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A progressive has won Tuesdays special election for the seat vacated by a fellow progressive on the Burlington, Vermont City Council.

In May, Ward 3 Progressive City Councilor Brian Pine resigned his seat after his appointment to lead the Burlington Community and Economic Development Office was ratified. Three people ran in Tuesdays special election for the seat: Independent Owen Milne, Progressive Joe Magee and Republican Christopher-Aaron Felker.

Turnout was low with 22 percent of eligible voters, or 1,011 ballots, cast in the ward. Progressive Magee won.

We had a message of raising the minimum wage here in Burlington and advocating for more affordable housing that I think resonated with a lot of folks.

Party Chair Josh Wronski says the Ward 3 seat has been held by a Progressive since the 1980s and is historically a big part of the partys base.

Joe ran on a very clear platform of continuing to advance a progressive agenda and advocating for policies that will make Burlington more affordable, things like living wages for working class people.

According to the unofficial results released by the city clerks office Magee received 475 votes, Milne 397 and Felker 136. That means Magees two challengers combined received nearly 6 percent more of the vote.

Former Republican city council president Republican Kurt Wright says the Progressively controlled council should pay attention to what he considers a close result.

In a ward thats very left, very dominated by Progressives and has been for many decades, the results certainly did not produce a mandate for the Progressives or Joe Magee." Wright continues "So no question Joe Magee is the winner. Hell join the council. But theres a message actually for the Progressives there. More people voted against their candidate and voted for candidates that have had different views on policing and public safety than they do.

But Progressive Chair Wronski downplays the numbers showing Magee behind the combined numbers of his challengers.

Were looking at an 8 percent margin and there are close elections all the time. This is certainly not the closest election weve had in Ward 3 even, " said Wronski. "Its just part of politics and this was a very low turn out election. And we typically dont do as well when turn outs low.

Wright, meanwhile, believes that the results are tied to growing public safety concerns after Progressives on the council approved a cap on the number of police officers.

Its really compromised public safety and its going to get worse. This group of city councilors are really much farther left and are really in some ways certainly in regard to policing I think are you know somewhat militant and extremist.

Magee says he heard from a lot of voters who said while community safety is important, it was not their priority.

I think a lot of folks recognize that we do need to continue to transition away from status quo policing. And you know I think theres a conversation that we need to have about the changes that need to be made in the police department as we continue to invest in mental health services here in Burlington and other community supports that meet peoples most basic needs.

Middlebury College Professor of Political Science Bert Johnson says public safety has been the dominant issue throughout the city this summer. Magees win, he says, superficially represents progressive continuity on the city council.

It would be wise probably for Progressives be a little bit cautious about how they respond to the upcoming report on policing and staffing and especially how they speak about what theyre trying to do.

Magee will serve until the end of the current term April 4th, 2022.

Continued here:
Progressive Joe Magee Wins Burlington Ward 3 Special Election - WAMC

Eric Adams in Brooklyn (photo: office of Eric Adams)

When Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams won the Democratic mayoral primary, to some it signalled a rebuke of the growing progressive movement in the city and called into question whether more left-wing candidates can win in communities of color. After recent years of electing an increasing number of progressives in local, state, and federal elections, New York City had chosen a moderate NYPD veteran and one-time Republican as its likely next mayor.

Older Black and Latino voters flocked to Adams, who is Black and pitched a message of restoring order and public safety while also pursuing police reform, as younger voters of color mostly cast their votes with avowedly progressive candidates who finished no better than third.

But to activists, experts, and elected officials, the question of a possible political divide in communities of color is far more nuanced and doesnt easily break down along generational, ethnic, or even ideological grounds.

Some, including Adams himself, see something of a mixed message: while Adams calls himself progressive and indeed much of his background and platform could be characterized as such, he has also framed his own win as a set-back for the citys leftists. Adams has often drawn a distinction between long-time liberals active in city politics like himself and younger activists, some of whom have helped grow the city branch of the Democratic Socialists of America, which has helped elect a growing list of legislators at all three levels of government. Social media does not pick a candidate," Adams argued repeatedly. "People on social security pick a candidate.

In the mayoral primary, progressive officials and activists largely wound up rallying behind Maya Wiley, a Black civil rights attorney who ran on reinvesting $1 billion in police funding into community programs, clashed with Adams at times on public safety policies, and received the second most first-rank votes but ultimately finished third in the ranked-choice runoff. While Wiley was unable to break through or best Adams in many communities of color across the five boroughs, she was also at major disadvantages to him going into the race, including never having run for office before and running a much shorter campaign, raising far less money than Adams. But, Adams ran a very strong race, dominating in the vast majority of areas with larger populations of Black and Latino voters.

Overall, the citys consequential primary election wasnt by any stretch a death knell for the progressive left. Progressives notched several major victories in races almost certain to determine much of the next city government class that will take office in January.

