What's missing from the progressive agenda is not the chameleon-like notion of the common good so much as the pursuit of collective mastery and the promotion of a shared sense of belonging. Abundance is the promised land of neoliberalism and shopping its highest purpose. To be a citizen is to be a consumer: “Consumo ergo sum.” Such cartoonish ontological moorings induce in many the despair of the void. America's vindictive penal system indeed suggests a nation riven by fear. For this, in my view, we have less bin Laden to blame than TINA and the materialistic vacuity that goes along with it. The first order of business is to allow the polity to regain control of its environment—moral, social, and physical. The progressive creed is, first and foremost, a quest for citizenship.

No citizenship, no social justice. It's hard enough to help the poor: go try and do it with a straitjacket on. But empowerment alone is not enough. I may well understand that my path to freedom lies through Town Hall and not Wal-Mart. But what's that got to do with justice? Perhaps that's why common-gooders ask us to clone ourselves into mini-Mother Teresas. Without prejudging the case about the goodness of our hearts, the weakness of a sainthood-based creed is simply too obvious to ignore. If everyone were a saint, we would not need a creed in the first place. The trick, therefore, is to create a society of saints none of whose members is one. That's where patriotism kicks in.

First, some clarification. “My country, right or wrong,” said Carl Schurz, echoing Decatur. After that fateful utterance, the word patriot was destined to join the select company of pedophile and macaca in the stink bomb arsenal of language. So it is with my nose firmly held that I vocally question the patriotism of those who care more about winning Fallujah than losing New Orleans. The most humiliating national shaming in recent American history, Katrina, registers barely a blip in a presidential campaign: a portrait of the patriot as an ostrich? Americans can love their country or they can turn a blind eye to poverty and segregation: they cannot do both. Patriotic citizenship is the commitment to a society that grants all of its members the means to belong. It is an affirmation of solidarity. Its motivation is the virtuous, idealized pride in an honorable society. It is also a sublimated form of self-interest: violent crime and poverty are, indeed, correlated. Most of all, it is the awareness that shame taints pride and that, despite their tenuous relation, (b) trumps or demeans (a):

• (a) The US is the world's richest nation; (b) the US outranks only Mexico in child poverty among OECD countries.⁽²⁸⁾ 

• (a) America's GDP per capita is 11 times higher than Sri Lanka's; (b) life expectancy for African-American men is 3 years shorter than for males in Sri Lanka.^(29,30) 

• (a) African-Americans have been the force behind this country's most influential musical genres; (b) one third of all black men will go to prison at some point in their lives.⁽³¹⁾ 

• (a) The US scoops up more Nobel prizes in medicine than any nation on earth; (b) 18,000 Americans will die this year for lack of health insurance.⁽³²⁾ 

“To make us love our country,” Burke said, “our country ought to be lovely.” The alternative is to avert one's eyes from the unlovely. It can be done. Progressive policies are never the default option. Patriotic citizenship rests on the mobilizing power of shame. But does shame mobilize? Patriotism is a wonderful fertilizer of delusion. And delusion works. Reagan speechified his way into the White House with chants of: “We're the Greatest Nation on God's Green Earth!” Am I suggesting “We Suck!” as a progressive alternative? Not quite. Americans should glow with pride at the mention of Citizen Kane, the Village Vanguard, and the Grand Canyon. But so should they at the thought that their society is fundamentally decent. Which it is fundamentally not.

I will leave the matter of a progressive foreign policy for another day, for I believe it requires a different treatment that cannot be inferred from the creed discussed above. But here is a point of direct relevance. The most consequential misreading of the fall of the Berlin Wall was that America had become the world's sole superpower. The irony is that it's precisely when it ceased to be one. Suddenly freed from the need for US protection, our allies realized they could ignore Washington's orders with impunity, and they did just that in 2003. In that sense, Bush did not kill US hegemony: he only supplied the death certificate. As the reality of a multipolar world sinks in, America has a golden opportunity to shed its exceptionalism and become a normal, decent society. Oddly for a technological wonderland, some of its beliefs hark back to Dickens and Kipling: the emulation factor of the wealth gap; the cleansing power of force; the euphoric arrogance of its mission civilisatrice (less euphoric after Iraq); the fixation on absolute sovereignty. These are all 19th-century values. The winds of geopolitical change will work to America's advantage if they help steer its foreign policy into the path to modernity.

Economic insecurity, a weak public sector, lack of social protection, fear of immigrants—where did we see that before? In Europe in the first half of the last century. Neoliberals like to forget that the continent was as globalized on the eve of World War I as it is today. Which is odd, because their credo that trading nations don't fight one another was proven entirely correct—plus or minus a few dozen million deaths. No, I am not suggesting that America's anxieties forebode an authoritarian future. The failure of a progressive alternative is more likely to produce a society that is increasingly unequal, unjust, hollow, and paranoid.

Some will invoke the recession as an excuse to do nothing. They have it exactly backwards. Economic distress has a way of rousing people from their political torpor—what else got the New Deal going? Fine, but Washington is too divided to get anything done. Just the opposite. Nothing gets done because politicians are too united—in taking orders from their corporate paymasters. The status quo is so beneficial to lobbies that campaign funds are roughly proportional to the number of times a candidate promises to look but not touch.

Assuming a progressive project gets underway, what challenges lie ahead? We know where to find the problems—racism, poverty, health, child care, public schools, the penal system, infrastructure, the environment, campaign financing, etc. We know where to find the expertise—the world's best social scientists live in our midst. We know where to find the resources—highest GDP and all that. We know where to find the words for the prose of our policies and the poetry of our vision. In the public mind, however, the right is about winning and the left about not losing. A bit of a downer perhaps. The pessimism of the intellect, Gramsci said, must be balanced by the optimism of the will. The hard part of a progressive project will be to summon the moral courage to prioritize the task at hand and fuel the effort with an unshakable belief in the justness of the cause. For that, we need a creed.

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