Mediaboss Marketing

Civil rights experts point to long wait times to vote as a sign of growing voter suppression in the U.S. Here's what to expect in the 2020 election. USA TODAY

The 2020 congressional primary electionshave been marked by a number of upsets, where candidates with little name recognition have been propelled into the national spotlight.

Early primaryupsets demonstrated the strength of some progressiveand staunch conservative candidates, who sometimes lacked backing fromtheir respective parties.

In New York,three Democraticcandidatesare poised to replaceor succeedmoderate longtime incumbents in June. In Illinois, a progressivecandidate, backed by the Justice Democrats organization, beat the most conservative Democrat in Congress.In Pittsburgh, a progressive statehouse candidate making her first run for officeoustedan incumbent who is the brother of the city's former mayor.

More: Booker beats progressive challenger, Van Drew race set and other takeaways from Tuesday's primary

Candidates of color, specifically Black candidates, have been on the winning side of several notable upsets. PhysicianCameron Webb, who is Black, beat three white opponents in Virginia's 5th congressional districtprimary, a seat Democrats hope to take back now that the Republicanincumbent lost his own primary. Wesley Hunt and Burgess Owens,Black candidates who won Republican nominations in Texas and Utah, respectively, are both running to represent districts in which Black people are minorities.

Jamaal Bowman, who's running against Rep. Eliot Engel in a Democratic Party primary, pictured at an endorsement event with Zephyr Teachout in Mount Vernon.(Photo: courtesy Bowman campaign)

More Republican women are also winning primaries. According tothe Center for American Women in Politicsat Rutgers, arecord 55 Republican women won House primaries this year, clearing the previous barof 53 set in 2004.That's in part because more Republican women are running 220 filed to run for the House, up from120 who ran in 2018.

Here are some of this primary season's most surprising upsets:

Rep. Scott Tipton, a five-term incumbent from Colorado, lostthe 3rd congressional district's Republican nomination to Lauren Boebert, a restaurant owner and outspoken gun rights activist. Boebert beat Tipton by nearly ten points.

More: John Hickenlooper wins Colorado Democratic primary, will face Sen. Cory Gardner

Trump hadendorsedTipton, tweeting his support for the congressman in December as well asthe night before the election. Boebert's website describes her asa supporter of Trump, praising "his policies to Make America Great Again."

Lauren Boebert waits for returns during a watch party in Grand Junction, Colo., Tuesday, June 30, 2020.(Photo: McKenzie Lange, The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel via AP)

Boebert's restaurant, Shooters Grill in Rifle, Colorado,becamethe subject of national media attention in 2014, for an open carry policy allowing staff to be armed with guns. Her commitment to gun rights also earned her a viral moment in 2019, when she confrontedthen-presidential candidateBeto ORourke at a town hall.I was one of the gun owning Americans who heard (O'Rourke)speak regarding your Hell yes Im going to take your AR-15s and AK-47s,'" she said. "Well, Im here to say, hell no youre not.'

Boebert was also covered by local press as a vocal critic of Democratic Gov. Jared Polis' coronavirus lockdown measures, reopening Shooters Grill in defiance of state orders.

Diane Mitsch Bush, a former state lawmaker, won the district's Democratic nomination and will face Boebertin the fall.

New York's congressional primary in June saw a near sweep of Democratic nominationsby progressives. With several candidates projected to beatmore centrist orestablishmentcompetitors, the electionsmirrored Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's upset against 10-term former Rep. Joe Crowley in 2018.

Jamaal Bowman, a former middle school principal from the Bronx,beat longtime Democratic incumbent Rep. Eliot Engelwith about60% of the vote.

Jamaal Bowman speaks to attendees during his primary-night party in June. The former middle school principal has toppled 16-term U.S. Rep. Eliot Engel in New York's Democratic congressional primary.(Photo: Eduardo Munoz Alvarez, AP)

Engel, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, represented the 16th District for more than 30 years.

The Justice Democrats-backed Bowman began to surge after Engel, asking to speak at an event, was caught on mic saying, If I didn't have a primary, I wouldn't care, according to NBC News. Engel was criticized by primary challengers for not returning to his district for months during the COVID-19 crisis.