City Council Member Brad Lander, the furthest left candidate in his race, won citywide in the Democratic comptroller primary though he performed far better in white neighborhoods than in communities of color. Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, a staunch progressive, is sailing to an easy reelection in his citywide post. Alvin Bragg, a former chief Deputy New York Attorney General who was endorsed by several prominent progressive groups and individuals, won the Democratic nomination for Manhattan District Attorney. Antonio Reynoso, one of the lefts rising stars, won the Democratic primary to succeed Adams as Brooklyn Borough President.

And the City Council will see its next class include many progressive members, a number of whom were backed by the Working Families Party and progressive advocacy groups, with two endorsed by the New York City branch of the Democratic Socialists of America though the NYC-DSA lost its other four Council races. Another socialist won a Harlem Council primary without the DSAs official support.

While Adams may stand out for his combination of pro-business, pro-real estate, pro-charter school, and tough-on-crime positions, he also ran on progressive ideas like reforming the police department in a number of ways, improving access to city services and benefits, upzoning wealthier communities to add and integrate housing, and closing racial disparities in health and education through a wide variety of measures. Though not always taking the left-most stances, Adams has also promised what could be categorized as progressive policies on transit and more.

That the mayoral race was dominated by the more centrist candidates was evident from early polls. Adams and entrepreneur Andrew Yang who largely ran as a moderate though he also supported several progressive policies both emerged at or near the top and remained there until former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia, another moderate on certain high-profile leftist priorities like divesting from the police, surged late in the race to end up in second place, narrowly losing to Adams. Wiley, former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, became the progressive candidate with any chance to win but could not pull the needed white voters from Garcia or Black and Latino voters from Adams. She finished third and Yang, who dominated in neighborhoods with large Asian populations, followed a distant fourth.

What set the candidates in the center apart from those on the left was, most prominently, their positions on policing and public safety, which became the top overall concern for primary voters during the race given what was an ongoing spike in gun violence. The race carried echoes of the intense 2020 debate spurred by the Defund the NYPD movement after the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota and larger Black Lives Matter movement that refocused on police abuses in the five boroughs.

Though they subscribed to a number of reforms and elements of a holistic approach to public safety, Adams, Garcia, and Yang -- three of the top four finishers -- all opposed significant reductions to police funding or sweeping removal of police from responding to certain issues like mental health crises or homelessness.

Adams experience as an NYPD officer and his willingness to defend the police department from budgetary cuts while also speaking of the need for police accountability gave him credibility with many primary voters, especially middle-aged and older voters who want a strong but fair police presence. Progressives too spoke of the need to tackle violent crime but advocated at the same time for diverting funds away from police and into communities in need through programs addressing root causes.

Adams promises both, though his formula is more moderate than those promoted by Wiley, progressive activists, and others. Throughout the campaign Wiley criticized Adams stances on policing and stood by her public safety plan that called for shifting $1 billion from the NYPD (she repeatedly declined to use defund nomenclature) and investing in communities, including trauma-informed care.

Those distinctions between the candidates in ideology and messaging may have made key differences with the Democratic primary electorate.

According to an NY1/Ipsos Poll released June 7, out of 876 likely Democratic voters, 24% identified as more progressive or left-leaning than the Democratic Party, 22% said they were more centrist or conservative, and 52% said they were generally in line with the Democratic Party.

Nationally, white voters are trending towards identifying as liberal at higher rates than Black or Hispanic voters. According to a Gallup poll from February 2019, between 2001 and 2018, non-Hispanic white Democrats who identified as liberal rose from 34% to 54%. Among Hispanic Democrats, that increase was 9 points, from 29% to 38%, and eight points among Black Democrats, from 25% to 33%.

According to the poll, between 2013-2018, among Democrats who identified as liberal, 65% were white, 17% were Black and 13% Hispanic. Among moderate Democrats, 52% were white, 28% were Black and 16% were Hispanic. White voters made up 40% of conservative Democrats, while Black voters stood at 35% and Hispanic voters at 22%.

An analysis in June by FiveThirtyEight based on four recent Democratic primaries (the 2016 presidential, governor and lieutenant governor primary in 2018 and the attorney general primary that same year) found that major parts of the Bronx, Central and Eastern Brooklyn, and Southeast Queens all home to majority Black and Latino communities tended to vote for establishment Democrats over progressive outsiders.

Adams was propelled to victory by those communities, the moderate Black and Latino voters in Central and Eastern Brooklyn, Southeast Queens, and almost the entire Bronx. Moderate white voters in parts of Eastern Queens, Staten Islands North Shore, and in Southern Brooklyn also tilted towards him, according to an election map of in-person votes created by Steve Romalewski, director of the mapping service at Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center.

According to data provided to the New York Times by John Mollenkopf, director of the CUNY Graduate Center for Urban Research, during in-person voting, Adams won in census tracts that are home to a majority or plurality of white voters without college degrees and those with a majority of Black voters without college degrees.

