Tag: Progressivism

Democratic New York governor Andrew Cuomo has said the so-called insurgent progressive wave in his party is “not even a ripple”, arguing that it’s pragmatists like him who can get things done who are the true progressives. The governor, viewed as a potential 2020 presidential contender, used a victory lap press conference on Friday to make a forceful case for his own vision of the party. New York primary: governor Andrew Cuomo defeats Cynthia Nixon Read more “I’m not a socialist. I’m not 25 years old … I’m not a newcomer,” he told reporters at his Manhattan office. “Where was that effect yesterday? Where was it?” Cuomo asked. Play Video 3:47 The statewide primary this week, by contrast, saw a spike in turnout, and Cuomo bragged that he got more primary votes than any governor in history. “That is a wave,” he said. And after Cuomo hosted an event alongside Hillary Clinton to mark the opening of a new bridge named for his father, the span was forced to stay closed due to structural dangers. “A progressive Democrat, a Democrat in New York state – these are not ivory tower academics.

During a lecture at the Library of Conservatism in Germany, British philosopher Sir Roger Scruton described conservatism as a philosophy that recognizes and acknowledges that good things are easily destroyed but not easily created, such as law, peace, freedom, civility, the security of property and family life. He states “the work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating.” “The work of creation is slow, laborious and dull.” For the African American, the journey from captivity to slavery, to eventual freedom was indeed painful and laborious. The life and community they once enjoyed were easily destroyed. Out of their struggle was born “Black Conservatism” that became inherent to future generations. The emphasis was born out of their struggle and was a means by which they could preserve themselves and their developing culture and heritage. African Americans are the quintessential example of it means to be conservative. Black Americans have not benefited from their loyalty to experimental and foreign beliefs of the left. African Americans can no longer be indifferent to this failure and must return back to their conservative roots and be skeptical of both political parties, while spreading their influence with their vote to both parties, enabling the maximization of political power, while conserving and preserving their interest. As Sir Scruton accurately stated, it is easy to destroy, but to create is a slow, arduous and dull process. That is not to say that Republicans should automatically get the African American vote because that trust must be earned, but the African American can slowly dictate the future of the Republican Party by participating in selecting the best candidates who are representative of Conservatism that has the interest of African Americans.

Afua Hirsch (Celebrate the NHS at 70. But don’t forget what inspired it, 27 June) hints at the deterioration of progressive politics over the past 70 years when she writes that in 1948 “rights” meant access to decent living standards for all not just the protection of minorities. The progressives of 1948 built an NHS benefiting everyone, whose public support even Theresa May and the Tory press cannot overcome. The identity-politics obsessed progressives of 2018, with their hyperliberal dislike of traditional social structures, their hostility to democratic control over immigration from the EU and to enforcement of the law on immigration from outside the EU, and their obsession with “unconscious bias”, have achieved only a national vote to leave the EU and a 7% swing from Labour to the Conservatives among working-class voters from January to May 2018. Christopher Clayton Chester • Tony Blair’s speech to Chatham House about relations between the US, Europe and the continuing battle against extremism on both the left and the right is a good analysis of where we are now (Report, 27 June). It fails, however, to show any understanding of how this fracture in our societies is occurring. A secure knowledge of who you are and of your history is the surest way of maintaining a liberal, open and welcoming society. The undermining of any sense of Britishness and the right to insist that all who come to the UK accept some degree of assimilation is part of the problem. This applies all over Europe. At the same time, the project to dispose of empire is unfinished business because many of the regimes that have taken control of former colonies serve their populations no better than than the previous colonial occupiers.

Her upset victory was cheered as a resounding win for the activist left – and a repudiation of centrist politics. “People were just excited to have someone stand up for their values,” Eastman said. But as the 2018 midterm primaries play out across the country, the “civil war” that once threatened to undermine Democrats’ path to power appears to be little more than a skirmish in the all-consuming battle they are waging against Trump. In the Georgia Democratic primary for the governorship, Stacey Abrams, a progressive former state house leader, won the race with support from both Clinton and Sanders. 'You don’t tell yourself no': Stacey Abrams' bid to be America's first black female governor Read more “There may be something much simpler and more powerful than ideology at work here,” David Wasserman, a political analyst at the non-partisan Cook Political Report, wrote recently: “Democratic primary voters’ intense desire to nominate women in 2018.” To be sure, there are certain issues and races that have plunged the party back into the bitterness of 2016 . The strategy, which drew progressive backlash in Texas, paid off this week in California, where a glut of candidates threatened to split the share of Democratic voters and produce all-Republican ballots in November under the state’s “jungle primary” system. In order to win back the House, the Democratic party must be willing to intervene in primary races as it did in California, says Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institutution and member of the DNC. The path runs through purple and slightly red districts,” Kamarck said, adding: “The irony here is that the party must win in places where the progressive message doesn’t work as well in order to get close to a place where you can have a progressive agenda.” The tug of the party’s progressive wing didn’t begin with Sanders’s entrance into the 2016 presidential race.But Stephanie Taylor, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, credits him with helping to bring the left’s economic populist agenda into the mainstream. Ideas like a European-style healthcare system, once dismissed as magical thinking, now has the support of more than half of House Democratic lawmakers and one-third of the Senate caucus. Among them is Eastman.

