Voter decision-making

It is the night of the New Hampshire primary, and the pundits are at work.

But what can we learn about American political choices based on what we see during this election season? What do voters care about when they decide which presidential candidate to support? Is it issues and positions; personality of the candidate (likeability); rhetoric and buzzwords; their perceptions of qualities of leadership and effectiveness; party affiliation; or something else? And which of these groups of qualities make sense as a criterion for choosing a president?

Many of the interviews with prospective voters we hear on radio and television refer to personal qualities: “I don’t like Hillary,” “Obama is exciting,” “Thompson is too boring.” It is worth wondering whether these sorts of personal responses make any sense at all as a basis for choosing a president. What are we to make of the possibility that many voters base their preferences on features they might notice in a “speed dating” event (looks, style, charm)?

Would it not be better to have a president whose manners and looks we don’t like but whose leadership competence is certain and whose agenda for change is one we can enthusiastically support? How can such superficial features as looks, style, and charm make a difference to a choice of this magnitude?

So what about judgments about leadership and effectiveness? This at least appears to be a rational basis for choice. If a president is inept at the challenge of inspiring citizens and other leaders to work together and to get things done, then his or her program doesn’t matter very much; the leader will not be effective in implementing it. So favoring a candidate who has the hallmarks of competence and leadership effectiveness is related to the ultimate goal of having a president who can successfully manage the affairs of the nation. So attempting to assess the candidate’s qualities of leadership and effectiveness makes sense as a criterion of choice.

But it would seem that the most important question is that of priorities and goals — the candidate’s program. If we assume that each voter has a set of preferences and interests about national and international policies, then it seems logical to suppose that the voter’s challenge is to decide which candidate will do the most satisfactory job of implementing those preferences and interests. On this approach, we might model the voter’s task as, first, articulating his/her chief priorities for national public policy, and then assessing each candidate in terms of the degree of fit between the candidate’s program and the voter’s preferences. Essentially, this amounts to the decision rule: measure the candidates by the programs they promise to pursue, and choose that candidate whose program lines up best with the voter’s preferences and interests.

Of course the situation is more complicated than this, in that each voter also reaches a judgment about “electability.” Why would a voter cast his/her ballot for candidate X whose program lines up perfectly with the voter’s preferences, if the voter also judges that X’s likelihood of election is 10% compared to the 60% likelihood of election for candidate Y whose program is still pretty well aligned with the voter’s preferences? So it seems rational for the voter to weight the judgment of consistency with my agenda by the estimate of the likelihood of the candidate’s being successfully elected.

But let’s turn the picture a little bit and consider parties and their programs. Policy implementation requires coordinated and disciplined efforts in the executive and legislative branches to enact legislation. So would it not be most rational to begin the choice process by evaluating the priorities and agendas of the parties? Why do American voters make their decisions on the basis of the personality rather than the party? Would we not be better off thinking primarily about the party’s program — as voters in many European democracies do? Here the first question would be: which party presents a program that best corresponds to my preferences and interests? And then, is the party’s candidate sufficiently competent to give me confidence that he/she will be able to advance the party’s program through legislation and public policy? And can I trust that the party’s candidate is genuinely committed to the party’s program?

All of these questions are subject to intensive empirical inquiry, and there are legions of political scientists who are devoting their energies to interpreting the thought processes and decision rules of American voters. (One whose work I have admired is Samuel Popkin and especially his book The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns.) But is it possible that we might actually be a more effective democracy if we gave more thought as a society to the ways in which voters join with issues and challenges and shape their preferences, and try to find institutions that make for a more engaged and deliberative electorate?

