When we graduate from college, we’re often hit by a flood of existential befuddlement. We don’t really have a way to organize our thoughts on what makes for a Good, hearty life. We often either trick ourselves into a much-too-simple one-note strategy (maximize money and all will be okay; maximize stability and all will be okay; maximize experience and all will be okay,” etc.) or lull ourselves into a nothingness strategy (“What feels good?” “You do you, man, you do you!” “What would a person like me do?” “Who *am* I?”).

Below is an essay I wrote after attending the Conservative Political Action Conference in an attempt to better understand part of the conservative movement of today.

If you followed the press coverage earlier this month of the Conservative Political Action Conference, you would think that the entire event was a never-ending parade of 2016 Presidential candidates. Outside the view of the news cameras, however, were the most important characters at CPAC: the hundreds of conference-goers, representing the conservative rank-and-file, whose passions and choices will determine the future of the movement.

I arrived at the Gaylord National Convention Center on a mission to see them. Specifically, I had come to CPAC to talk with them about issues where the Left and the Right could converge. I was hoping to see if — at a frequency below the carnival barks broadcasting from the Palin wannabes on stage — there were, among the conference-goers, some seeds of potential for progressive-conservative alliances that could be fostered to break through Washington’s partisan gridlock.

After speaking with dozens of the conference-goers and spending the subsequent weeks exploring the mantras and media that they had made reference to in our conversations, I have four conclusions to report back to my fellow progressives.

1. The conservatives represented at CPAC fall into two main political communities: The Young Professional Right and The Old Heartland Conservatives.  

The largest community at CPAC was what one might call the Young Professional Right. These were the 20-something young guns working for — or, in the case of the sprawling job fair at CPAC, aspiring to work for — the dozens of right-wing institutes bankrolled by the conservative one percent. Young Americans for Freedom, Generation Opportunity, The Leadership Institute, Turning Point USA: the conference was bursting at the seams with well-organized, big-tent organizations meant to attract students and recent graduates to this Young Professional Right.

These clean-shaven greenhorns often spoke of the “spiraling national debt” as their millennial convening issue — “because, you know, we’re in charge of paying it off in the future” — though I doubt any of their blood is actually boiling over the debt as a generational self-interest issue. What seemed to really drive these right-leaning yuppies was economic libertarianism, an ideology which provides them many benefits: it enables them to participate in a self-described insurgent movement; it allows them to be “conservative” while still participating in the modern liberal culture they learned to love at college; it is a worldview to which only they, with their economics degrees, can hold all the intellectual keys; and, of course, it opens doors to the most lucrative political jobs.

The other community — one might call them the Old Heartland Conservatives — is different. They are the older heads of families from outside the beltway.  At CPAC, they were the midwest grandmas huddled around the “Draft Ben Carson” table and the 40-something small business owners from the exurbs dragging their kids to the NRA booth. They talked about the “spiraling national debt” too, but unlike their young libertarian counterparts, they spoke of the economy in moral terms: less “the incentive effects of marginal tax rates” and more “self-responsibility.” They are also more ideologically diverse: while the the young libertarians I spoke with were one trick ponies — “liberty, liberty, liberty!” — the Old Heartlanders had room for guns, God and glory in their ideological repertoire.

2. The Young Professional Right’s libertarianism presents an opportunity for convergence, but their abstract carelessness gets in the way.

For the Young Professional Right, divisive social issues have receded to the background, creating an opening for convergence on issues where good governance meets libertarianism. Take corporate welfare, for example: libertarians and progressives both have reasons to oppose federal subsidies to Big Oil and Agriculture. Or campaign finance reform: libertarians and progressives both have causes — tax reform on the right, safety and health regulations on the left — that have been squandered by the distorting influence of money in politics. When I raised these issues with the young libertarians at CPAC, they always nodded their heads in agreement, giving me a sliver of hope that such openness could be tapped for convergent action.