Garcia swept almost all of Manhattan, large parts of Staten Island, and white neighborhoods in the northwestern Bronx. Wiley won in several gentrifying neighborhoods with younger voters including the East Village in Manhattan, Astoria, Long Island City, and Steinway in Queens, and Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, Fort Greene, and parts of Park Slope in Brooklyn. Garcia was favored by college-educated white voters whereas Wiley was supported by Black and Hispanic voters with college degrees, according to Mollenkopf.

Areas of Brooklyn where Wiley, Lander, and Reynoso did especially well have been hotbeds of the ascendent left, including neighborhoods represented by Black and Latino socialist state legislators like State Senators Julia Salazar and Jabari Brisport. Parts of Queens where Wiley and Lander did well are also represented or soon to be by a number of democratic socialist politicians who are people of color, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez -- who endorsed Lander early in the comptroller race and Wiley late in the mayoral race -- and Tiffany Cabn, who just won a City Council primary. Meanwhile, Lander and Wiley did well in some parts of Harlem, where socialist Kristin Richardson Jordan, with Lander's backing, won a close primary victory over City Council Member Bill Perkins.

Adams victory created no shortage of speculation and punditry -- including from Adams himself -- that the city was experiencing a backlash against the Defund the NYPD movement and that progressive candidates did not have a winning message with communities of color. Adams has repeatedly described himself as a progressive even as he has denounced the defund movement as unrealistic and dangerous (and at times conflating it with the much smaller police abolition movement).

I believe that you cant run cities based on slogans, and because youre able to handle your Twitter handle, does not mean you can handle the complexities of running the cities in America, he said in a July 13 appearance on ABCs The View. I am the progressive candidate. And being progressive is not only talking about closing Rikers Island, its closing the pipeline that feeds Rikers Island.

Others were quick to point out that the chips dont fall neatly, just like last year. When the City Council voted on a budget that was meant to cut the NYPDs budget by hundreds of millions, several Council members of color like Reynoso, Carlina Rivera, Inez Barron, Donovan Richards (now Queens Borough President), and Carlos Menchaca supported those cuts, and voted against the budget because it did not go far enough in shifting funding from the NYPD (the source of about $10 billion in city spending per year). They were backed by a legion of Black, Latino, Asian, and white activists, a mix of young and older, some who had been advocating for more limited policing for years, if not decades.

On the other side were conservative and moderate Republicans and Democrats who wanted to safeguard the NYPD from interference and divestment. That group included several Black Council members such as Laurie Cumbo and Adrienne Adams -- both of whom later endorsed Eric Adams for mayor -- who agreed with many calls for police reform but insisted that their own communities were calling for more and better policing.

What a lot of us recognized was that in some areas of New York City, shooting and criminal activity were on the rise and the hashtag, Defund the NYPD, doesnt speak to that tragedy or to the residents who are affected by it, said Council Member Adams, in an interview in August 2020.

Cumbo, in particular, argued vociferously against activists leading the defund effort, claiming that the movement was being hijacked by white progressives seeking to uproot Black political power. The progressive agenda did not align with the practical concerns of Black and brown New Yorkers, she insisted, and the crime and violence affecting neighborhoods of color could not be curbed with fewer police officers on the beat. It's not sexy to talk about hiring, training, staffing, integrating a new public safety program...That's not hashtagable, Cumbo said in August last year, following the passage of the contentious budget.

Activists, including some who have been involved for decades, have a different view, of course.

The term defund I think was oftentimes branded by and shaped by quote-unquote progressives, many of color, many Black, many white, said Mark Winston Griffith, executive director of the Brooklyn Movement Center and a longtime police reform activist in Central Brooklyn and citywide. And I would say that the idea of dismantling the carceral system, starving it of oxygen and resources is nothing new and it's something that Black people, low- and moderate-income people have been talking about and been thinking about for generations.

The conversation around defunding the NYPD became un-nuanced as opponents sought to delegitimize the movement, Winston Griffith said. Indeed, Adams, along with Cumbo, was among those who painted the movement as being led by white activists and young socialists, effectively erasing the work of the many Black leaders involved, some of whom -- including individuals who just won City Council races as Adams won the mayoral primary -- have spoken out assertively in response. Public Advocate Williams endorsed Wiley for mayor in large part because of the difference between her and Adams views on public safety, he said.

As Winston Griffith noted, the disconnect between younger and older voters in communities of color in their attitudes towards police funding and public safety is personified by Adams. He is one of these Black elected officials who are very much tied to the status quo, and are able to paint the conversation around defund in a way that minimizes Black consensus around it and paints it as a white gentrifier issue, Winston Griffith said.

Every generation and every movement has a dynamic where younger people are pushing up against the status quo, and older people and people who are fully tied to that status quo are going to discredit what those young people are saying and pushing for, he added.

Adams recently portrayed his primary win as one opposed by socialists everywhere. Im no longer running against candidates. Im running against a movement. All across the country, the DSA socialists are mobilizing to stop Eric Adams, he said at a fundraiser co-hosted by Republican City Council Member Eric Ulrich of Queens, according to the New York Post. Ulrich was among the Council members who voted against last years budget because they believed it cut too much from the NYPD budget. One of the NYC-DSAs top priorities is a major defunding of the NYPD.