Labor abuses in Chinese factories

Today’s New York Times has an important article about the conditions of workers in many of the factories in China devoted to manufacturing goods for export to the United States and other countries (In Chinese Factories, 1/5/08). The reportage is eye-opening but not surprising. Times reporters have documented excessive hours of work, pay that is lower than what Chinese law requires, working conditions that are chronically unsafe, and persistent exposure to the very dangerous chemicals that American toy consumers have been so concerned about. One of the authorities quoted in the article is Professor Anita Chan from the Australian National University, and Professor Chan has been documenting these conditions for years. Her book, China’s Workers Under Assault: The Exploitation of Labor in a Globalizing Economy (Asia and the Pacific), is a detailed and factual examination of some of these conditions. She documents the fact that the most vulnerable groups of workers — in the range of tens of millions! — are the internal migrants of China, who have left their home regions in search of jobs. Very significantly, Professor Chan bases some of her fact-finding on the slowly emerging field of local investigative journalism in China.

Why do these abuses occur? For several related reasons. First, the motive of generating profits in the context of a rapidly growing economy. Since China’s industrial economy was reformed in the 1990s, permiting private ownership of factories and enterprises, there have been strong incentives to be successful in business and to become rich. There is tremendous demand for low-cost Chinese-manufactured goods, and great fortunes are being made in consumer electronics, toys, clothing, and dozens of other sectors. But the profit motive leads factory owners and managers to strive hard to keep wages and factory expenses as low as possible; and the vast population of poor rural people in China who are available for unskilled factory work makes the bargaining position of the factory owner very strong. (Chan documents some of the forms of coercion and intimidation that are used in some Chinese factories to keep workers on the job and to prevent them from leaving or resisting.) And, as the Times story points out, the American purchasers are insistent about cost-cutting and price-cutting on the finished goods. So the result is — a chronic competitive “race to the bottom” in which each factory tries to produce at the require level of quality with the absolutely lowest level of cost; and this means continuous pressure on working conditions, health and safety conditions, and environmental effects.

So part of the story has to do with the economic incentives and advantages that factory owners have relative to a large working population that has few alternatives. But this part of the story is familiar from other economies as they have developed through intensive industrialization. It has been learned elsewhere in the world that the imperatives of profitability by themselves almost mandate the abuse of labor; so government regulation and inspection are a necessary part of a manufacturing system if it is to succeed in treating all the population fairly and humanely. We might have imagined that the Chinese government would have been prepared to provide the regulatory environment that was necessary to protect the best interests of farmers and workers; it is, after all, governed by the party of farmers and workers. However, this is not the case. China has been so concerned to support economic growth that it has been very slow to implement effective regulatory systems to protect labor and the environment. Moreover, the balance of power between factory owners and local officials seems to be tilted towards the owners; other Times reporting has documented the fact that local officials cannot impose their will upon the owners. And, of course, there is ample opportunity for corrupt collusion between owners and officials.

This failure to regulate has been evident in other areas besides labor; the Chinese government has shown itself to be unwilling or unable to enact effective environmental regulations or to establish an effective regime of inspection and regulation for foods, drugs, and other potentially harmful products. It appears that middle-class Chinese consumers themselves are now expressing anxiety about the absence of this kind of regulation within their food and drug system.

So what other avenues exist for improving the conditions of workers in China?

There are three possibilities — all mutually compatible. First, workers themselves can protect their interests in fair wages, safe working conditions, and limited hours of work — if they are permitted to organize in unions. Woody Guthrie had it right: as individuals, workers are weak, but together they are strong. It seems inescapable that a major part of the problem is the enormous imbalance that exists between the powers associated with ownership and management, and those assigned to workers and their organizations. So a more just China will need to permit the development of real independent labor unions that work hard for the interests of their members.

Second, labor mobility can improve the conditions of labor everywhere. It is not an accident that some of the worst abuses documented by Professor Chan have to do with the forms of coercion that factory owners use to keep workers in their factories. If workers can vote with their feet, then we would expect that they will migrate to factories and other employers who offer better conditions of work and pay. And this will force employers to bid for qualified labor on the basis of improved working conditions.