Bowman, who was endorsed by Ocasio-Cortez, ran a campaign firmly aligned with the party's progressive flank. He is a proponent of multiple "New Deals," including the Green New Deal an Ocasio-Cortez-spearheadedproposal that outlines a broadplan for tackling climate change as well as plans to reform education and public housing.

"I am excited, I am happy, I cannot wait to get to Congress and cause problems for the people in there that have been maintaining a status quo that has literally been killing our children," Bowman said during his election night watch party.

There is no Republican challenger for the November election.

More: AOCs blowout win, last-minute voting in Kentucky and other key takeaways from Tuesdays primaries

Madison Cawthorn, theowner of a real estate investment company, unexpectedly beat Lynda Bennett, a real estate agent and activist, in the race to claim the Republican nomination for Mark Meadows' 11th District seat in North Carolina, which he gave up to become Trump's chief of staff.

Madison Cawthorn(Photo: Courtesy Cawthorn for NC)

Cawthorn, 24,beat Bennett with 65.82% of the vote in the district's runoff election in June. The outcome was considered an upset, given that the Trump and Meadows-endorsed Bennettwon the vote in March (but not by a wide enough margin to avoid a runoff election).Like Boebert, Cawthorn is a supporter of Trump.

Cawthorn said that he was inspired to run for Congress because he was disappointed by how the Republican party handled full control of the White House and Congress in 2017.

It felt like Donald Trump was having to pull teeth from Congress to try to get anything done, and so I want to go over to Washington D.C. to break that status quo, to actually get something done, he said in an interview with The Hill.

More: With second primary underway, Cawthorn addresses voting in-person, by mail options

Cawthorn's website toutshis conservative views on health care, immigration, abortion rightsand gun control. "Im running because our faith, our freedoms and our values are under assault from coastal elites and leftists like Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez," he states.

If elected in November, Cawthorn would become the youngest member in Congress, a title currently held by Ocasio-Cortez. He willface off against Democratic candidateand retired U.S Air Force colonel Moe Davis in the fall.

Iowa Republicans ousted nine-term incumbent Rep. Steve King, nominating state Sen. Randy Feenstra to run for the state's 4th congressional district seat. Feenstra beat King by nearly ten points.

State Sen. Randy Feenstra and Rep. Steve King. Feenstra is challenging King in the GOP primary for the 4th District Congressional seat.(Photo: Robin Opsahl)

The conservative district has long had to contend with King's controversial remarks. While talking about "Dreamers" in a July 2013 interview, King claimed that for every young immigrant who becomes a school valedictorianthere are "100 out there that, they weigh 130 pounds and they've got calves the size of cantaloupes because they're hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert."In an interview with The New York Timeslast year, Kingsuggested that the term "white nationalist" should not be consideredoffensive.

King was removed from his committee seats over the comments he made to the Times. King'scompetitors, including Feenstra, used King's rejectionfrom those committees as proofFeenstra would be more effective as an ally of Trump.

Republicans largely rebuked King through their support of Feenstraduring the primary campaign. Feenstra significantlyoutraised King, andwas endorsed by theU.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Right to Life Committee. Five Republican congressmen even donated to Feenstra's campaign.

Feenstra will compete with J.D. Scholten, who ran uncontested for the Democratic nomination, in the fall. Scholten previously lost to King by a slimmarginin the 2018 general election.

Feenstra's win is likely. Support for a Republican representativein Iowa's 4th congressional district exceeds support fora Democrat by 22%, according to aJune Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll.

Republican Mike Garcia, a former U.S. Navy pilot and defense contractor executive, beat Democrat Christy Smith,a member of the California State Assembly, in the special general electionfor Illinois Rep. Katie Hill's seat in May.

Mike Garcia(Photo: CONTRIBUTED PHOTO)

Garcia's 25th District victoryrepresents the first time a Republican candidate has flipped a Democratic seat in California since 1998. Trump had endorsedGarcia on Twitter, though he originally saidthe election would be "rigged" by California Democrats.

The two candidates will run against each other again in the fall.

