To beat the Trumpian zeitgeist, Democrats will need a plan for making government work. But to make that notion plausible, they will need to wrestle with the core contradiction that bedevils their governing ideology. Progressivism today wants at once to allow government to make big decisions efficiently and to ensure that no one gets snowed in the process. To that end, they decided decades ago to throw their lot in with a notion that procedure can replace discretion. Today, we are all living with the consequences of that mistake.
From progressivism’s founding in the late 19th century into the 1960s, the movement offered a simple answer to the question of who should decide. Scientifically driven expertise was, to the progressive mind, the key to good public policy. That meant authorizing expert public officials—the establishment—to stand up holistic solutions to big challenges. Let the engineers design good sewer systems. Let the social workers design proper social-safety nets. Let the medical professionals design the health-care system.
New Deal Democrats extolled the “wise men” and “city fathers” wielding broad tranches of public authority. The establishment produced New York’s Port Authority, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Social Security Administration, the Marshall Plan, and the Federal Highway Administration. On issues of great public import, progressives agreed that big bureaucracy might not be beautiful, but it got the job done.
By Jimmy Carter’s presidency, however, progressives had lost that faith. Urban renewal robbed Americans of their confidence in municipal government. Vietnam had taken away the progressive reverence for the military. The civil-rights movement had exposed the bigotry within the governing class. And Watergate had revealed just how sick and self-serving the power elite really were.
But progressivism’s sudden turn against the establishment left reformers in a quandary. If they couldn’t trust the experts to exercise authority, who would make important decisions in their stead? Who would decide where to build the new bridge crossing the river, or which neighborhoods were going to be compelled to accommodate new housing projects? The answer seemed obvious—the people would decide.
But amid the rush to decapitate the establishment—to end the war, to snuff out racial discrimination, to speak truth to power, to “put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels”—the question of just how the people would decide was left hanging. The problem, to the progressive mind, was that fallible bureaucrats and elected officials had been imbued with too much discretion. To counter unconstrained discretion, progressives would seek to impose process.