Unfortunately, a certain abstract carelessness among the Young Professional Right stands in the way of convergence with progressives. I mean “careless” precisely here: many of the millennial conservatives I spoke with at CPAC simply did not care that certain concrete problems existed in the world. To the young conservatives, if a problem could not be solved by freeing markets, it was not a problem worth thinking about.

Take the 20-something at the Right to Work booth, for example. I asked him, “okay, I totally get the argument for Right to Work, but given that unions are in decline, how do we ensure fair wages in the service sector?” He responded, “you know I haven’t really thought much about that.” This is what I mean by carelessness: a guy who spends his whole day professionally thinking about labor policy while having no opinion about the declining wages of millions of his neighbors.

Or take another millennial at a booth promoting an app that helped you avoid patronizing companies that had donated to liberal causes, like “environmentalism.”  I asked what he meant by “environmentalism” and he said, “you know, crazy tree huggers, like Greenpeace or the World Wildlife Fund.” What? Boycott Coke because they donated to The World Wildlife Fund? This assuredly smart graduate had clearly never cared enough to think hard about the concrete reality of the tradeoffs of industry and conservation, let alone the history of conservatives in the conservation movement.

These young libertarians illustrate what George Will once called “pitiless abstracting”: letting abstract slogans and ideologies — the type of abstracting that conservative icons like Michael Oakeshott have argued is anti-conservative — get in the way of seeing the concrete suffering in your midst. The Young Professional Right can only converge with progressives if they can move down the ladder of abstraction to a shared concrete reality– a reality with more available solutions than just “lower taxes, reduced spending and less regulation.”

3. The Old Heartland Conservative’s commitment to moral values and a producerist ethic could be tapped to rein in corporate power, but only if progressives are willing to tap it.

When I asked about potential for Left-Right convergence, the Old Heartland Conservatives were much more skeptical than their younger counterparts. However, two trends in the Heartlanders’ rhetoric set off my ideological diplomacy receptors.

The first was their emphasis on moral values in the public sphere. Many Heartland Conservatives spoke of their worries that we have become a society without a moral core, as well as of their anger at Hollywood and the courts for pushing moral values out of our public culture. Some liberals might see this sentiment as a trojan horse for mixing Church and State and pushing anti-gay and anti-feminist policies. But I see it another way: it’s an opening for convergence over the immoral excesses of corporate capitalism.

Without a shared moral language in the public sphere to draw on, we have no recourse against those who assert their power in the vacuum of morality. For example, in an earlier time, if a corporation were to advertise sugary drinks to children, we might have been able to shame them by drawing on the shared moral language of public responsibility. If greed was rampant in a community, we could call for “Prudence.” The corporate-funded cult of economic absolutism thrives on today’s vacuum of neutrality in the public sphere. The only counterweight to it’s relentless expansion is our collective moral indignation.

On this issue, it is young progressives who seem to create the roadblocks to convergence with the Old Heartland Conservatives. How many millennial liberals are asking critical questions about public morality: Are celebrities using their platform to make us better or worse souls? Are public school classes helping students grow up to be Good citizens instead of just “career-and-college-ready” individuals? Are politicians challenging us to have higher, civic interests, or just pandering to our current self interests? The Old Heartland Conservatives are asking these important questions better than we are. If we stopped disparaging the houses of their moral values — their churches — and took time to listen, perhaps we could converge on revitalizing a moral force to counter the corporate libertarian agenda.

The opportunity for convergence around moral values is closely tied to a second hopeful trend among the Old Heartland Conservatives. I finally put my finger on it while talking with Buck Allen, a country singer who was plays Tea Party-themed songs with lyrics such as “Don’t tread on me, I’m American free, you’re not gonna take it away!” I asked him about how he made a living and he talked with pride about his 28-acre farm and the need for people “to produce things again, not just consume things.” If a Tea Party member talking about anti-consumerism is not a sign of potential convergence, I don’t know what is.