And finally, there is obviously a role for consumers and companies in North America and Europe in all of this. North American consumers benefit from the low manufacturing costs currently available in China; but these low costs are unavoidably associated with the labor abuses we see today. We have a model for how international companies can take responsibility for the conditions of labor and environmental behavior, in the form of the Fair Labor struggles of the 1990s on university campuses in the United States. Large apparel manufacturers took on the responsibility of subjecting their suppliers to standards of conduct, and they subscribed to third-party organizations that undertook to “audit” the level of compliance with these standards by the supply chain. (Visit the Fair Labor website for an example of such an organization.) As the Times story observes, this is a tricky business, given the substantial degree of sub-contracting that occurs in the manufacturing process in China. But it can have a measurable effect.

China is plainly destined to be a major economic and political power in the coming fifty years. But to succeed in creating a society in which everyone has a continuing stake in a good quality of life and a fair deal from society, it will have to solve the problems of regulation of labor, health, and environment. And this will mean a degree of redistribution of China’s wealth and power towards its poorest people.

Perspectives on us

My idea of a really gifted social inquirer is Studs Terkel. This isn’t because Studs is a methodologist with a research plan and a falsifiable hypothesis, a dependent variable to track and a research strategy on a bunch of independent variables. It is because he is a voracious listener — he is interested in people, and he is aware that every person’s story has the potential for breaking new ground on his own understanding of how our society works. And he uses an active, sympathetic intelligence as his research tool, to draw out of his ordinary people the most amazing insights into how they’ve experienced their lives — as service workers, as civil rights activists, as policemen and women. What Studs finds is the great breadth and depth of human experience, human histories, and human coping, embedded in the thoughts and life moments of ordinary people. And he sheds a bright light on how varied human experience is — even in the same city (Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco). It’s a little bit like the way that the early biologist van Leeuwenhoek described his amazement in the 1660s at looking through a microscope at clear water, and seeing thousands of tiny organisms. Terkel discovers nuance, variety, and drama, in the most ordinary and apparently mundane experiences of ordinary people. (Studs has just published a memoir that is well worth reading — Touch and Go: A Memoir.)

But there is an insight in this for all of us. We can each learn from Studs’ ability to connect with the most varied group of people. Most of us live our lives in deliberately familiar circumstances. We talk to the people we know (often about pretty trivial things). We visit the places we’re comfortable with. And we recreate a pretty repetitive and stereotyped world of experience for ourselves. When we think about people in other circumstances than ours — for example, the Egyptian cabdriver who takes us to LaGuardia — we fall back on stereotypes about the other person rather than extending our own understanding of the complexities of the world around us. (Why is this man, trained as an engineer in Cairo driving a cab in New York? What circumstances in Egypt led to his emigration? How does he experience New York? What does he think of Fifth Avenue? Does he have healthcare? What does he want next in his life?)

There is a connection between this fact about our customary narrowness and “stereotyped social knowing” and the educational importance of diversity. The idea is that when universities succeed in recruiting a diverse student body, there is a greater chance that students will get to know each other better and more deeply, and will come to have more knowledge — and a more active desire for knowledge — about the life experiences and perspectives of others. So racial, religious, ethnic, sexual, or age diversity in a university community is a crucial component of the social learning, the cultural cognition, that we want young people to acquire. By living, working, and learning together young people are in a better position to see the world more fully and to understand each other more deeply.

Of course this theory doesn’t work as well in practice as in theory. Young people still have the choice of self-segregating and confining themselves to the familiar. So it is important for faculty and university leaders to create the situations on a campus that break down the barriers. (It is often observed that theater programs and geology departments often have the best success in engaging students across racial or ethnic lines. And a plausible theory of why this is so is that both programs involve extensive group work, field trips, and team cooperation.)

But there are other mechanisms for creating a broader social knowledge as well. For example, programs of national service like AmeriCorps and CityYear can give young people a deep and transforming experience of relationships across class and race lines — and the cross-culture learning that takes place there seems to be more profound. Could a mandatory year of national service be a viable mechanism for breaking down the forms of separation and mutual misunderstanding that we find in our society?