A key example of the ideological diversity in communities of color is the multigenerational membership of the New York Working Families Party, said Sochie Nnaemeka, state director of the progressive party that does organizing, advocacy, and endorsements. They include older members from the first generation of ACORN, the now defunct international left-progressive group, and younger members who have been energized in recent years by leaders such as Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez.

Voters are complex beings with complex views that don't always map themselves on to a perfect ideological platform, Nnaemeka said in an interview. She noted that support for Adams was predicated in part on his support for police accountability and reform, which hes been known for by some for decades, even if he was more moderate than other candidates running in the primary. That is not nothing. That is already a more progressive position and thats already an anti-establishment position that voters embraced, she said.

Among other planks, Adams has pledged to rid the NYPD of bad cops through multiple policies and quickly improve police-community relations, including by giving local communities more say in choosing their local commanders.

Nnaemeka pointed to progressive victories in Central Brooklyn and even outside the city. For instance, India Walton, a socialist candidate who won the Democratic mayoral primary in Buffalo, and two candidates who staunchly supported the Black Lives Matter movement winning primaries for the City Council in Rochester. I think that there is a story generally about voters rejecting establishment frameworks, rejecting austerity narratives, rejecting unaccountable policing, and looking for the best messengers to carry forward that vision, but there is a lot more alignment around the kind of world that people want than the headlines say, Nnaemeka added.

While many Working Families Party-backed candidates were unsuccessful across the New York City primaries, its candidates -- almost all of them progressives of color -- won a number of seats. That included Williams, Lander, Reynoso, and a slew of City Council candidates who ran on leftist platforms that included cutting police department funding to invest more in community and social programs. Many of those candidates were also backed by progressive groups like Make the Road Action, New York Immigration Coalition Action, and others, as well as progressive labor unions like 1199 SEIU. DSA candidates Cabn, who wants to eventually dismantle the police department, and Alexa Aviles won their primaries in Queens and Brooklyn, respectively. But several DSA City Council candidates running in more moderate districts performed much more poorly and lost.

Progressive candidates themselves have pushed back against the suggestion that progressivism was losing steam. Wiley, in a Q&A with reporters after her concession speech, pointed to Landers and Braggs primary victories. I don't see this in a limited framework that says it is only about who gets 20,000 more votes, that's not what it is to have a discussion about how we come out, not just of a historic crisis, but of all the crises that predated covid and that's what we have demonstrated, Wiley said.

Public Advocate Williams similarly disputed the theory that voters, particularly voters of color, lost faith in progressive ideas or dont subscribe to them to begin with. In an appearance on the Max Politics podcast on July 7, he said, [I] wanna reject this notion that any election is a repudiation of anything because I met from Buffalo to Brooklyn Borough Hall, with so many people elected to important positions that have been saying the things I've been saying for quite some time.

He said candidates and elected officials need to have a more holistic conversation, particularly about defund and public safety. Stop focusing on the word or hashtag, he said. Our jobs as leaders are not to tell activists how to express their trauma. Let them do that. Our job as leaders is to take that trauma, that pain and turn it into real policy. And I've never heard anyone say defund public safety. So we have to figure out what the people need, and how do we turn that into real structural change.

Lander and Cabn said similar things about explaining their views on shifting funds from the police to other services when talking with some voters on the campaign trail, arguing that it is about presenting the broader plan for how to achieve public safety and why police should have a more limited role.

What reverberates through all those views, from Nnaemeka to Williams and others, is that media narratives and campaign rhetoric flattened the mayoral race into a dichotomy of public safety versus disorder, with the former equated with more moderate candidates and the latter painted as the desire or eventual consequence of progressive politics. That narrative served to silence progressive voices calling for structural change they say would create more safety while reinforcing knee-jerk reactionary politics, said Jawanza Williams, director of organizing for VOCAL-NY, a nonprofit group. I think because that was effective for Eric Adams, I think he will likely not be a progressive mayor, he said.

Progressive ideas and progressive policies are unilaterally popular, he argued. When you support people with housing, support people with nutritional assistance like SNAP, when you support people with cash assistance whenever they're struggling, when you support people in these kinds of robust, secure, concrete economic and social ways, people love and appreciate these kinds of programs. What people get confused by and divided by is the sort of perceptions and the politics of the issues.

Is there a divide between working class, moderate Black communities and progressivism? said Jawanza Williams, The debate isn't actually that. Its being presented as that by moderates, by conservatives, by people that are interested in defunding our social services.

I think this generational divide is partly because there's a narrative in the mainstream media that there's this massive crime wave despite the fact that it's not really supported by the facts and figures, said Michael Whitesides, an NYC-DSA spokesperson. Poll after poll, we see that strong socialist policies like free universal health care, real affordable housing are very popular. I think that the challenge is just translating that into votes in the next election, they said.

