[This article draws on some ideas developed further in Practical
Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World by Deepak Bhargava and
Stephanie Luce (New Press, November 2023). ]
[[link removed]]

THE DEATH OF “DELIVERISM”  
[[link removed]]


 

Deepak Bhargava, Shahrzad Shams, Harry Hanbury
June 22, 2023
Democracy
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ This article draws on some ideas developed further in Practical
Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World by Deepak Bhargava and
Stephanie Luce (New Press, November 2023). _

Joe Biden speaks during a campaign event, Tuesday, July 14, 2020, in
Wilmington, Delaware., AP Photo/Patrick Semansky

 

How could it be that the largest-ever recorded drop in childhood
poverty had next to no political resonance?

One of us became intrigued by this question when he walked into a
graduate class one evening in 2021 and received unexpected and bracing
lessons about the limits of progressive economic policy from his
students.

Deepak had worked on various efforts to secure expanded income support
for a long time—and was part of a successful push over two decades
earlier to increase the child tax credit, a rare win under the George
W. Bush presidency. His students were mostly working-class adults of
color with full-time jobs, and many were parents. Knowing that the
newly expanded child tax credit would be particularly helpful to his
students, he entered the class elated. The money had started to hit
people’s bank accounts, and he was eager to hear about how the extra
income would improve their lives. He asked how many of them had
received the check. More than half raised their hands. Then he asked
those students whether they were happy about it. Not one hand went up.

Baffled, Deepak asked why. One student gave voice to the vibe, asking,
“What’s the catch?” As the class unfolded, students shared that
they had not experienced government as a benevolent force. They
assumed that the money would be recaptured later with penalties. It
was, surely, a trap. And of course, in light of centuries of
exploitation and deceit—in criminal justice, housing, and safety net
systems—working-class people of color are not wrong to mistrust
government bureaucracies and institutions. The real passion in the
class that night, and many nights, was about crime and what it was
like to take the subway at night after class. These students were
overwhelmingly progressive on economic and social issues, but many of
their everyday concerns were spoken to by the right, not the left.

The American Rescue Plan’s temporary expansion of the child tax
credit lifted more than 2 million children out of poverty, resulting
in an astounding 46 percent
[[link removed]]
reduction in child poverty. Yet the policy’s lapse sparked almost no
political response, either from its champions or its beneficiaries.
Democrats hardly campaigned on the remarkable achievement they had
just delivered, and the millions of parents impacted by the policy did
not seem
[[link removed]]
to feel that it made much difference in their day-to-day lives. Even
those who experienced the greatest benefit from the expanded child tax
credit appeared unmoved by the policy. In fact, during the same time
span in which monthly deposits landed in beneficiaries’ bank
accounts, the percentage of Black voters—a group that especially
benefited from the policy—who said their lives had improved under
the Biden Administration actually _declined_
[[link removed]].

Explaining the Disconnect

More broadly, the suite of progressive economic policies Biden enacted
hasn’t made a dent in his approval ratings. Sixty-two percent of
Americans
[[link removed]]
said in a poll from early 2023 that Biden has accomplished “not very
much” or “little or nothing” during his presidency. The
ambitious drive to “Build Back Better” after the COVID-19 economic
shock wasn’t as far-reaching as progressives (or Biden) had hoped,
but taken together, the American Rescue Plan, the CHIPS and Science
Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the Inflation
Reduction Act constitute a sweeping effort to remake the U.S. economy.
Many progressive groups are turning their attention to implementation
of these major pieces of legislation, which is worthy work, whether it
has political consequences or not. But it’s a remarkable feat to
spend trillions in an attempt to usher in an economic transformation
and to get such an underwhelming response.