Another avenue that is available to all of us is the national oral history project called “The Story Corps.” (Portions are played on National Public Radio and the archives are maintained at the Library of Congress.) This is a different kind of oral history project — ordinary people talking about a single incident or moment in their lives. By listening to a number of these stories, you can get a much greater appreciation of the richness of experience that the diversity of our society represents — and the depth of insights that ordinary people bring to interpreting their experiences.

But back to Studs Terkel. What does he have that most of us lack? Mostly it is the curiosity to get a real understanding of the other person’s microcosm, and the courage to engage in the conversation. These are things we all can learn — and our understanding of the multiple social worlds we inhabit will be much the richer for it. So I for one want to go out of my way to connect better with people in ordinary social contact, in a way that lets me get a little bit better idea of how they experience their lives and what singular features of experience their worlds contain.

(Some of Studs’ best work is found in Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do and Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression. But to really get a feeling for his mind, you need to hear some of his radio work.)

The ethical consumer

As a rule, we know too little about the social and economic histories of the goods we consume. (Oddly enough, this is what Marx was referring to when he talked about the “fetishism of commodities”.) This is true of food — we consume coffee, tea, sugar, rice, or beef without thinking much about the conditions of human labor through which these goods were produced, or what fraction of the purchase price goes to the farmer or farm worker. And it is true of apparel and consumer goods such as toys or electronic gizmos — we don’t think too much about the factory conditions in which the products are made. We are distantly aware of “sweat shops” — but we don’t take the time to collect much information about what this means. And we certainly don’t know very much about the value stream through which the product passes, and the revenues generated for various parties along the way.

This is about the congealed history of the product. But we also don’t pay much attention to the future of the product — the consequences it will have after use. The social cost of recycling the AA batteries we use and the computer monitors; the ozone-depleting effects of the refrigeration we depend upon; the climate effects of the energy we consume — these all have major consequences that we recognize upon reflection. But we don’t look at the product and “see” the long-term consequences it represents, and we too rarely make consumption choices based upon those consequences.

And yet both features of a product need to be noticed and measured. How much exploitation and misery of distant farmers is congealed in the pound of coffee or the scoop of rice? Which seed and grain corporations have received what percentage of the total value of the finished product? Is the division of the final price among the producers and conveyers “fair”? Are we creating too much of an environmental deficit for the future by continuing to charge up all our cell phones and mp3 players? And how could we measure and compare products on the basis of criteria like these?

There is data to suggest that consumers in Europe and North America would differentiate among the products they purchase based on the “fairness” content and the “sustainability” content of the product — if this information were readily available. For example, a Eurobarometer study in the 1990s found that European consumers would pay a premium for fruits and vegetables labeled “fair trade”. (The amount they would pay varied significantly across countries, however!) (Visit the Eurobarometer website for a wide range of public opinion research on Europeans.)

We might imagine — literally imagine — a marketplace in which the social costs of a product are a part of what we examine when we consider a purchase. Like the list of ingredients on the can of soup, we might imagine each product labeled with basic information about its production history, the composition of the value stream, and the environmental costs of resource depletion and recycling that the product represents. And we might speculate that consumers would actually behave differently in the face of this kind of information.

This is the scenario that the Fair Trade movement in food is trying to create: a situation where consumers know more about the labor components of their choices and have some assurance that the primary producers and growers are receiving a fair share. And to judge from the visible successes of this movement in many places, consumers are willing to adjust their choices to bring about greater fairness.

So one wonders — what’s the next step? Is it possible that the resources of the internet might be a new way of leveraging consumer behavior in the direction of greater fairness and sustainability? Could we imagine a data service that allows the consumer to search for the product and see at a glance the “social accounting” that it represents? The possibility is tantalizing because of the exploding set of resources and tools that we possess to get a handle on the world’s data. And would this have the effect of further shaping our world in the direction of greater justice?

Is there a right to healthcare?

It is worth unpacking, first, why healthcare is so crucial to everyone’s life. Everyone faces illness and accident in life. Maintaining and restoring health and function are crucial to our quality of life and our ability to live fully, freely, and independently. So access to healthcare is one of those core needs that are so closely connected to a good human life that they can be regarded as an essential human good (for example, nutrition, education, and freedom). A life deprived of access to decent healthcare is likely to be one of unnecessary pain, anxiety, and limitation.