In fact, Allen’s “producerist ethic” was present in many of the conference-goers stories. This idea of “Producerism” — the belief that producers of tangible wealth should be valued and that citizens should work to produce more than they consume, give back more than they take — is an old one, having originated in America among laborers, artisans and farmers in the nineteenth century. The worst, untempered edge of Producerism has been visible on the Right in recent years. It is present in the accusations that 47% of the country are “takers,” that those on welfare are “leeching” off of the system, and that the poor are not just economically poor, but morally poor. But, underneath this vile co-option is the original Producerism: the ethic that originally challenged those on all sides of the economic spectrum — especially wealthy financiers — to work to not leech off the system; the ethic that says we should reward the sweaty creators of America, not the tidy aristocrats; the ethic that reminds us that more joy comes from making things than from consuming them.

This is an area ripe for Left-Right convergence. One roadblock, though, is the fact that liberal economic policy often focuses only on the consumption side of the economy: more wages, more equitable incomes, more employment. Where are the popular progressive policies about more worker ownership and worker cooperatives? Or about access to productive resources for starting one’s own business? If progressives started talking more about this production side of the equation, we might be able to bridge the divide.

The Old Heartland Conservatives need to play their part in convergence, too, though.  Despite all the talk about “job creators” and “risk takers,” the Republican Party has yet to put forth a program that seriously supports entrepreneurial dreamers, artisans and makers in the Heartland. Yet, the Heartlanders never punish them for it at the ballot box. Despite all the Tea Party talk about how they are against Wall Street fat cats as much as they are against Washington bureaucrats, their shouts of “taker” are always louder when directed at poor individuals than at rich corporations. Convergence will only be possible when they see the sizeable coalition that could be made from joining with progressives to both rein in the corrupting power of corporate aristocrats and open access to more productive resources for small producers.

4. Conservative leaders have a choice between fortifying the roadblocks to common ground or sowing the seeds of Left-Right convergence.

The “leaders” at CPAC — the ones at the podium in front of the cameras — are roadblocks to convergence for both groups of conservatives. In the CPAC ballroom, the respective flaws of the Young Professional Right and the Old Heartland Conservatives — doctrinaire insensitivity to serious problems and improperly-directed scorn — were fertilized by a bevy of speakers who pandered to the attendees, uninterested in leading them to higher levels of informed and productive conscientiousness. As a result, the Palins, Cruzes and Rubios laughed their way to the headlines, the Young Professional Right got their high-paying jobs at the Koch Institute, the Heartland Conservatives learned new slogans of indignation to bring home, and no one in the ballroom was left making progress towards convergent coalitions that could actually ameliorate their public dissatisfaction.

Away from the cameras though, tucked in the corner of the convention hall, was real convergent leadership for the Right. When I came across the “Right on Crime” booth, three men present were talking to conference-goers about their convergent initiatives in Texas. “Hey, we believe in limited, efficient government,” one said. “And yet our prison system is bloated and inefficient — something had to be done.” They have spent the past years organizing a Left-Right coalition to develop reforms to the criminal justice system to save money and decrease recidivism. With their help, Texas has strengthened alternatives to incarceration for adults and juveniles over the past years, achieving significant reductions in crime while saving taxpayers $2 billion. At the end of the day, they partnered with progressives to achieve success without sacrificing their conservative commitment to limited government.

Here’s to hoping that by next year’s CPAC, the Palins are tucked in the corner and convergers like “Right on Crime” are center stage.

Today is the 80th birthday of Ralph Nader, who is perhaps the most effective civic reformer of the past 50 years.

When he was in law school, some of his friends had been hurt in automobile accidents and his gut told him that it might not have been their fault– it might be the fault of the cars themselves. He set about investigating and eventually produced Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile. The book was a sensation and eventually led to the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, which shifted the onus of automobile safety from the consumer to the producer and the government. The seatbelts, airbags, and safety standards that arose from his efforts have been credited with saving tens of thousands of lives.