It has long been an article of faith among liberals and leftists that
if you “deliver” for people—specifically, if you deliver
economic improvements in people’s lives through policy—these
changes will solidify or shift people’s political allegiances.
Ironically, this transactional vision of politics echoes a naive
assumption
[[link removed]]
more commonly associated with economists, particularly neoliberals:
that humans are rational actors motivated above all by immediate
material interests. After the 2022 midterm election, Elizabeth Warren
wrote an op-ed
[[link removed]]
in _The_ _New York Times_ that exemplifies this way of thinking. She
contended that “Voters rewarded Democrats for protecting the lives
and livelihoods of struggling families,” citing things like allowing
Medicare to lower drug prices, capping insulin costs, and increasing
corporate taxes. A more accurate look
[[link removed]]
at the 2022 election results, however, shows that they were highly
geographically uneven, and that the unusually good results for
Democrats came in places where reproductive rights were under threat
and where people felt their votes mattered as a stand against MAGA
extremism. Biden’s economic record played little role in persuading
voters—and in much of the country, authoritarian candidates
prevailed.

We use the term “deliverism” to describe the presumption of a
linear and direct relationship between economic policy and people’s
political allegiances. Originally coined
[[link removed]] by
Matt Stoller and expanded on by David Dayen, the word broadly
describes an approach to governing that focuses on enacting and
implementing policies to improve people’s lives. Stoller and Dayen
situate the concept as an alternative to popularism
[[link removed]],
arguing that it’s not enough for progressives to simply talk about
popular policies—they must also actually deliver on the policies
they claim to support. In exchange for enacting these policies,
deliverism holds, voters will reward progressives at the ballot box.
Centrists, liberals, and progressives in politics and in outside
social movements disagree about many things, but deliverism is a
worldview that unites most of them.

However, progressive economic policies do not necessarily lead to the
political outcomes that deliverism predicts they should, and
deliverism is proving ineffectual as a response to authoritarianism.
People are fully capable of supporting or ignoring progressive
economic policies while voting for authoritarians. In 2020 in Florida,
for example, more than 60 percent
[[link removed](2020)]
of voters supported a ballot initiative to raise the state minimum
wage to $15 per hour by 2026—the same state where a majority also
voted for Trump. Last year Nebraska passed a similar measure
[[link removed](2022)]
despite overwhelming support for Trump in both the 2016 and 2020
presidential elections. And we’ve seen this movie before: Political
scientist Dan Hopkins shows
[[link removed]] that
President Obama’s signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act,
did virtually nothing to shift political allegiances and had a minimal
impact on the political behavior of even its direct beneficiaries.

Although we have long been sympathetic to deliverism, we now believe
that it is mostly wrong. Delivering for people on economic issues is
an important goal in itself, but it is not an antivenom for the
snakebite of authoritarianism.

There are many reasons why economic policy and political behavior
might be disconnected. People might not know about a policy, why it
happened, or who brought it about. (There is a long history of
politicians blaming faulty “messaging” for the lack of popularity
of their policies. And to be sure, getting better at communicating
with voters is important.) A policy may not be large enough or not get
implemented soon or well enough for people to see a direct impact in
their lives. (Sometimes policies are _designed_ to make their impact
on beneficiaries invisible, as was the case with Obama’s
middle-class tax cuts.) In some cases, a policy simply may not feel
particularly salient to some people. The media frequently fail to
explain the relationship between policies and people’s everyday
lives. Often the right has already done such a good job of inoculating
people against the idea of government as a benevolent force that many
are unable to see it working to make their lives better. And both
parties have created programs that are demeaning, confusing, and
demoralizing to their beneficiaries, leading to the deep and grounded
skepticism of government that Deepak heard from his students.

But there is another factor we want to highlight to help explain this
disconnect—a dramatic cultural turn that has been weaponized by the
authoritarian right and neglected by the technocratic, policy-obsessed
left.

The Rising Wave of Unhappiness

Happiness, measured in a variety of ways, has been on the decline for
decades in the United States, and this phenomenon is crucial to
understanding the cultural sources of the authoritarian turn. The
meaning of “happiness” is of course contested, slippery, and
culturally specific
[[link removed]].
We’re using the term here deliberately because it is a frame through
which people understand their everyday lives. But we’re not using
the word to describe ephemeral, moment-to-moment feeling states. We
use “happiness” to refer both to objective indicators of
well-being and to people’s subjective characterizations of their
satisfaction with their lives.

