Todd Suomela's Library tagged progressive →  View Popular, Search in Google

"In the United States, everyone may enjoy freedom of speech so long as it doesn’t matter. For those who would like what they say to matter, freedom of speech is very expensive. It is for this reason that organizations with a strong sense of public mission but not much money are dependent on the “blonde child of capitalism,” private philanthropy. This dependence is true for both conservative and progressive causes, but there is an important difference in the philanthropic cultures that they appeal to."

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"The foundation of my politics is the recognition of our collective interdependence. In the complex world that we have inherited from our forebears, it is often difficult to see just how to translate that fundamental interdependence into laws or public policies, but we must always begin from the acknowledgement that we are a community of men and women who must care for one another, work with one another, and treat the needs of each as the concern of all."

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"Many journalists, it seems, pay lip service to the First Amendment, but turn their backs or grow disdainful when people actually exercise these rights in the streets. In such a climate, idealistic activists such as those at the tar sands pipeline and Wall Street protests, obviously, can be safely ignored by the major news media or condescended to as not being rooted in the practical, real world. Real grown-ups don’t need to protest."

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What has the left really accomplished over the past two centuries? FDR's New Deal remains one of the great American success stories. In the '60s, leftist politics created a massive countercultural movement -- and sexual and feminist revolutions. The civil rights movement transformed both American society and the American soul. But, if you compare the accomplishments of the American left to those of other parts of the world, like Western Europe, its record is remarkably dismal, with a surprising lack of real political and social impact.

At least, that's the main takeaway from "American Dreamers," a new book by Michael Kazin, professor of history at Georgetown University, which covers nearly 200 years of struggle for civil rights, sexual equality and radical rebellion.

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"In the United States, I think the specific move that needs to be made is the recognition that the rank-and-file hostility of Tea Party adherents and sympathizers towards “big government” has an intimate, potentially generative connection to the possibility of a wider mobilization against the powers-that-be, that this is the cognate American form of the energy that’s flowing into protests in India, in Egypt, in the European Union. Which in turn requires a less knee-jerk response by progressives about the wonderful things that government can do or already does. It’s true that government action at all levels of American life could do a great deal of good, that it already secures many fundamental rights and protections, that we are dependent upon that power in so many ways. But when our first response to a fierce, wild and often reactionary anger at “government” is to recite a litany of its benefits, I think we disclose too much our own desire to retain an intimate access to acting within as well as against a deeply entrenched political class. "

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"Progressives need a fundamentally new approach to politics. They have been losing not just because conservatives have so much more money and power, but also because they have accepted the conservatives’ framing of political debates. They have accepted a framing where conservatives want market outcomes whereas liberals want the government to intervene to bring about outcomes that they consider fair.

This is not true. Conservatives rely on the government all the time, most importantly in structuring the market in ways that ensure that income flows upwards. The framing that conservatives like the market while liberals like the government puts liberals in the position of seeming to want to tax the winners to help the losers. "

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"The current left is irrelevant, precisely because its first gesture, is to join with the powerful, in condemning it. It shows that the leadership of the current left is, in fact, on the side of oppression, so long as their own place in that oppression is more reasonable."

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By Noam Chomsky. - compare and contrast to Andrew Sullivan

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"It’s perplexing. When unemployment is high, and the rich are getting richer, you would think that voters of average means would flock to progressives, who are supposed to have their interests in mind — and who historically have delivered for them.

During the last half-century or so, when a Democratic president has led the country, people have tended to experience lower unemployment, less inequality and rising income compared with periods of Republican governance. There is a reason, however, that many voters in the developed world are turning away from Democrats, Socialists, liberals and progressives."

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"In The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era, Lisa Szefel illuminates a time when American poets became committed to the notion that poetry should matter, that it should speak to the greatest concerns of the day. In this original and elegantly written account, Szefel traces the rise of a progressive-minded poetry movement that, between 1910 and 1920, developed alongside the social reform efforts of the era. These poets sought to break away from the genteel elitism of Victorian poetry and produce works that reflected the experiences of ordinary Americans and addressed the woes and sorrows that unmanaged capitalism had wrought. They believed that socially relevant poetry could strike readers’ moral imaginations and spur social action. With the help of sympathetic editors and readers, they created a flourishing literary community, which built the “cultural infrastructure” (p. 2) that later allowed the famous mid-century poets that Gioia celebrates to thrive. "

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"And yet, despite Dewey’s explicit hesitations, nearly a century later, the history of American education suggests that order almost always wins out over justice, no matter authorial intentions—and no matter that Deweyans persist in sprouting up across the educational landscape. We might need to come to terms with the fact that education—or more precisely, schooling—is meant to serve the ends of the status quo, i.e., brutal inequality. And thus, if the educational reformers have been successful at anything, it’s in ensuring a more efficient machine for reproducing the status quo. "

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"since the historical evidence mostly shows that crises are good for the right, not the left. Crises make people want to retreat to the familiar, not strike out in new directions. So here and in many other places around the world, we’re seeing an upsurge in nativism and xenophobia, not solidarity. The 1930s were an exception, but that’s because things got really really awful then, with the unemployment rate maxing out at 25%. Times have been bad here lately, but nothing like that. Do we really want to see the unemployment rate more than double because it might be good for politics?"

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"As both later Sartre and Badiou recognized, the only way to produce change is through the production of collectives or subject-groups capable of lifting us out of seriality. Yet the only way to produce collectives is through the formation of a sensus communis. This means that questions of the distribution of meanings, of ideological sequences, is crucial to any leftist project. It means that questions of “the sense of the world”, to quote Nancy’s term, are central to leftist political engagement. A recognition of this, I believe, is why thinkers like Badiou and Zizek have, of late, been so interested in the figure of Saint Paul. Yet such questions of distribution cannot simply focus on what senses are distributed, but must also focus on strategies of distribution. Enough for now."

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American citizens should ask themselves: I work hard and pay my taxes, so why don’t the richest people and the corporations? Why should I pick up the entire tab for keeping the nation running? Why should the people who can afford the most pay the least? If you’re happy with that situation, you can stay at home and leave the protesting to the Tea Party. For the rest, there’s an alternative. For too long, progressive Americans have been lulled into inactivity by Obama’s soaring promises, which come to little. As writer Rebecca Solnit says, “Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky…. Hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency.” UK Uncut has just shown Americans how to express real hope—and build a left-wing Tea Party.

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Yet, despite these and other meaningful and important advances, nothing in progressive thinking has enough traction when set against the mantras of pluralism and multiculturalism. Progressives have become the chief proponents of cultural diversity and multiculturalism, unwitting participants in a "separate but equal" orientation; we think that by promoting diversity, we are promoting both equality under the law and individual rights. They are not the same thing.

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