Louis Brandeis's vision of what it takes to create an engaged citizenry went far beyond voting rights, touching on leisure, regulation, and the welfare state.

During the Independence Day celebrations of 1915, Louis Brandeis was invited to give the prestigious Fourth of July Oration at Boston's Faneuil Hall. Brandeis was already a towering figure in the progressive movement, driving minimum wage reforms as a practicing lawyer, pioneering the use of social science research in legal advocacy, and serving as the chief intellectual architect of the 1912 "New Freedom" campaign by Woodrow Wilson (who would later appoint Brandeis to the Supreme Court). In this famous speech, which Brandeis called "True Americanism" (full text here), he provided a compelling vision of democracy, freedom, and pluralism, outlining themes that continue to resonate with core progressive values. The speech revolved around two key elements. He portrayed citizenship as more than just voting or civility. Rather, he said, it is fundamentally about sharing in the project of governance -- a view of citizenship that requires policies and institutions to thrive. He also emphasized the economic dimensions of citizenship: both as a right of all individuals to a level of economic wellbeing, and as an obligation for each of us to make public policies that provide those economic necessities.

Brandeis opened his speech by noting the diversity of American citizenship: America, unlike other countries, welcomed the inclusion of immigrants and thrived on diversity. This uniquely "inclusive brotherhood" recognized equality regardless of race, gender, or country of origin, and saw such equality "as an essential of full human liberty and true brotherhood, and...[as] a complement of democracy." America's greatness, for Brandeis, stemmed in part from its commitment to the belief that "in differentiation, not in uniformity, lies the path of progress." This was the central foundation of democracy: the belief that "all men are equally entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," and the "conviction that such equal opportunity will most advance civilization." This democratic faith sought progress in diversity and the drive of ordinary people rather than relying on an aristocratic faith in the "principle of the superman."

But Americanism for Brandeis also meant accepting a substantive view of human freedom. This ideal of freedom served two purposes: it offered a set of values that knit together an otherwise diverse populace, and it implied a particular vision of the good society that was built to expand and foster the capacities of citizens themselves, thereby ensuring the very progress that Brandeis saw possible in a diverse democratic society. American ideals, then, meant "the development of the individual for his own and the common good" through the promotion of "democracy and social justice." Freedom thus meant more than just the negative freedom from interference by the state. It also meant freedom "in things industrial as well as political" and the fostering of opportunities for meaningful participation in the political, social, and economic life of the country. On this view of freedom, self-fulfillment could come "only through the full development and utilization of one's faculties."

This view of freedom and fulfillment thus implied a particular configuration of social, political, and economic arrangements designed to foster each individual to make full use of his or her abilities. In particular, Brandeis outlined several elements required to realize this vision.

First, he defended the importance of an inclusive franchise, giving individuals the opportunity to partake in the central political issues facing the country. But the franchise was only one of the necessary elements.

The second element was a robust welfare state. "In order that men may live and not merely exist," argued Brandies, they must have education, regular employment yielding "reasonable income," and health care: "the essentials of American citizenship are not satisfied by supplying merely the material needs or wants of every worker." Further, citizens needed insulation from "sickness, accident, invalidity, superannuation, unemployment," or "financial losses" -- thus "the standard worthy to be called American implies some system of social insurance."

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Third, citizenship required leisure. In stark contrast to the anxieties around contemporary defenses of the welfare state, Brandeis argued that leisure was essential to human fulfillment and was a worthy goal for the welfare state. "But leisure," he warned, "does not imply idleness. It means the ability to work...at some thing besides breadwinning. Leisure, so defined, is an essential of successful democracy."

Fourth, citizenship required the extensive regulation of concentrated private power. Citizens in a successful democracy must be free, and they could not be free so long as they were "dependent industrially upon the arbitrary will of another." Thus, "some curb must be placed on overweening industrial power," in particular on the threats posed by the vast economic and financial power of trusts. These constraints on private power required both external government regulation and internal empowerment of workers themselves as co-participants in the governance of these private firms: "control and cooperation are both essential to industrial liberty."

