Professors Debate Future of U.S. Progressivism

Six of Harvard's top political thinkers participated in a public discussion yesterday afternoon on the meaning and future of progressivism in public debate.

The discussion, held in the Lowell Junior Common Room between 4 and 6 p.m., focused on the ongoing questions in the presidential election and how to restore traditionally progressive views to the forefront of national political debate and the Democratic Party platform.

Buttenwieser University Professor Stanley Hoffmann declared that "the progressive vision died with Bobby Kennedy."

Richard J. Parker, lecturer in public policy in the Kennedy School of Government, said he agreed that what was missing from the Democratic Party was an overarching commitment to a progressive agenda.

"The battle is about vision," Parker said. "The rest will follow."

College Democrats President Marcie B. Bianco '02 said that the event reflected the organization's attempt to move toward the left and to work at "establishing more of a presence here on campus" after the end of the presidential campaign.

"I want to move this club way to the left of where Al Gore ['69] is," she added.

The panelists disparaged the Gore, President Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council for veering from crucial liberal values.

For example, Director of the Harvard Seminar on Environmental Values Timothy Weiskel said, "[Clinton] is the best Republican Democrats ever elected."

Professor of Government Michael J. Sandel, who led the later portion of the discussion, said Gore had ignored the issue of poverty.

"Gore was so frightened of approaching the word....'Poverty' has not figured in American political discourse since the 1960s," he said. "The Democrats don't want to be seen as the party of the poor."

Sandel argued that this problem was still extremely relevant to the country's political future.

"Given the tendency of the affluent to secede...to buy their way out [of societal institutions], there's less mixing of classes and people," he said. "And when there's not enough of a common life that people think they're in a common project, democracy falls apart."

Professor of Law Randall Kennedy, meanwhile, said he saw some hypocrisy in the group's statements.

"I send my kids to private schools," he said. "Do I buy out of public problems? The answer is yes."

The speakers also discussed ways to avoid the problems that occurred in the Florida vote during this presidential election in the future.

Hoffman proposed a solution to prevent such electoral haranguing from recurring: replacing most states' allocation of electoral votes with a proportional representation system similar to the ones used in Maine and Nebraska.

"The winner-take-all system has no justification," he said.