The New Majority: Toward a Popular Progressive Politics.

Just three years ago, the Republican party was not only proclaiming itself revolutionary, but Democrats were in deep disarray, convinced that, for the next decades, their role would be primarily a defensive one. Both parties, it turns out, were premature in their assessments. As Stanley Greenberg and Theda Skocpol argue in The New Majority, the prospects for a Democratic majority are by no means hopeless.

For Skocpol in particular, the key arena of life which preoccupies most Americans, and to which both political parties have had difficulty responding, is the family. And she means this in a down-to-earth and practical way, not as a symbolic conflict over cultural visions. The overwhelming majority of Americans, Skocpol believes, worry about making insufficient incomes to support their children and having insufficient time to raise them. "Family populism," as she calls a program that would speak to their needs, can unite working-class and middle-class Americans in ways not fundamentally dissimilar from the Roosevelt electoral coalition fashioned during the New Deal. From that base could be built a civic vision, a sense of national purpose which would enable Democrats to stand for something more than the collective needs of the interests attracted to the party. Focused on the family, progressives can avoid both the probusiness orientation of New Democrats and the identity politics associated with specific groups such as women, gays, or African-Americans.

Skocpol, in my opinion, is on the right track. She lays out her strategy in clear, direct prose and manages to avoid sentimental romanticism. Her co-editor Stanley Greenberg, moreover, demonstrates with the use of polling data how broad the appeal of such a progressive "story" would be. It is a shame, then, that the contributors Greenberg and Skocpol assembled for their book so persistently depart from, and occasionally contradict, the sensible advice of the editors. While any edited collection will present a wide variety of viewpoints, too many of the contributors to this collection wind up repeating the tired cliches which got the Democratic party in so much trouble in the first place.

In an age preoccupied with economics, no political platform can ignore the role government plays in promoting economic growth. To spell out a new progressive vision for the economy, the editors turned to Jeff Faux, president of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. Faux calls for full employment programs, greater public investment, a social safety net, and steps to empower workers. He warns against a fixation on a balanced budget and reminds his readers that "the vast majority of U.S. families are not winners in today's economy, and they know it." Whether Faux is right or wrong is not the point. The point, rather, is that Faux offers nothing particularly new. Indeed he says as much: "There are no entirely new departures in politics." Tell that to the Republicans who managed to change themselves pretty thoroughly and in the process ended their status as a minority party.

"The need for and value of public investment may seem self-evident to some," writes the historian Alan Brinkley. "But to many others, the idea of public investment has become a powerful symbol of government waste, inefficiency, and incompetence." Unlike Faux, Brinkley understands that we cannot go back to liberal politics as usual because the voters, for whatever reason, tried that course and found it wanting. One would think the progressive alternative, therefore, would lie, not simply in reiterating rejected programs, but in trying to understand what the public has on its mind.

Yet even Brinkley, one of the most intelligent contributors to this volume, does not make a serious effort to do so. Speaking of public investment, he suggests that "all the rational arguments in its favor have little effect against the overwhelming popular animus - actively fanned by political figures in both parties - toward any public expenditures, however vital they may be...." Such a perspective is far too patronizing ever to be popular. We the intellectuals are "rational." You the demagogues have an "animus" against what we know to be true. No wonder that liberals lost power. Convinced of their superior designs, liberals could not grasp - and evidently still have not grasped - that ordinary people, and the politicians who appeal to them, have perfectly "rational" reasons to think in a different way about government than they do.

Of all the issues that divide progressives from the majority of Americans, none has played as major a role as race, as many of the contributors to this book recognize. Citing survey data, the University of Chicago's Michael Dawson points out that "blacks tend to value equality more than liberty, whereas for whites, liberty has priority." I believe that Dawson is correct, but he also fails to understand the dilemma that results from this finding. Most white Americans have turned their backs on the idea that active governmental programs can promote equality. So long as black Americans link their fates with the fate of government, white Americans tend to repudiate them, not only because of racism, but also out of a distrust of liberalism. The solution, it would seem, would be for African-Americans to find ways to articulate their interests without identifying themselves so closely with an increasingly repudiated tradition.

But Dawson urges the opposite step. "In this period of economic change, progressives must seriously agitate for an inclusive, job-centered economic program; a vigorous education program to revitalize the public education system throughout the country; and the type of strong health-care and child-care systems that allow adults to work while children thrive." All good ideas, I would say, yet nothing new - and a great deal unpopular - about all of it.

Not all the essays in The New Majority are given over to reasserting traditional liberal pieties. Paul Starr offers a wonderfully refreshing strategy for how the Democrats could "flip the sunbelt" by appealing to Hispanic voters and young voters. "Liberals and progressives seem peculiarly afflicted by what might be thought of as the perils of high-mindedness," Starr writes. Against a politics of moral purity which, for example, might support a third party, Starr calls for an inclusive Democratic party that can co-opt political energy from many places. Starr joins William Julius Wilson, who adds a clear-sighted case for a biracial coalition to attack racial injustice, as penning the best individual chapters in the book.

Janus-like in quality, The New Majority is filled with too much boiler-plate rhetoric to carry out its editors' intention to fashion a new progressive platform. But the book also contains enough nuggets of common sense and sage strategic advice to make it worthwhile. The Democratic party will not be passing from the American political scene for some time. It is refreshing to know that at least some intellectuals, if all too few, are leading rather than following.

Alan Wolfe teaches sociology at Boston University. His most recent book is Marginalized in the Middle (University of Chicago).