But as the earlier essays in this series have shown, this right-wing view has also influenced progressive policies.  In recent years, progressives have been more inclined to support privatization of state functions like prison management, to view equal opportunity in terms of a market-competition for increasingly scarce jobs, underinvesting in worker rights, and using a rhetoric overly friendly to financial interests. If progressives want to affect substantive change these areas, they need to do more than come up with policy ideas. They need to reclaim the language of freedom.

Despite conservative rhetoric to the contrary, freedom is more than individual freedom from state interference, or the freedom to transact on the market. Throughout history, successful progressive reformers have espoused a much more robust view of freedom: one that combats not only the arbitrary power of the state, but also the threats posed by powerful private actors like big corporations, and by the inequities and insecurities caused by market fluctuations. In this vision, the government is not an obstacle to freedom that must be dismantled; rather it is a vital tool that can help expand individual freedom against the dangers posed by big private interests or economic insecurity. This progressive view of freedom is also a deeply democratic one: We are free when we can act as politically empowered citizens, holding government accountable, and pushing the state to create a more just economy.

This progressive view of freedom was most clearly articulated by a disparate set of reformers around the turn of the 20th century. Their world was shaped by the nation’s radical transformation in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. The stunning growth of corporations created powerful new companies like the Standard Oil Trust and financial giants like J.P. Morgan. Meanwhile increasing urbanization, poverty and social displacement combined with recurring boom and bust economic cycles to create a new level of economic insecurity.

The anxieties caused by this emergence of the modern industrial market economy fueled an explosion of reformist political activity. From the rural Populist Farmers Alliance to urban reformers, antitrusters and a new cadre of professional lawyers and economists, the period from 1880 to 1920 marked one of the most vibrant and active areas of reform and innovative thinking about the basic structure of the economy and American politics. Although the Progressive movement was multifaceted and diverse, these reformers shared a common set of responses to the challenges of the new economy – views that are crucial to consider in today’s debates over state regulation, economic revival and democratic reform.

Progressive reformers faced three major obstacles. First, there was the problem of concentrated private power: large corporations, trusts and monopolies. The vast sums of money and market dominance of railroads, financial firms and industrial factories made it obvious that these corporations could use their power arbitrarily or self-interestedly, to the detriment of individual citizens and the public good. What chance did a small businessman have for fair credit, or a farmer for good prices, or a worker for fair wages in an economy dominated by powerful and largely unaccountable firms like J.P. Morgan and the railroad monopolies?

Second, even apart from these various monopolies, the new economy itself created enormous instability. Fluctuations in commodity prices affected both producers and consumers, and wages were similarly volatile. Individuals found themselves in a more precarious position than ever, increasingly dependent on wage income, yet increasingly susceptible to ill health from pollution or workplace accidents.

These problems were magnified by the third challenge facing of Progressive Era reformers: political corruption. At precisely the time when citizens were mobilizing in favor of policies to protect workers’ health, safety and economic opportunity, it was becoming increasingly clear that the state was incapable of responding to these needs. Muckraking accounts of legislative corruption highlighted how big business had captured state and federal legislatures. Meanwhile, a conservative Supreme Court struck down reform efforts such as the workday regulations revoked in the infamous 1905 case of Lochner v. New York.

So these economic challenges became political ones: The prospects for reform depended on overcoming political constraints of corruption, disparities in political power, and the conservative Supreme Court. As a result, Progressive Era reformers developed a rich array of social and political innovations designed to expand the political influence of ordinary citizens. First, reformers coordinated through a wide range of associations. The period from 1880 to 1920 saw a rise of farmers cooperatives, women’s leagues, trade unions, manufacturers organizations and professional associations. Such associations helped educate ordinary citizens about issues of the day, which in turn made them more adept at asserting their own political interests against wealthier and more established groups. In addition, many reformers tried to expand the powers of local governments, in the hopes of creating an alternative space in which to experiment with new social policies. These efforts helped give rise to the Home Rule movement, which aimed to grant municipal governments basic powers to make social policy without state approval.