Since 1990, the number of Americans reporting they feel “not too
happy” has been trending upward
[[link removed]], particularly among those without
a college education. The onset of the pandemic only exacerbated the
growing national unhappiness: By 2021, just 19 percent of Americans
reported
[[link removed]]
that they felt “very happy”—the lowest level on record since the
General Social Survey began asking the question in 1972. The
intensifying unhappiness is also reflected in data showing that more
and more Americans are overdosing
[[link removed].]
on drugs and that the suicide rate has increased
[[link removed]] by about 30 percent over the
last couple of decades. Our culture and politics are increasingly
driven by this rising wave of unhappiness.

And it’s a worldwide phenomenon. Gallup data reveal a global surge
[[link removed]]
in unhappiness that predates the pandemic and has gotten worse since.
The percentage of people reporting
[[link removed]]
a negative overall experience of life increased nearly by half around
the world between 2011 and 2021—from 24 percent to 33 percent.
Surprisingly, this trend coincides with a steady decline
[[link removed]] in the
global poverty rate over at least the last couple of decades.

But although happiness in the United States has fallen on average,
there are profound differences across demographic groups. One of those
divides is class. Since 1990, a growing gap
[[link removed]] in life expectancy
has emerged between the one-third of the country with college degrees
and the two-thirds without, driven in part by “deaths of despair”
from drug overdoses, suicide, and alcohol-related liver disease.
Class-based discrepancies in happiness have long been present in the
United States, but researchers have found
[[link removed]] that the “happiness
gap”—the divide between those with the lowest socioeconomic status
and the highest—has steadily grown between the 1970s and the
2010s.And this dynamic, too, is not the same for all groups. White
Americans appear to be losing ground in terms of happiness compared to
their Black counterparts, despite persistent racial inequities.
College-educated whites with high incomes experienced stable happiness
levels or slight declines, but white Americans without a college
degree saw a 28 percent drop in happiness from the 1970s to the
mid-2010s. By contrast, working-class Black Americans without college
degrees experienced relatively stable happiness levels throughout the
four decades, and higher-income, college-educated Black Americans
experienced large gains, with 63 percent more Black adults with a
college degree reporting they were “very happy” in the mid-2010s
compared to the 1970s.

These differences present a paradox: Those in relatively privileged
positions, such as white men, are experiencing greater declines in
happiness than groups facing objectively worse social conditions. One
explanation for this is that white Americans, particularly white men,
feel that their dominant position in the social hierarchy is
diminishing, and studies have shown
[[link removed]]
that status threat is associated with greater mortality among whites.

To be sure, worsening financial circumstances—for example, as
evidenced by non-college-educated white men’s declining wages over
recent decades—likely play some role in explaining this group’s
downward trend in happiness. But economic conditions make up just one
piece in the larger happiness puzzle and cannot be assessed without
taking sociopsychological dynamics into account as well. For example,
economist Pinghui Wu shows
[[link removed]]
that between 1980 and 2019, non-college-educated men’s earnings
decreased by 30 percent on average relative to the wages of all
workers. But white men responded to declining wages by exiting the
labor market in huge numbers, while Black and Hispanic men did not.
This finding points to the way economic realities are mediated by
identity, and it is suggestive of the power of people’s sense of
social status to shape their economic and political decisions.

