Culture Clash at the New New Deal Conference

I'm not entirely sure what to write about the conference so far. Policy and issue work is not my usual bag, and this conference feels quite different from the kind I'm used to attending. There are congressmen here and non profit heads. Great activists like Deepak Barghava, and Democratic Names like Simon Rosenberg and Mike Lux are in attendance, as are the usual crazy progressives who bring all their personal baggage to these types of events and use their time at the mic to harangue the panelists. There are also a lot of really smart college and grad students asking complex questions about policy.

Superficially, I'm woefully underdressed (though that's not unusual at these things) and stick out like a sore thumb. More substantively, I just attended a panel on the New Deal called "The Intellectual Underpinning of a Renegotiated Social Contract," featuring the afformentioned Mike Lux, Simon Rosenberg, Deepak Barghava, and Tim Fertik, a Roosevelt Institution fellow. The content was interesting. Deepak noted that the incrementalist, technocratic progressive approach for last 40 years has failed against a values driven, movement and ideas approach of the conservatives, and any attempt to revitalize or create a New New Deal will have to reckon with both that failure as well as the structural racism that was embedded in our society in part by Roosevelt's programs.

Mike Lux made the point that, from a political perspective, reviving the "old" New Deal is not a good framework for achieving a "new" New Deal. Americans are looking to the future, according to Lux, and 2008 is a debate between future vs. the past. Likewise, our rhetoric must be about the future. Deepak's suggestion is that the idea of a shared fate and common destiny for all Americans might be the messaging Rosetta Stone to translate our policy priorities into reality.

These are all well and good (and necessary), and the Roosevelt Fellows that are sitting on panels alongside some of the bigger names in the progressive movement are more than keeping pace. But I can't help but feel a bizarre culture clash at this conference, and its about more than the fact that I'm in jeans while everyone else is in suits.

Most conferences I go to are very much geared towards action - winning elections, defeating conservatives, winning legislative battles, exchanging best practices. This is much more like an academic conference. Everyone is talking about policy, but it's not a vigorous debate. There will be no new policy working its way out of this conference. Rather, it's a gathering of the policy tribes in which everyone is affirming core progressive policy principles. It's a lecture and most people in the room already agree with the thesis.

I have very little understanding of how the progressive policy world works, as a hierarchy/career path to climb or as a machine whose goal is the creation and passage of policy. So I don't have a good idea as to how a conference like this fits into that machine.

With regard to the generational gap here, Margaret Simms, President of the National Academy of Social Insurance had something very informative to say earlier this morning. She said that achieving a New New Deal needs to be a generational partnership, and we cannot pursue a course that set the generations at odds with each other. At the very least, this conference does seem to be a networking opportunity to forge those bonds between the older and younger generations of progressive policy types. That alone is probably worthwhile.