Progressives were also the driving force behind early regulation experiments, supporting the creation of state agencies to oversee industries such as the railroads and other trusts. At the federal level, these debates led to the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission and later the Federal Trade Commission. Although both agencies faced stiff opposition from the Supreme Court which routinely narrowed the scope of regulatory power on antitrust issues, these efforts helped set the stage for the New Deal. At the state level, rate commissions and other forms of regulatory oversight of the economy became more common. Finally, at the local level, progressives engaged in a spirited effort to develop systems of public utilities. From transportation systems to water provision, reformers argued that private monopolies in these necessity-providing industries undermined the public good. Through unique municipal oversight, and in some cases outright public ownership, progressives tried to deploy the powers of the states to ensure that basic necessities were provided effectively and fairly.

The common thread running through these disparate reform efforts was a distinctly progressive view of freedom that contrasted with the free-market views of conservatives.  This vision was most clearly articulated by Progressive Era thinkers such as the philosopher and activist John Dewey, and Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.

For both Dewey and Brandeis, freedom meant more than just individual autonomy and free market exchange. Instead, freedom was achieved when citizens were able to live meaningful lives. In the modern economy, creating this sort of freedom meant enacting public policies that would protect individuals from extreme insecurity and exploitation.

First, this required a robust welfare state, providing social insurance so that, in Brandeis’ words, citizens “may live and not merely exist.” Freedom was threatened by unrestrained competition that created unacceptable risks for individual incomes and basic well-being.  To protect freedom, then, required social insurance and minimum standards for wages, health and safety.

Second, there had to be regulations and oversight to place checks on the power of large corporations, for such powerful private actors could dominate workers, extract unfair profits from consumers, and corrupt the political process itself.

Third, these freedom-enhancing policies had to be paired with greater political freedom in the form of direct citizen participation. For both Dewey and Brandeis, freedom meant that citizens were empowered to participate in politics, hold government officials accountable, and help drive new policies. As a result, both thinkers emphasized the mobilization of citizens in associations like labor unions, and the importance of policymaking at the local level where citizens could engage directly with the political process and hold the government accountable.

In today’s world where most citizens are increasingly disempowered—at the mercy of big corporations, the vagaries of the market economy, and the corruption of public officials—freedom has to be more than just the conservative view of freedom from the state and freedom to transact in the market.  Instead, the progressive view of freedom expands the power of individuals themselves, by protecting them from private interests and insecurity, while giving them a more direct voice in government. This vision requires a different rhetoric than what is commonly used by progressives in politics today. But it also requires policies that go further in expanding the social safety net, overseeing big corporations from Wall Street to BP, and expanding the opportunities for direct citizen participation in government. This election offers an opportunity for progressives to revive this view of freedom—and in so doing, to catalyze a longer-term movement for a more just economy.

Yet, 2012 finds progressives without any such unifying vision to mobilize a broad-based reform movement, let alone to define the debate about the economic future. Instead, by some still-puzzling turn of events, the Tea Party infused political right has capitalized on the crisis produced by already radically deregulated “free-market” financial capitalism to promote an even more radically right-wing agenda based on the argument that what we need now is more of the same—further tax cutting, deeper spending cuts, more deregulation and the eventual elimination of what remains of social welfare and labor rights. Right-wing activists have also reclaimed the moral high ground by framing their agenda as a crusade to save capitalism and political freedom from the threat of liberal “big government,” albeit by resorting to the decidedly low-road tactics of blaming the Great Recession on overly-generous entitlements, organized labor and the “undeserving” poor. For the time being, this is the narrative that is setting the terms of the debate in Washington over what the post-recession economy should look like.

Still, there is reason for hope. From Wisconsin to Wall Street, grassroots movements have resuscitated flagging reform momentum, organizing to defend the rights and dignity of labor, to protest the rise and concentrated power of “the 1 percent,” and to make deeper, decades-in-the-making issues of inequality the center of a campaign to renew representative democracy. Whether and how this translates into a more concrete reform program — and whether it will be able to displace the still locked-in logic of austerity and retrenchment  —remains to be seen.