Rep. Denver Riggleman, a freshman congressman, lost the Republican nomination for Virginia's fifth district seat to Bob Good, aformer official in the athletics department at Liberty University in June.

Denver Riggleman speaks during a forum at the Lynchburg Regional Business Alliance in Lynchburg, Va., Monday, Oct. 22, 2018.(Photo: Taylor Irby, AP)

Riggleman, a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, was the subject of intense criticism from Republicans in his district after he officiated a gay wedding for two former campaign volunteers last summer.

The Virginia county GOP formally censuredRiggleman last fall, doubtinghis "support for traditional family values, and other conservative principles," according to The Hill.

"He's out of step with the base of the party on life," Good saidin May,in a debate with Riggleman on The Schilling Show, a Charlottesville radio program. "He's out of step on marriage. He's out of step on immigration. He's out of step on health care, on climate, on drug legalization."

Riggleman claimed the election process was riggedby Republican insiders, by makingthe nomination process a convention instead of a primary. Conventions traditionally favor more conservative candidates and have been used for years by Virginia Republicans to block moderate candidates from winning elections.

Good will face off against physician Cameron Webb in the fall's general election.

Ronny Jackson, aTrump-backed former White House physician with no political experience, beatJosh Winegarner, a former cattle industry lobbyist, in the Republican runoff for Texas' 13th District House seat.

Jackson, whowas a White House physician to President Donald Trumpand former PresidentBarack Obama, received endorsements from Trump on Twitter, who called him "strong on Crimes and Borders" and insisted Jackson would "protect your #2A."

Winegarner had the support of outgoing Republican Rep. Mac Thornberry.

Former White House physician Dr. Ronny Jackson arrives at the annual White House Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, April 2, 2018.(Photo: Andrew Harnik, AP)

Jacksonpositioned his relationship with Trump as the biggest asset to his candidacy. Thedistrict has some of the highest rates of support for Trump in the country, giving the president 80% of its vote in 2016, according to the Cook Political Report.

Jackson had afundraising advantage over Winegarner as well, accruing just over $490,000 since April, comparedto Winegarner's almost $300,000 haul duringthat same time period.Jackson won with about 56 percent of the vote, beating Winegarner by more than 11 points.

Jackson, who is a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral, was in the running to be Trump's nominee for Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2018, but ultimatelywithdrew from consideration amid a swarm of allegations of prior misconduct.

More: Some Americans refuse to mask up. Rules, fines and free masks will change that, experts say.

Former colleaguestold Senate investigators that Jackson regularly drank on duty, had an "explosive" temper, and that he abused his powers to prescribe himself prescription drugs for recreational use, among other allegations of misconduct.

Jackson denied all of the allegations leveled against him, calling them "completely false and fabricated." Theinvestigation was opened by the Pentagon inspector general in June 2018 and remains ongoing.

More: Wearing a mask doesn't just protect others from COVID-19, it protects you from infection, perhaps serious illness, too

On election night, Jackson celebrated his win by tweeting, "Jane and I just got off the phone with @realDonaldTrump! Its official! I am honored to be the Republican nominee for #TX13! I promise I will make you proud!"

Jackson will face off against Gus Trujillo, who won the Democratic runoff election.

Mondaire Jones, a lawyer from Rockland County, wonthe nomination forlong-time incumbent Rep. Nita Loweys 17th District seat in New York. The Associated Press did not call the race until about three weeks after it ended, though the nomination was always considered Jones', who had picked up more than double the votesof any other candidate by election night.

Mondaire Jones, Democratic candidate for Congress in the 17th C.D., speaks during a rally honoring lives lost to police violence in front of the Westchester County Courthouse in White Plains July 15, 2020. The rally was sponsored by the Westchester Coalition for Police Reform.(Photo: Seth Harrison/The Journal News)

His closest competitor, former federal prosecutor Adam Schleifer, hadfour times Jones budget.

Jones received endorsements from progressive members of Congress such as Ocasio-Cortez, Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley, and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Jones' campaign did not accept corporate PAC donations, and signed the No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge.He ran on a platform that advocated for labor rights and student debt relief, as well as Medicare for All and paid sick leave as responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Like Bowman, he is also a proponent ofthe Green New Deal.

