The arc of my public life—as a progressive advocate, politician, lawyer, and author—roughly tracks the political arc of the country from the 1960s to 2016. So I write this “generational memoir” not because I’m the but rather a boomer who’s traveled this personal and political journey, working with some of the greatest liberals and against some the most talented conservatives of this era. I’ll occasionally provide profiles of these “forces of nature” who have moved the needle of history.
The core premise of Bright, Infinite Future is that there’s a rising progressive majority and era in this country due to a combination of demographic and social trends and a Republican lurch from the mainstream to the extreme.
Political memoirs, however, often disappoint because public figures have an inner press secretary, to use Jonathan Haidt’s metaphor in The Righteous Mind, warning them away from risky, vote-losing, donor-offending Bulworthian candor. But to keep my wife and sanity, I’m now done with electoral politics and free to be candid about politicians of all persuasions—and myself.
Especially myself. I’ve made law and made mistakes and I’ve lost to enough major figures—Michael Bloomberg, Chuck Schumer, Andrew Cuomo, and Bill de Blasio—that I began to think that someone couldn’t rise in New York politics unless they got by me first. But I learned valuable if expensive lessons about what it’s like and what it takes to succeed in the public arena, lessons I want to share in Bright, Infinite Future.
Books about contentious issues in this very polarized time can easily slip into two genres: either false symmetry passing for thoughtfulness—well, both sides do it—or the partisan hysteria seen in big-selling books with titles that are synonyms for traitor followed by an exclamation mark. I’m aiming instead for a blend of memoir and manifesto—call it evidence-based advocacy.
People born before 1945 or after 1961 may plausibly wonder about my linkage of the Sixties to today. “Arrgh, yet more boomer hubris?” Well, every affinity group seeks some uniqueness to give their lives special meaning as part of a larger whole. In my view, the Sixties constitutes the Consequential Generation. It’s pretty remarkable how the creativity and values of that decade—liberally stretching from the sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, and John F. Kennedy’s defeat of Richard Nixon in 1960 to Nixon’s resignation in August 1974—have gestated so many positive ideas that are becoming public policy. These are now echoing in the 2016 national election and will for years to come. True, short of H. G. Wells, there’s no going back to Che T-shirts, but Earth Day connects to the 2015 Paris Climate Summit just as Dr. King connects to #BlackLivesMatter.
In my view, if liberal values were a stock, now is the time to buy. Read on to find out why.
Mark Green