Hope can also be found in the enduring salience of an older tradition of progressive economic reform. From the late 19th century through the New Deal, similarly fraught moments of economic crisis and inequality were used to frame a series of public debates about the rise of industrial and finance capitalism, and the hazards it introduced. Chief among these were the problems of inequality and concentrated economic power that marked the decades around the turn of that century as what, until very recently, was our first and only Gilded Age.

Indeed, that era’s skewed patterns of wealth and income distribution were much like our own. They stemmed from deliberate,  ideologically slanted policy choices and industry practices in a political system dominated by the interests of big corporations and the wealthy. They reflected vast imbalances of power when it came to controlling wages, prices, working conditions and the broader fate of the economy. For the great majority of citizens, the material risks and consequences of these imbalances were palpable, and never more so than in the sequence of mass unemployment, falling property values, foreclosure and deepening depression that periodically gripped the economy in the wake of the financial panics endemic to unregulated industrial capitalism.

The moral and political hazards of Gilded Age capitalism were palpable as well, inspiring a language of protest most recently echoed in anti-Wall Street demonstrations in Zuccotti Park. Then as now critics protested the “evils” of inequality and wealth concentration as akin to plutocracy, predation, malefaction, economic oligarchy and outright theft. They worried about the corrupting influences of a financial sector that had grown too large and of the speculative pursuit of profit for its own sake.

But the progressives of yesteryear voiced their concerns in the name of more positive, traditionally republican principles as well: principles grounded in ideas about socially productive labor as the source of true economic value and civic virtue; about the need to balance the public interest against the overreaching claims of narrow private economic interests; about the importance of free (that is, autonomous and independent) and fairly compensated labor that were rapidly being undermined by the work conditions of industrial capitalism. While hardly uncontested, and by no means applied equitably across the lines of race, ethnicity and gender, these principles stood in sharp contrast to Andrew Carnegie’s self-justifying Gospel of Wealth and every-man-for-himself Social Darwinism. They provided the basis for framing Gilded Age inequality as a violation of traditional republican values, and for justifying such measures as anti-trust legislation, labor and environmental protections, the progressive income tax, and financial reform. The true radicals, in this narrative, were the proponents of laissez faire.

Over the course of several decades, a wide and by no means unified array of political actors — labor unions, farmer alliances, consumer groups and policy intellectuals as well as elected officials from both major political parties — would draw on these principles and values to build a case not only against the “evils” of wealth concentration and oligarchic control but for a political economy that represented the worth and served the interests of  the people. Few issues absorbed as much public attention — or have as much contemporary relevance — as the Congressional investigations of Wall Street and the banking industry conducted in response to the system-shaking financial panics of 1907 and 1929.

The first of these investigations was conducted in 1912-13, and was aptly dubbed “the hunt for the money trust” in a series of riveting blow-by-blow articles by renowned investigative journalist Ida B. Tarbell. It also produced the well-known broadside by lawyer and future Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, who published a series of articles in Harper’s Weekly in 1913, soon after collected in a book with the memorably aphoristic title “Other People’s Money, and How the Bankers Use It.” The articles, illustrated with caricatures of overfed plutocrats, used evidence from the “money trust” investigations to track the system of “interlocking directorates” that had allowed a small coterie of investment bankers to establish monopoly control over the nation’s credit, and hence over the economy writ large. Worse still, they financed their riskiest and most personally profitable ventures by using bank deposits — the modest savings of the average citizen — appropriating the people’s capital and putting it to self-enriching but otherwise unproductive speculative use. Brandeis looked to the state for regulation, suggesting, among other things, that banks be regulated as public utilities, entrusted as they were with safeguarding so much of the nation’s wealth. But in “Other People’s Money,” he offered a complementary strategy as well. Banking, he urged, could be by and for the “the people” if the millions of farmers, workers and clerks who entrusted their savings to the big banks would put it in credit unions and banking cooperatives — the financial instruments of industrial democracy — instead.

Although it would take another two decades — and a more massive financial collapse — to pass meaningful financial regulation, Brandeis’ basic formulation continued to serve as a powerful touchstone for reform throughout the New Deal. In 1933, the Senate instigated the well-known Pecora investigations of the Wall Street money trust and its role in the stock market crash of 1929. (Congress soon after passed the Glass-Steagall Act to prevent the very abuses that would lead once again to reckless financial speculation in the wake of its 1999 repeal.) Echoes of “Other People’s Money” could be heard in letters to Ferdinand Pecora, the chief counsel for the investigation,  urging him to “bring all these crooks to their knees, and make them repay us decent and honest people” for the life savings they had lost.

