Philosophical Assumptions

In reading your books and many of your op-ed pieces, I'm struck by two things that emerge in your writings. One is a philosophical basis for your understanding of what is at stake. For example, you just discussed the 2000 election, and you were saying that Bush actually was pretty clear about where he stood on the big issues. He's for the individual; he's for limiting government, although not doing away with it. And the same is probably true of Al Gore. So on the one hand, one sees in your writing this zeroing in on the problem because of your philosophical roots, but then on the other hand, there is a theme, and you actually said somewhere, "I think politics is really the essence of the democratic process, but what politics ought to be about is solving problems." During this period where we weren't getting at the issues, we weren't addressing either one of those, were we?

You're right, there's a tension in this view, maybe even a contradiction in my view. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., said that politics ought to be the search for remedy. When most people come to politics, they have orientations, and actually, every individual is more philosophically oriented than he or she might even think. In other words, most people have quite coherent world views. You see that in Peoria, where people do have coherent world views and tend to vote for the candidate who is closest to that world view. The more I've looked at Peoria, the more I've been impressed that people get the idea, they know what they're doing. But when people look to government, they tend to have a very practical view of government.

There's an old political science concept that Americans are operationally liberal and philosophically conservative. They're skeptical of government, and yet when something goes wrong, they want it to do something. Bill Cohen, the former senator and secretary of defense, once said, "Government is the enemy until you need a friend" It's funny, I quoted him in a column once saying that and he came up to me about six or eight months later, and said, "You know. I shouldn't have said that to you. The Democrats in my state are using that as their slogan and attributing it to me," which was true.

But I think that's the way people are. They want government to step in when there are large things going wrong that they believe with reason cannot be dealt with simply by individuals, especially by non-privileged individuals. I think the relentless attack on government, largely from the Right, discredited that idea. And yet, I still think that's where Americans were. I think you saw that in the Clinton years, where there was a softening of the anti-government rhetoric. Bush is very interesting that way, because his rhetoric is quite sympathetic to government, and yet his program is actually Reaganism redux, because the pressure from these tax cuts is designed to reduce the size of government, as some honest conservatives have said. But the fact that he had to change the rhetoric suggests that we moved away from always demonizing government.

In both your books, you're looking for a progressive solution to this stalemate; and after listening to you now, I would almost call your position that of a progressive conservative.

How so? That's an interesting concept.

I think your emphasis on community is key. Your notions of social justice strike me as having a community dimension. And this strikes me as going back to your roots. It enriches what you're saying because it moves you beyond the purely simple social justice position. So that's my take on you. Is that fair?

That's very interesting. I'm a liberal Catholic, which is another way to put the same thing. I mean, being Catholic was important, the Church was important to [my family]. book cover If you take what the church says seriously, what the social teaching says, you end up being progressive on social welfare matters. The priority is on the poor, and on the least among us, and you value community. That is not trivial or abstract. So I'm sure that shapes what you have called a progressive conservatism.

My politics are a combination of that Catholic tradition, a sort of Michael Walzer, social democratic tradition, and then a practical moderate tradition. I have affection for a group that no longer exists practically, that is, liberal Republicans, who held the position that, "Okay, we have these commitments, these philosophical commitments," and then the question becomes, "What do you do about it? How do you get something done?" Sometimes I say my heart's on the left and my head's more in the center. But my heart is still on that side.

For me, the struggle in politics is trying to figure out how to give practical life to a set of aspirations without becoming foolishly utopian. Another tradition I respect is that of Reinhold Niebuhr, a Christian realist, a great theologian, who was concerned with how can you maintain ideals and yet be practical about the nature of human beings and the nature of the political enterprise.

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