In her May 25 column, "All talk and no action," Katie Lamm '07 reflected on a common stereotype of Brown - that it's a hotbed of liberal activism. Lamm arrived in the fall of 2003 expecting four years of passionate left-leaning political debate. What she found was general apathy on major policy issues, punctuated by occasional outbursts of "Bush-hating" as a show of the broad, vague liberalism assumed to be cool on campus.
My experience has been similar, but I'm less inclined to blame students for the vacuity of political conversation. Instead, I wonder if the woolliness of what it means to be a liberal at Brown is indicative of the woolliness of liberalism in America.
Our politics are at a crossroads. Both political parties know they occupy untenable ground, but neither one knows where to turn next. The Democrats have been essentially the party of the New Deal - of big government spending on social programs - since 1933. Even as they have supported balanced budgets, the party's professed values have gone unchanged. Today, Social Security and Medicare are collapsing, but the Democrats are too married to those systems to devise sound replacements.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party is headed for its own crisis of values. After the stunning defeat of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, the Republican Party retreated into think tanks to develop neoconservatism, the basic value system of the present-day GOP. But neoconservatives are now finding that the post-Cold War world doesn't support their views as well as the previous era did.
The groups the current parties represent no longer have much in common. Without their belief in American exceptionalism and the evangelizing power of democracy, what do social conservatives share with Republican war hawks and big business? Without their faith in the welfare state, what do first-generation blue-collar immigrants share with the Democratic intellectual elite?
The smarter pundits predict restructuring on both sides of the aisle. Thomas Friedman sees new Democrats as made up of the educated classes: pro-business, pro-globalization and pro-environment. He calls this platform "Geo-Green." David Brooks sees the new Republicans as a party of a broadly defined middle class: social conservatives who are pro-local and skeptical of authority, whether corporate, federal or international. In its foreign policy, the new Left is multilateral, and thus non-interventionist when allies cannot be had. The new Right is isolationist, but when foreign involvement is necessary, they'd rather America go it alone.
A good indication of this new landscape is the recent debate over New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg's potential run for the presidency. Bloomberg does not fit neatly into either of the old political categories, which is why he vacillated between the old parties and has now become an Independent. But on the new playing field, he is decidedly left of center, and the number of liberals I know who wish he'd run as a Democrat is astounding. Pro-education, pro-gay-rights, pro-civil rights, pro-environment, but also pro-business, pro-globalization and tough on unions and other pet old-Democrat causes - this is the stance of the new Left. It's also my hunch that this is the kind of liberalism endorsed by most students at Brown. If it doesn't look or sound like the tree-hugging Brown stereotype, it's because liberalism has changed.
Unfortunately for Bloomberg and American voters, the party heads haven't quite cottoned on to geo-green yet. The restructuring of the GOP in 1964 is still our best model of how to achieve such transformation. What sealed the deal for the Republicans was an exodus of intellectuals from the Democratic Party who developed the new principles of neoconservatism. Since then, the right has maintained its think tanks, and kept them developing new ideas. Which means, firstly, that no exodus of dissatisfied rightists will provide new principles to the new Democrats, and secondly, that the new Republicans already have a host of thinkers on which to rely.
The Democrats have no such think tanks, and new value systems need to be developed in an intellectual lab, where individuals are close enough to leadership to understand policy problems and smart enough to have solutions, but removed enough from practical politics to take risks on new ideas. For the Left in America, Brown - with all its woolliness - might be just the right lab environment.
Another stereotype of Brown is that it's the slacker Ivy, the school for JFK Jr., but not Jack or Bobby. I encourage Brown to embrace that comparison. Brunonian liberals - think Ira Magaziner '69 P'06 P'07 P'10 - have been the originators of ideas, not the main party poster children. Because Brown is not Harvard or Yale and not expected to produce stable, consistent ballot-box material, Brown is the kind of school that can take a risk in developing the New Liberalism.
I propose that we turn some official funds toward that goal and establish a think tank, perhaps run out of the Watson Institute for International Studies and the Taubman Center for Public Policy, to redefine the Left's vision in America. I am aware of the criticism such a plan is likely to attract: that Brown's responsibility is to educate its students, not engage in lobbyism, but I'd say that's na've. Academic institutions, even private ones, have a public, social role. Society supports our right as young people to take four years developing our minds on the assumption that we'll give it back to society in the life achievements college prepares us for. Why can't we give some of it back "in kind," with the most valuable gift academics have to offer - our ideas?
Such a policy center would inject some life back into our politics and give the Democrats something tenable to stand for. More importantly, it would give apathetic students something more than Bush-hating to wear as a political badge.
Maha Atal '08 embraces her woolliness.