In 1938, countering the ill-advised austerity measures that had led to the deep “Roosevelt recession” the previous year, progressives in the administration pushed a vacillating president to step up the battle against the monopoly practices that, they suspected, were stifling the recovery.  After three years of research, the eventual recommendations of the Temporary National Economic Committee were fairly tepid, nor did the committee find evidence of the suspected capital strike.  But by then FDR had used the TNEC’s creation to turn the tables on his conservative critics.  The true threat to liberty came not from an elected and publicly accountable government, as detractors charged, but from “a concentration of private power without equal in history.” He also joined a host of other political activists and reformers in recognizing the necessity, indeed the imperative, of a government prepared to hold private industry accountable to the standards of democracy.  “[T]he liberty of a democracy is not safe,” the president argued, “if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living.”

Though articulated in immediate response to the looming threat of economic oligarchy, these principles of reform and regulation were embedded in the more expansive idea of the economic and  political rights of citizenship — and the role of government in protecting them — that had become the cornerstone of New Deal reform. FDR enumerated these as a “second,” economic bill of rights in his 1944 State of the Union address. Among them were the right to a job with a fair wage, a decent home, a good education and healthcare as well as the right to an equitable playing field and to protections against the power of organized wealth. Underlying these rights, FDR declared, was an even more basic and “self-evident” — republican — economic truth: True freedom rested on economic security and prosperity for all. This principle would be embraced by generations of civil rights, women’s rights and labor movement activists as they struggled to make the country live up to that promise.

It is against this historical backdrop that the convergence of Wisconsin and Occupy Wall Street can be seen as an opportunity to articulate some core principles of a progressive vision for the 21st century economy: jobs at living wages for all who want them; equal opportunity regardless of race, class, gender, religion or sexual orientation; universal access to social goods such as health, education, decent housing and economic security; a fair distribution of wealth and income; a democratic system of finance; respect for human dignity in the workplace and the public sphere; a  market regulated by representative government rather than left to its own devices. These, at a minimum, are a starting point for an economy that creates the  conditions within which modern-day democracy can thrive.

At a time when even the most modest healthcare and financial reform measures spur charges of “European-style social democracy,” it may be tempting to conclude that these expansive ideals are simply too far outside the realm of political possibility to be relevant. But that logic, decades in the making, has already exacted a devastating political price. We see it in the failure, after nearly 40 years of falling wages and rising inequality, to make full employment that sustains decent standards of living a standard-bearer for economic health. We see it in the absence — public outrage over Wall Street bailouts and “too big to fail” aside — of any real challenge to the logic and power that continues to sustain our modern-day money trust. We see it in the inability of progressive individuals, organizations and movements to connect to create an economy that works for the benefit of a democratic polity rather than the other way around. And we see it in the right’s enduring monopoly on the politics and the rhetoric of economic values and reform. It’s high time for progressives to reclaim that too-long neglected territory, lest we do ourselves the injustice of forgetting a vital part of our past.

The urgency is striking. Instead of being fundamentally discredited, the oligarchs and plutocrats who crashed our economy are raking in record profits and acting even more aggressively to bury the American labor movement once and for all. Over the last year, several labor leaders have told me that they believe unions have only about five more years left if they don’t figure out some kind of breakthrough strategy.

The complete collapse of unions would have devastating consequences. The labor movement has played a crucial role in advancing economic justice in the workplace and in politics. Union membership raises median weekly earnings and reduces race- and gender-based income gaps, and union workers are much more likely to receive health care and pension benefits than workers who are not members of a labor union. The decline of organized labor is directly linked to the rise in economic inequality over the last 40 years and the onset of a “Second Gilded Age.” The decline in union density coupled with the decline in the real value of the minimum wage explains one-third of the dramatic growth in wage inequality since the early 1970s.

