How a progressive is made (with Osita Nwanevu)

The case for a values-first approach.

(Image by mammuth via Getty Images)

Hello, dear reader! My name is Shahrzad Shams, and I’m the deputy director of the democratic institutions portfolio at Roosevelt Forward. Over the past few years here, we have spent a lot of time thinking about how we can make a bold and genuinely progressive agenda more legible and compelling to more Americans.

It’s no small question. Answering it requires thinking outside of the box and seeing the big picture, balancing grand vision with practical reality. So you’ll understand why, when the brilliant Osita Nwanevu joined Roosevelt as a fellow, I was buzzing—for our collective movement, but also, selfishly, for my own edification.

Osita is a contributing editor at The New Republic, a columnist at The Guardian, and the author of The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding. His work focuses on the intersection between democracy and political economy, with a particular focus on economic democracy and local politics.

I recently had the chance to pick his brain about what it means to be a progressive, what role pre-political values play in shaping ideology, and how we might make both progressivism itself, and a progressive policy agenda, more popular.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Shahrzad Shams: You’ve spent a lot of time thinking not just about what a successful progressive agenda might look like, but also about how that agenda could be made more appealing to more Americans. But before we dive into specifics, can you first define what you mean by progressivism? What, to you, does the “progressive” ideology entail?

Osita Nwanevu: To me, progressivism is an ideology rooted in a commitment to human progress—not for one class or privileged set of people, not for one faction at the top of a particular hierarchy, but progress for the human being as such. That’s the sense of it that unites all the causes progressives have fought for over the last century and a half or so, so that’s the one I like.

Progressives have stumbled and made some appalling mistakes over the course of that history, and we’re going to be litigating what exactly “progress” means forever, but to me, that’s the unifying aspiration.

So how do we go about making progress? I think democratic institutions matter—giving people the agency to shape their own lives and the societies they live in through fair and egalitarian political contestation. And I also believe in economic democracy—ensuring that ordinary people have a real say in economic decision-making, including at the level of the firm. In both cases, democracy helps ensure that ordinary people, not just the wealthy and privileged, have the power, resources, and security to flourish.

Shahrzad: How do people become progressives—or, for that matter, come to subscribe to any other ideology—in the first place?

Osita: Ideology is shaped by a wide range of factors, and people don’t come into policy debates as blank slates ready to neutrally receive and process information. And I’ve been recently thinking about the role pre-political values in particular play in forming our ideologies.

All of us move through the world espousing or at least subscribing to these values. These are the principles we bring into our assessment of policy from elsewhere, whether that’s our upbringing, our education, our religion, or any other facet of our lived experience.

There are different frameworks that might be applied here—for instance, the “basic human values” framework of social psychologist Shalom Schwartz, which identifies self-direction, universalism, benevolence, conformity, tradition, security, power, achievement, hedonism, and stimulation as values that exist across cultures; or the moral foundations theory of moral psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham, which identifies care, loyalty, authority, equality, proportionality, and purity as basic components of our moral infrastructure as human beings.

At the end of the day, there isn’t a definitive and uncontested catalog of these values. But the important thing is the understanding that these and other principles shape our behaviors, our sense of self, our worldviews, and our relationships to others.

And the ways these values shape our worldviews have enormous implications for progressive policymakers. I think we have a good amount of evidence from experience now that material appeals only get progressives so far—we’ll only bring more Americans over to our agenda if we also make appeals to the principles that shape how our audiences make sense of the world and how they think about the meaning and purpose of human life.

Shahrzad: How do progressives and conservatives differ in their use of pre-political values in their messaging efforts? What values do you see as being commonly invoked by progressives, and which ones do you see being used by conservatives?

Osita: I think invoking pre-political values in policy rhetoric and messaging efforts can help make progressive ideology and progressive policy solutions more popular among people who might feel disillusioned with our institutions, and those who might not necessarily spend much time thinking about policy at all.

I don’t think we’re invoking those values well enough when we promote our policy ideas. And to the extent we do make reference to certain pre-political values, like the desire for freedom, equality, and so on, we don’t do a very good job of explaining how those values fit together holistically and why a progressive interpretation of those values, as well as the policy implications that come out of them, are preferable to other interpretations.

I think that’s partially because progressives tend to disagree fundamentally and bitterly about what progressivism even is. By contrast, I think conservatives tend to invoke principles and pre-political values—liberty, the belief in God, tradition, and so on—with simplicity and clarity.

Those values could be invoked to progressive ends too, of course—religious faith was part of the moral infrastructure of the civil rights movement, for instance, and helped win concrete policy victories like the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.

I think we ought to break from the material-first approach a bit—as important as delivering material wins for people obviously is—and be creative about this. What values can we appeal to and try to own as progressives today? What more can we do to socialize people into progressivism at the level of first principles?

Shahrzad: I take your point that the exact values invoked won’t matter much if we don’t do a good job actually invoking them. But I’m curious if you could talk more about values that are tapped into by both camps.

Osita: There is real overlap sometimes—take freedom, for instance. Freedom might mean having the right to choose or the right to start a union—policy positions that we might associate with a progressive worldview. But it could also be associated with more conservative ideas, like freedom from pesky taxes and government regulation, or the right to own an AR-15. Why should progressive ideas about freedom win out? We have to make an affirmative case for our side.

But it’s not enough to just use the word “freedom” or have a couple of progressive voices here and there draw connections between a progressive policy agenda and the concept of freedom. What we need is a movement-wide effort to make the meaning of progressivism itself clear, legible, and digestible to ordinary people in the first place.

Shahrzad: What does that look like in practice to you? How can progressives make moral appeals in a way that brings more coherence and cohesion to their agenda? What concrete steps do you think they need to take in order to make their policy agenda more appealing to more people?

Osita: Progressives first need to think deeply about the pre-political values that most clearly animate their policy concerns and see which ones most clearly bind together the constellation of progressive issues—healthcare, climate change, LGBTQ+ rights, immigrant rights, labor rights, racial inequality, wealth inequality, anti-imperialism, and any number of other issues—together in an easy-to-understand way.

For me, I think agency is one promising candidate, a pre-political value that could be tapped into to make a progressive policy agenda more coherent and cohesive to more people. We believe in human progress, which means, I think, enhancing human agency and our ability to live life at our own direction, and not as the mere victims of circumstance or subjects of a powerful few.

Articulating agency in these terms gets you to political democracy, of course, but I also think it brings you to economic democracy—the idea that we are entitled to a say over the conditions of our economic lives. I think it tells you why we care about reproductive freedom and why we think it’s unjust for people to die or go bankrupt because they can’t afford healthcare. I think it tells you why we don’t believe people should be subject to a different justice system because they happen to be of a particular race. It tells you why we want to ensure America remains open to people abroad who want to lift themselves up and change their standing in the world. It tells you why we fear environmental changes that make it harder to live comfortably and safely across more and more of our country and the world.

The concept of agency and the premise that human beings are entitled to it helps paint a clear picture of the kind of economy and society we think needs to be made real.

Moreover, it’s not a difficult concept to understand. There’s nothing technocratic, wonky, or out of touch about the idea that all people should be entitled to live their lives at their own direction, deciding for themselves how they want to spend their time. I think many Americans would find an agency framing compelling because they can directly relate it to their lived experience—every time they have to skip a meal, delay necessary care because of costs, or show up for a job they hate.

It’s a jumping-off point for clear and effective policy communication. And clear and compelling policy communication is a jumping-off point for making a progressive worldview, and the material agenda it seeks to deliver, more popular.

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