tea Party. Jill Lepore’s, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History, (reviewed here by Gordon Wood) explains how the Tea Party turned the founding into a quasi-religious like moment that is “sacred” while documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution “are to be read in the same spirit with which religious fundamentalists read, for instance, the Ten Commandments.”

Since the first election of Obama we’ve also seen a drumbeat of conservative academic and lay historians using the critical method to attack the legacy of FDR and progressivism, and by extension, the policies of Obama who is cut from the same ideological cloth.  Amity Shlaes’ attempted takedown of the New Deal and subsequent promotion of the wonders of Coolidge-nomics is one strand of this type of history. Glenn Beck and others have promoted another strand that argues the original Progressive movement — and its contemporary manifestation — is a subversion of the Constitution and an aberration from historical norms.  Progressives tend to view these critical uses of history as over-the-line and “factually challenged” (as Newt Gingrich famously labeled Michele Bachmann during the presidential primaries), but it is certainly necessary and important for conservatives to put forth their version of the nation’s past for Americans to evaluate.

Both ideological sides use history for their own purposes often in legitimate and honest ways. But can we objectively determine who is doing better and worse when it comes to abusing history? Probably not. Progressives and conservatives could, however, agree to some criteria for evaluating the use of historical claims in our contemporary discourse. One, are these claims factually correct ? Two, are these claims fair interpretations of both past and current events and do they adequately account for competing evidence? Three, is the aim of these claims primarily to advance our understanding of the past and present or to advance an ideological agenda?

Based on these proposed standards, when the left says Obama hasn’t been bold enough or is too imperialist is history being used or abused? When the right says Obama is undermining our founding values and pursuing federal actions that failed in the past are they using or abusing history?

 

One of the most undercovered stories of recent years has been the increasing importance of Asian-Americans as a progressive group. In the 2012 election, Asians raised their share of voters by a percentage point, about half of the overall increase in minority vote share. Moreover, they contributed significantly to increased minority voting in many swing states, including Minnesota and Michigan in the midwest and, particularly, Colorado and Nevada in the southwest. In Colorado, Asians increased their share of the voting electorate by 3 points, accounting for most of the increase in minority voting in that state. And in Nevada, where the share of minority voters increased by 5 points, that increase was split evenly between Latinos and Asians.

But Asians did not just turn out in larger numbers, they also sharply increased their level of support for Obama. In 2012, Asians supported Obama by a staggering 73-26, compared to 62-35 in 2008. This is a remarkable trajectory for a group that, back in 1992, supported George H.W. Bush over Bill Clinton by a strong 54-30 margin. In every election since then, Asians have increased their support for the Democratic candidate, including elections like 2004 where most other groups, even progressive ones, were going in the opposite direction:

What drives conservatives nuts about this trend is that Asians are doing so well economically. They have the highest average educational level and median household income of any race-ethnic group in the country, including whites. In the simplistic conservative view of the world, Asians’ material success means they should hate taxes, despise the government and vote Republican.

Wrong on all counts. Far from turning their backs on government, Asian Americans say they want more of what government can provide. In a massive study of Asians released last July, the Pew Research Center found that, by 55-36, Asians preferred a bigger government providing more services to a smaller government providing fewer services. This is only one result among many that confirm the strongly progressive nature of America’s burgeoning Asian population.

The role that Asian Americans play in our politics will only increase in coming years, as they are now provide the largest share of America’s new immigrants. And by current evidence, that should be one more factor pushing the country in a more progressive direction.

It’s time for one of our annual political rituals — CPAC, the American Conservative Union’s conference, begins this Wednesday. A who’s who of conservative leaders go to recite movement-friendly shibboleths, while liberal journalists generally record the panoply of crazy that inevitably seeps into the proceedings.

But 2013 is looking to be something more than spectacle. As conservatives reckon with the party’s declining electoral clout, CPAC is shaping up to become the forum in which the under-the-radar intra-conservative sniping blows up. CPAC declined to invite popular governors Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell on grounds that they were insufficiently conservative, an absurd charge that infuriated less dogmatic Republicans. The exclusion of gay group GOProud kicked off a similar dustup. It’s no civil war yet, but there certainly have been some civil skirmishes.

There’s a temptation for progressives to bask in the heat generated by the GOP’s self-immolation. The reformist camps are still weak and divided, and so long as the party keeps people like Sarah Palin and Donald Trump as members in good standing, the hyper-radicalized, anti-intellectual Republican mainstream will cater to an increasingly small part of the American electorate. It’s a recipe for inevitable progressive triumph, right?

Wrong. Progressives should want the Republican reformers to succeed in creating a party that’s both more substantively tethered to reality and, as a consequence, more electorally viable. The current Republican party is a serious threat given the structure of American politics even if it’s in long-term decline, and the benefits of it collapsing down the line are uncertain at best.

