Progressivism in America: Past, Present, and Future

For several decades conservatives set the political agenda in the United States, allowing them to focus the conversation on topics such as tax cuts, national security, and social issues. It is increasingly becoming apparent, however, that this has begun to change. Factors such as the election of the first African-American President and the increasing diversity of the population, the dramatic rise of income inequality, and the social liberalism of younger Americans indicate that progressive political ideas are more influential today than at any point in four decades. This book is the first to offer a comprehensive overview of progressive politics, combining historical analysis, a discussion of policy priorities today, and a survey of the challenges ahead. Featuring essays by leading scholars, analysts, and commentators, it is an indispensable guide to the ideas and debates that will shape American politics in the coming years. Contributors to this volume - Jonathan Alter is an award-winning author, reporter, columnist and television analyst. Since 2011, Alter has written for Bloomberg View, a worldwide commentary site housed under Bloomberg News. He spent 28 years at Newsweek, where he was a longtime senior editor and columnist. He has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Monthly, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, The New Republic and other publications. He is the author of The Promise: President Obama, Year One (Simon & Schuster, 2010), and The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (Simon & Schuster, 2006). Alan Brinkley is Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia University. A specialist in the history of twentieth-century America, his publications include Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Oxford University Press, 2009), Liberalism and Its Discontents (Harvard University Press, 1998), and The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (Vintage, 1995). Rosa Brooks is professor at the Georgetown University Law Center where she teaches courses on international law, national security, and constitutional law. She is a columnist and contributing editor for Foreign Policy, and serves as a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. From 2009-2011 she served as Counselor to Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy. During her tenure at DoD, Brooks founded the Office for Rule of Law and International Humanitarian Policy. She has also served as a senior advisor at the US Department of State, a consultant for Human Rights Watch, a fellow at the Carr Center at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and as a board member of Amnesty International USA. She is the co-author of Can Might Make Rights? The Rule of Law after Military Interventions (Cambridge University Press, 2006), and has written numerous scholarly articles on international law, failed states, post-conflict reconstruction, human rights, terrorism and the law of war. Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and the author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (Doubleday/ Penguin, 2010). His essays and reviews appear in many U.S. and European publications. Ellen Chesler is a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, where she directs the Women and Girls Rising program. She is author of Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America (Simon & Schuster, 1992), which remains in print in a new paperback edition released in 2007. She is co-editor with Wendy Chavkin, M.D. MPH of Where Human Rights Begin (Rutgers University Press, 2005), a volume of essays that emerged from a fellowship program they directed for the Open Society Foundation. Chesler has also written extensively for academic and public policy anthologies, journals, newspapers, magazines and blogs. Over a 40-year career, she has held positions in government (chief of staff to New York City Council President Carol Bellamy, 1978-84); philanthropy (Open Society Foundation, 1997-2006, and the Twentieth Century Fund, 1992-1997); and academia (Hunter College of the City University of New York, 2007-10, and Barnard College, 1988-9, 1992-3) and is widely respected for both the intellectual and practical perspectives she brings to her work. She is currently a member of the advisory committee of the Women's Rights Division of Human Rights Watch and served for many years on the board of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and as chair of the board of the International Women's Health Coalition. She has twice been a member of the U.S. delegation to the UN Commission on the Status of Women. She holds a B.A. from Vassar College and a Ph.D. with distinction in history from Columbia University. E.J. Dionne is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, and university professor in the Foundations of Democracy and Culture at Georgetown University. A nationally known and respected commentator on politics, Dionne appears weekly on National Public Radio and regularly on MSNBC. He has also appeared on News Hour with Jim Lehrer and other PBS programs. He is chair of the editorial committee of the journal, Democracy and is the author of the award-winning Why Americans Hate Politics (Simon & Schuster, 1991). He is the author and editor or co-editor of several other books and volumes, including They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era (Simon & Schuster, 1996) and Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent (Bloomsbury USA, 2012). Jacob S. Hacker is Stanley Resor Professor of Political Science and Director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University. An expert on economic inequality and contemporary governance, he is a frequent commentator on public policy and civic affairs, a regular adviser to leading policymakers in the United States and other advanced industrial societies, and the author or co-author of five books, numerous journal articles, and a wide range of popular writings on American politics and public policy, with a focus on health and economic security. His most recent book is Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (Simon & Schuster, 2011), written with Paul Pierson. With the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, he directs the Economic Security Index, a multi-year project examining economic insecurity in the United States, and he currently serves as a member of the High-Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, housed at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. He recently won the Heinz Eulau Prize of the American Political Science Association for his 2013 article "The Insecure American," written with Philipp Rehm and Mark Schlesinger. Michael Konczal is a Fellow of the Roosevelt Institute, where he works on financial reform, unemployment, inequality, and a progressive vision of the economy. His blog, Rortybomb, was named one of the 25 Best Financial Blogs by Time Magazine . His writing has appeared in the Boston Review, The American Prospect, the Washington Monthly, The Nation, Slate, and Dissent, and he's appeared on PBS NewsHour, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show, CNN, Marketplace, and other media outlets. Mark Lytle is Lyford Paterson Edwards and Helen Gray Edwards Professor of Historical Studies at Bard College, and the Mary Ball Washington Professor of American History, University College Dublin (2000, 2004). He is the author of The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring