The Power of Progress rises again!

[The task of reconstructing the history of progressivism, by progressives, is therefore more than an academic pursuit. Indeed, a good number of public intellectuals are trying to reclaim the reform traditions of a century ago. In 2008, John Podesta, former Clinton chief of staff and eventually a top Obama advisor, prepared the way by penning The Power of Progress: How America’s Progressives Can (Once Again) Save Our Economy, Our Climate, and Our Country. For an overtly political manifesto written by a political operative, Podesta’s book is unusually sophisticated in its sustained treatment of “the original Progressive era ... as a useful and inspiring historical moment in helping to understand the challenges we face today.” Podesta’s cast of characters opens not with status-conscious members of the middle class, but rather with Henry George and his class conscious attack on power and privilege. The strikers at Haymarket and Pullman join Ignatius Donnelly and William Jennings Bryan in Podesta’s narrative, where labor and populism are necessary ingredients in making progressivism powerful not only in the early twentieth century, but in the decades beyond. Podesta spends four pages on the Osawatomie speech but gives Robert La Follette (who “represented the progressive spirit in total”) nearly equal billing. The second half of the book is a wonkish manual for the current day, but the first half (relying primarily on Eric Goldman and George Mowry), thoughtfully distills historical lessons for latter-day progressives.46 

In 2003, Podesta founded the Center for American Progress, which became one of the leading left-leaning Beltway think tanks. The CAP also kept Podesta’s passion for history alive. Staffers Marta Cook, John Halpin, Ruy Teixeira, and Conor P. Williams have done considerable work that mirrors that sponsored by the Claremont Institute. They composed a series of policy briefing papers on “Progressive Traditions” that served as a pointed rejoinder to the right-wing critique of progressivism, as well as a robust and positive defense of using the history of a century ago to fight for a new Progressive Era. Their work had equivalents in the professorial realm. Literary scholar Cecelia Tichi, for example, published a scholarly book with a large public ambition, to acquaint twenty-first-century Americans with seven left-wing reformers who “helped foment an American revolution for the upcoming new century.” “Their lives and work,” Tichi urged in Civic Passions, “speak to the present as if it were only yesterday.” Walter Nugent’s Progressivism: A Very Short Introduction, a scholarly work designed to appeal to general readers, likewise celebrated the populist roots of progressivism and the ultra-democratic side of Theodore Roosevelt in a manner meant to inspire in the present day.47 This genre’s gem was Our Divided Political Heart, by the prolific liberal pundit, E. J. Dionne. Appearing in the midst of the 2012 presidential campaign, Dionne’s book sought, like much of his previous work, to bridge the divide between individual and community, the public and the private, and the market and the government. Dionne introduces the idea of “the Long Consensus,” the joint contribution of both late nineteenth-century populists and early twentiethcentury progressives to a democratic public culture that “wrote the social contract for shared prosperity” during the American Century. Under this regime, workers unionized, property ownership expanded, social mobility grew, and the state expanded its regulatory role even as “capitalism flourished.” With the rise of the Tea Party, however, “the Long Consensus is under the fiercest attack it has faced in its century-long history.”48 

Dionne, in line with Podesta’s argument, hopes that citizens will pay especially close attention to “the Populist strain of the American Progressive tradition.” He expresses impatience with liberals who write off Populism/populism by taking the bigotry at its extremist edges as the movement’s essence and thereby ignoring Populism’s “deeply democratic character.” “The original Progressive Era succeeded,” Dionne argues, “because it created an alliance between the largely rural Populists and urban, middle-class reformers.” Once the two movements came together, “the Progressive impulse shaped American thinking about public life for the next eight decades” (with the exception of the twenties). Moreover, Dionne’s progressives were genuine, if at times ambivalent, democrats—not the elitist centralizers of both left-wing and right-wing critiques. They were communitarians who, above all, strengthened the institutions of civil society.49​]