Commonweal Institute Blog

Welcome to the Commonweal Institute’s new blog. We hope it will stimulate discussion about how to market progressive ideas, what progressive values are, and how progressives can work together more effectively. We also want to discuss building a political infrastructure that can keep working to advance progressive perspectives all the time, not just during election seasons, and not just limited to specific issues.

To give you a little background, my late husband Leonard Salle and I started the Commonweal Institute in 2001, in the wake of the 2000 election and its messy aftermath. We were motivated by our recognition that progressive voices and perspectives were being drowned out in the public arena, thanks to the well-organized conservative movement that had evolved over decades. The public, the media, and politicians (regardless of party) were accepting as credible many ultra-conservative ideas and actions that previously would have been unthinkable. There was little visible resistance to what we saw as a reversal of much of the progress that America had made in the 20th century. We decided it was time for progressives to get their collective act together.

Based on our analysis of what had made the Right successful, plus our awareness of the differences between progressives and conservatives, all of us at Commonweal agree that the Institute should not be just a traditional think tank. Instead, it should be a multi-issue organization that develops and promotes ideas, strategic thinking, and techniques for action. We’ve been doing this through research, advocacy, training, and strategic consultation to other organizations. In March of 2006, the Commonweal Institute sponsored the first Progressive Roundtable, as a step toward building coordinated political infrastructure.

The Common Good. There has been a lot of buzz around this phrase the “common good” ever since President Bill Clinton’s speech in Georgetown last week. President Clinton laid out an alternative philosophy for progressives around this notion of the common good. Well we’re thrilled! Since the Commonweal Institute was founded in 2001, our raison d’etre (as well as our tagline) has been “advancing ideas for the common good.”

Could this simple notion be the string theory of progressivism – the unifying equation that holds us all together? As we know that devices such as alliteration and repetition help ideas to become “sticky” (in Malcolm Gladwell’s words), I would add common good…common ground…commonsense.

More on the common good (and Commonweal) coming soon...

A CNN poll this week shows that, as CNN worded it,

"...most Americans still agree with the bedrock conservative premise that, as the Gipper put it, "government is not the answer to our problems -- government is the problem."

From the CNN story:

"Queried about their views on the role of government, 54 percent of the 1,013 adults polled said they thought it was trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses. Only 37 percent said they thought the government should do more to solve the country's problems."

Let me ask a different question: How many Americans do you think have been exposed to the other side of the story? We hear, over and over, that government is bad, that it is inefficient, that it sucks up our tax dollars and harms the economy, that it messes up everything it gets involved in, and negative point after negative point. And we hear, over and over, that regulation of business is bad and "private sector solutions" are good, efficient, and are exposed to a hundred other positive images and messages along those lines.