Framing the Debate

Not long ago, my blockmate’s father asked me a seemingly simple question over dinner: why am I a Democrat? I momentarily—and awkwardly—fell silent, knowing that “I guess I agree with most of their policies” would be an insufficient response, particularly after he had just explained his faith-based conversion to the Right. There I was, unable to find a larger and more compelling reason for choosing my defining political affiliation.

Democrats’ inability to articulate not only the minor policies they advocate, but also the major ideals that they represent—or at least should represent—has real and pernicious political and social consequences. The bumper-sticker talking points of modern Republican stump issues—economic freedom, national security, family values—have, for several years now, dominated our national discourse and so demanded that any new policy justify itself in conservative terms that are inherently hostile to a robust progressive agenda.

If Democrats are to undertake the governmental action necessary to deal with today’s pressing issues—a dire environmental crisis and staggering inequality at the forefront—they need to develop a clear philosophical narrative that articulates the implicit reasoning behind their best policies and guides them toward better future policies. They must stop working within the Right’s discourse and form their own narrative. Such a narrative can be found by looking back and trumpeting two ideals popularized by John Dewey: effective liberty and pragmatism.

Refusing to accept the ideas of Enlightenment liberals such as John Locke “as immutable truths good at all times and places,” Dewey insisted that we instead conceive of liberty “as something subject to historic relativity.”

“Effective liberty,” he argued in his book “Liberalism and Social Action,” “is a function of the social conditions existing at any time” that “signifies release from the impact of particular oppressive forces.”

In both Dewey’s time and ours, this means liberation from material insecurity, from economic coercion, and from cultural repression so that each individual can fully benefit from the teeming cultural and economic resources that too few in our nation enjoy. Formal liberty—the legal constructs that conservatives subsume under the rhetoric of “equality of opportunity”—thus becomes opposed to what Dewey called “effective liberty of thought and action.” It is the latter that leads to an unchanging but endlessly adaptable ideal: granting each individual the autonomy to realize his capacities.

Effective liberty, then, depends not on the absolute laws of classical economics—one of the most useful but most overused paradigms of sociopolitical thought—but rather on a pragmatic approach that recognizes the complexity, nuance, and newness of each situation.

Democrats—particularly young ones—need to embrace this mantle, and embrace it fully, both following its precepts and arguing for them. As Dewey wrote in “The Public and Its Problems,” “Thinking and beliefs should be experimental, not absolutistic.” The basis for social policy then becomes not a matter of sound-byte ideals, but a matter of establishing concrete correlations of cause and effect that depend on the particular and complicated history of each problem.

This greater measure of argumentative complexity need not disempower or limit Democratic political discourse to elite technocrats. Rather, an emphasis on concreteness will facilitate a more robust and inclusive democracy that forces us to recognize that every voter—and every human being—has something to offer. “The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches,” Dewey insisted, “even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied.”

Democrats could thus offer not only alternative policies, but an alternative conception of political policy that challenges Republican ideals and creates an implicit counter-narrative defining the Republican Party as the party of dogmatism. And after seven years of George W. Bush, how many Americans find dogmatism appealing? A discourse of pragmatism and effective liberty would create a new set of criteria by which to judge policy.

Democrats thus face an opportunity. Recognizing that the President shapes not only policy, but the culture which enables that policy, Barack Obama has opened a space for a broad reconceptualization of our political process. If Democrats can follow his lead and fill this space by becoming the party of pragmatism and effective liberty, they may find themselves governing this nation—and governing it well—for several years to come.

Patrick R. Chesnut ’09, a Crimson Arts Chair, is a History and Literature concentrator in Leverett House.