While this was happening, General Motors sent goons to discredit him. They couldn’t crack him and he sued, resulting in the largest invasion of privacy award at the time. He used the money to double down on his consumer protection efforts, growing a force of mini-Naders — eventually deemed “Nader’s Raiders” — to repeat his methods with automobile safety on dozens of other issues. The Raiders, at their peak, are pictured here on the steps of the Capitol.

His method was genius:

1. Get energetic young people to research a topic and publish a “Nader Report”;
2. Use his fame to generate buzz from the report, usually through appearances on the Phil Donahue show;
3. Switch gears from research to activism, lobbying Congress and federal agencies to act on the newfound research; and
4. Found an organization to build on legislative victories.

Lather, rinse, repeat, all the while producing a new generation of civic reformers.

The result, legislatively: the Freedom of Information Act; the Wholesome Meat Act; the Natural Gas Pipeline Safety Act; the Clean Air Act; the Occupational Safety and Health Act; the Consumer Product Safety Act; the Safe Water Drinking Act; the Clean Water Act; the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act; the Mine Health and Safety Act; the Whistleblower Protection Act and much more.

The result, organizationally: American Antitrust Institute, Appleseed Foundation, Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest, Aviation Consumer Action Project, Buyers Up, Capitol Hill News Service, Center for Auto Safety, Center for Insurance Research, Center for Justice and Democracy, Center for Science in the Public Interest, Center for Study of Responsive Law, Center for Women Policy Studies, Citizen Action Group, Citizen Advocacy Center, Citizen Utility Boards, Citizen Works, Clean Water Action Project, Congress Project, Congress Watch, Connecticut Citizen Action Group, Corporate Accountability Research Group, Critical Mass Energy Project, Democracy Rising, Disability Rights Center, Equal Justice Foundation, Essential Information, FANS (Fight to Advance the Nation’s Sports), Foundation for Taxpayers and Consumer Rights, Freedom of Information Clearinghouse, Georgia Legal Watch, Global Trade Watch, Health Research Group, Litigation Group, Multinational Monitor, National Citizen’s Coalition for Nursing Home Reform, National Coalition for Universities in the Public Interest, National Insurance Consumer Organization, Ohio Public Interest Action Group, Organization for Competitive Markets, Pension Rights Center, Princeton Project 55, PROD – truck safety, Public Citizen, Retired Professionals Action Group ,Shafeek Nader Trust for the Community Interest, Student Public Interest Research Groups nationwide, Tax Reform Research Group, Telecommunications Research and Action Center, The Visitor’s Center, and Trial Lawyers for Public Justice.

This is all without mentioning that he hosted SNL, was selected by the Atlantic as one of the Top 100 Most Influential Americans, was asked by George McGovern to be his running mate in 1972, sang a song about consumer advocacy on Sesame Street (see minute 3:30 of this clip), and is the namesake of the “Nader Bell” which is the horn that beeps when big trucks back up.

I am personally inspired by him because he embodies this lost art in American politics, which is “the reformer.” The reformer is pushing no burn-it-all-down revolution; the reformer need not be culturally libertine; the reformer is not inspired solely by sticking it to the Man. Rather, the reformer, from a position of deep care for the community, looks at public problems, develops solutions and speaks Truth to power until the system is reformed so that the problems are a bit meliorated. And the best reformers have a vision of how problems are interconnected so their work is not made of one-off band-aids. Some lived the 1960’s counterculture — the push for individual authenticity and broad-based political participation — by dropping acid at Woodstock. Ralph Nader did it by founding public citizen groups that wielded facts, beat the system, and saved tens of thousands of lives. He’s in a category with Fred Rogers, who took the call for more authentic lives in the 1960’s and founded a television show that helped children develop in a healthy and natural relationship with their own feelings. These are my heroes: those with radical lives, not just radical lifestyles.

Nader’s a living embodiment of his quote: “Almost every significant breakthrough has come from the spark, the drive, the initiative of one person.” And when asked what he wants to be known as, he responds, “Full-time citizen.” Amen.