In Texas’ 21st congressional district, walking from street to street, knocking on doors and asking for votes is not as straightforward as it sounds. Can the wave of female House candidates lead to a 'tsunami' of wins? But there is another dividing line, next to which Wilson stands on the left: a Democratic divide between progressives and moderates that will be closely watched on Tuesday, as Texas holds party runoff elections ahead of November’s midterms. The city is covered by six districts that extend far out into conservative strongholds, diluting the influence of Travis County, where Hillary Clinton won 66% of the vote in 2016. How did I, this lifelong Democrat, become that ‘anti-establishment’ candidate? Wilson, a minister and former math teacher, believes that the Washington establishment, in the form of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), favours her runoff rival, Joseph Kopser, a decorated army veteran and entrepreneur with endorsements from a number of party figures. “I don’t know why then we should consider him to be the most viable candidate to win in November when he couldn’t win in March with every advantage. “Being a progressive-minded person, social justice advocate – and being a female social justice advocate – really fits the tenor of the mood in the country right now.” If Wilson wins on Tuesday her path to victory in November will require a high turnout in Austin and San Antonio. The Great Revolt review: Trump-approved study of 2016 is key reading for Democrats Read more With no candidate securing a majority of the vote, Moser forced a runoff by finishing second in the primary to Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, a business attorney who has been endorsed by Emily’s List, an influential group that works to elect pro-abortion rights Democratic female candidates. “This part of the district is not as Republican as the Republicans think, but we just have to engage new voters out here,” Moser said.

The populist uprising in the US, Britain, and Europe is a backlash against elites of the mainstream parties, but its most conspicuous casualties have been liberal and centre-left political parties – the Democratic Party in the US; the Labour Party in Britain; the Social Democratic Party in Germany, whose share of the vote reached a historic low in the last federal election; Italy’s Democratic Party, whose vote share dropped this year to less than 20 per cent; and the Socialist Party in France, whose presidential nominee won only 6 per cent of the vote in the first round of last year’s election. In today’s economy, it is not easy to rise. The dignity of work The loss of jobs to technology and outsourcing has coincided with a sense that society accords less respect to the kind of work the working class does. To think it through, political parties will have to grapple with the meaning of work and its place in a good life. But this principled response, valid though it is, fails to address an important set of questions implicit in the populist complaint. But this strategy of avoidance, this insistence on liberal neutrality, is a mistake. Liberal neutrality flattens questions of meaning, identity and purpose into questions of fairness. And liberal public reason is not a morally neutral way of arriving at principles of justice. Three decades of market-driven globalisation and technocratic liberalism have hollowed out democratic public discourse, disempowered ordinary citizens, and prompted a populist backlash that seeks to clothe the naked public square with an intolerant, vengeful nationalism. It draws upon material from Sandel’s articles “Lessons from the Populist Revolt”, in Project Syndicate, and “Populism, Liberalism, and Democracy”, in Philosophy & Social Criticism (2018).

The new building was to occupy what had been, for many years, a vacant lot along a major thoroughfare. If the building (which now exists, and is quite lovely) could not go up without generating neighborhood ire, it is hard to imagine where new housing in a major city would not cause local resistance. The difficulty of increasing housing supply is a problem across major American cities, especially on the coasts, but also in many non-coastal university towns and other prosperous areas. In California, the problem has taken on crisis dimensions. California is a one-party, Democratic state. You can dive in to the details if you want, but the bottom-line conclusion is quite simple: Housing is too expensive in many cities because there isn’t enough of it. There isn’t enough of it because zoning and other regulations prevent the construction of high-density housing. Opponents of allowing more dense housing construction associate the solution with gentrification, but this gets the question backwards. Expanding the supply of housing allows people to move in to cities without displacing existing residents. Allowing the construction of more multifamily housing means relaxing — gasp — regulations.