The medical resources that are available today for addressing the challenges of illness and disability are incredibly powerful, compared to the first half of the twentieth century. But they are also very expensive — socially and privately. Insurance is a way of spreading out these costs over a population of people with varying levels of risk; each contributes part of the cost of this risk-sharing system, and each is assured of help when the occasion arises. And people lacking health insurance are faced with cruel choices: do without the effective therapies that exist for their illnesses; or do without other crucial things like food, gas for their cars, or paying their rent.

This gives us reason to judge that healthcare is not simply another consumable resource which people have more or less of; it is a good that a decent society needs to ensure that no one is deprived of. Like hunger or illiteracy, it is a social bad that a decent society must be urgently concerned about.

Could a just society take the position that healthcare is simply another private good that people need to purchase with their own resources? That depends essentially upon the circumstances of social inequality. If in fact everyone in society has sufficient income to purchase healthcare or private insurance, then the “private good” approach may be sustainable. In a society in which there is substantial inequality and poverty, however, this position is untenable. Low- and middle-income people do not have the resources to purchase healthcare as a private good. And if social arrangements required this, then unavoidably there would be a disadvantaged population which was more disabled, more ill, and less long-lived than the more affluent population. This is plainly not a just or defensible outcome — anymore than starvation or malnutrition in the midst of plenty is a just outcome.

The general answer our society has provided rests on two legs: employer-provided health insurance and state-funded insurance programs for the elderly, the disabled, and extremely poor children. What this system leaves out is a very large population of ineligible uninsured adults. And there are tens of millions of people in this situation. What does our society do to handle this situation? Very little. Basically we require hospitals to provide free care to extremely ill uninsured poor people, and we provide no avenue to affordable insurance for this group beyond the emergency room.

So, back to our question here : do people have right to healthcare? My answer is that it is a requirement of basic justice that all members of society should have access to healthcare, because this is essential to living a normal human life; that our society essentially recognizes this fact about justice (witness the emergency room contingency); but that this society does a simply terrible job of satisfying this requirement of justice. The tens of millions of people who are uninsured because they cannot afford to privately purchase health insurance are sufficient evidence for that.

So what is the solution? It seems inescapable that there needs to be a system of publicly provided and means-adjusted universal health coverage. This doesn’t mean a national health system. It doesn’t even necessarily mean a single unified national health insurance program, or abolition of private insurance. But it does mean that we must succeed in designing and implementing an affordable option for those not served by the current patchwork quilt of coverage systems. (Several states such as Massachusetts and Maine have made bold attempts to do this.) To date, however, we have not faced up to this simple requirement of justice. Let us look at the moral issue honestly and let us design a just and sustainable system.

(Philosopher Norm Daniels has thought about these issues deeply for many years. His recent book, Just Health: Meeting Health Needs Fairly, is a great contribution.)

The rule of law and the national security state

The current US state has fundamentally changed the relationship that has existed between citizen and state for a long time in this country. They have posed the choice in impossible terms: would you rather be safe from terrorist attack with a reduction in legal and constitutional protections, or would you rather permit enemies of the United States to act with impunity? Our leaders express no respect for the rule of law and our rights of liberty, association, or expression. Their rhetoric is about fear, enemies, and patriotism, rather than the rule of law, civil communities, and the rights of individuals against the arbitrary power of the security state. They pretend to support American values — but in truth they make a mockery of those values by acting lawlessly.

If there is an opening for American authoritarianism, this is it: a government explicit in its willingness to use the power of the state as it sees fit, without a deep loyalty to the idea of the rule of law and constitution.

And what really motivates this administration? It isn’t even the ideology that the current administration professes, their neo-conservative view of the world. It is instead the naked pursuit of continuing political power for their party. The firing of the US attorneys didn’t have to do with values and ideology. These firings all too plainly had to do with attempting to use the power of the Department of Justice for political advantage. It was pure Richard Nixon politics. It is the administration’s cynical willingness to use whatever levers of power that can be found to preserve the power and ascendency of the party.

