Q. Times are tough for American workers. How tough?

A. Things haven’t been going very well for workers in America. Wages have essentially remained flat for the past five years or so. Workers [are] losing health insurance and pensions. Pensions are being replaced by 401(k)s, which generally aren’t nearly as good, nearly as generous, nearly as secure for giving people a good retirement. At the same time, companies are doing very well. Profits have gone up 10, 11, 12, 14 percent a year since the last recession ended in November, 2001. Also, worker productivity has gone up about 15-20 percent since 2001. And a lot of people, a lot of economists are saying there’s something wrong here, corporations are doing well, productivity is going up, yet wages remain absolutely flat after inflation and benefits are growing worse. 

Q. You write about the growing income inequality. What effects does that have?

A. Income for the bottom fifth of households has gone up just six percent since 1979. Compensation for the middle fifth has gone up maybe 15-70 percent, after inflation. But for the top one percent income has more than tripled. Again, that’s something many economists are trying to figure out. One problem is that the minimum wage has remained very flat. That’s held down incomes for many workers. Unions have grown weaker—that’s held down incomes. Globalization has made it easier for companies to tell workers, “Look, you’ve got to accept lower wages, you’ve got to forgo raises because if you don’t we’ll move your jobs overseas.” Read More

Q. How did the CIA get started?

A. During World War II, the United States created, after some fits and starts,  a wartime civilian intelligence service, the OSS. It had a mixed record and was not terribly trusted by the military. President Roosevelt had commissioned an internal report on the OSS, and it was quite scathing. It allowed that some of the analytical work was good, but that the operational work was not. Truman ordered it abolished. At the end of the summer of 1947, CIA was established. The problem then was much the same as the problem now: we Americans are not very good at espionage — the secret work designed to steal secrets — which is the core mission of the CIA. We’re not very good at this because it’s new to us. The British had been at it for 500 years since Elizabeth the First, the Chinese for 2,500 years. But secrecy and deception are not part of the American makeup.

Q. What was Truman ordering up when he ordered up the CIA?

A. Originally, what Truman wanted was a newspaper, a daily digest of all the knowledge in the government about what was happening abroad, so he wouldn’t have to read a two foot high stack of cables everyday. He wanted information about the world coordinated, analyzed, digested, and put on his desk every morning. But the Cold War was heating up in Western Europe. There was political warfare notably in Italy and France, and guerilla warfare in Greece, and the agency quickly because involved in fighting fire with fire — that is, is doing what the Soviet Communists were doing: trying to buy elections, support paramilitary operations, and struggling for dominion in Europe. By the time of the Korean war it was a global struggle. Again, we were not set up to do this, and the first era of the agency’s life from the beginning of the Bay of Pigs can largely be read as learning by doing — and, in most cases, failing. Read More

Q. You begin the book by describing the panic and confusion at the upper reaches of the Bush administration on 9/11, with the main focus on Dick Cheney. Why?

A. There was panic in the White House, and I think a level of panic that people don’t really realize, and it lasted beyond 9/11 into the weeks afterwards, particularly when the anthrax letters reached the Hill. That completely freaked out Cheney in particular. There was a while there when Cheney thought that he may have personally been exposed to chemical, biological, or radioactive weapons, and that he might die. And so the threat from al-Quaeda was not just political, it was personal for Cheney. He felt personally targeted, and he has acted ever since in a way that some people think shows a real change in his personality.

Q. So let’s talk about how that reaction played out. Cheney and his deputy, David Addington, began to put in place essentially a new system of law – what they called a “New Paradigm” – under the banner of the War on Terror. What was the New Paradigm?

A. One of the most important quotes in this book is uttered by Phillip Zelikow, who was counsel to Condoleeza Rice, where he says that this whole period as he sees it was “fear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools.” Sept. 11 and the fear and anxiety it provoked allowed Cheney and a man many people have never heard of before, David Addington, his lawyer, to implement policies that would never have been possible the day before 9/11. Many of them were ideas that they had been longing to put into place really since the Watergate era, and they would never have been able to do it because the political ideas were so extreme, and really so undemocratic. Their notion was that the President needed more power, and as they rewrote the laws and reinterpreted the constitution they gave the President the power to do pretty much anything he wanted, including torturing people, which was a complete break with U.S. history and tradition. Read More

Leading political strategist Erica Payne is at the forefront of an effort to build a modern progressive movement. Payne is the founder of The Tesseract Group, which provides strategic counsel and communications expertise to major foundations, private philanthropists, and select organizations. And she co-founded the Democracy Alliance, a donor collaborative whose partners have invested over $100 million in progressive organizations.