The causes of rising unhappiness are complex, but they surely have
roots in the failures of a neoliberal economic regime that has
fostered insecurity, isolation, anxiety, and fear—and was brought
about by politicians in _both_ political parties. Neoliberalism
privatized risk, catalyzed alienation, and cultivated feelings of
inadequacy and low self-worth for the 99 percent. But the fact that
neoliberalism is a primary cause of unhappiness does not mean that the
implementation of progressive, redistributive economic policies alone
will lead to rising happiness. Bad economic policy has produced
knock-on effects of increasing drug use, homelessness, and mental
illness—realities that have come to dominate the mental landscape of
voters who nonetheless may not see economic policy as a source of
solutions. There are many other related causes contributing to the
unhappiness wave, including corporate social media, the impending
sense of doom brought about by the climate crisis, and the social and
cultural aspects of neoliberalism such as the dramatic decline of
people’s attachment to institutions like work, unions, and churches.
Loneliness and social isolation are major drivers of unhappiness. We
are experiencing a crisis of what French sociologist Émile Durkheim
called “anomie,” or normlessness, arising from the dizzying pace
of social, economic, political, and technological change in our
times and the weakening of institutions that foster social cohesion.

How Authoritarians Surf the Unhappiness Wave

Whatever the causes, it turns out that unhappiness is a very strong
predictor of voting behavior. Being extremely unhappy more than
doubled a person’s likelihood of voting for Trump in 2016, and the
unhappiest counties were the Trumpiest. As social scientist Johannes
Eichstaedt and colleagues show
[[link removed]],
“Unhappiness predicted the Trump vote better than race, income
levels, or unemployment, how many immigrants had moved into the
county, or how old or religious the citizens were. Unhappiness also
predicted the Trump election better than other subjective variables,
like how people _thought _the economy was going or would be going in
the future.”

Other researchers have shown
[[link removed]] that counties
that went to Trump were often “landscapes of despair,”
characterized by more economic distress, poor health, low educational
attainment, high alcohol and suicide mortality rates, and high divorce
rates. States with the lowest life expectancies and education levels
used to vote strongly for Democrats, but the past four decades have
witnessed what Nobel laureate Angus Deaton called an “extraordinary
realignment,” with those states now heavily favoring the Republican
Party.

MAGA extremists have made the most of the cultural turn, capitalizing
on the unhappiness wave for political gain. Trumpist politicians
invoke righteous indignation not only about material economic
conditions, but also perceived disrespect by cultural elites, rising
crime, and disintegration of traditional family structures. The power
of this story derives partly from its clarity about the
enemies—despised “others”—and from the sense of community and
shared purpose that participation in the mass authoritarian project
provides. There is considerable evidence
[[link removed]]
that authoritarianism is driven by racial animus. Whether supporters
view it this way or not, the MAGA movement is fundamentally a white
supremacist movement that activates racist beliefs as a powerful
political weapon. Despite the common narrative that Trump’s 2016 win
could be explained by the economic distress of Americans who felt
they’d been left behind, research shows
[[link removed]] that candidate
preference was influenced more by issues that threatened many white
Americans’ sense of dominant group status.

The emotional alchemy of the authoritarian approach is so strong that
it can override facts and material reality. Trump duped millions with
his false claim
[[link removed]]
to have brought back manufacturing jobs. (In reality
[[link removed]],
manufacturing jobs declined during his Administration.) By contrast,
Biden’s success in reducing unemployment to the lowest level in 54
years
[[link removed]]
goes virtually uncredited, with his approval rating
[[link removed]]
hitting an all-time low of 36 percent this past May. In the same poll,
an astounding 54 percent of Americans said that Trump handled the
economy better than Biden has so far, compared to just 36 percent of
Americans who felt the opposite was true. The MAGA extremist response
succeeds because it speaks to a visceral sense of dissatisfaction and
promises security, belonging, and recognition.

It works because it offers a kind of psychic release, an outlet for
powerful emotions to find expression. There is an angry ecstasy in
authoritarian rallies and online culture. MAGA extremism takes
seriously some aspects of people’s actual, lived experience (like a
sense of bewildering change and threatened life prospects), and it
invents other threats (like trans people, immigrants, refugees, and
racial justice protestors). If anomie or normlessness is the problem,
authoritarianism supplies certainty and a compass to navigate a
changing world.