Gabe Tobias of Our City PAC, which was created to promote progressive candidates in the citys 2021 elections, doesnt think the Adams win is a trend away from progressivism -- either nationally or locally in New York -- arguing that both President Biden and Adams did not shy away from pitching themselves as progressives. Theres not an ad that doesnt mention police reform, doesnt mention racism in the NYPD, Tobias said of Adams. These are progressive talking points.

He also mentioned the downfall of the Yang campaign, attributing it in part to Yangs shift from what he called a happy progressive to a more conservative candidate who touted endorsements from uniformed unions including the Uniformed Firefighters Association and the Captains Endowment Association and maligned homeless New Yorkers.

Senator Brisport, a member of DSA who previously challenged Cumbo for City Council, was elected last year to the 25th Senate District, filling a seat held by retiring Democrat Velmanette Montgomery, who was close with the party establishment and together backed an unsuccessful chosen successor. He is one of several young progressives of color, including several democratic socialists, elected to the state Legislature in the last two election cycles, buoying the progressive movement across the city.

I think it really comes down to hope versus jadedness, Brisport said, insisting that a generational exists across different communities. Younger voters who vote more progressive because they believe through politics we can radically alter our world and older voters who do not."

The voters who chose Adams did so because he is a known quantity, Brisport said. Maybe he wont promise the moon but they know him.

Originally posted here:
What's the Gap Between Progressive Politics and Communities of Color in New York City? - Gotham Gazette

Americas Founders understood political change is inevitable. They thought it must come about through constitutional mechanisms, with the consent of the governed, and must never infringe on the natural rights of citizens.

Progressives rejecting the idea that any rights, including the right of consent to government, are natural accept no such limits. Progressivisminsists that the principled American constitutionalism of fixed natural rights and limited and dispersed powers must be overturned and replaced by an organic,evolutionary modelof the Constitution.

To them, historical progress should be facilitated by experts dedicated to the expansion of the public sphere and political control especially at the national level. As progressivism has grown into modern liberalism, the commitment to extra-constitutional progress is broadly shared across elite political, academic, legal, and religious circles. Politics is thus increasingly identified with a mix of activism, expertise, and the desire for change.

The progressive understanding of the American polity grew out of a transformation in American political thought that occurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This transformation stemmed from a confluence of ideas borrowed from Darwinism, pragmatism, and German idealism. Each of these philosophical systems rejected natural law and natural rights. They privileged inexorable historical evolution and change over continuity and fixity.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Americas intellectual classes, guided by these ideas, moved in lockstep. They scorned whatever they perceived to stand in the way of Historys march especially the Founders Constitution and traditional Christianity. Government was understood to be unlimited in principle and it certainly could not be limited by a dusty 18th-century Constitution based on the flawed theory of a fixed, and fallen, human nature.

The most important forms of social, economic, and political progress came to be seen as depending on the state, and the manipulation by the state of measurable phenomena. Human flourishing was most often seen as an incident of politically engineered growth and transformation. As the idea of a formal Constitution disappeared as an object of study and eventually of public veneration so, too, did the realm of the private and the invisible.

American Catholicism and Protestantismassimilated themselves to the progressive synthesis, in their calls for social solidarity through economic policy. Whether through the Catholic social thought of Fr. John Ryan (A Living Wage, 1906), or the social gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch (Christianizing the Social Order, 1913), significant portions of religious opinion turned against limited constitutionalism in the quest for more rational, just, and scientific state administration.

This stood in contrast to the pre-progressive American Christianity that buttressed the constitutional order by linking human fallenness, or imperfection, to the need for political moderation, individual rights, personal responsibility, and limited government. Such assimilation of secular thought and theology to the aims of progressivism continues to have important ramifications.

It would be next to impossible to understand the nature and depth of this progressive revolt against American institutions if one were to read the accounts of major American historians from the mid-twentieth century onward. As Winston Churchill is reputed to have said, History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it. In large measure, the scholarly interpreters of progressivism were in deep sympathy with its premises and conclusions.

For much of the twentieth century, progressivism was interpreted as a populist or occasionally intellectual movement that was ultimately assimilable to the basic contours and concerns of the American regime. This is largely becauseprofessional historians shared the assumptions of the progressivism they documented: the utility of statism, the chimerical status of natural rights in the face of Darwinian and pragmatic criticisms, and the anachronistic nature of a Constitution rooted in political thinking that could not be squared with scientific and evolutionary approaches to history.

The dominant professional organization of historians theAmerican Historical Association was founded in the late 19th century, just as fashionable progressive ideas were sweeping the intellectual classes. American historians from the beginning downplayed any constitutional perspective because they saw it as quaintly irrelevant and professionally antediluvian.

With the growth of academic history in the 20th century, the disciplines practitioners absorbed progressive orientations deliberately or through subtle osmosis from the very movement that many of them would chronicle. Collectively, therefore, they were guilty of a strange complicity of understatement.

In fairness, historians were not alone in this. Many other academic disciplines were similarly compromised. But it was historians who most thoroughly told the American story to generations of college-educated citizens.

