Michael Kazin: The Need for Big Ideas

Michael Kazin is co-editor of Dissent and teaches history at Georgetown University. His most recent book is "A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan."

Fifty years ago, liberals and radicals were eager and able to think big. Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, sparked a campaign to defend and develop diverse urban neighborhoods. In 1962, Michael Harrington’s The Other America, with its startling revelations about the depth and extent of poverty, as well as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the first environmental best-seller, appeared. That summer, a band of twentysomethings, led by Tom Hayden, produced the “Port Huron Statement,” the manifesto of the white New Left, which offered participatory democracy as the antidote to an over-managed, bureaucratic society. Then, in 1963, James Baldwin’s angry yet hopeful The Fire Next Time branded racism “a recipe for murder”; and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique provided a candid, stirring diagnosis of female submission which helped galvanize the fledgling women’s movement.

The prose in all these works was forceful and often eloquent in its urgency. “Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living,” wrote Hayden and his comrades. Friedan’s “problem that has no name” would soon acquire one, sexism, which identified a set of grievances shared by millions of women. All six authors did much to set the agenda for the American Left, broadly defined, for the next two decades and more. Every major social movement echoed some or all of their ideas, and Democrats in the White House or with aspirations to live there had to respond. So why, a half-century later, has no one emulated these authors’ achievements?

Part of the answer, of course, is that American politics has marched decisively rightward since the 1970s and turned liberals into a defensive breed. The most prominent liberal writers—Paul Krugman, for example—now dedicate themselves to defending the reforms enacted from FDR to LBJ’s administration and rebutting free-market fantasies, rather than proposing fresh models or theories. The best-known radicals—like Michael Moore or Naomi Klein—produce witty critiques of global capitalism, but they lack both a credible alternative and a sensible strategy to achieve it. Perhaps another Hayden or Baldwin will emerge from the ranks of the Occupy protestors. But so far, that movement has generated memorable slogans rather than persuasive statements. It’s hard today to invoke a sustained passion for beginning the world over again....