Importantly, authoritarianism does not depend on solving people’s
problems to succeed politically; indeed, its genius is to harness and
feast on unhappiness without trying to reduce it. In his speech
[[link removed]]
at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March, Trump spoke
openly to this pain and offered the satisfaction of revenge: “In
2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice.’ Today, I add: I am your
warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and
betrayed: I am your retribution.”

This challenge will not be solved, as the Biden Administration seems
to be realizing, by industrial policy or progressive economic policy
alone. Although the wave of unhappiness is partly the result of
neoliberalism, the cultural response has acquired its own force and
exercises a powerful influence on social identities and modes of
living, thought, and feeling. People who do not conceive of their
unhappiness as a product of economic forces and seek solutions in
other spheres of life are unlikely to be moved by an economistic
response, however worthy it may be and even if they agree with
specific policies. Biden has spent much of his political capital in
his first term on delivering economic wins, while deprioritizing
issues like racial justice, voting rights, immigration reform, and
reproductive rights that have a deeper connection with people’s most
salient identities. But his reelection campaign’s pivot
[[link removed]]
toward defending personal freedoms and denouncing MAGA extremism
signals a recognition that deliverism is not a viable political
strategy.

Implications for the Fight Against Authoritarianism

What does the death of deliverism mean for progressive strategy? We
see four strategies that are crucial to countering authoritarianism;
all involve broadening our idea of how to talk to people and taking
seriously fears and anxieties that we have too often tended to ignore
or downplay.

First, progressive policymaking must take identity, emotion, and story
much more seriously. We should care not only about the details of the
policies we pass, but also about how we fight for them. Policies that
deliver economic benefit without speaking to, reinforcing, and
constructing a social identity are likely to have little political
impact. Progressives won a victory for working people in passing the
expanded child tax credit, but leading up to, during, and after
passage they largely failed to tell a political story that answered
urgent questions: Why was this happening? Who were the beneficiaries?
And why did they deserve to get the check? An exception was Ohio
Senator Sherrod Brown, who defended
[[link removed]]
the fact that people without earnings got the child credit by saying,
“raising kids is work.” That’s a compelling moral argument that
draws on and amplifies the powerful identity of parenthood. But most
who promoted the policy failed to make that case. So even though the
economic, material benefit of the expanded child tax credit was
enormous, the political benefit was close to zero.

Contrast this with “Build the Wall,” Trump’s only partly
[[link removed]] realized signature
policy proposal that had zero economic benefit but activated intense
(if not broad) support by tapping into a social
identity—whiteness—and telling a story, complete with villains and
heroes, of being under siege. As historian Greg Grandin has written
[[link removed]], “The
point isn’t to actually build ‘the wall’ but to constantly
announce the building of the wall.”

Progressive policymaking will need to better identify and make clear
for people the culprits fueling our discontents. Stories without
villains make no sense to anyone. The mainstream Democratic Party’s
tendency to avoid naming corporations as bad actors, whether
pharmaceutical companies or big banks, is politically disastrous. The
Bernie Sanders campaigns showed the importance and potential of
telling a simple, true story about cause and effect.

Second, progressives must offer ideas about issues they have too long
neglected. Economic changes may be at the root of what ails us, but
they are refracted through people’s lived experience with things
like violence, addiction, mental health problems, social isolation,
loneliness, and a sense of social disintegration. Progressive
policymaking and political rhetoric have been extraordinarily thin on
these topics, tending to treat them as secondary issues. The visceral
experience of class, race, and gender is often felt through these
non-economic aspects of life.

