Tag: Progressivism

Yet among the flaws on Bernie’s resume for many progressives is an unalterable one — he is a white male, and an old one without a cute Spanish nickname. The straight, cisgendered Sanders is burdened by his utter lack of intersectionality, unless being a Vermont senator from Brooklyn counts. Sanders cited the famous Martin Luther King Jr. quote about judging people by the content of their character and replied: “We have got to look at candidates, you know, not by the color of their skin, not by their sexual orientation or their gender and not by their age. Neera Tanden, of the Center for American Progress, thundered, “At a time where folks feel under attack because of who they are, saying race or gender or sexual orientation or identity doesn’t matter is not off, it’s simply wrong.” Former Hillary Clinton aide Jess McIntosh added, “This is usually an argument made by people who don’t enjoy outsized respect and credibility because of their race, gender, age and sexual orientation.” Stephen Colbert snarked, “Yes, like Dr. King, I have a dream — a dream where this diverse nation can come together and be led by an old white guy.” But what Sanders is getting at here should be completely uncontroversial. Of course it is important that we look beyond the demographic characteristics of candidates, to their views and their merits. Do we want to live in a society where no one can represent people different from them? By this logic, given a choice between South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and Bernie Sanders for president, progressives would want all African-Americans to vote for the black Republican (of course, in that scenario, many progressives would pronounce Scott “not really black”). Bobby Kennedy, lionized for his unifying campaigning, would be retroactively deemed just another straight white male. Anyone who looks at, say, Steve Forbes and Bernie Sanders and thinks, “Oh, just a couple of white guys” is disregarding every political and philosophical difference in favor of a racialist reductionism. Today, though, Bernie is not race- and sex-obsessed enough for the identity-politics hall monitors of the Democratic Party.

A friend in a very blue part of the country recently sent me an email describing his experience with much younger progressives singing the praises of rising political stars Beto O’Rourke and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. What matters is who they are — young, hip, fresh, unencumbered – and how they talk. Reminds me of a dinner party my wife and I attended in 2008 after Barack Obama announced his presidential candidacy. I listened to them and then asked if anyone had actually met Obama or dealt with him. I had known Obama, though, for many years and had helped conduct a training course that he attended before he began a short, uninspired few years in organizing. I said that he was smart, reflective, and skilled at speaking, just as he appeared to be. I described to my dinner companions how several of my colleagues from Chicago met with then-Sen. Obama in Washington about local issues and asked if he would consider returning and running for mayor. The left’s tendency to latch on to the next charismatic persona, even if he or she has little or no track record of accomplishment, is again in full bloom. When I’m asked who I prefer for president, I always say “Lincoln” and then explain that I want someone like Lincoln, who has proven that he or she can succeed in something other than politics and has demonstrated effective action in politics. She responded by affording them “an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.” We don’t need another charismatic Democrat or plutocratic Republican or politically naïve corporate titan to run for president.

Hours after being sworn into the House, Rashida Tlaib was heard saying, "We're gonna impeach" President Trump. What can we do to build on these victories and produce more in this year's elections — and in 2020? We must assess this broad strategy ourselves, for most of today's mainline political analysts focus solely on "candidate politics." Obviously, we need information about the principals who are asking for our votes, but too much "focus on the candidate" pushes America's election story into the swirling shallows of gossip and puffery while ignoring the bigger, more significant story in 2018: movement politics. Thus, the media reduce our nation's vital democratic exercise to comic-book buzzwords like "blue wave" and "red wall," trivializing the extraordinary efforts of the multitudes who are striving to create a progressive future. New York Times commentator Frank Bruni, for example, even consulted a Harvard professor of evolutionary psychology to develop his novel grasp of last year's voter behavior ("Politics aren't pretty. But politicians are," Nov. 20). Normally a smart guy, he veered off into the psycho-pop ditch, writing after the election that the meteoric rise of such progressive candidates as Andrew Gillum in Florida, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York and Beto O'Rourke in Texas was attributable to a political quality they share: They're "hot," the scribe explained. Apparently, the lesson we should take from these candidates is to prioritize hunkiness and gorgeousness in recruiting future progressive candidates. Grassroots participants and some of us less prominent pundits would argue that in 2018, progressive forces prioritized a very different kind of political beauty: genuine democratic populism.