Over the past 30 years, American employers have become even more aggressive at violating their workers’ rights to organize under a toothless and outdated labor law regime. Contrary to the intent of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which made it national policy to encourage and promote collective bargaining, the NLRA now provides incentives for employers to break the law routinely and ignore any compulsion to negotiate collective agreements. When there is little outrage for the daily violations of workers’ liberty (employers fire workers illegally in 1 in 3 union campaigns for attempting to exercise freedom of association), our democracy is in peril.

As worker power has eroded in the workplace, the labor movement’s political clout has also declined. Measured by both members and money, unions are  still the most influential and resourceful left-wing constituency in American politics. Organized labor also remains the most powerful core of the national Democratic Party by several measures, including campaign contributions, grassroots mobilization efforts, lobbying and setting the party’s legislative agenda. Indeed, the labor movement spent a record amount of money to help get a Democrat elected to the White House in 2008.

With a labor-friendly White House and a Democratic Congress, organized labor began strategizing about how and when to push for its No. 1 priority, the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). Labor law reform would not only help the flagging movement survive but also offer an indirect solution to our growing problems of economic inequality and the catastrophic Great Recession. By leveling the playing field between workers and employers, higher union density decreases wage inequality in the American labor market while increasing purchasing power of consumers.

But the move to pass EFCA failed, revealing just how weak organized labor has become. Now, with no hope for labor law reform in sight, is the time to rethink the role of the labor movement in the 21st century. Progressives need a strong and vibrant labor movement that focuses not just on workers’ rights, but can also act as a democratizing force advancing social justice and expanding worker, citizen and resident power in the workplace and in their communities.

The labor movement is the critical anchor and enabler of democracy grounded on a notion of freedom. Most people have an intuitive understanding of what democracy means: rule by the people (as opposed to rule by the few or an elite). Yet, as Corey Robin so eloquently points out in his book on fear, Americans give up their individual freedom and democratic voice every single day they walk into work. The workplace is an authoritarian dictatorship, and we accept this as legitimate.

Now is the time to challenge that feudal relationship. We need to call into question the assumption that Americans believe democracy stops at the workplace door. If we would not stand for a despot to rule over us with impunity, why do we let the boss do so every day of the workweek? Any progressive advance needs a strong labor movement to achieve a fully free and democratic workplace and society. This vision of freedom and democracy manifests in two domains: the workplace and the southern region of the country.

First, labor’s role must be made much more central at the workplace and in the economy more broadly. Labor can, and should, be a governing co-partner with business and government in the economy. What labor brings to the table is a vision of growth with equity. And there are already examples of this kind of union and worker organizational influence in the economy at the regional level. The Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE) and Working Partnerships USA, both in California, have shown how labor can become a governing partner in economic decision-making at the regional level.

Another aspect of centralizing labor’s role in the economy and advancing workplace democracy is to expand workers’ voice and power at the bargaining table.  A 21st century vision of the American labor movement is one that destroys the divide between labor and community that has long governed the politics and practices of unions. What the emergence of new forms of worker organizations have taught us is that workers are also residents in communities, while residents are also workers, and there are organizational models available that take all workers’ identities into account.

While labor law constricts the scope of issues that unions can negotiate at the workplace, it doesn’t prevent worker organizations from bargaining in the political arena for affordable housing, equitable development, local, regional and national economic policy, criminal justice, or the wide range of issues that affect poor and working class people. Stephen Lerner, among others, has outlined what a wider scope of collective bargaining might look like. Imagine, for instance, that the United Auto Workers could negotiate over the environmental standards of the cars they produce instead of just wages and benefits. Such a vision requires a far-reaching campaign to redefine the scope of collective bargaining and workers’ voices at work. This is a 10- or 20-year effort to be sure, but one that will be crucial to any future the labor movement has in the U.S.

Directly related to expanding labor’s role in the economy and expanding the scope of collective bargaining is advancing freedom in the workplace. In short: democracy, over autocracy, at work. This would go beyond the softer slogan of the AFL-CIO’s “voice at work.” This is an admittedly long-term project. But several concrete demands arise out of the broad notion of a workplace democracy. For instance, the Employee Free Choice Act would have allowed workers a modicum of political liberty at the workplace; it aimed to restore workers’ rights to freedom of association. But a deeper and even more controversial demand proposes an end to management prerogative over all workplace decisions. Workplace democracy means truly giving workers a “voice” at work. Whether through work committees or required seats for employee representatives on the company’s board of directors, a deeper vision of workplace democracy enables workers’ voices to have a real impact.