In this brief account of American citizenship, Brandeis outlined a vision that offers significant lessons for progressives today. This is not to say that Brandeis or his contemporaries had all the answers. Indeed, Progressive Era reformers of the early twentieth century were notorious for their Victorian sensibilities, often favoring the interests of white, middle-class, male Americans over others. Nevertheless, the thinking and rhetoric of key Progressive Era intellectuals like Brandeis paints a picture of progressive politics and of American citizenshp more broadly than ours. In many ways it is more compelling and more substantive than much of contemporary political rhetoric.

Inclusion is central to citizenship, but it requires more than formal inclusion in the franchise. Inclusion was not just a value in the abstract for Brandeis; it was also a central driver of progress. It rested on a commitment to progress through the empowerment of all individuals, rather than through an "aristocratic" faith in superhuman individuals. By contrast, too much of contemporary discourse speaks of inclusion and opportunity, but valorizes the particular unique genius and capabilities of a few select individuals -- from Steve Jobs to Alan Greenspan or even to Barack Obama. Rather than seeking such heroic ideals in business, expertise, or political leadership, progressives should focus on unleashing of every individual's talents and capacities.

This unleashing of individual capacities -- and in turn the larger social progress that arises from it -- requires a sustained and coherent set of reforms across all policy areas designed to protect individuals and unleash their capacities to innovate, to create, and ultimately to lead fulfilling lives. These reforms would expand the ability of individuals to participate in both political and economic decision-making. They would also expand the scope for individual leisure, giving people the space to engage in fulfilling activities in both the public and private arenas. They would constrain the ability of private actors to interfere with these individual capacities. This approach makes citizenship more than a mere exhortation to civility or virtue; it is instead something that has to be fostered and sustained through extensive political, social, and economic reform.

Brandeis's vision of citizenship is ultimately shaped by a sense of active humility, rather than passive exceptionalism. While the values he articulated are powerful and important, they are aspirational, demanding extensive action to make them a reality. In the final moments of his speech, he alluded to the great conflict in World War I Europe, calling for a universal commitment to this vision of democracy and economic wellbeing as a route to world peace. But he also warned his audience that America did not possess a monopoly on rightness, but rather must work to promote these ideals through its own example.

Sabeel Rahman is a Roosevelt Institute Fellow, a PhD candidate in Political Theory at Harvard University, and a JD candidate at Harvard Law School.

Liberals aren't seeking a limitless welfare state, but the right balance between competing approaches.

Breakthrough Journal, which I predicted would offer a significant contribution to the political debate when it launched last summer, has doubled down on expectations by publishing a companion to their challenging  "Modernizing Liberalism" article from the first issue with "Modernizing Conservatism" by the Reagan biographer and AEI scholar Steven Hayward. The path forward for the country won't be found just by identifying some middle ground between two unyielding ideologies or some magical third way. It will be found by creating some real conversation among people who are fully engaged in reevaluating the future of their own assumptions.

The editors of Breakthrough invited my comments on Hayward's essay, which I tried to offer in a respectful spirit, although of course I'm not a conservative and conservatives don't need my advice. Hayward's main point was that conservatives should back down from the "starve the beast" strategy of cutting taxes and hoping that government will shrink as a result and acknowledge that they aren't going to crush liberalism forever. But before conservatives can make those compromises (which seem more like common sense than compromise), Hayward insists that liberals would have to back down from our aspiration to extend the "welfare state" to infinity.

I had a couple of comments on Hayward's first points, which you can read at the site, but the main point of disagreement, particularly in his reply to me, had to do with the question of whether liberalism's aspirations for the welfare state are limitless. This is worth digging into at length because it's quickly becoming a major theme on the right. William Voegeli of the Claremont Institute has written an entire book, which Hayward draws on extensively, contending that liberalism knows no limits, that for us progress is "Never Enough." It's the central premise of Mitt Romney's new stump speech, which argues that Obama's "entitlement society" economic policies have as their goal "equality of outcomes," rather than "equality of opportunity," and won't stop until they (we) achieve that radical leveling. This is the central charge in the economic culture war: As Hayward puts it, "the absence of any principled limit to the reach of egalitarianism is implicit -- and occasionally explicit -- in modern liberalism. The insatiable egalitarian impulse is only held in check by practical politics, not by any discernible principle."