Surely the most basic obligation of political morality is to respect the rule of law and to preserve the system of constitutional protections we have historically enjoyed. To their shame, this administration has shown its contempt for those values.

Inequalities in China

China’s Communist Revolution was founded upon the idea of equality. It was a basic principle of the early Communist Party that inequalities ought to be eradicated and the power and privilege of elite groups should be dismantled. Today in China the situation is very different. Farmers and rural people no longer have the support of the central state in their grievances against powerful forces — land developers, factory owners, power companies. And inequalities have increased dramatically in China — inequalities between the rural population and the city population, between manual workers and professionals, between eastern-coastal regions and western regions. Small numbers of elites are able to capture wealth-creating opportunities; the separation between wealthy and poor widens; and often the political power of office permits self-aggrandizement within China’s burgeoning economy. The situation of small farmers and of internal migrant factory workers is particularly bad, by all accounts.

Paradoxically, these facts about widening inequalities serve to point out something surprising: the sometimes narrow limits to the power of central state and party institutions. Regional and local officials are often able to undertake actions and policies that are directly harmful to poor people and directly contrary to central policies — and the central government is unable to reign them in. There are some deliberate policy efforts from the central state to improve the conditions of rural people — as a class and as a region of disadvantaged population. But those policies have often had little effect; the benefits that were intended to redress inequalities wind up in the hands of more elite actors.

So how do Chinese people think about these facts — facts that are even more visible to them than to us outsiders? Recent research seems to point out a generational difference with regards to the “sense of justice” that Chinese people bring to their perceptions of the society. Older people appear to have shaped a set of ideas about social justice under the Mao years that lead them to judge today’s visible inequalities very unfavorably. Younger people seem to be more accepting of inequalities — if they are earned! What is most morally offensive to younger people seems to be the fact that privilege of position allows some people to do much better than others. Whether this is a function of corruption, cronyism, or the use of state and party power for personal gain — younger people seem to be very offended at these sorts of inequalities. (C. K. Lee’s pathbreaking work on the sociology of law and justice makes these points starkly; see some of her related work in Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt.)

What should we think about China’s social future if these sorts of inequalities continue to widen? Several points are worth considering. First, persistent deprivation and inequality is certainly a contributing cause of social contention. So China’s current inability to redress these inequalities probably suggests a continuation of the pattern of social protest in China. (Tens of thousands of incidents of collective protest and resistance take place every year in China — and the rate appears to be rising.) Second, the fact that China’s state institutions haven’t been able to regulate the local mechanisms of abuse of poor people (through property confiscations, for example) also suggests the likelihood of rising social contention. Confiscations are a leading cause of protest. And third, a set of meaningful reforms in legal protections for all members of society, including secure property rights for farmers and labor rights for workers, would surely create an environment that is more acceptable to the younger people who are accepting of inequalities if they have arisen through processes that are procedurally fair and legitimate. So a more “liberal” future for China, in which economic activity is regulated by a fair system of law, and a set of opportunities are available to make something like a level playing field, would appear to be the most sustainable course for China’s leaders to attempt to achieve.

Gradient of justice

Given that there is significant injustice in our society, and granted that we are a long ways from a society that establishes what Rawls called the circumstances of justice — can we at least have the confidence that we are moving in the right direction?

Some people would argue that our society is doing just that. They sometimes point to the fact of rising nutritional and health status in the poorest 40 percent of our population during a 50-year period, and they might say that the situation of institutionalized racism — and with it the circumstances of middle-class African-Americans — has also improved measurably in 50 years.

Unfortunately, these impressions are misleading. In fact, it is more likely the case that inequalities of income, wealth, and well-being have worsened in the past twenty years. Lower-middle income and poor people have the smallest share of the nation’s affluence that they have ever had. And many of the programs designed to provide a social safety net have been gutted or have disappeared altogether.