Tony Blair has called for new political leadership from the “strong progressive centre” and confirmed his institute is developing a raft of policies to encourage such leaders. The former prime minister insisted he had not given up on Labour despite his concerns of it being “in the grip of the hard left”. Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, he admitted he was trying re-energise the centre ground of British politics, which he claimed was being abandoned by the two main parties. “If you leave between the Brexit-dominated Tory party and a hard-left Labour party vast uncultivated centre ground, at some point someone is going to come along and cultivate it,” he said. At the weekend the Observer revealed that plans for a new centrist party had attracted £50m of investment. Blair denied trying to form a new party, saying: “I’m not advocating it or involved in such a one or certainly not running for its leadership at this or any stage.” But he said such a plan should not be derided by the established parties. “And the result of it is you have rightwing politics going into anti-immigration nationalism and leftwing politics going into sort of anti-business old form of statism, and neither are the answer to the problem of the future.” He confirmed that his Tony Blair Institute for Global Change was developing a platform for any emerging centrist politicians to utilise. Tony Blair launches pushback against 'frightening populism' Read more “It is not a manifesto because it is not for a political party – it is for people whether they are in the Labour party, Conservative party, Liberal Democrats, wherever, who can see the way politics is developing in the is country and who think there must be a better set of policy ideas for the future.” He added: “I have got no infrastructure for building some political party. But what I fully own up to is trying to create the sort of centrist policies that I think can rekindle optimism about the future, since I think that these lurches to the right and to the left are basically the politics of pessimism. “Starting a new political party is incredibly difficult.

For years, a breakaway faction of Democrats helped Republicans control the state Senate in New York, one of the country’s most liberal states. IDC members blame Felder for Republican control, claiming they have moderated a GOP agenda that would pass with Felder’s help anyway. But progressive activists, some of whom are backing a primary challenge against Felder as well, have lambasted the IDC members as “Trump Democrats.” They note that GOP control of the Senate, enabled in part by the IDC, has prevented progressive climate action and single-payer health care bills that passed the state Assembly from coming up for a vote, and stalled or diluted other liberal legislation. IDC-enabled GOP domination of the state Senate prevents Democratic Senate Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, a black woman, from playing the leadership role in negotiations that Democrats’ numerical majority would otherwise afford her. Biaggi is one of seven Democrats challenging IDC members with the backing of major progressive organizations like the Working Families Party. Cuomo, often blamed for failing to leverage his power against the IDC and Felder, has also elicited a left-leaning primary challenge from Cynthia Nixon, an actress and progressive education activist. A condition of the deal is that neither former IDC members, nor mainline Senate Democrats would back primary challenges against incumbent members. In an open letter to IDC members on Wednesday in which Biaggi and the six other candidates affirmed their decision to stay in the race, they argued that IDC members “cannot undo the damage that [they] have done by blocking a single Democratic state Senator in the room to advocate for common-sense progressive priorities.” Intent on punishing IDC members and securing a more progressive Senate delegation for its own sake, the grassroots coalition No IDC New York and the labor-backed New York Working Families Party are both maintaining their support for the IDC challengers. “If you’ve set your own house on fire and watched it burn for eight years, finally turning on a hose doesn’t make you a hero,” Nixon said. “And the common enemy is defeating Trump and Ryan and McConnell and defeating their agenda and taking over the New York state Senate so we can protect the state the way it needs to be protected.” However, Cuomo also revealed at the press conference that his re-election campaign would be coordinating closely with the campaigns efforts of Senate and Assembly Democrats.

California’s exposure to climate change has been laid bare with warnings that San Francisco faces a far worse threat from rising seas than previously thought, while the agricultural heart of the state will increasingly struggle to support crops such as peaches, walnuts and apricots as temperatures climb. The findings, from two new scientific studies, come as California’s neighboring west coast states Oregon and Washington have both faltered in their legislative attempts to address climate change and deliver a rebuke to Donald Trump’s dismissal of the issue. “In Washington, we are holding a very good policy hostage because it’s not perfect. San Francisco can lay claim to being one of the greenest cities in the US, through its embrace of clean energy, mandated recycling and banning of single-use plastic bags, yet it faces a steep challenge to avoid the ravages of sea level rise. Researchers using satellite-based radar and GPS have discovered large areas of land beside the San Francisco bay is sinking, exacerbating the threat from sea level rise and storms. This scenario would worsen if melting glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica trigger a far faster rate of ocean expansion. “A huge number of people along the west coast are in low-lying areas, in Los Angeles and San Francisco all the way up to Seattle. And California’s neighbors to the north are struggling to demonstrate that states can compensate for the lack of federal action on climate change, even those where Democrats have a firm grip on power. Meanwhile, in Oregon, another state dominated by elected Democrats, lawmakers failed to agree on a cap on greenhouse gases and will instead revisit the issue in 2019. “Rather than getting bogged down in how money from a carbon tax would be spent, we need to make climate change a bipartisan issue again,” said Aseem Prakash, the director of the center for environmental politics at the University of Washington.