People’s fears of crime may be exaggerated, for example, but their
feelings of disorder and danger are real and demand a response. This
is not just about reaching Trump voters—it’s about reaching
working- and middle-class people across racial lines. Taking fears of
crime seriously is not an inherently conservative position; what’s
important is _how _policymakers address these concerns. Do we turn to
outdated, cruel, and ineffective answers, like punishment and
fear-mongering? Or do we tackle crime at the root, offering all people
nourishment, care, and community? It’s time we realize that people
aren’t foolishly “voting against their interests,” as many on
the left have long argued and struggled to explain
[[link removed]].
People hold multiple and sometimes contradictory identities and
interests. It’s not inevitable which identities or interests will
come to the fore and determine their political allegiances. We have to
take seriously people’s preoccupations as _they _define them, not as
some distraction from what they _should_ care about.

Some of the root causes of growing unhappiness aren’t solely
economic and need more attention. Social media, for example. Utah is
the first state to have restricted access
[[link removed]]
to social media without parental consent for those under 18. The idea
raises concerns—for example, some kids, particularly queer and trans
youth, may find solace in supportive relationships built on the
internet, especially if they find themselves in homophobic or
transphobic in-person environments (which is increasingly likely in
states, like Utah, that have banned gender-affirming care). But the
Utah law is an actual response to the impact tech companies are having
on our brains, especially young brains. As digital media use has
increased, in-person social interactions, amount of sleep, and general
happiness have plummeted
[[link removed]]
among teens. The CDC reports
[[link removed]]
that the percentage of teenage girls who said they feel persistently
sad or hopeless increased from 36 percent in 2011 to 57 percent in
2021. Nearly one in three had seriously considered attempting
suicide—up nearly 60 percent from a decade ago. Progressives need to
confront these issues with the seriousness they warrant and offer
clear solutions.

We also need to take social connection, isolation, and community much
more seriously as policy priorities. Even before COVID-19 changed the
way we interact with our social worlds, three in five Americans were
classified
[[link removed]]
as lonely. Research shows
[[link removed]]
that Americans’ number of close friendships has shrunk over the past
few decades, especially for men: In 1990, just 3 percent of men
reported
[[link removed]]
having no close friends at all, but by 2021 that number had risen
dramatically to 15 percent. Policy can’t solve a crisis of
friendship directly—but it can support the rebuilding of social
institutions, like community organizations and unions, that create
opportunities for connection. (There is considerable evidence
[[link removed]]
that unions are a xxxxxx against authoritarianism.)

Third, progressives need to articulate not just a string of worthy
policies, but a vision of the good life grounded in what British
cultural theorist Stuart Hall called “root ideas” about how we
should live, who we should care about, and what makes for a meaningful
life. Neoliberal striver culture promises wealth, security, and
pleasurable consumption through individual effort. This conception of
the good life has proved persuasive to people across race and class
lines. An ethno-nationalist, patriarchal vision promises community,
belonging, and status dominance through the support of authoritarian
leaders. That vision has gained adherents as fewer people find the
promise of striver culture to be convincing. A compelling alternative
progressive vision will start from first premises about identity,
purpose, and the grounds for human flourishing, and will make
practical sense to people grappling with everyday challenges by
providing clear stories, complete with heroes and villains.

Fourth and most importantly, reinvigorated organizing and recruitment
of new people, especially working-class people, into worker and
community organizations is essential. But the craft of organizing has
been in deep decline. As long-time community organizer Kirk Noden puts
it, “Never have there been so many people with the job title
‘organizer,’ never have so many foundations funded organizing, and
never has there been so little real organizing happening in
America.” People are often mobilized on issues but too rarely
invited to be part of a democratic community built on relationships
that forge collective power.

There is important innovation underway. A new generation of organizing
efforts in both blue urban and red rural terrain pairs work on issues
with a strong emphasis on building community and connection, including
sometimes through direct services and mutual aid. Make the Road NY, a
grassroots organization rooted in immigrant communities, uses services
to recruit working-class immigrants and actively constructs a culture
of belonging grounded in love that forges strong ties. While the
organization delivers concrete benefits to community members, people
who seek services first experience an “agitational intake”—a
conversation that situates a personal problem in a collective context
and asks individuals to join with their neighbors to fight for
structural solutions. People may come for the service, but they stay
for the community. Political scientist Deva Woodly shows
[[link removed]]
how the Movement for Black Lives has developed a politics of care and
specific practices, like healing justice, that connect personal pain
and trauma to collective struggle.

