• in favor of affordable healthcare and affordable housing,
• in favor of equal pay and equal rights for women and gays,
• in favor of habeas corpus, opposed to torture and domestic spying
• opposed to the use of war as an instrument of foreign policy,
• opposed to corporate personhood.

But, on the surface, those issues all appear to be unrelated to one another. How is that?

Do we merely have a coalition for convenience, among special interest groups who say to one another, "I don't really care about your cause, but I'll support it if you'll support mine"? No, actually most of us sincerely agree on most of the issues.

Is it merely coincidence that people who agree on one issue, also agree on a seemingly unrelated issue? No. There is a common thread, an underlying theme, a unifying vision, in our views on all these issues. That vision lives in us at a level deeper than the specialized issues, and it is what really motivates us. We think about (for instance) affordable healthcare, not just for its own sake, not just for detached and rational reasons, but because we feel something about our society, about our relation to our fellow human beings.

Identifying and describing that unifying vision may be difficult, but doing so is important, even crucial. Unless we recognize our shared values, we progressives tend to splinter into special interest organizations, competing against one another for funding and volunteers; uniting us is as difficult as herding cats. But if we understand our message well enough to deliver it clearly, it will not only unify us, but also swell our ranks, as it inspires the millions of other people in our society who are presently discouraged, directionless, alienated.

We are engaged in a worldwide ideological struggle. The people who favor corporatocracy, war, etc., understand their own vision and ideology and message all too well, and they use it to brainwash millions of people, converting those people into their enablers. If ever we could wake up all the middle-class employees of the plutocracy, its bureaucracy of brutality would fall without a shot. Even the members of congress, mostly corrupt, are still human beings, still changeable. But to awaken all these sleepers, we must speak to their hearts, not just their minds.

The specialized issues on the platform are important -- e.g., no one can say that ending war or extending healthcare are unimportant. And yet, those are merely surface consequences of our deeper attitude about society.

So what is our unifying vision? That question has been in the mind of many progressives for several years; it has been a sort of identity crisis. I've come across several overlapping, slightly different answers that I've liked. My favorites are due to Waldman, Hartmann, Lakoff, and Lerner; I'll discuss them briefly below. In my opinion these men have been more insightful than most of us, and also more skilled than most of us in finding words to express their insights. But I am not claiming that any of these is the "right answer." I merely assert that, personally, I have liked these answers and been inspired by them, and I think you might be too.

For an introductory answer, the definition I like best is Paul Waldman's: We are progressives because we believe that we are all in this together. We care about one another, and our fortunes are bound together. I want my neighbor's kid to get a good education, both for altruistic reasons -- I want him to enjoy his life -- and selfish reasons -- that way he's less likely to steal my car and more likely to pay taxes. (That's in contrast with the conservatives, who proclaim that you're on your own.) Waldman has explained this answer in several places -- in articles such as The Progressive Identity Complex, and in his book Being Right is Not Enough, and in lectures he has given (for instance, see this great 7-minute video). Waldman has explained that people are best motivated by basic values such as "we're all in this together." If you want to persuade someone to support some policy, begin by talking about the common good, and then explain how that is connected to the policy you're advocating.

The title of Waldman's book refers to the fact that just telling the facts is not enough. In political matters, raw data does not explain itself. Facts only take on meaning when interpreted in some worldview, some overall philosophy. For instance, taxing the rich more heavily than the poor makes sense to someone who believes we're all in this together, but a "flat tax" might make more sense to someone who really believes it's every man for himself.

How could anyone really believe in "every man for himself"? That notion sounds alien to most of us progressives. But the other side would describe it differently.They believe in "personal responsibility" and "self-discipline." They claim poverty is caused by laziness, and they praise the "self-made man."

Now, we could point out that the "self-made man" is merely a myth. The fact of the matter is that every successful businessman has relied on public roads, public courts (to enforce contracts), public schools (to train employees), and so on. You can't make a dime without relying on the shared infrastructure that we all built together with our taxes. No one actually makes it on his own. But that is merely a fact. Facts just bounce off the heads of people who have already made up their minds. (Lakoff has written extensively on this phenomenon.) We have to reach people on a deeper level than reason. We have to reach people's feelings, if we want to change anything. Logic can only be used to find the consequences of one's assumptions; logic tells us nothing about the choice of the assumptions themselves.

At root, then, progressives and conservatives start from different assumptions about human nature. That is mentioned in Thom Hartmann's book Cracking the Code. He says that progressives are optimistic about human nature; for instance, progressives want to build more schools, to empower people to reach their full potential. Conservatives, on the other hand, are pessimistic about human nature; they believe that people are only motivated by greed and fear. Conservatives want to build more prisons, because they believe that people can only be kept orderly by threat of punishment. By the way, the USA presently has a much higher percentage of its population in prison than any other country in the world. We're not the "land of the free."