Such matters are not merely of academic or antiquarian interest. The serious but flawed historical scholarship of the twentieth century laid the groundwork for far less serious but more famous progressive assaults on America, such as those contained inThe 1619 Project.

More broadly, as History and progress cameto replacenature as the fundamental ordering ideas of American politics, they laid the groundwork for the contemporary embrace of the living Constitution as a replacement for the Founders formal, fixed Constitution. The reverberations of this shift are still being felt on matters as diverse as the size and scope of government, freedom of conscience, identitarian politics, and the political and cultural drift of the nation.

Writing after the Progressive Era had morphed into the New Deal, leading progressive historians wrote with the considerable authority that twentieth-century American academia provided. Starting in the 1940s, they studied progressivismquaprogressivism which is to say, they identified it by name, casting longing glances in its direction.

These scholars cemented in the American mind the image of progressivism as a warm and fuzzy movement for change whose time had come and gone. The chroniclers more often than not ignored the fundamental constitutional dimensions of progressivism and the relationship of citizens to the state. And where they didnt ignore such matters, their works trod lightly so as not to challenge an increasingly conventional wisdom.

For example, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (The Vital Center, 1949), gives an account of progressivisms direct lineal descendant the New Deal which, he claims, fills the vacuum of faith. New Deal liberalism provides an intellectual and moral compass that allows Americans to work their way through the anxieties of the postwar era, when unhappy people see that both communism and capitalism have dehumanized workers and destroyed personal and political liberty.

Echoing the central themes of the progressives while seeming to dismiss their romanticism, Schlesinger observes matter-of-factly that the problem remains of ordering society so that it will subdue the tendencies of industrial organization. He laments threats to the vital center the New Deal center that must be defended against all enemies. The positive state latent in the American tradition since Hamilton must continue to flourish for the sake of democracy.

Likewise, Richard Hofstadters consensus view of American intellectual history (The Age of Reform, 1955) deemphasizes the depth of philosophic disagreement that separated the founders of progressivism from the founders of the American regime and from what was then the mainstream of American political thought.

In Hofstadters telling, the desire for reform was more psychological than political, not rising from a will to promote ideas as much as a reflex to defend against economic and emotional insecurities. He sees progressivism as the quest of the essentially well-off classes to maintain status in an era of socioeconomic challenge.

America, he asserts, lacks a conservative intellectual tradition, so progressive thinking exists as a highbrow reaction to unserious political conservatism. The possibility of a genuine constitutional conservatism stretching from the Founders to Lincoln and reasserting itself in the very period that is the subject of his book (through William Howard Taft and Calvin Coolidge, among others) is beyond Hofstadters imagining.

Indeed, the continuities in the American tradition, rather than important disjunctions in thought, were emphasized by scholars across the spectrum, from Louis Hartz (The Liberal Tradition in America, 1955) to Henry Steele Commager (The American Mind, 1950), to Daniel Boorstin (The Genius of American Politics,1953). In these accounts one finds a peculiar mix of understatement and triumphalism, something particularly noticeable in Commager, who claims that progressive calls for reform rested on moderation, common sense, and even inevitability, given the fundamentally changed political and economic landscape of the early twentieth century.

In other words, Commagers historians interpretation coincides with the self-understanding of his subjects. The progressives searing constitutional critique attracts surprisingly little attention.

Arthur S. Link (Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1954) argued for the relatively superficial character of progressive thought exemplified by Woodrow Wilson, in the course of which he accepts the historicist premises of progressivism, claiming that the progressive movement itself was the natural consummation of historical processes long in the making. The understanding of progressivism as fundamentally a populist rather than philosophic movement was reinforced by historians such as C. Vann Woodward (Origins of the New South, 1951). Henry F. May (The End of American Innocence, 1959) even suggested that many progressives represented a basic cultural and political conservatism, a theme that would be magnified in the next decade.

As the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, American history writing was increasingly defined by the concerns of New Left scholars, who interpreted progressivism primarily in economic terms. They rejected the psychological reductionism of consensus historians and made ideology and interest central concepts in their analysis. But their deep sympathy with the aspirations and philosophical orientations of progressivism ensured that they became part of the story they chronicled.

In The Contours of American History (1961), William Appleman Williams sees the progressives as Christian capitalists merely trying to harmonize private interests, rather than attempting to challenge the system as whole. Themes of economy and empire loom large in Williamss account, and constitutional questions are all but invisible as he insists that a fundamental conservatism characterized progressive thought. Williams argues that the progressives sought to nationalize and Americanize but he does not attempt to define Americanization other than in materialist terms.

Like Williams, Gabriel Kolko (The Triumph of Conservatism, 1963) tries to construct a grand narrative of American history along materialist lines. The Progressive Era was really an era of conservatism, serving the needs of particular classes especially the business classes. Political capitalism is the term Kolko uses to describe the dominance of politics by business.

