More Lessons from Matt Bai

More good reading (and I should say, good writing!) from the TPM discussion of Matt Bai’s new book. In this section, Bai is explaining part of his suggestion about a “core vision”:

I'm not talking about a policy that discriminates against the self-employed....I'm taking about a policy that encourages and enables people to BE self-employed, because that's where some sectors of the economy seem to be headed, and it's a real opportunity for people to create better lives. If you de-coupled benefits from employers (enabling them to compete more easily), and if you reformed the tax code, then a lot of people who now drop off their kids and drive to offices could stay at home and mange their time and maybe even make people compete for their services. I'm talking about a social contract for the workforce of this century, not the last one. Andy Stern and SEIU have been working on just such a program for the self-employed, and I hope they pull it off; they understand that the idea of a union may have to expand to keep pace with the proliferation of free agents in the workforce.

And I don't think you do these things in a piecemeal way. I think you have to tell Americans a story about where the economy and society is headed, and I think you need to make the argument for why all of these things--health care, retirement, taxes--are interrelated and part of a system that's changing. Bill Cinton started this conversation, and I admire him for it. But, like so much else in the country, it has stalled under the current administration, or even gone backward. The same could be said of our foreign policy future.

I don't have all the answers here, obviously--if I did, I suppose I would have written THAT book. I'm not a policy expert, really. But I sense a great potential here, and I talk to a whole lot of voters around the country who have both anxiety about the present and a sense of expanding possibilities for the future, and I think a truly progressive movement would try to meet that challenge, even if the agenda weren't immediately politically practical. That's why we care about politics, right? Because it can move us forward.

Of course, I talk about this stuff, and then somebody says something--as he or she did elsewhere on one of these threads--about how I don't care about poor women and their sick babies. And I think, is it really even worth having this discussion? Can people debate without turning it into an issue of who cares and who doesn't? Don't we all care? Isn't that why I do what I do, and why you come to this site and do what you do?

My answer, after a week-long discussion here, is I don't know--but I think you can. I think there are enough people who really want some better brand of politics and some more useful form of conversation.

Me too.