And on the racial justice side — if general social racism has diminished, the depth of racial inequality and lack of opportunity in large cities has almost certainly increased in thirty years. The lack of opportunity and hope that exists in Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, or Oakland is truly staggering — and it is worsening. This wall of deprivation is drawn largely along racial lines. And all too often this impacted lack of opportunity leads to crime and violence.

So we don’t seem to be on a trajectory of general improvement when it comes to social justice. The myth of the “trickle-down society has turned out to be more trick than truth. The benefits of economic growth have not lifted the lower middle class. This growth has not dissolved the knot of urban poverty. The public is turning its back on public schools — surely one of the surest mechanisms of greater social justice over time. And we don’t seem to have a public commitment to the basic value of allowing all members of society to fully develop their talents. Even more disturbingly, we seem to be entering a period of time that will involve even greater economic anxiety. And anxious times seem to bring out the worst in people when it comes to competition for scarce resources and opportunities.

What we seem to need is a greater sense of community, a greater recognition of our inter-connectedness and inter-dependence, and a greater common commitment to making sure that our society and its policies work to improve the lot of all its citizens. But most regrettably — this sense of the strands of community is exactly what is most imperiled by the facts of current inequalities. It is difficult to maintain the strands of civic commitment to each other when fundamental inequalities separate us further and further.

So perhaps we ought to consider the unhappy possibility that our society may be inching towards the deepening chasm of inequality that characterizes South Africa, Mexico, or Brazil today. And if this is true, then the future is ominous.

A sense of justice

What does it take to get people truly engaged in a common purpose, joined with others in pursuit of a common cause?

I suppose there are numerous answers to this question — fear of impending danger (global warming), a sense of empathy at the suffering of others (Katrina, the Indonesian tsunami), a rational desire to gain a collective benefit, resentment of other people or groups, anger at the actions of the state or its officials. But the question on my mind right now is about the role of the sense of justice in people’s readiness to act collectively or politically.

I asked a group of students today to talk about their perceptions of “major social problems” in the United States today. This wasn’t part of a class, and it wasn’t a group of students who knew each other well. It was a very diverse group of young people from Detroit and the suburbs. But in spite of the fact that there wasn’t an organized setting of the problem, we had a good discussion that brought out some of the most fundamental issues of justice in our country today. They talked in very personal terms about poverty, inequality of opportunity, racism, hunger, lack of access to health care, and personal uncertainty about their futures. One young woman said to me, “There are hungry people on this campus — and there are caring people on the campus who help by making sure that food at campus events isn’t wasted.” These students tended to agree with each other that the worst sources of injustice are those that involve enduring inequalities of opportunities across generations.

I mention this conversation for several reasons. First, it illustrates the point that these young people have very developed intuitions about fairness and justice, and they have had very concrete experiences that inform their judgments. They have a sense of justice, and they have a strong ability to recognize and evaluate some of the unfair workings of our basic social institutions. It’s not a theoretical issue to them.

Second, there is a very palpable sense of a desire to do something about the social problems they see around them — to be engaged, to find organizations that make a difference. We talk a lot on our campus about the value of “student engagement” — these students want to be engaged, and sometimes the frustration is that there aren’t opportunities for engagement that can really promise to make a difference.

Third, there was in this discussion a very strong illustration of the value of “diversity” in American communities and on American university campuses. I mean this in two ways — first, the valuable contributions brought by the different life experiences of different people in the room. The perspectives and experiences that African-American students brought into this discussion was very different from that of their white suburban fellow students. But equally, the perspective that a returning woman student brought — her own story of going from a white middle-class life to a struggling life of near-poverty — added tremendously to the discussion. (This is a dimension of age diversity that you don’t often find on many university campuses.)

Moreover, every student in the room plainly recognized the value of a diverse discussion of these topics. The group was willing to talk honestly about their different experiences in white, black, and brown communities — and to value the fact that they were able to do so. There was a strong shared sense of the reality and importance of mutual respect, and an openness to learning from each other’s experiences.