Competing scholarly accounts of the nature and significance of progressivism, among other matters, culminated in furious battles within the historical profession. The 1969 meeting of the American Historical Association was tumultuous, with conflict between the radical caucus and the establishment coming to a head. The radicals aimed their fire at the consensus historians, who were seen to dominate the field.

It was only a matter of time before someone would attempt to put conflicts over progressivism to bed once and for all both for the historical profession and ultimately for the American people. And the way to do this was to claim that there was no there there to begin with. By the 1970s, the radicalism of the New Left was giving way to a perhaps even more radical postmodernism.

Cultural historian Peter Filene (An Obituary for The Progressive Movement, 1970) denied that progressivism had ever existed. In fact, he saw significantly less to progressivism than even Hofstadter, who at least allowed for some measure of psychological unity among progressives, or temperamental traits that they shared.

Filene accepts the view that progressivism was aimed at undermining privilege and expanding both democracy and government power. But he claims that there was much more that divided the progressives than united them. For example: Teddy Roosevelts beliefin big government to offset the power of big business, versus what he denigrated as the rural toryism of the more populist wings of the movement.

Additionally, progressives alternately emphasized either democracy or paternalism. Such splits point not to a cohesive movement, according to Filene, but to various incompatible visions of reform. In each of its aspects goals, values, membership and supporters the movement displays a puzzling and irreducible incoherence. There are only shifting coalitions around different issues. The idea of a progressive movement is but sound and fury, signifying nothing.

By the end of the twentieth century, most scholarly accounts of progressivism downplayed its constitutional dimensions and its effect on larger cultural conceptions of the private sphere. For some, progressivism represented little more than the cautious efforts of popular or at least non-elite interests to check elite dominance. This was, broadly speaking, the view shared by early liberal historians like Hofstadter, Schlesinger, Jr., and many more.

For others, populism had little to do with progressivism. The New Left historians, such as Kolko and Williams, attempted to upend the liberal or consensus narrative by insisting that corporate elites either drove or coopted progressive reforms in order to exercise ideological and political control over an otherwise unruly economic order.

For most everyone, progressivism was bound up with the desire for efficiency and expertise rather than the messiness of republican politics and with a faith in expanded state (especially national) power, as opposed to decentralized market forces or the spontaneous workings of civil society. Almost no one saw progressivism as a fundamental rejection of the Founders Constitution, embodying a new form of secular millenarianism rooted in a strong, relatively unified sense of historical unfolding and pointing to deep theoretical unity, rather than division.

Todays progressives, who occupy almost all the cultural high ground in America, were educated in institutions where the misrepresentations of historians still loom large. Despite these modern progressives positions of privilege and systemic advantage, a new constitutionalist critique of progressivism prevents them from claiming final victory. Only recently have scholars outside the historical profession mostly a new generation of political theorists identifiedprogressivism for what itwasand continues to be: afundamentalrupturewith the roots of American order.

This article is reprinted from RealClearPublicAffairs, with permission.

Bradley C. S. Watson is Professor of Politics at Saint Vincent College, where he holds the Philip M. McKenna Chair in American and Western Political Thought. His books include "Living Constitution, Dying Faith: Progressivism and the New Science of Jurisprudence," "Progressive Challenges to the American Constitution: A New Republic," and, most recently, "Progressivism: The Strange History of a Radical Idea."

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Why You Can't Be A Progressive And Truly Love American History - The Federalist

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), a member of the Budget Committee, said in an interview Wednesday that he remains optimistic about the bipartisan talks, but added that, if for some reason the bipartisan version doesnt work out, then we ought to be looking at a reconciliation bill thats at $4.1 trillion.

Any talk of such a backup plan, however, is in the early stages as Democrats await another week of bipartisan talks in the Senate. But the fight over whether to increase the party-line bill's price tag is one of several potential problems that would bedevil Democrats if those bipartisan Senate negotiations fail underscoring the tenuous peace that both Schumer and Speaker Nancy Pelosi will need to hold throughout the falls high-stakes floor action.

Right now were trying to [see a] silver lining moving towards how we can get this done and not assume that we have members that are also going to be problems, said Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), former chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) hold a news conference in the U.S. Capitol Visitors Center May 17, 2019. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Still, Democratic impatience is mounting by the day, particularly on the House side. Many progressives there have spent months airing loud skepticism of Bidens talks with the GOP.

The whole thing is really disappointing. I think it does slow down the process, said Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), adding that he hopes the Senates failed vote leads to a willingness on the part of a couple senators to go ahead and ditch the GOP talks in favor of a Democrats-only bill.

Theyre eating time, added Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), referring to the bipartisan Senate group. And having been burned back in 09 and 10 by the Republicans in the Senate on the Affordable Care Act, we are understandably wary.

Schumer set a Wednesday deadline to get all 50 Democratic senators to get on board with the $3.5 trillion package that's poised to include an expansion of Medicare and child care assistance, among other items. The majority leader has further vowed that the Senate would move forward on a budget before the August recess.