The second domain for a 21st century labor movement is geographic: finally democratizing the South through the building of a Southern labor movement. After the CIO’s Operation Dixie failed to organize Southern workers in the late 1940s, with a few exceptions mostly in the public sector, organized labor gave up on the South. We’ve been suffering the consequences ever since. The Southern, Walmart model of low-wage labor markets is being imported to the North. We only have to look at the attack on public sector workers in Wisconsin and Michigan and the recent passage of Right-to-Work legislation in Indiana to understand that Northern governors and the Republican Party are trying to turn their states into Yankee versions of Southern Right-to-Work (for less) states.

Instead of retreating to a defensive posture, organized labor should launch an ambitious and bold campaign to organize the South. A Southern labor movement would galvanize workers in the region who, contrary to popular belief, would like to become dues-paying union members. Given the dramatic demographic changes occurring in the South involving increased migrations of people of color who tend to be the most pro-union and pro-worker organization (see the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ recent victory over Trader Joe’s), the opportunity for organizing and building a Southern labor movement is greater today than even 60 years ago under Operation Dixie. This effort would not only transform the low-wage economic model of the South, it would prevent the race to the bottom from North to South, and most important, it would transform the politics of the region and fundamentally the country.

What grounds this vision of a 21st century labor movement is the core idea of extending what Americans claim to cherish in politics and civil society to the workplace: democracy, liberty and freedom. The consolidation of income, wealth and political power by the 1 percent over the last several decades is directly related to the decline of workers’ voice and power. Rebuilding a truly countervailing (and democratic) power, as the labor movement did in the 1930s and 1940s, will require a bold and convincing vision of workplace democracy and freedom. Workers and their organizations have historically played this anchoring role for progressive politics throughout American history. Now is the time to reclaim this historic charge for the 21st century.

Despite the ambiguity of their goals, the Occupy protests have made one point abundantly clear: The mainstream Democratic alternative is paltry stuff. For the most part, Democrats disagree that tax cuts and deregulation are the solution, and instead argue that the state should be used to guarantee equal opportunity. For instance, cheap, publicly available education, job training and affirmative action are all justified on the grounds that each American should have the skills to compete and the labor market should treat everyone equally.

Yet, the two parties differ only on means, not ends. While Republicans profess a more abiding faith in a self-regulating economy, Democrats believe carefully tailored state interventions are needed to ensure equal opportunity.

The question becomes: Equal opportunity for what? For both parties, opportunity basically means a market-oriented ideal where individuals are given the chance to fight over a limited supply of high-status jobs. As it turns out, the end that each party agrees on is largely same: the equal opportunity to become unequal.

Most Democrats and Republicans share a commitment to an inegalitarian, early 21st-century version of social mobility first articulated in the United States by Thomas Jefferson. In a famous letter to John Adams, Jefferson argued that there is a “natural aristocracy amongst men” who are marked by “virtue and talents.”

According to Jefferson, the natural aristocracy was “the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society.” He distinguished this natural aristocracy from the “artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents.” The latter won its power through circumstances and laws that protected the privileges of birth – like laws of primogeniture, or hereditary political positions. Jefferson’s view was seemingly egalitarian: Inherited status, wealth or power is undeserved. But at its heart, this view – let’s call it meritocracy – remained deeply inegalitarian. It favored a society in which the majority were deferential to, even subject to, the power and authority of the naturally talented few.

Republicans and Democrats each pay tribute to this Jeffersonian vision of meritocratic decision-making and political leadership. If anything, Democrats are often even more intent that Republicans in promoting expert authority and professional management.

More generally, both parties agree that equal opportunity means the equal opportunity to rise into the few positions of social power and prestige, or perhaps more broadly, into the economically secure, high earning professions. Call them the 20 percent who control 67 percent of the income and, even more importantly, 85 percent of the wealth.