Which assessment of human nature is correct? Well, these assessments are self-fulfilling prophecies, so our task is not just to describe the world we see, but to choose the world we want. It is up to us to try to change our culture, to change human nature.

Waldman and Hartmann based their insightful analyses on mere anecdotal evidence, but George Lakoff has been scientific about all this. He is a professor of linguistics, and he has been analyzing our political landscape by studying what people say and inferring from that how they think and how they feel. Lakoff has brought several important ideas to the progressive movement -- the importance of framing, and the fact that worldview trumps reason -- but here I want to concentrate on what Lakoff has said about the dichotomy between liberals and conservatives. In books and lectures starting with Moral Politics (1996), Lakoff has explained that progressives and conservatives use the same words in different ways, and so they often do not realize how poorly they understand each other, how greatly they differ not only on how the world works but even on what is right or wrong. The chasm is so wide that many people in either group view the other group as moronic and/or satanic. Lakoff's most recent works draw this distinction: Progressives give higher priority to empathy, and lower priority to authority, than conservatives do. That simple little switch in priorities has for its consequences all the differences between a progressive platform and a conservative platform, on every specialized issue under the sun. By the way, I recommend Lakoff's lecture on the significance of authoritarianism in child rearing, as well as psychologist Bob Altemeyer's book or lecture on The Authoritarians.

Of related interest is the work of historian Lynn Hunt, who has written a history of empathy. She says that the "self-evident truths" in the U.S. Declaration of Independence would not have been self-evident a few decades earlier, because empathy in our culture had not yet reached sufficient strength. It has been growing. Hunt says one factor contributing to its growth was the development of the novel, which taught people to put themselves in someone else's shoes to a greater degree than they had ever done before.

Most theorists in the movement use the terms "progressive" and "liberal" either interchangeably, or nearly so. One noteworthy exception is Michael Lerner. Lerner sees himself as a progressive who has moved beyond liberalism. Liberals are motivated toward the goals of empathy -- i.e., making the world a better place for all -- but Lerner explains that liberals are thoroughly misguided in their tactics, on account of not understanding how things have been working out psychologically and ideologically. Liberals have been too concerned with balancing the moral checkbook, protecting the individual rights of this minority or that minority, and have perpetuated the overemphasis on the individual which is also at the root of the right wing's philosophy of selfishness. Lerner advocates a progressive movement which is more aware of our interconnectedness, the importance of community, the fact that we are social beings and cannot live comfortably or meaningfully as isolated individuals.

Why have the conservatives been winning the ideological contest for the last few decades? Well, they've had an unfair advantage; "fair and balanced" is a lie. The conservative worldview makes a few people at the top richer and more powerful (while impoverishing everyone else), and those few people mistakenly attach a great deal of importance to their wealth and power. Consequently, they've been investing some of their money in think tanks and news media, so that most of the idea mills in our society are now conservative-based. That's not just coincidental; it's been a concerted effort ever since the Powell Memorandum of 1971. Naomi Klein has commented that "It's easy to be discouraged by how much more funding the right wing think tanks have. But ... they need that money, because they have a really tough intellectual job: Their job is to convince people that [altruism is bad and selfishness is good]. Crazy talk. Very expensive to convince people of something so deeply counterintuitive. It is much cheaper to convince people that to do good is good; bad, bad."

But in the long run, we have seen progress. For instance, we're not done with racism or sexism yet, but I think we're much further along now than a century ago. I hope the long-term trend is in our favor, and I believe it is, because though we rarely learn any basic truth about human nature, we unlearn it even more rarely. And so, two steps forward and one step back, with excruciating slowness, we are progressing in the right direction. I agree with Martin King's statement that "human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable," but also with his statement that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." We've just got to keep pushing. Unfortunately, we may actually be facing a deadline, what with global warming and peak oil and nuclear proliferation and overpopulation and all that.

Summary, and what should we be doing about it. I now see the world as engaged in an ideological/cultural struggle between authoritarians and the forces of empathy. Certainly we need to push for progressive legislation, everything on the progressive platform, to make the laws more progressive; but we also need to work on a much bigger, longer range project: We need to make society more progressive. We need to change culture; we need to change human nature. To do that, we need to improve our own understanding of ourselves and our relation to the rest of the world. We need to change ourselves.

As a progressive, I advocate for empathy, and I'm looking for ways to spread empathy. But I have to admit that I don't know how that's done; I'm new to all of this. I suppose we all are. There are no rules on the road to global enlightenment; we need to discover the rules and erase them en route. We don't really know our destination. But we know the direction, and I feel like I'm finally part of the right caravan, and I'm glad to have your companionship on it.