It’s a giddy time for the Democrats. More high-level GOP indictments may be on the way, and recent polls have shown Democrats with a more than 15 percent lead on Republicans in the fall. Naturally, most Democrats would like to take the upheaval and turn it into a revolution. This Democraticrevolution will take off, the wisdom goes, when they add to their opposition-party momentum the fuel of Big Ideas.
A good example of the prevailing sentiment appears on the cover of this month’s American Prospect, one of Washington’s most highly regarded liberal journals, in the form of a story titled, “What’s The Big Idea?” Editor Michael Tomasky writes, “Democrats need to think differently — to stop focusing on their grab-bag of small-bore proposals that so often seek not to offend and that accept conservative terms of defeat.”
There’s a new economic policy project recently launched that thinks differently. Unfortunately, Democratic strategists chomping at the bit for Big Ideas could easily pass it over: It comprises a grab-bag of proposals. It doesn’t seek to offend. And its leaders have even called it “bipartisan.” Meet the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution: possibly the least bomb-throwing-and most promising-Big Idea project in the works in Washington.
The Hamilton Project, the brainchild of ex-Clinton administration policymakers including Bob Rubin and Peter Orszag, aims to generate policy proposals that tackle America’s burgeoning economic problems, guided by a Hamiltonian philosophy of upward mobility. “We believe in America’s promise: That education and hard work can provide each individual with the opportunity to advance and allow each generation to do better than the one before,” the project’s leaders write, eloquently, in their strategy paper, using turns of phrase Big Ideas-types would love. Yet this is, in the end, an individualist philosophy, something liberals are often —and unnecessarily — allergic to.
But the Hamilton Project takes individualism in the economic sphere — an outlook that’s been totally hijacked by conservatives-and explains how to make it liberal: The market, while a great economic driver, doesn’t naturally encourage investment in areas crucially important to fostering opportunity for individuals in the long term. Here’s where government’s stronger hand comes in, to force “increased public investment in key growth-enhancing areas,” like education. Liberals are often caricatured as happily letting economic growth stagnate for the sake of indiscriminately extending benefits to everyone. The Hamilton Project will battle to show that sharing the wealth bolsters the economy, instead of dragging it down — thereby reconciling liberalism with the market. Liberals have no more important image battle to fight than this one.
Alas, Harold Meyerson has already criticized the Hamilton Project in The Washington Post for losing sight of liberal principles — in light of, in part, a paper it released allegedly slamming teachers’ unions. The critique is incredibly shortsighted, and not only because many liberals actually involved in education policy don’t like teachers’ unions, either. One of the project’s most interesting characteristics is its conspicuous lack of “in-house scholars.” Unlike many think tanks, it will operate by commissioning thinkers outside of Washington to investigate data-supported ways to achieve its lofty goals. Instead of coming from a claque of insiders with slickly streamlined ideologies, the project’s policy papers will emanate from independent thinkers, armed not just with theories but with hard facts, who generate debate. Teacher’s unions be damned-these are liberal qualities of the highest order.
Here’s hoping the Hamilton Project gets the attention from Democrats — and non-Democrats — it deserves. Its goals partake of real liberalism, but it could appeal to conservatives, too. And with its emphasis not just on making arguments but on synthesizing and analyzing often-surprising economic data, the project has the potential to produce not only Big Ideas, but actual truths.
Eve Fairbanks is a reporter-researcher at The New Republic.
