This post is a follow up to a conversation initiated by Doc Searls.

When it comes to politics, new language and new thinking are different things. Whatever new language progressives used in 2004 failed to change the electoral outcome, and at most it’ll help them eke out a few victories in the coming years. New language is like changing the window treatment, not the window, not the view, not the perspective.

What’s required for social change, and it could come from either party, is the kind of political realignment we get once every 50 years. Such realignment pulls a sizeable majority from the vast non-ideological, sensible middle of the political spectrum, and creates a real mandate for fundamental social change. Like those that FDR and LBJ presided over. Like the universal health care and campaign finance reform that we need now.

America may well be approaching another such tipping point. To actually tip, we need a core unifying idea to rally around, and equally we need a name for the situation we’ll no longer put up with. For the unifying idea I suggest the slogan “Dignity For All.” (The bumper sticker goes ‘Dignity4All’ and they’re being created by a woman in Kansas.) The constellation of behaviors and practices “up with which we will not put” all fall under the heading of rankism.

Rankism is defined as abuse of the power inherent in rank. It’s the culprit. It’s the cause of indignity. It’s the source of the most vexing political problems troubling Americans, from Katrina to Abu Ghraib to corporate corruption to bought politicians and elections. But most disturbingly, it is the cause of the emergence of an entrenched class locked in permanent poverty. America without the American Dream is not America … and the Dream is fast becoming a mirage. This trend must be reversed, and it’s going to take once-a-generation political realignment to do it.

The goal then is to build a dignity movement that provides grassroots support for democracy to make its next evolutionary step. In the sixties the step we needed was to overcome racism; in the seventies we trained our sights on sexism; now the challenge is to target rankism—in all its guises. And they are many: bully bosses, sexually abusive clerics, professors who “borrow” research results from graduate students or exploit them as assistants, politicians who threaten privacy and liberty, condescending doctors, arrogant bureaucrats, coaches who humiliate players. Wherever there is a hierarchy, it’s susceptible to abuse by power-holders of high rank.

But neither rank nor hierarchy are inherently, necessarily abusive. Actually, we admire, even love, people who earn high rank and handle it with grace and respect for those they outrank. What we cannot abide, what causes indignity, is abuse of rank. In a word, rankism. And we do need a word. It wasn’t until the women’s movement had the word “sexism” at its disposal that it made the gains it’s now known for: equal pay for equal work; the right to choose; Title IX, etc.

To bring about social change, it’s not enough to know what you’re for; you also have to know what you’re against. The dignity movement is for a dignitarian (not an egalitarian) society and it is against rankism.

That’s it in a nutshell. Like any far-reaching analysis of social justice, the full story is a longer, more complex one. This web site is a primer on the dignity movement. There’s a 1 minute video for those in a hurry. The full treatment (interpersonal and institutional rankism and how to confront them) can be found in my book All Rise.

The goal is to make rankism as defendable as racism has become, which is to say, not very. It didn’t used to affect your career advancement to be identified as racist or sexist, but now it stops you in your tracks. As the dignity movement gains momentum, it will be equally disadvantageous to be known as rankist. If you’re interested in joining the movement to help us bring that day closer, please let us know.

Progressive economist Jared Bernstein has written an article about economic policy that has strong affinities with Fuller’s position on dignity as a unifying value for the Democratic party. The article is reprinted below with permission.

The YOYO Handcuffs
By Jared Bernstein

Here’s a test: name one economic policy, other than tax cuts, associated with outgoing Treasury Secretary John Snow.

Give up?

Now think about this: what is the economic policy of the Bush administration? What about the Congress? What about the Democrats?

If all you could come up is that the first two aforementioned groups want to cut rich people’s taxes, I’m with you. Beyond that, none of the above has offered a coherent strategy for meeting America’s economic challenges.

And these problems are prodigious: global economic competition; 46 million people lacking health insurance; the seemingly inexorable climb of inequality; obscene CEO compensation packages totally unrelated to performance; an economy that’s doing fine, until you consider the people in it.

Each of these problems needs concerted thought and action. But while the administration’s new nominee for Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, is certainly an able economist, he will likely be as ineffectual as was Secretary Snow.

There’s a reason why the nation’s economic policymakers are suffering from a deficit of ideas: It’s YOYO economics.

YOYO is an acronym for “You’re on your own,” and it is the guiding light of economic policy as practiced today. The idea is that no matter what the problem is, the solution is less government and more markets.  You’ve seen many examples of YOYOism in action, but here’s a primer:

Problem: The looming health care crisis.

YOYO solution: individualized Health Savings Accounts, designed to create better “health care shoppers.”

Problem: The economic insecurity associated with globalization.

YOYO solution: more education. If you’re not smart enough to compete with cheaper, skilled workers abroad, well, “you’re on your own.”

Problem: Solvency in your old age.

YOYO solution: Try your hand in the stock market with a private account.

And underlying all of this is the biggest YOYO tactic of all: cut taxes to the point where government is forced to contract so there’s no question of an activist agenda. If you can enrich your donors along the way…well, then it’s a “twofer.”

The problem is, as is becoming undeniably clear, YOYOism doesn’t work. It failed lethally in New Orleans. It’s done nothing to stop the growth of the uninsured, the rise in poverty, the decline in median earnings (i.e., the real earnings of the typical worker, down 2% over the recovery, while productivity is up 15%), nor the rise in the profit share of national income, now at a 39-year high.  The public rejected it with the failure of the Bush-push to privatize Social Security, and now the polls show deep dissatisfaction with the president’s management of the economy.