Progressives have some intellectual and moral work to do. What are cast as political challenges to liberals and the left are also philosophical problems. All politics is about identity in some way, since all of us think of ourselves as, well, something. To use an example I am especially familiar with: I’m a reasonably well-off white male liberal who grew up in a middle-class family in a working-class city in Massachusetts where Catholicism and trade unions were important parts of life. This limited tour of my political psyche is the sort of exercise all of us can engage in. This alone makes the war on identity a non-starter among progressives and Democrats. On the left, the word “intersectionality” has gained popularity as it deals with the cross-cutting effects of race, gender and class, and there is no doubt that progressive politics will, of necessity, be intersectional. But beyond buzz words, progressives must find a politics that links worker rights with civil rights, racial and gender justice with social justice more broadly. In his book “Modernity and Its Discontents,” Yale political scientist Steven B. Smith offered this in an essay on the philosopher Isaiah Berlin: “Identities are not just things we have, they define who we are. If I am only for myself, what am I?” Hillel was not a political consultant, but his balanced approach remains sound, electorally as well as morally.

WASHINGTON — Progressives have some intellectual and moral work to do. What are cast as political challenges to liberals and the left are also philosophical problems. It's a question joined most pointedly in arguments over "identity politics." All politics is about identity in some way, since all of us think of ourselves as, well, something. To use an example I am especially familiar with: I'm a reasonably well-off white male liberal who grew up in a middle-class family in a working-class city in Massachusetts where Catholicism and trade unions were important parts of life. This limited tour of my political psyche is the sort of exercise all of us can engage in. This alone makes the war on identity a non-starter among progressives and Democrats. On the left, the word "intersectionality" has gained popularity as it deals with the cross-cutting effects of race, gender and class, and there is no doubt that progressive politics will, of necessity, be intersectional. But beyond buzz words, progressives must find a politics that links worker rights with civil rights, racial and gender justice with social justice more broadly. In his book "Modernity and Its Discontents," Yale political scientist Steven B. Smith offered this in an essay on the philosopher Isaiah Berlin: "Identities are not just things we have, they define who we are.

The “yellow vest” riots in Paris should alarm Democrats, especially the new progressive governors in blue states like California. Fuel would be more expensive, people would drive less or more thoughtfully, and the problem would be solved, tout de suite! So now enters the next governor of California, champion of sanctuary cities and San Francisco’s drug-addicted sidewalk defecators, and a promiser of higher taxes, father of the California’s budget-busting single-payer health care proposal, building his own wall against climate change. California has highest marginal income tax rate of the states, 13.3 percent. And apparently not the top 1 percent who make 24 percent of the income and pay 48 percent of the taxes. But what about the other 59 percent, the middle-income earners who pay 50 percent of the taxes, high property and sales taxes, and are increasingly unable to buy a home or even afford rent? This was apparently because Newsom as governor promised to raise taxes even further. Veiled in a tax conversation during the gubernatorial campaign were promises of higher spending, a single-payer health plan and feigned indifference to repealing property tax limits. Gov.-elect Newsom clearly might think he has a mandate to continue a high spending progressive agenda, but when might the yellow vests come out? Just about the time Newsom is getting comfortable in the governor’s chair, people will be reminded that they cannot deduct those huge California income or property taxes on the federal tax forms.

Outgoing U.S. Rep. Michael Capuano says he knew even before his eventual successor Ayanna Pressley challenged him in the September primary that this year’s election was going to be a tough one for him. But he dismissed the notion that he was targeted by voters hungry for change during a WBUR interview that aired Tuesday. “It’s whoever was in office in a place that has progressives. And that’s fine. That’s not a problem to me.” The 10-term incumbent garnered 41.4 percent of the vote to Pressley’s 58.6 percent amid an election cycle that catapulted a wave of women, people of color, and Democrats into Congress. Capuano, reflecting on his loss, said this week that voters are angry and upset with the direction of the country under President Donald Trump. He heard that anger from constituents, and, although it wasn’t directed toward him specifically, “when that happens, you have a tough opponent,” he said. “My hope is that it ends up something positive,” Capuano told WBUR. “My hope is that the people who came out to vote for the first time or one of the few times from this primary continue to vote and learn these issues and figure out how to actually change the system. “There’s nothing wrong with new blood, but it has to be balanced as well with people that have been around, that know the history of what has happened, know the internal relationships between people, know what you can do and what you can’t do.

