Joel Rogers Responds

Jeff Isaac believes contemporary progressives face serious new problems of program and agency: identifying “what is to be done” to advance egalitarian democratic values under present economic and social conditions, and finding someone to do it. Sharing these values with Isaac, I agree with him that we need a new strategy to realize them. We disagree on what that strategy should be.

To begin with our common problem. We need to figure out policies and organizational forms appropriate to a changed world: where the nation state is less capable of directing the economy within its borders; where solving supply-side and regulatory problems is essential to citizen well-being; where traditional productivist politics is qualifie...