There’s a countervailing message rising out of the anxiety generated by the new economy:

“Policy makers, work with us. We’re in this together. Rebuild a government that we can believe in, and we will do so. Conceive and articulate an agenda that harnesses the tremendous capacity, skill, and flexibility of our economy to meet the challenges. Instead of creating 300 million individual risk-bearing silos, let’s pool risk though universal health insurance coverage and a strengthened pension system. Let’s build an ambitious public/private partnership with the goal of energy independence to replace the jobs and wages lost to globalization.”

You have to strain to hear this message, but it’s there. It is, however, in desperate need of amplification.  The new treasury secretary can’t help–his hands are tied by YOYO ideology. So the question is: who will step up and amplify this liberating message?

Disciplinarian parents who ignore the viewpoint of their children may be contributing to the obesity epidemic. The tentative explanation is that children overeat to cope with stress. Parents who set out rules, but listened to their children and provided them with a sense of security, had children with the fewest weight problems.

There’s a lesson for society as a whole here. Subjecting the most vulnerable members of society to constant insecurity isn’t an incentive to try harder, it’s an incentive to find ways to alleviate the stress. No matter what obesity-pundits say, food is an effective and cheap way of reducing stress. Business and government are currently being obliged to adjust to the reality of inceasing rates of obesity. The efforts seem to be focused on setting more controls: deprive people of food, berate the character of people who have “let themselves go”, and bemoan “addiction” on all the afternoon talk shows. Perhaps instead of spending all this time and money on damage control, which seems to be rife with humiliations that will only make the problem worse, people should consider providing more checks on rankism. Allowing open season to abuse the most vulnerable members of society has resulted in a tremendous cost, and the bills are now coming due.

In a time when half of all U.S. bankruptcies are caused by overwhelming medical bills by predatory hospitals, it’s important for patients to understand their rights. Thankfully there are also lawsuits afoot to curb the practice of price-gouging the uninsured. Is there any greater rankism than business syndicates that take advantage of their power over medical treatment, maintaining control over decisions that could have life and death consequences?

In the U.S., nothing brings out the policy wonks like the subject of health care. The profits of the health care industry have been soaring, while the legions of uninsured has reached a staggering 48 million.

One under-explored angle on this problem is the culture of rankism that infects the medical community and plagues the major health care organizations in the U.S. While Britain has engaged the medical community in a public discussion of physician-on-physician bullying, similar concerns in the U.S. have been downplayed. However, the U.S. public is slowly coming to realize that dysfunctional administration profoundly influences the delivery of health care and leads to many unnecessary deaths every year.

Interestingly, the controversy over investment in a national EMR, has opened a wedge between traditional physician interest groups and the advancement of technology, which has allowed a few mavericks to break ranks and debunk the myths that have granted the MDeities fate-making powers over those in need of medical care.

Mounting evidence of medical student abuse (particularly in regard to women), suggest that subjection to hazing in medical school shapes physician attitudes about rank and entitlement later in their career. As long as rankist practices and traditions remained hidden behind the cloak of “professional matters”, there could be no public comment on the gross social and organizational distortions created by physician culture. Now, as the death toll mounts, it has become evident that medical student abuse and endemic rankism in health care organizations are problems that demand public attention and legislative oversight.

When the mainstream media began covering ghostwriting in medical journals, the chief concern was that writers were being paid by business interests and would thus omit any unfavorable evidence that might interfere with product promotions. I’d like to raise an additional concern about how this practice contributes to rankism in the field of medical science. For instance:

…a University of Arizona professor listed as the lead author of a Vioxx article in 2003 said he had little to do with the research in it.

While Vioxx got a boost from using the name of a well-known authority, the professor also increased his own reputation and power by gaining publication credit for an article he didn’t write. This unearned power and authority could be used to attract funding and investments, secure promotions and important advisory positions, increase leverage for further publication deals, and use resource re-distribution to control the fates of students, junior associates, and other hangers-on.

Part of democracy’s next step is to recognize that treating someone’s reputation as a commodity will lead to expanding their unearned power and increasing their potential for engaging in rankism.

When George Washington University barred a depressed student from campus and attempted to intimidate him into withdrawing from school, the legal wonks immediately questioned why university administrators were even given access to this student’s private medical information.

Furthermore, a school policy of amputating the depressed is not only inherently cruel, it’s an abdication of any responsibility that the school itself had in fostering conditions that might produce depression. Anyone who has ever been a student at a major university can probably recite a litany of frustrating, contradictory, and downright wrong experiences that occured there. Often the only thing separating successful students from those who fall through the cracks is the existence of an outside social safety net. In other words, punishing a student for being depressed may amount to an act of class violence.

Perhaps someone should send the GWU administrators an anonymous copy of The Beach.

In the ultimate betrayal of the country he pretends to lead, Bush used the health care crisis as a pretext to create the mother of all tax shelters for his rich cronies. Before Bush deprives workers of employee-sponsored health insurance and devastates the safety net for the most vulnerable members of our society, find your nearest community meeting on health care and make your voice heard!

While this study of heart disease factors focuses on marital relations, it seems likely it would apply to any social or working relationship where people need to cooperate with each other for an extended period of time.

According to a study conducted last year by the American Association of Critical Care Nurses fewer than 10% of health care providers speak up when they witness medical mistakes. The other 90% feared that raising concerns would provoke retaliation. Countering rankism is vital for fostering a culture of safety in the health care arena.