“To put it simply, we need to argue our case – every forum, every opportunity,” Albanese said on Thursday night. “Conducting politics in an echo chamber does nothing to advance a progressive agenda”. The speech examined political disruption and what he termed “the new politics”, particularly the polarisation now evident in political systems around the world. That's what normal people do – the ones we need in politics | Joanna Nilson Read more “The polarisation in global politics has seen the demise of many of the historically successful progressive political parties such as France’s Socialist Party, Pasok in Greece, the Partito Democratico in Italy, the Social Democrats in Germany and many other affiliates of the Socialist International,” Albanese said. “The disruption of economic change in these economies has incubated a group of people who are angry that change has not benefited them, and opportunist politicians such as Donald Trump have found an audience from those looking for answers as to why their expectations of quality of life have not been met”. He said on the progressive side of politics, “some have retreated into the comfort zone”, aided by social media, with algorithms designed “to encourage people to engage with the content of people who share their world view”. Albanese said the disrupted environment discouraged problem solving and championed the expression of feelings. He said increasingly, compromise and searching for outcomes were seen as weakness. “Alternative views are not just dismissed, they are not even considered”. “This creates a shock when the outcomes of elections are not what was anticipated, the most notable of which is the election of Donald Trump as US president.

It’s fashionable to claim that progressive politics has been in decline across the western world since the global financial crash of 2008, that progressive politicians don’t know what they stand for anymore, and that parties of the far right and far left have been insurgent. At the core of our beliefs is the value of work – yet we acknowledge there is more to life than work. The centre-left administrations of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown lost power in 2010, having won three general elections in a row since 1997. In elections last year, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) got 20.5 per cent of the vote, and the Dutch Labour Party (PvdA) got just 5.7 per cent of the vote. These politicians respect the achievements of the wave of “third way” leaders of the Nineties and Noughties, but also recognise times have changed, which means different, modern solutions to today’s problems. New Zealand Labour’s 38-year-old Jacinda Ardern – who describes herself as a “progressive” and a “social democrat” – became leader of her party just three months before their general election in October 2017. She went on to become prime minister of a coalition government after substantially increasing Labour’s vote share. But the debate could be about so much more than this if we could lift our sights beyond the domestic to the international, drawing on fresh ideas and initiatives shown to work by progressives in power. This month, The Progressive Centre UK, a new think tank and network of progressives – to which I have been appointed chair – launches with the explicit aim of connecting progressives from across the UK with the latest ideas and experience from across the globe. As it happens, Ardern, Trudeau and Sanchez were all involved in the gathering the centre co-sponsored in Canada last month, organised by the Global Progress network.

As progressive reformers organized challenges to IDC-aligned senators in this years primaries, the group was disbanded. All eight state senators who had been associated with the IDC were challenged in Democratic primaries Thursday. The biggest victory for the challengers—and for the unions and grassroots activists with groups such as the Working Families Party and Citizen Action of New York that campaigned against the IDC-tied incumbents—was that of Alessandra Biaggi, who got a lot of street-level and social-media campaign help from Ocasio-Cortez for her challenge to a former IDC leader Jeffrey Klein. “There are five times as many Democrats as Republicans in District 34 and yet for seven years, my opponent led the Independent Democratic Conference (IDC), a group of 8 New York state senators who ran and were elected as Democrats, but then went to Albany to caucus and vote only with Republicans, handing control of the State Senate to the GOP. The Climate Change and Community Protection Act. Biaggi, who ran with the support of The New York Times, as well as Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, the Working Families Party, and Service Employees International Union local 32BJ, reminded voters that the election provided an opportunity to diversify the legislature and state politics. City & State New York noted that “Salazar ran on a platform of universal rent control and single-payer health care, but she made national headlines when media reports challenged the working class, immigrant, Jewish image Salazar presented on the campaign trail. Stories about Salazar’s past, which featured prominently in the city’s tabloid dailies, appeared to have little impact on the ground in New York’s Senate District 18, where she was pulling 58 percent of the vote after campaigning “as an advocate, a tenant, a feminist, a democratic socialist, a union member, and a proud daughter of an immigrant family.” Other progressive contenders—including Nixon and Williams, who came close to upsetting Cuomo’s running mate in the contest for lieutenant governor—ran with support from the New York City chapter of DSA. But Salazar campaigned as an active member of DSA’s largest local, which on Thursday night announced that “NYC-DSA has built a movement to send one of our own to Albany.” The change in Albany will be dramatic as a new generation of insurgents and reformers arrives. And the legislature will be populated by a state senators like Alessandra Biaggi, who claimed her victory as a signal that New Yorkers would no longer “tolerate Democrats who would be empowering Republicans.”