So what does this show? In my eyes, it demonstrates two important facts. First, many young people have well-defined ideas about justice, fairness, and denied opportunities, and they care about these issues. They can figure out some of the ways in which some of our basic institutions assign benefits, burdens, and opportunities in very different ways to different groups — and they are offended. And second, this “knowledge” of injustice also has a motivational effect. They want to be mobilized around a project that can have some success in addressing some of these unjust inequalities. Their engagement can take many forms — excitement about a political candidate who is speaking of these issues, involvement in a tutoring program in an inner-city school, participation in a student organization that is campaigning for more scholarships for poor people.

So this experience with a dozen students at a public university in the midwest goes against the grain of those who talk about the current youth generation as being apolitical, disengaged, and unmoved by injustice. Isn’t there something in this story that lays a basis for some hope about the feasibility of a more activist politics in the America of the future?

Progressive politics

There are many ways of distinguishing different kinds of political values: liberal-conservative, environment-growth, radical-reactionary, left-right, Democrat-Republican, social democrat-christian democrat, libertarian-statist. But consider this fundamental divide: between those political programs dedicated to progress for the poor and powerless, versus those focused on conserving the power and privilege of existing elites. One is a party of progress and change; the other is one focused primarily on conserving the status quo.

To locate this distinction in political space we need first to identify the dimensions of inequality over which the privileged and the non-privileged are separated. These obviously include ownership of wealth, income, ability to influence or determine major social institutions; access to important social opportunities (education, healthcare, mobility), quality of life, and degree of independence and self-determination. And these can be further simplified as wealth, power, and distributive outcomes. Most societies provide very different levels of these goods to various groups in society — and almost always there is a high degree of overlap across the membership of the various disadvantaged groups.

It is plain that many societies create substantial inequalities along these lines, and that these inequalities arise as a consequence of systems of power and distribution. Powerful institutions — corporations, governments, insurance companies, political parties, the military — make private decisions that affect outcomes and quality of life for the non-privileged — and these decisions are almost always beyond democratic control. These institutional arrangements give rise to a systematic flow of basic goods that is highly unequal across society. Moreover, the institutions and their directors have substantial power to protect and preserve their positions of privilege.

So these are the central social cleavages that exist in many societies. Corporations, powerful officials, landlords, party functionaries, and owners of large wealth stand on one side — and wage-earners, tenant farmers, the urban poor, the uninsured, some racial or ethnic minorities, and the disabled stand on the other side. And they are separated by powerful and entrenched distributive institutions that reproduce these inequalities generation after generation.

So now we are face to face with the most fundamental dichotomy among political parties and programs: between those that attempt to modify some of these distributive institutions in favor of the poor, and those that are committed to preserving this whole system of inequality creation. There is a “party of progress” and a party of the status quo, conserving of a system of power and privilege.

Are there any political movements in the US today that stand for meaningful change in our system of inequality? And do these movements offer any significant challenge to the most fundamental interests of this system? Yes and no. Examples of programs that would significantly improve outcomes for the disadvantaged in our society include efforts to invent a system of universal health insurance, efforts to secure greater environmental justice for urban people, efforts to turn back the regressive tax policies of the recent past, and efforts to reinvigorate the union movement in this country.

But do any of these political goals present a serious challenge to the basic structures of a divided society? Most likely not. The American economy can absorb a huge amount of redistribution of benefits from rich to poor without fundamentally changing the mechanism of inequality of power and privilege that has endured throughout our history. The New Deal created a meaningful change in American distributive structures — but it did not significantly reduce the wealth and privilege of the elites. There is ample room for a “New Deal for the twenty-first century” that would significantly shift our inequalities in the direction of greater justice — but such an effort is likely to leave unchanged the system of power and privilege that exists.

A progressive politics is possible. But unfortunately our national political parties have rarely addressed these core issues. Where are the national leaders who look honestly at the facts of poverty, powerlessness, racism, and lack of health care, and work for the changes that will structurally address these issues?