and the Rise of the Environmental Movement (Oxford University Press, 2007); America's Uncivil Wars: The Sixties Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon (Oxford University Press, 2006); and The Origins of the Iranian-American Alliance, 1941-1953 (Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1987). Jeff Madrick is director of the Schwartz Rediscovering Government Initiative at the Century Foundation, a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and a former economics columnist for The New York Times. He is editor of Challenge Magazine and visiting professor of humanities at The Cooper Union He is the author of The Case For Big Government, (Princeton University Press, 2008) which won a nonfiction award from Pen America, and Age of Greed, The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present, (Vintage, 2011). His latest book is Seven Bad Ideas, How Mainstream Economists Damaged America and the World (Knopf, 2014). He has also written for The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Institutional Investor, The Nation, The American Prospect, The Boston Globe, Newsday, the Boston Review of Books, and the business, op-ed, and Sunday magazine sections of The New York Times. Kevin Mattson is Connor Study Professor of Contemporary History at Ohio University and serves as a faculty associate of the Contemporary History Institute. His work explores the broad intersections between ideas and politics in 20th century America. He is author of When America was Great: The Fighting Faith of Post-War Liberalism in America (Routledge, 2004), and "What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?": Jimmy Carter, America's Malaise and the Speech that Should Have Changed the Country (Bloomsbury USA, 2009). Charles Postel is an associate professor of history at San Francisco State University. He has also taught at California State University, Sacramento, the University of California, Berkeley, and Heidelberg University. An historian of American political thought, he is the author of a history of the original Populist movement of the 1890s entitled The Populist Vision (Oxford University Press, 2007), which received the Bancroft Prize in History and the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians. His present book project is a new interpretative work on the post-Civil War reform movements that culminated in the Progressive Era. He is also researching conservatism and the historical origins of the Tea Party movement. Charles Postel earned both his B.A. in history (1995) and his Ph.D. in history (2002) from the University of California, Berkeley. Mark Schmitt is the Director of Political Reform at the New America Foundation, a former Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and a leading progressive writer and organizational leader, with a deep understanding of the importance of ideas in the political process. Most recently he was executive editor of The American Prospect, a position he held since 2008. He guided the Prospect during a period when it won several awards, including the Utne Reader award for best political magazine, for its coverage of the policy and political battles of the first two years of the Obama administration. He was policy director to former Senator Bill Bradley in the 1990s and a senior advisor on Bradley's 2000 presidential campaign. Before joining the Prospect, he was a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. Joseph Stiglitz is Senior Fellow and Chief Economist at the Roosevelt Institute, Professor at Columbia University, and University Professor at Columbia University. In 2001, he won the Nobel Prize in economics and he was a lead author of the 1995 Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. During the Clinton Administration, he served as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1993-95 and as its chairman from 1995-97. He has also served as chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank from 1997-2000. He is the author of numerous books, including Globalization and Its Discontents (W. W. Norton & Company, 2003), The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, with Linda Bilmes (W. W. Norton & Company, 2008), The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future (W. W. Norton & Company, 2013), and Creating a Learning Society: A New Approach to Growth, Development, and Social Progress, with Bruce C. Greenwald (Columbia University Press, 2014). Dr. John M. (Jack) Thompson is Lecturer at the Clinton Institute for American Studies, University College Dublin. His most recent publication is an edited volume, with Hans Krabbenam, titled America's Transatlantic Turn: Theodore Roosevelt and the Discovery of Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). He is a frequent commentator in Ireland on American politics and foreign policy. He earned his M.A. from Johns Hopkins University and his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. Dorian T. Warren is Associate Professor at the School of International and Public Affairs and at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. He is also Co-Director of the Columbia University Program on Labor Law & Policy, a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and an MSNBC Contributor. His research interests include labor organizing & politics, race and ethnic politics, urban politics and policy, American political development, community organizing, public policy, and social science methodology. His publications include "The Unsurprising Failure of Labor Law Reform and the Turn to Administrative Action" in Reaching for a New Deal: President Obama's Agenda and the Dynamics of U.S. Politics (Russell Sage Foundation, 2010), "The American Labor Movement in the Age of Obama: The Challenges and Opportunities of a Racialized Political Economy" in Perspectives on Politics (American Political Science Association, 2010), and Race and American Political Development, Editor, with Joe Lowndes and Julie Novkov (Routledge, 2008). David B. Woolner is Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, Senior Fellow of the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard College, and Associate Professor of History at Marist College. He is the author of FDR: The Last 100 Days, forthcoming from Basic Books and Searching for Cooperation in a Troubled World: Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden and Anglo-American Cooperation, 1933-1938, forthcoming from Praeger Press. He is co-editor with Warren Kimball and David Reynolds of FDR's World: War, Peace and Legacies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); with Henry Henderson of FDR and the Environment (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); and with Richard Kurial of FDR, the Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church in America, 1933-1945 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and is the editor of The Second Quebec Conference Revisited: Waging War, Formulating Peace; Canada, Great Britain and the United States in 1944-1945 (Palgrave/St. Martin's Press, 1998). He has been Visiting Associate Professor of History at Bard College and remains a member of the faculty of the Bard Prison Initiative. He serves on the Editorial Board of the International History Review, and has been an Archives Bi-Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, and held the Fulbright Distinguished Research Chair at the Roosevelt Study Center in Middelburg, the Netherlands, where he remains an Honorary Fellow.