Emboldened by the protesters on Wall Street, progressive activists are starting to believe that the public is poised to embrace their ideology. “We are at a turning point in America right now,” Justin Ruben, director of the liberal activist group MoveOn.org said on Tuesday. “We’ve seen more energy on this issue than we have on any issue since the Iraq War.”
The “issue” — broadly speaking — is the anger among progressives that governments, at all levels, have been focusing on cutting deficits instead of spending additional money to boost job growth, all because wealthier Americans aren’t paying enough taxes.
“Now it’s our turn,” former White House green jobs czar Van Jones, who has been calling for a liberal counter to the Tea Party, declared. “The 99 percent of us who watched and sat back and hurt and cried and mourned, but never had the opportunity to stand together.”
Both men were speaking to reporters at a press conference during the Take Back the American Dream conference, which drew thousands of progressives to Washington. Liberal organizations and unions have banded together to support what they call the American Dream movement, which will stage an ongoing campaign of “actions” over the next few months, culminating with nationwide protests on Nov. 17.
Throughout the conference, speakers expressed a growing confidence that most Americans share the progressive worldview.
“We always thought as progressives that we weren’t quite mainstream,” Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., said during one panel on raising taxes, “but I’m going to tell you, the progressive point of view, the progressive place where we’ve been for so many years, is where the majority of the country is.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the Senate’s only openly socialist member, said that, “The vast majority of the American people agree with us.”
But the reality is that progressives are misreading the polls, as well as the trajectory of history.
In a Gallup poll released last week, for instance, 56 percent of Americans said they supported a government with fewer services and lower taxes, compared with just 16 percent who said they wanted more services and higher taxes.
It’s true that Americans often claim they support smaller government in the abstract while opposing specific cuts to government programs. But the problem for progressives is that in the long run, the debate isn’t moving in their direction.
As America’s debt burden continues to spiral out of control, it will force major changes to their cherished government programs of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
But progressives don’t even support a “balanced approach” to reducing the deficit through a mix of spending cuts and tax increases. “No more cuts,” the crowd chanted at this week’s conference. Yet this won’t come close to addressing the problem, even with defense cuts (the only type of spending cuts they’ll accept).
Over the next 10 years alone, the Congressional Budget Office projects $4.7 trillion in deficits — and that’s if all the Bush tax rates, on all income levels, expire as scheduled after 2012.
Preserving the rates and various credits for lower-income earners would add $3 trillion to that number. And that doesn’t even account for the additional stimulus spending that progressives are seeking.
This fiscal picture is going to further deteriorate over time. And even raising taxes to levels never before seen in American history won’t be enough to bring deficits to sustainable levels without significant spending cuts.
Progressives won’t succeed, because they have no answers to what is sure to be the nation’s most pressing challenge in the decades to come. What we’re witnessing is not a rebirth of progressivism, but a collective temper tantrum.
Philip Klein is senior editorial writer for The Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected].