Her book, The Practical Progressive: How to Build a Twenty-First Century Political Movement, is the essential guide to what’s happening, who’s who, and how to get involved in the new progressive “infrastructure,” the growing network of progressive political organizations–think tanks, legal advocacy organizations, watchdog groups, and media vehicles–leading the effort to change the country’s intellectual and political climate for the better. Based on input from many well-known progressive activists and writers, The Practical Progressivestands as testament to one of the most invigorating periods of renewal and growth in political history. (To find out more, go to: www.practicalprogress.org)

Q. Why did you write this book, and why now?

A. In the first place because while the story about the infrastructure and the importance of this network of think tanks and legal advocacy groups has gone out to a bigger audience than it was out to five years, which was an audience of zero.  So there were a lot of influencers, writers, funders, et cetera who turned their attention towards funding this stuff, which is great, but I felt like the universe was not big enough.  There’s one organization on our side, The Democracy Alliance, which I co-founded with Rob Stein, and their sole purpose is to fund this infrastructure.  And they have 120 partners who commit to a pretty significant amount of money.  In contrast, there are 5,000 people who give $10,000 dollars or more to the Democratic National Party.  So the relative weight given to pure politics versus what I think significantly more impactful over the long term we still have a big universe of people to get after. Read More

Q. You’re an academic philosopher. How did you come to write Moral Clarity, which is aimed at a general audience?

A. Right after the 2004 election I was staggered that we were in for another four years of the Bush administration and particularly by the claim that people had voted for Bush because he represented moral clarity.  Now it seemed to me that there were two ways to go on that.  One was to say, somebody who lied his way into a war and legalized torture is so far from representing any moral clarity that I care about, that the people who gave that as a reason for voting for him must be nuts, bamboozled, stupid, whatever—which is a direction that a lot of people on the left took.  The second alternative was to say, Wait a sec, let’s clean up our own house first.  What is it that progressives have been doing wrong that allows millions of people to say that we’re lacking in moral clarity? I thought, if there’s something useful that I can do with my training as a moral and political philosopher, it would be to take back words like moral clarity and moral values for progressives.  

Q. And how did you start going about that?

A. One thing that seemed particularly important to me is the question of where morality comes from.  An awful lot of people both left and right associate morality with religion, which is one reason progressives get nervous around moral language, language like good and evil, terms which have been used simplistically, demonically, irresponsibly, but nevertheless are the most powerful words we have in the language. And of course conservatives who insist on rather fundamentalist interpretations of religion were the ones who felt comfortable talking about good and evil.   Read More

Q.  Let’s start with the basic idea at the heart of the book, which is about how American history works and how it advances. You see that in terms of a conflict, a long argument between the forces of conservatism and the forces of progressivism. 

A.  I argue in the book that from the very beginning, literally from the Revolutionary War, there’s been an ongoing argument in American history between people who believe, as Paine and Jefferson did, that all of us are created equal, that government should be of the people, by the people, for the people, and that government should be focused on policies that help people at the low end as well as at the high end, versus more conservative forces who initially were pro-King George and against revolution. Historically the conservative group has been more in favor of the status quo, no matter how unjust that is; more in favor of tradition, even the worst kinds of tradition; and more in favor of elites. No matter how much money and power elites had, this group of thinkers has always thought they should have more and that democracy was dangerous. That’s been the ongoing argument, and it played out in the Revolutionary War era and at the Constitutional Convention. It also played out in the fight over slavery, over voting rights, over economic policy, over the forums in the progressive era about allowing women the right to vote, in the debates on the New Deal and the civil rights movement, and ever since. Read More

Former Washington Post reporter Linda Perlstein spent a full year immersed in the day-to-day life of Tyler Heights, a Maryland elementary school striving to meet the student test standards set down under the No Child Left Behind law. The book she wrote about that experience, Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade, is a masterly examination of the ambiguities, contradictions, and unintended consequences that flow from even well-intentioned educational reform.

Perlstein combines dispassion and sympathy as she introduces readers to the principal, staff, and students of Tyler Heights, and her perspective is refreshingly–and, for readers who don’t work in education–helpfully objecitive: she broadly supports test-based accountability for schools and teachers, but is convinced that one type of test will never tell you what you need to know to evaluate either teacher or student performance; she’s in favor of some form of merit pay for teachers, but is quick to point out that some teachers, in especially challenging schools or classes, start out at a disadvantage; she thinks the federal government needs to put more money into the public school system but is under no illusions that money alone will fix our schools. Combined with her storytelling gifts, the clarity of her thinking and her conviction that there are no easy answers to the problems of public education make Perlstein one of the most interesting journalists writing about the subject today. Read More