Here's Hayward's killer piece of evidence: That liberals once talked about "comparable worth" -- that is, a system to adjust pay scales to reduce discrimination based on job classifications. "The idea almost made the 1984 Democratic platform," he says. That's it? An idea that didn't make it into a party platform 28 years ago proves that we're boundless egalitarians? (Actually, it was endorsed in the 1984 platform, and several states were implementing comparable worth standards for public employee job classifications without controversy. But it died such a quick death that most people under 40 have probably never heard of the idea.)

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It's really a pretty good example of where liberalism finds its limits, and why the process of finding those boundaries makes liberalism such a vital and adaptive political philosophy. Employment discrimination was and is a real problem, and formal job classification systems that systematically underpaid women were part of it. The market wasn't getting rid of this discrimination any more than the market eliminated racial discrimination before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A number of ideas were on the table, some of which worked. (Collective bargaining turned out to be a good way to fix discriminatory job classifications.) Ultimately, most liberals decided that a formal, government-mandated system of classifying the "worth" of different occupational categories across the private sector would be a solution worse than the problem. (I remember that being my view, even as a naïve college student at the time.) Liberalism is always about finding the right boundary between market and state, public and private, fairness and liberty. The process of considering and rejecting an idea like comparable worth is the process of finding that boundary.

Hayward would say that's not a "principled" limit. A principled limit presumably would be obvious and not argued about. But what's the principled limit to libertarian conservatism? Is it the minimal "watchman state"? I know that in practice most conservatives don't go that far, but why not? Part of the answer is "practical politics," as Hayward says of liberalism. But what's wrong with practical politics? In a functioning democracy (which ours, in which money plays a huge role and institutional quirks such as the filibuster play an outsized role, is not), ordinary politics -- elections, debates, fights over values, legislative struggles -- are a perfectly valid or even ideal way of defining the limits of the governing party's philosophy. We even internalize the limits of practical politics. For example, I've never been a supporter of single-payer health care, and most of the liberal wonks I know haven't been either. If pressed on the point by one of the few single-payer supporters I know, I can't give a very good answer on policy grounds. I understand that single-payer would be fairer, more efficient, and would lift the burden of health insurance costs from employers. But it's never going to happen and so I don't waste much time or energy on it. That's a limitation on my aspirations imposed by practical politics, but it's no less real a limit.

Egalitarianism (of opportunity) is one element of liberalism, but it's not the only one. Democratic practice is part of it, too, so the limits of practical politics are real -- not just the way we achieve other social goals, but an end in themselves. It's why making democracy work better is more than just a process concern. At the end of my comments on Hayward's essay, I suggested that the key to "modernizing conservatism" would be for conservatives to rejoin the democratic process, to get over the all-or-nothing impulse that led them to opt out of the health care debate entirely, or to attempt "nullification," to use James Fallows' word, of laws already passed. Hayward, like Romney, is basically saying that no real debate or compromise will ever be possible, that we face a pure clash of irreconcilable worldviews. That's simply not true of modern liberalism, and it shouldn't be true of conservatism either.

Mark Schmitt is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Fellows Program at the Roosevelt Institute.

The Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network may be on over 100 college campuses, working with over 10,000 students, but it started just seven years ago. To celebrate that meteoric success, it put together this video:

As Hilary Doe, National Director, says of the motive behind starting the Campus Network, "Young people were asked for their blood and their sweat and their tears, but not their ideas." The Campus Network changed all of that. What does it do instead? As the video puts it, "We build progressive leaders for tomorrow and we build better policy for today."

It's been an exciting seven years, which saw the creation of the Blueprint for the Millennial America, the Budget for Millennial America, the Roosevelt Institute | Pipeline, and so much more. The next seven years stand to be even better.

