Lodewijk Asscher bij Global Progress Conference

It is a great honour to talk to you, progressives from around the globe. In the following ten minutes I want to set straight what I think is wrong with the progressive movement and tell you where we should be heading. Not an easy task.

I remember a game show for kids I saw on television. The host asked an eight year old kid what he wanted to become later in life. The kid didn’t blink and said: deputy director. The host thought this was a perfectly normal answer for a kid. Deputy director. It is like saying you want to become a professional soccer player … in the second league. I guess his dad is a deputy director somewhere and his dad is his hero. But still. Why doesn’t he dream of becoming the boss? It’s unlike a child to give such an answer. It is a like child who doesn’t want to become a fireman, but a bookkeeper. Or worse, who dreams about becoming a bureaucrat.Progressives around the globe are acting like this little boy. They seem to have lost their natural inclinations. They act out of character.

A progressive should not identify himself with bureaucracies, he should identify himself with those who get lost in bureaucracies. A progressive should not be modest, but zealous. A progressive should not defend the status quo. He should be striving for a better world. Not looking for a narrative, but fighting injustice just around the corner.

As with the boy, we can understand where this unnatural behaviour is coming from. There was a time when progressives where overzealous, where the ideological truth was more important than the experiences of the common man. And we do live in a time where the revolutionary energy is coming from the right. The loony left have made way for the rabid right. And if the welfare state is under attack, I can understand that progressives tend to defend it. Still, to just defend the welfare state is simply wrong.

Understanding is not the same as condoning. By identifying ourselves with the status quo, we are also identifying ourselves with a public sector that is way too bureaucratic, a public sector that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. A public sector that sometimes is too lenient and sometimes too strict. A public sector that spoils some and fails others. A public sector that is hated by those it should serve.

And what is true for the public sector also applies to our values. Because some of our values are under attack, we are inclined to defend them. In our fighting spirit we try to close our eyes for the negative effects of the values we stand for. We are in favour of tolerance, but haven’t we become too tolerant towards the intolerant?

We must act as progressives again. A progressive wants to fight for a better world, not accept the status quo.

To rediscover our character it helps to ask questions. I always ask directors of schools in backward areas if they would send their own children to their schools. If their honest answer is no, there is no excuse to lean back. More generally the question for progressives should be:What do we tend to regard as given, that is in fact unacceptable?

As deputy mayor of Amsterdam I put a lot of energy in fighting an injustice that a lot of people had accepted as given, as something that couldn’t be changed. I am referring now to the famous Red Light District. Progressives have in the past fought for the legalization of prostitution. Criticism of the red light district was ridiculed by the left as moralizing sermons. But by being so heartwarmingly liberal, they were closing their eyes to the realities of the red light district. Closing their eyes to forced prostitution, closing their eyes to women trafficking, closing their eyes to the huge criminal economy in the Red Light District.

We started to attack the status quo.We started to protect those who needed protection.We started to fight what was regarded as given.

For this endeavour I was applauded by former foes and attacked by former friends.

But I maintained that this was a progressive project. Protecting those without power and engaging those with illegitimate power.

No opportunity society can be built on an economy of slavery.

A similar clash I have experienced with the boards of our schools. Progressives have always fought for equality of opportunity. Without excellent education for the disadvantaged such equality of opportunity is a joke. But something strange has happened. We do spend extra money on the education of immigrant children, but we don’t demand extra results.

On the contrary.

We have come to accept that only a small minority of immigrant kids really succeed in school. We have even introduced a separate lower level for schools with a high proportion of disadvantaged children. We think it is normal for Turkish kids to leave the primary school with a two year gap in their language skills compared to the average Dutch kid. We have come to accept that our education is deeply segregated. We have come to accept that in some areas very few kids go to college.We have grown accustomed to something that is totally unacceptable. The money we spend is not an investment in the future of our kids, but an indulgence to buy off our conscience.

But by accepting the status quo we stain the promise that education is the royal way to emancipation.By accepting the status quo we put the privileges of some above the future of the rest.By accepting the status quo we are failing our kids.

To counter this betrayal of our values, I have introduced new norms to assess our schools. From schools with a high proportion of disadvantaged kids, we expect more not less. We want kids from those primary schools to have an equally good chance to go to the highest secondary school as kids in more privileged parts of town. And if schools can’t make that happen we offer them help to raise the quality of their education.

No opportunity society can be built on an economy of segregation.

Progressives should fight for equality of life chances. Success in life should depend on the diligence and talent of the kids, not on the money and the educational level of their parents. But if we really believe in equality of life’s chances, we cannot accept the status quo.We must walk the extra mile, the extra ten miles. We won’t rest until we succeed.

There are many areas where we have grown used to things that are totally unacceptable. We live in a freeriders economy where profits are private but losses are pushed off on the collective. Look at our banks. They gambled with our future. And as long as they won, they kept the gains, but when their lucks changed, the taxpayer paid for their losses. We accept the neoliberal economic structure as a given, instead of fighting its excesses. Ed Miliband was right to address corporate predator behaviour as a huge problem. We accept the fact that under the guise of personal responsibility, government has withdrawn itself from society. We accept that risks are shifted from government to individual citizens. We accept a government that says: the welfare state has become too costly, so we dismiss it.

The same is true for our environment. The price of pollution is not paid by the polluters, but by the next generation. Our companies act once again as free riders who want profit from what we create without contributing to our collective effort .

We have grown used to things that are unacceptable. Why are we so passive in the face of these gross injustices?

Because we were told to believe that because earlier efforts to change the world failed all efforts are doomed. Lack of imagination is sold to us as realism.

But this realism is defeat before the fight. We must learn from mistakes of the past, not to sell out our values, but to find new ways to serve them.

If we as progressives want to take back the political initiative, we must go back to our natural inclinations.

Making progressives matter again starts with making progressives care again.

We must not and cannot accept the bureaucratic design of the public good. We must reinvent it.

We must not defend the status quo, but challenge it. And yes, finally we see some revolutionary energy, some anger towards the status quo. The occupy wall street movement has spread around the globe. Only waiting for a serious progressive agenda of reform.

I ask you to become what you deep down have always been.

A progressive,Someone who is interested in the common good, not in his individual successSomeone who wants to unite people to make them gain control, not divide people to make them lose control. Someone who is inspired by hope, not intimidated by fear.

The welfare state will not become an opportunity society by technocratic modernization, but by winning elections and fighting for change.