The apparent egalitarianism of the meritocratic society is a thin veil indeed. The reality of rising poverty and declining social mobility underscores that in practice our “meritocratic” order is hardly fluid. Rather than individuals easily entering and exiting the upper classes based on personal skill, professional status has become an inherited privilege – reproduced from one generation to the next.

But even at its purest, stripped of race or sex-based barriers to advancement and in a setting of fluid inter-generational change, the meritocratic ideal is still aristocracy by a different name. After all, meritocratic success is a zero-sum game. Professional respectability and high-status positions are inherently exclusive domains. For every one person who rises into the top 20 percent, there are four others who by definition fail to make it. In fact, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, of the 20 occupations projected to grow rapidly over next decade, just five require an associate’s degree or more. Just two require a doctorate or professional degree (hat tip Doug Henwood). As a model for society, Jefferson’s “natural aristocracy” does not challenge the permanence of social hierarchy, but instead seeks simply to rearrange its membership.

Still, there is another possible interpretation of equal opportunity that  we can look to. Just before the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln articulated an alternative account of economic improvement: “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while… [This] is free labor.”

Lincoln imagined social mobility as the transition from dependence to independence, or in his terms, from wage-labor to free labor. An economy consistent with this idea had to be organized so that everyone could become economically independent. One person’s success was not another’s failure, because ideally everyone could rise together.  Moreover, this was an ideal of freedom applied not just to politics but to economics. The thought was that a person ought to be free from domination in all spheres of life. As Corey Robin recently put it, Americans have a “visceral hostility to – individual forms of domination.”

This Lincolnian vision is truly egalitarian and highlights precisely what is troubling about the current crisis of social mobility. The problem is not just that we do not to live up to the ideal, but that the underlying ideal is hierarchical, and fails to grasp the way in which we ought to be making it possible for everyone to escape relations of dependence and control.

Today we barely know how to make sense of Lincoln’s vision of social mobility. The thought is not entirely foreign — it haunts our economy in the dream of self-employment or workers cooperatives. But mainstream debate has too quickly accepted Jefferson’s theory, the meritocratic ideal, and argued only about how to realize it. By focusing primarily on the means of social mobility we put the cart before the horse. We argue about the social and economic policies that promote equal opportunity before we figure out what kind of opportunities are important in the first place.

A change in perspective forces us to look differently at wealth and income inequality, and social stagnation. If what we care about is economic independence for all, then we have to think not just about the (very important) topic of wage levels, but above all about social power.

Making such power broadly available rests on two key elements. First, individuals have to possess enough material and cultural resources to be secure from potential destitution. And second, they must have opportunities to make decisions about the most important economic and political issues.

So, minimally, expanding the social power of most Americans means investing in programs like universal health care, which secure citizens from the vicissitudes of nature and the market. But it also means going beyond the politics of social welfare in order to ensure that workers have control over their own activities.

Employees must not only be able to provide for their basic necessities, but also to shape the terms of their work. This latter — equally fundamental — goal is a major reason why “the primary economic objective of the Democratic Party” for decades was once the commitment to full employment. The purpose behind guaranteeing everyone a job was not simply to provide Americans economic security; it was to elevate the overall bargaining power of employees. In an America wherever everyone could find work, employees would have infinitely more control over the structure and rules of the workplace. The shadow of this idea still lingers in proposals like the Employee Free Choice Act and public works programs.

Ultimately, if the market is doing such a bad job at supplying employment in which most Americans can enjoy real economic independence, then it may well be time to look elsewhere. Progressives have a responsibility to think again and more expansively about ideas like workers’ cooperatives and how to promote broader democratic control over investment (for instance, by restructuring corporate governance). Experimentalism should be the order of the day, not cautious reaffirmation of tired nostrums.

But instead, the consensus, bipartisan framework of social mobility primarily offers a language of elite advancement, rather than a vision for widespread independence and social power.  This means that what makes equal opportunity such a mirage is more than just a failure to institute the right policies or to live up to society’s basic principles. We are facing a failure of principle itself. Recent events give us at least some hope that this failure can also become an opportunity to reimagine what equal freedom means in America.