Message

Shawn makes a really interesting point about how community and the economy are deeply interrelated that I'd like to build on. A key question here is what the public thinks about communitarian economics. Meg Bostrom's report on communicating low-wage work (good webinar here) found that some people care more about how the economy impacts communities than they do the economy alone, while others respond better to a message about the economy alone.

Bostrom tested three frames- stressing responsible economic planning, community planning, and sympathy for the poor. She found that, for example:

Importantly, less educated men and women respond differently to these frames. Less educated women respond to all three frames, but particularly to the Sympathy for the Poor frame. However, men without a college education only respond to the Economic Planning Frame. This suggests that advocates should communicate with less-educated voters using the Responsible Planning Frame, but add a morality-based appeal when speaking specifically with less-educated women.

Other subgroups responded to the sympathy for the poor frame and the community planning frame, but not the economy frame. And some only responded to the community and economy frames.

So for people who prioritize community, it might work to contrast "you're on your own" economics and individualism with the "we're all in this together" philosophy and interdependence. And to reach people who're more interested in the economy, Bostrom recommends a message about long-term responsible planning, which could be contrasted with a conservative approach that stresses short-term gains. Bostrom concluded that the economic planning message is the strongest and ought to be the lead, but that it would be even stronger if it was supported by the community planning frame.

So there may be no one right message, but rather multiple useful messages that probably ought to be combined or deployed separately according to the audience. Bostrom even found that the sympathy for the poor frame might be a good way to stir up support from the progressive base.

I've lost hope that the Democrats will draw real contrasts between themselves and conservative economics anytime soon. So for me, it's on to the next big issue: the safety net that's supposed protect people during a recession. What's the progressive message there?

I dusted off a copy of Jacob Hacker's The Great Risk Shift and found some pretty good stuff.

The Great Risk Shift is not just an economic change; it is also an ideological change. For decades, Americans and their government were committed to a powerful set of ideals- never wholly achieved, never without internal tension- that combined a commitment to economic security with a faith in economic opportunity Animating this vision was a conviction that a strong economy and society hinged on basic financial security, on the guaraee that those who worked hard and did right by their families had a true safety net when disaster strcuk. Social Security, Medicare, private health insurance, traditional guaranteed pensions- all sent the same reassuring message: someone is watching out for you, all of use are watching out for you, when things go bad.

Today, the message is starkly different: You are on your own. Private employment-based health plans and pensions have eroded, or been radically transformed, to shift more and more risk onto workers's shoulders. Government programs of economic security have been cut, restructer, or simply allowed to grow ever more threadbare. Millions of Americans lack health insurance. Millions more lack guaranteed retirement benefits. Our jobs and our families are less and less financially secure.

Communal values are the right place to start. Hacker also often invokes "fate," which is probably the right grounding for policies that essentially guard against events that are outside an individual's control. I think he makes a mistake, though, by tying insurance programs to economic opportunity, which would be unnecessary during a time of broad distress and could muddle the message. In this way the book seems written for a bygone era, even though it came out in 2006.

And I think a good message would need to be much harsher on an individualistic alternative. What we have now is essentially a good system for the fortunate few and a bad system for everyone else. But disasters affect ALL of us. The implication is that somehow wealthier people deserve security and everybody else doesn't. It's this sense of entitlement, this selfishness, that drives the hyper-individualists to tear up the safety net for everyone else and leave it intact for themselves. It's this same selfishness and unscrupulousness that will drive them to hoard whatever they have left and take whatever they can get from a compliant administration. They should be called out for it.

The folks who brought you "timely, targeted, and temporary" are at it again. On Friday, the Brookings Institution is hosting a panel on the mortgage crisis, and the Traveling (former) Treasury Secretaries, Citigroup's Robert Rubin and Prof. Larry Summers, are receiving top billing.

Whatever emerges might very well become the Democrat's response to the unfolding financial crisis. As is customary, nobody identified with the left wing of the progressive movement will be contributing. Panelists will probably offer watered-down proposals that excessively defer to free market theology and/or bail out everyone in Rubin's rolodex. Needless to say, I don't expect these folks to pull the economy out the ditch it's in, especially because they helped put us there in the first place.

So who will? Is there a comparable progressive event or set of proposals being planned? And am I missing something or have the centrists been way out front with solutions for our recession problem while progressives have been playing catch up? Perhaps I have unrealistic hopes that the Democrats would listen anyway, but it's at least worth a shot, and from where I'm sitting it doesn't seem like anybody is really trying.

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero put out a good message following his party's victory in Spain's national election. The NYT:

“I will govern by continuing with the things that we’ve done well and correcting mistakes,” Mr. Zapatero said in accepting victory outside his party headquarters. He added, “I will govern for all, but thinking above all of those people who do not have everything.”

American progressives could do a lot worse, I think.

One more thought on an economic message: another way to respond to conservative "economic royalism" is define conservatives as the divisive ones who favor the few at the expense of the many and liberalism as the inclusive alternative that envisions an economy for everyone. This is, I think, what FDR meant when he vowed to remove the moneychangers from the temple and all that, and Shawn's right that it was pretty successful rhetoric.

It just worries me that a liberal message that envisions a smaller "us" and a bigger "them" would backfire. It could trigger the false but prevalent perceptions of a progressive "us" that excludes the working class. That's the perception that Stan Greenberg's project found:

That the group most distressed about this changing economy is the group most hostile to the Democrats is a powerful statement about the character of progressive politics today. These voters feel increasingly marginal in this market economy, and Democrats -- and likely the labor movement as well -- barely know how to open their doors to them. However, it is hard to imagine a successful future for Democrats or the labor movement if they fail to build support with the working class electorate, broadly defined. In the absence of a strong initiative from the progressive side, many of these working class voters are sure to turn to a more conservative populist politics.

I'd also argue that even populist progressive messages can encourage people to turn away from government, because at root they're about the self-interest of a group and not the interests of the whole community. The work Demos has done on citizen and consumerist mindsets seems to caution against this approach, and so would the relative ease with which left-wing populism turns into right-wing populism, as it did for Reagan Democrats.

And I can see how the "hands-on manager" image is, well, boring, and I'd agree that competence isn't the most compelling virtue. But it's also important to address the feelings of helplessness and fear that John identified, and a message that stresses that something can be done about a crisis and that we're all in it toghether might serve that purpose. A chief goal here is to reassure the public that it's ok to make a change and take a risk in the middle of a crisis, and there's a general tendency to be risk-averse when times are tough. Rhetoric should attempt overcome these psychological obstacles in addition to the ideological ones.