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We’re happy to announce a new project at Think Progress called “TP Ideas.” Over the years, we’ve come to see that our readers appreciate some perspective on political life, both with respect to TP’s bread-and-butter topics (like the economy, foreign policy, health care, climate change, immigration, LGBT and women’s rights, and the law) as well as different set of issues entirely. Alyssa’s great work on culture has helped pave the way, and now we’re expanding further.

TP Ideas will focus on books, philosophy, social science, history, demographics, and political strategy from a long range progressive perspective. The goal is to engage with ideas across the ideological spectrum and to use historical and theoretical research to cast light on contemporary problems, including the current ideological movements that dominate contemporary American and global politics. Some posts will be short or tied to the day’s events. Others will be longer or unfold in a series on a specific subject or book. We hope to add author interviews and possibly a book club down the road as well

Here are a few recent posts to give you an idea of what TP Ideas will look like going forward:

- Sheryl Sandberg, Meet Richard Nixon: Why We Don’t Have Universal Childcare

- Not Just Single Ladies: How Single Men Are Becoming An Important Part Of The Progressive Coalition

- 10 Years Later: What Everyone Should Know Now About The Darfur Genocide

- How The American Left Has Gotten The Upper Hand

We welcome your thoughts on how to make TP Ideas work best and hope you’ll get involved in these debates as we move forward.

- The Editors

It’s common to observe that unmarried women are a key part of the progressive coalition these days. And it is true that Obama carried this group by a wide 67-31 margin in 2012, not far off his 70-29 margin in 2008. Unmarried women were also a larger share of voters, 23 percent vs. 21 percent in 2008. Pretty impressive.

But is far less widely noted that unmarried men have also become a significant part of the progressive coalition. Despite the unflattering portrayals in the media of single guys as aimless yahoos, they do in fact have some definite—and progressive—politics. In the 2012 election, unmarried men favored Obama by a healthy 56-40 margin, close to the 58-38 margin they gave him in 2008. And their share of voters went up even more than unmarried women, increasing by 4 points to 18 percent.

Unmarried men’s progressive leanings are not unique to the last two elections either. As the chart below shows, these voters supported Clinton twice, as well as Gore and Kerry. The last time they supported a Republican candidate was in 1988, when they gave George H.W. Bush a modest 3 point margin over Michael Dukakis:

The country has changed a lot since then….and so have single guys. Time to rethink our stereotypes.

Ruy Teixeira is a Senior Fellow at both The Century Foundation and the Center for American Progress, where he focuses on political demography. He is the author, with John Judis, of The Emerging Democratic Majority.

It’s difficult in modern politics for those of one ideological persuasion to adequately describe and comprehend what the other side believes on its own terms. Progressives correctly scoff at right-wing notions that they are trying to pursue some undefined “European socialist” agenda and force the federal government into every aspect of American economic and social life. Progressives see themselves engaging in pragmatic uses of both governmental and private actions to solve concrete problems such as poverty, the lack of health care, or climate change. Progressives want to achieve greater liberty, equality, and opportunity for all people in a manner that acknowledges actual inequalities in social life and takes appropriate steps, within democratic and constitutional limits, to redress these inequities.

Conversely, conservatives rightly recoil at liberal depictions of conservatism as little more than an elaborate justification for greed, moral self-righteousness, economic privilege, and inequality. Conservatives see themselves advancing ideas about limited government and citizenship where individuals and families are the center-piece of social life and economic activity revolves around market interactions with little interference by outside forces. They believe a decentralized and limited government is more consistent with human nature and produces better economic outcomes.

Obviously, there’s more to each of these political traditions than described here. And it’s certainly fair for ideological proponents to question one another about their motivations, theories, core values, and policies.

But given the mutual confusion that often arises in ideological discussions, it is refreshing as a progressive to read Tod Lindberg’s astute article, Left 3.0, in the final issue of the Hoover Institution’s Policy Review.
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Our guest blogger is John Halpin, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and the co-director and creator of the Progressive Studies Program at CAP.

Massachusetts State Rep. Dan Winslow (R), one of three candidates for his party’s nomination in the upcoming special election to fill Secretary of State John Kerry’s Senate seat, won a GOP straw poll Saturday. He then ended the event on a hypocritical note: After giving his speech to the party faithfuls, Winslow tried to disassociate himself from the event’s location, the Danversport Yacht Club. “I am not a tea and crumpets Republican,” he said:

“They gave us three minutes to speak today; three minutes is longer than I ever wanted to spend in a yacht club,” Winslow said. “I am not a tea and crumpets Republican. I am here because there are activists here. I am running a grassroots campaign.”

Winslow’s professed enmity toward yacht clubs is apparently newly found: as recently as 2011, the candidate disclosed that he served on the board of directors for the Pamet Harbor Yacht & Tennis Club. Both Danversport and Pamet Harbor could well benefit from HD1965, Winslow’s proposed bill to repeal the sales tax on the sale of boats built or rebuilt in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

As ThinkProgress reported last month, Winslow’s attempts to spin himself as “from the middle class” are not matched by reality. A ThinkProgress review of Winslow’s financial disclosure filings showed he owns two homes and earns more than $160,000 annually.