by Seth Michaels, Jul 21, 2008

In 2009, a new president and many new members of Congress will come into office—and they’ll face both big problems and powerful resistance to solve them. How can we pass good policy and improve the lives of working families?

At “The Coming Social Democratic Moment,” a session at the Netroots Nation conference in Austin, panelists agreed that no matter who wins this fall’s election, there’s an opportunity to really turn around the country and a need for progressives to organize and fight hard to ensure that we fix what’s wrong.

Elizabeth Jacobs is a sociologist who studies attitudes toward the economy and social programs. She notes that the last few years have seen rapid deterioration of objective circumstances around the issues that are at the heart of the progressive movement—a broken health care system, an economy that’s failing most people, a collapsing housing market and unsustainable energy prices.

Jacobs says people are unhappy with their day-to-day lives and unhappy to see that political leaders aren’t providing the relief  they could and have in the past. Public opinion, to a certain extent, is ahead of where political leaders and the media are.

Jacobs compares the current moment to the era immediately before the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s. New Deal programs weren’t an easy sell; to the contrary, Roosevelt exercised real political leadership, reaching out to different constituencies and forging coalitions, while groups outside the government mobilized to support these programs.

Ben Brandzel, an online activist who has worked with Move On and John Edwards’ presidential campaign, says that over the past decade, progressives have created and strengthened institutions in opposition to Bush politics. However, if a pro-working family president and Congress are in place in 2009, he says, these institutions will need to adapt to a new climate—working to pass progressive policy, not just block bad Bush-style policies.

Brandzel notes that the political climate that produced grassroots movement-building converged with a technological revolution in the way activism is carried out. Blogs and e-mail allow mobilization to happen quickly and on a large scale.

Elections make sense as an organizing goal, Brandzel says, but they’re short-term: Movements need to keep going beyond elections. It’s been easy to organize people around opposing bad policy, he says, but organizing people around actually solving real-world problems is harder and more slow-going.

Chris Hayes, Washington editor for The Nation, says rebuilding the energy economy and reforming the health care system are the two fundamental changes that need to be made under a new administration. Standing in the way are Big Oil and the insurance industry, which have held enormous sway in the political process. Hayes says that a vigorous progressive movement, outside of political parties and elected officials, will need to counterbalance entrenched big-money interests.

Under the Bush administration, Hayes says, the basic social contract has been undermined, and public policy is being run for the benefit of a tiny segment of the population, with most people left behind.

It almost boggles the mind how few people are benefiting. The concentration of how intensely upwardly redistributive conservative government has been shows what the project is.

In particular, Hayes hopes that progressives remember how dangerously close Bush came to destroying Social Security through privatization.  Bush, often accompanied by John McCain, traveled around the country, going directly into congressional districts, and put political muscle behind undermining Social Security. It was only through the large-scale cooperation of progressives inside and outside of government that the project was thwarted and Social Security was protected.

Progressives, long out of power, need to be this aggressive in fighting for legislation to improve the lives of working people as they were in fighting Social Security privatization. Hayes says there needs to be an independent movement, outside of politicians and parties, which can be an actor in political fights. Governments, he says, aren’t going to magically hold themselves accountable.

Blogger Ezra Klein says that to make the best use of the political moment, progressives need to quickly pass policies that build political strength for working people. In particular, he points to the Employee Free Choice Act as what he describes as a “reinforcing legislation.” If passed, the Employee Free Choice Act would create more engaged progressive voters, increase the constituency for pro-working family policies and strengthen the ability of working people to mobilize politically.

This panel is an appropriate way to sum up Netroots Nation. With a clear sense of what’s wrong in America and what needs to happen to fix it, bloggers and activists will, along with unions, civil rights groups and community organizations, take the lead in defining a new agenda and holding leaders accountable for passing it.

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