But the Wednesday deadline is likely to slip, in part because the $3.5 trillion proposals future is tied closely to the bipartisan negotiations. That's frustrating to many House Democrats who had hoped to see action before the lengthy recess begins.

House Democrats have, instead, acknowledged that theyll likely need to return to Washington mid-August to vote on the budget blueprint and potentially the Senates bipartisan infrastructure deal, should one be reached.

While Democrats are far from finalizing the specific policies they plan to add to the social spending package, party leaders plan to take the first step in the coming weeks by voting on a budget that will determine how much each relevant committee can spend. If the bipartisan deal fails, then, the party might have to raise its top line number in order to tackle physical infrastructure while leaving its social spending priorities intact.

I cant give you an exact timeline, but I think that we are going to have every Democratic senator on board, said Senate Budget Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). At the end of the day ... the $600 billion in physical infrastructure, you can do it in the bipartisan bill, or you can combine it with one bill. One way or another, its going to happen.

Sanders is not alone in pitching the idea that roads, bridges and broadband could be rolled into the social spending bill. Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said this week she would push for the physical infrastructure plan to be included in the broader spending package if the Senate talks fail: That has to be incorporated.

But that Plan B is already drawing sharp pushback from moderates, especially in the House, who are anxious about signing on to a $3.5 trillion package amid concerns about the debt and GOP attacks over rising inflation.

Heck, no, said Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.), when asked about a top line number potentially above $3.5 trillion. We cant afford to keep spending money we dont have.

Another pivotal moderate, Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), said that "I need to see specifics but that number is aggressive."

Other Democrats argue that placing everything in a $4 trillion package, if it comes to that, shouldnt matter to moderates.

I dont know why theyd change their mind on infrastructure spending depending on the vehicle through which its accomplished, said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.). That wouldnt be a very logical position in my view.

The White House privately warned Democrats this week that if the bipartisan talks fall apart, they could have to make some painful decisions related to the budget blueprint. Given that moderates are wary of going above $3.5 trillion, that could mean important progressive priorities have to be altered or cut to make room for infrastructure funding.

And not all Senate Democrats have even signed onto the $3.5 trillion number. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), who is negotiating the bipartisan package, said Wednesday she hadnt made a decision yet on whether shed support that figure.

Im still focused on infrastructure, Shaheen said. Were going to reach a deal.

Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), another bipartisan negotiator, said that hed support moving forward on the $3.5 trillion package but added: Ill reserve the right to do whatever the hell I want once I see whats in the bill and how its funded and how its distributed.

While Republicans blocked Wednesdays vote to begin debating the bipartisan infrastructure plan, senators are aiming to reach an agreement by early next week. A group of 11 Senate Republicans sent a letter Wednesday to Schumer indicating that theyd be willing to move forward Monday, if they reach an agreement and have a score from Congress' nonpartisan budget scorekeeper.

Schumer on Wednesday voted against proceeding with the measure a move that allows the majority leader to bring the vote back up again at a later date. Senate Democrats said in interviews Wednesday that they expected Schumer to maintain his focus on the bipartisan plan before moving to the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package.

I dont know the exact sequencing, but the goal right now is to get that bipartisan bill done, said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), another member of the Budget Committee.

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With bipartisan infrastructure talks in limbo, progressives eye $4.1T silver lining - POLITICO

Skip to contentAt the local level, sidewalk socialists represent a movement whose time has come.July 21, 2021

India Walton.

EDITORS NOTE: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvels column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrinas column here.

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In 1910, during the United States first Gilded Age, Milwaukee elected Emil Seidel as its first socialist mayor. For much of the next 50 yearseven during the Red Scare led by Wisconsins notorious Senator Joseph McCarthythe city elected and reelected socialist mayors. These mayors, author Dan Kaufman wrote in The New York Times, were known for their integrityuncompromised by the local business community that despised themand for their frugality, their commitment that public money should be spent carefully and not squandered in smarmy deals with private contractors. They installed hundreds of drinking fountains, prosecuted restaurants serving tainted food, and modernized public services. Seidel appointed a new health commissioner whose department oversaw a reduction of more than 40 percent of the cases of six leading contagious diseases.

Their opponents tried to deride them as sewer socialistsa term Seidel, his successors and their supporters soon would proudly adopt. Now, chapters of the ref, the Working Families Party and other progressives propelled by the energy of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns are gaining traction at the local level and recalling sewer socialisms proud history.

In Buffalo, India Walton, running as a democratic socialist, defeated a four-term incumbent in the Democratic primary for mayor, propelled by local activists and those of the Working Families Party and the Democratic Socialists of America. In Richmond, Calif., a small working-class community outside San Francisco with a population that is 80 percent people of color and a large immigrant community, the Richmond Progressive Alliance has succeeded in electing a majority slate to the city council while battling Chevron to counter the poisonous effects of its local refinery and force it to pay its fair share of taxes.

Read the full text of Katrinas column here.

Continued here:
Progressives Around the Country Are Recalling Sewer Socialism's Proud History - The Nation