For more information, I highly recommend the documentary about his life, “An Unreasonable Man,” which is streaming online.

Folk music lovers, justice-fighters, Americans and humanity lost a great man today: Pete Seeger.

I have come to believe that an honorable path in working life is to (1) struggle for a cause and (2) hone a craft, using the latter as a tool in the the former. No one in recent memory has embodied this path of life better than Pete Seeger, who wielded a banjo, a voice, and a song in the struggle for justice for almost a century. The New York Times obituary laid out Seeger’s theory of mixing craft (folk) and cause (justice) perfectly: “For Mr. Seeger, folk music and a sense of community were inseparable, and where he saw a community, he saw the possibility of political action.”

Name something important in the past 100 years and you will be surprised to see how often Pete Seeger participated in it. The Civil Rights Movement? Seeger was the first to publish “We Shall Overcome,” which was sung at the March on Washington and inspired the most pivotal line of President Lyndon Johnson’s historic Civil Rights speech in 1965. The Red Scare? Pete Seeger stood up to the House Un-American Activities Committee, telling them:

“I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this.”

The fight against smoking and commercialism? Pete Seeger quit the Weavers because he would not stand for recording a tobacco commercial. Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan? Both cite Seeger as one of their inspirations. Seeger helped found the Newport Folk Festival that Dylan subverted in his iconic “going electric” moment. When Seeger was banned from an ABC show in the 1960’s, Dylan, Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary boycotted. The environmental movement? Seeger helped build a ship, the Clearwater, to inspire the cleaning of the Hudson River, which helped kick-start conservation efforts across the country. Vietnam? After being blacklisted off of television for a decade, Seeger returned to the Smothers Brothers show to sing “Waste Deep in Big Muddy,” an antiwar song with the refrain “The big fool says to push on.” World War II? He supported the anti-fascist cause, being drafted in 1942 into a performing unit… but he also kept preaching the message of peace. Plus, on a family note, when my Dad needed a spotlight on his project to ensure the land rights of the Yąnomamö in Brazil in the 1980’s, Seeger came down to Cambridge to headline a fundraiser.

This is all without mentioning that Seeger built his own cabin (which he lived in for half a century), wrote the definitive book on how to play the banjo and dropped out of Harvard because his sociology teacher said that you can’t change the world.

On a personal note, Seeger became my folk music hero after I saw the documentary “The Power of Song,” which I highly recommend. Perhaps my all-time favorite youtube video is his performance of “This Land is Your Land” at the 2009 inaugural concert with Bruce Springsteen. On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in front of millions, the nonagenarian snuck the two socialist verses penned by Woody Guthrie in 1940 back into the song:

In the squares of the city / by the shadow of the steeple / by the relief office / I saw my people. / As they stood hungry / I stood there whispering / ‘This land was made for you and me.’ / A great high wall there / that tried to stop me / that great big sign there / said ‘Private Property.’ / But on the other side / it didn’t say nothing! / That side was made for you and me!

I was determined to meet him before he passed on. I found out that he headlined a small corn festival in Beacon, New York every year and drove up with my Mom and Sister in 2009 in the hopes he would be there. He was (!) and we talked over corn for two minutes or so after he played a wonderful banjo set. I keep his portrait hanging today.

He kept working, kept fighting, kept singing, (and kept chopping wood at his cabin) right up until the end. He was true to his craft and true to his cause, living by his promise in “If I Had a Hammer“:

If I had a song / I’d sing it in the morning /I’d sing it in the evening / all over this land. / I’d sing out danger / I’d sing out a warning / I’d sing out love between my brothers and my sisters
all over this land.

I’ll end with two quotes Seeger himself said and sang:

“The key to the future of the world is finding the optimistic stories and letting them be known.”

“Deep in my heart, I do believe. We shall overcome someday.”

From one Pete to another: Amen.