Defanging authoritarianism requires a shift in organizing methods to
widen the on-ramps that welcome in people who are not already
progressive and to work at the levels of survival needs, meaning, and
identity—not only policy. One group, Hoosier Action
[[link removed]] in Indiana, likes to say that its model
is to create an organization that is a “Church, Shelter, and
Vanguard,” meaning that it provides a combination of belonging,
mutual aid, and intensive training and meaning-making. The
organization also works directly on issues at the heart of the crisis
of despair, like the opioid epidemic. Hoosier Action is building
community-owned centers that can provide an institutional home to help
foster solidarity among working-class people. Some organizing on the
right—for example, in evangelical churches—is thick in this same
way, forging deep social ties rather than relating to people
transactionally on issues of the moment.

Organizing works in part because it breathes life into latent social
identities. For example, someone may be a worker, but that may not
become their primary identity until they are engaged in a concrete
struggle over wages and benefits with other workers. The students
receiving the refundable child tax credit experienced having something
done _to_ them, rather than being protagonists in the story. And the
latent and powerful identity of being parents, with the deep love that
lies at the core of their purpose, was untapped by the policy debate.
Progressive efforts to implement the Inflation Reduction Act are far
more likely to increase civic engagement if they proceed from an
organizing, rather than a technocratic, mindset.

The Cloth and the Milk

In a series of classic behavioral experiments conducted in the
mid-twentieth century, psychologist Harry Harlow separated infant
rhesus monkeys from their mothers and placed them in isolation, where
they had access to two surrogate “mothers” fashioned by Harlow.
One surrogate mother was constructed out of wire and offered milk from
a feeding tube; the other wore soft terry cloth but did not provide
milk or food. The infant monkeys showed a strong preference for the
cloth mother, spending far more time clinging to it and running to it
when frightened. When hungry, they would go to the wire mother, but
then immediately return to the comfort of the cloth mother. At times,
the monkeys would even try to reach their lips to the feeding tube of
the wire mother while still grasping onto the cloth mother.
Progressives have, too often, played the role of the wire monkey,
expecting love in exchange for benefits that are vital but
insufficient.

Deliverism is not the solution to our democracy crisis because, as
Staci K. Haines has argued [[link removed]], our
needs for safety, belonging, and dignity are fundamental to our
humanity. Delivery of even dramatically more progressive economic
policies than are on offer in the United States today won’t prevent
the rise of authoritarianism. The rise of far-right parties in the
Scandinavian social democracies—which have social and economic
policies that U.S. progressives envy—is a cautionary tale about the
limits of an economistic approach. The best strategy, therefore, will
combine the milk with the cloth—the material with the emotional.

Solving the authoritarianism challenge requires a progressive program
and organizing strategy that speak directly and persuasively to the
wave of unhappiness and despair and are rooted in the texture of
everyday life—what people actually talk about, care about, and worry
about. Such an approach will continue to foreground economic security
and rights, but it must also affirm other aspects of human flourishing
that have long been emphasized by diverse social movements, including
the importance of collective care, community, belonging, and
solidarity. The task for progressives at this historical juncture is
not to find the magic message or to deliver more popular policies.
Rather, it is to offer a compelling, energizing, persuasive vision of
the good life and to organize mass-based organizations through which
people shape and live out those values in the here and now.

Deepak Bhargava
[[link removed]] is a senior
fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and a Distinguished Lecturer at the
CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies.

Shahrzad Shams [[link removed]]
is the program manager for the Race and Democracy program at the
Roosevelt Institute.

Harry Hanbury [[link removed]] is
a documentary filmmaker and journalist.

* democracy
[[link removed]]
* Authoritarianism
[[link removed]]
* Economic Policy
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]