Politicians who fail to truly engage with Millennials, rather than simply ask them for money, will inevitably fail.

When he was sworn into office in 2009, President Obama had an advantage no other president ever had: an e-mail list of more than 13 million Americans who were engaged, excited, and eager to communicate directly with the White House. Remember the first message they sent to that list? I do. It was a few months after the election and I was ready to get to work. My sleeves were rolled up. And the first e-mail… asked me for a donation.

I was thrilled when Barack Obama won the 2008 election, not so much for the legislation he might pass, but for the potential of a community organizer president leading a generation of grassroots builders ready for action. I envisioned Organizing for America as a new millennial organizing tool, carrying on the principles that Obama professed to stand for and serving as a coherent platform for small-scale organizing projects around the country.

When the administration was working on the Affordable Care Act, OFA could have encouraged an army of young progressives to build projects that have real impact on health outcomes in their own communities. When the administration turned to jobs, OFA could have focused a million creative minds on finding local solutions, like community full employment projects or groups working to support local businesses. OFA could have been part of a new online participatory system of democracy, supported by a government that sought citizen’s participation beyond ubiquities requests for financial support. Instead, it became a fundraising tool.

This missed opportunity gets to the root of a very real generational shift in how politics works -- one that will overwhelm politicians who don’t get on board. The Millennial generation is a generation of builders, joiners, and doers. We are also the most ethnically diverse and by far the most technologically advanced generation in American history. To engage with us in a meaningful way, politicians need to be doing more then polling us for ideas: they need to be vesting us with the power to make our own decisions, engaging us as equals, and trusting us to build instead of simply donate. The policymakers who figure out how to engage us will be political winners for decades.

We stand on the edge of one of the inevitable great swings in American political history. As the pendulum heads back to a progressive vision of government that is useful and important, we need to be building progressive systems that support that vision. The left has been out-thought, out-spent, and out-organized for years. The only way to counter that reality is for progressives to find new ways to engage and to become engaged.

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FDR addressed his generation's failures of government with a progressive solution. Governing as a true technocrat, he put people with great ideas into positions within a central government, decentralizing power and empowering those creative minds to come up with real solutions. In 2012, politicians can create a new definition of what it means to be progressive by using the web to create a decentralized organizing tool. By so doing, they can make the case that government is useful and that we as citizens can be trusted and engaged in fundamentally meaningful ways.

To alter the face of a political system that is dominated by corporate interests and fundraising bottom lines, my generation must be builders. We need platforms for sharing information and forums for the local brainstorming that drives so much in our giant, multipronged government. Direct lines of communication can mobilize people around the issues that actually concern them.

Turning an entire network loose on the problems that we face as a nation might not be clean and efficient. It would often be ungainly and probably hard to control. As we learn every day at the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network, there are many situations in which grassroots networks take you in surprising and unpredictable directions. But, unlike Congress, networks get things done. They build leaders and they build loyalty (two things that the Obama administration could really use right now in the under-35 demographic).

This model would support the political system that nurtures it. There is a "general and longstanding trend" that people who are civically engaged tend to be more involved in electoral politics, according to Matthew Diemer, associate professor of education at Michigan State University. Diemer researches civic engagement among low-income youth, and his recent study concludes they are generally "more apt to vote if they are engaged in political activism and influenced by friends and family."

Today's politicians must realize that if they only turn to us for fundraising, they will turn off many of the young progressives who want to work for campaigns that seek their opinions and engagement as OFA did during the election. But you can't plant a grassroots movement, neglect to water it for three years, and expect it to spring back to life.

There's still a good chance that Obama will win reelection in 2012, but if he wants to make real progress in his second term, he needs to recognize that the age of Internet organizing can be about so much more than filling a campaign war chest. It needs to be more than that for a progressive vision of government to take hold. And speaking for my generation, I say: You can't control us. You might just have to trust us.

Alan Smith is the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network's National Program Director.