In the original iteration of this site, i launched the short-lived “Pete Davis Riffs” with Adults in the Room: A Letter to Fellow Young People, a speech I wrote at the end of college in 2012:

https://youtu.be/_2IJw9HxKpY

I would like to take this opportunity to write to you as members of a particular generation at a special time in history.

By the time we came of age, a wall had fallen, a Cold War had ended, a crime wave had receded and a budget was balanced. We rang in the new millennium with hopes that the information superhighway and global trade would bring about a lifetime of peace and prosperity.

However, with every festive night comes the morning after. The SUVs that drove us to soccer practice became the greenhouse gases we were warned about in our teens. The big house our uncle bought had a foreclosure sign up five years later. Global trade and information networks came on the same wave as outsourced industries and global terror networks. Something had to give, and it did: levees broke, bubbles popped, economies crashed, and public trust bottomed out.

Having been the generation of kids who were raised on such safe touchstones as Tickle Me Elmo, Seinfeld reruns, and AOL Instant Messenger, and then suddenly flung into a world of Columbine, 9/11, and Katrina, it was no surprise that we thought the 2000s to be a great time to drop everything and play around with wizards at Hogwarts. Indeed, in times of shock and confusion, we tend to hide away in fantasy worlds: places with clear heroes and villains; nations with perfect presidents played by Martin Sheen; universes where the only available feedback option is a “like” button.

But when we return from these fantasies, we are left standing in a real world still facing rising inequality, a warming globe, and a continued struggle to have our humanizing endeavors catch up with our commercial ones.

For the past couple of years, we have had the luxury to reflect on the age we find ourselves in, but I will be the first to admit that, in this very real world, it is not always clear what is going on. We see a black president but read about the black unemployment rate. We are excited by the freedom that comes with the Internet, but still frustrated by the old power structures.

It seems that society, like us graduates, is in a transitional phase, an in-between state where it all seems out of sync. We use twentieth-century language to describe twenty-first-century problems; economic orders are collapsing; populist movements crop up right and left.

All the while, there remain big public problems — problems that are overwhelming and complicated. What is to be done in such an age?

Well, we have a choice.

We can turn a blind eye and retreat from the confusion of our era back into the safety of fantasy. Some have made that choice: those who choose to be cynical, who use irony to distance themselves from any conviction; those who yearn for nonexistent pasts when “everything was better”; and those who reject the great life in favor of their own big life.

Others look for a quick fix, like the election of a president who will solve our problems for us, or the hope that we will all take to the streets and — with enough noise — the problems will cease. To some, the quick fix is the vanquishing of the latest boogeyman: if only we got rid of the federal government, or Muslims, or Southerners, or immigrants, or evangelicals, then everything would be solved.

But it is never that easy. That is fantasy, too.

This leaves a final option: to reject these fantasies as childish. It is the option to be an adult, which is to say, “Yes, the problems we face are complicated; yes, the path forward is not always clear; yes, the solutions we need might take decades; but, because of this, it is even more important that we struggle!”

To be an adult is to be a participant in co-creating the world, not just another spectator watching others create it, or destroy it, for us. It is to think in the long term, putting sustainability over short-term gain. It is to back up complaints with hard work. To be an adult is to be childlike, but not childish — still able to use our imagination to envision new alternatives but ready to implement them ourselves. To be an adult is to have hope; it is to recognize that a world where people are good and ideas can sweep across the globe in seconds is a world where we can, with time, solve some of the great problems we face.

By this standard, some wielders of power are not acting like adults: they continue to play childish games with our economy, our democracy and our earth.

But we do not have to. We can be better. When we turn to each other and ask “Are you ready to enter ‘the real world’?” we do not have to mean, “Are you ready for the daily grind?” To continue the failed patterns of the old era and to expect that there will not be grave consequences is to not live in the real world. The real world desperately needs adults.

Are we going to be the last gasp of an old era or the first breath of a new one? If we want the latter, now is the time to be the adults in the room, to have the courage, wisdom, and grit to walk into the halls of power and utter the sacred phrase: “We are here to get to work.”