Raiding Progress How Ralph Nader and the Public Interest Movement Undermined American Liberalism

Raiding Progress
How Ralph Nader and the Public Interest Movement Undermined American Liberalism

Progressives have long bemoaned the public's declining faith in government, blaming it on the rise of corporate power and hegemonic neoliberal ideology. But what if the modern practice of crusading progressive politics bears its own share of the blame? In "Raiding Progress," historian Michael Lind argues that it was the public interest movements of the 1960s that marked the beginning of the end of America's mid-century heyday of high growth, low inequality, and improving environmental quality. Prior to the 1960s, American liberalism accepted that “public policy emerged from negotiations among economic interests groups, rather than from all-wise, altruistic progressive experts.” All of that changed with the rise of the environmental and other “public interest” movements, which attacked corporate interests as illegitimate and compromise as appeasement, shattering the old postwar compact between business, labor, and the American public. As both the working class and the business establishment abandoned the Democratic Party, conservatives set to work dismantling the postwar liberal consensus. “Whether the center-Left can aspire to repair its relations with productive industry and much of working-class and middle-class America depends on whether it can renounce the dream of the crusade and rediscover the lost art of the deal,” argues Lind.
by Michael Lind http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/issue-5/raiding-progress