In an interview with NPR, Jones said that it was his commitment to progressive policies that set him apart during the primary election."I am the only candidate in a crowded Democratic primary who supports the only policy that would literally ensure everyone has health care in this country and that is Medicare for All," he said.

In the fall, Jones will face Maureen McArdle Schulman, who won the district's Republican nomination.

Marie Newman, a former management consultant and founder of an anti-bullying non-profit, narrowly beat incumbent Rep. Dan Lipinksi in the Democratic race for Illinois' third district seat in March.

Lipinski's father, WilliamLipinski, held the seat for more than twodecades before his son succeeded him. Newman's win represents the first time the seat will be out of the Lipinski family since 1983.

Marie Newman smiles as she campaigns in the Archer Heights neighborhood of Chicago.(Photo: Charles Rex Arbogast, AP Images)

Lipinskiisnotoriously one of the last few conservative Democrats in Congress. His opposition to abortion rights, the DREAM Act, and the Affordable Care Act all alienated him from his party. In contrast, Newman was backed by progressive groups such as Justice Democrats, the political action committee that supportedOcasio-Cortez in 2018.

Newman will compete withCounty Board Member Mike Fricilone, who won the Republican nomination, in the fall.

Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who was previously Alabama's U.S. Senator for 20 years, lost his runoff bid to former football coach Tommy Tuberville.

Tuberville considers himself a Christian conservative,and ran a campaign that was pro-life and pro-gun rights. He told the Montgomery Advertiser in March that he supported Trumps efforts to build a border wall with Mexico, and wanted to reduce the national debt through cuts to social programs, with exceptions for Social Security, Medicare, andMedicaid.

The race to see who would compete with Sen.Doug Jones, who flipped the traditionally Republican seat in 2018, also highlighted the rift between Trump and Sessions.

Former college football coach Tommy Tuberville defeated former Senator and Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the Alabama Republican Senate primary. Tuberville goes on to challenge Democratic Senator Doug Jones. (July 15) AP Domestic

In the early days of Trump's presidency and during his campaign Sessions was a prominent ally. Sessions was the first U.S. Senator to endorse Trump's campaign, providing it cruciallegitimacy before the 2016 Super Tuesday elections. Sessions publicly supported Trump as early as 2015, sporting a Make America Great Again hat at a Trump rally in August2015 and praising Trump's border wall plans.

More: Illinois GOP congressman criticizes Trump for lack of 'loyalty' to former Attorney General Sessions

Sessions' goodwill with Trump expired when herecused himselffrom the Russia investigation, whichled to Robert Mueller'sappointmentas special counsel and anearlytwo-year investigation that shadowed Trump's early years in office. Trump was not charged, and fired Sessions in 2018.

In a television interview last summer, TrumpcalledSessions' appointment as attorney general the "biggest mistake" of his presidency.

Although Trump regularly endorses GOP candidatesusually on Twitter he paid special attention to the race between Sessions and Tuberville,explicitlytyinghis endorsement of Tuberville to Sessions' recusal.

Tuberville will face off against Jones in November.

Contributing: William Cummings, Brian Lyman, Stephen Gruber-Miller, and Nick Coltrain

Read or Share this story: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/07/22/2020-election-democrats-republicans-both-see-congressional-primary-runoff-upsets/5369587002/

Read more:
Congressional upsets: Progressives, candidates of color, and GOP outsiders net primary wins - USA TODAY

Solving Americas race-related problems is hard. So hard that nobody really has any clue how to do it. Burning down an auto-parts store isnt going to help. But forcing people to attend reeducation seminars also seems unlikely to work.

Just as we spend more time watching TV than training for marathons, we lapse into doing whats easy. And whats easy, when it comes to race, is pretending to be outraged about commonly used words. Trying desperately not to get canceled, bosses are trying to think ahead about what words might create a fake Duraflame firestorm of anger, and preemptively ruling ordinary words out of bounds.

At the Los Angeles Times, for instance, an editor has said the word looters, which has been used many times in the paper, now has a pejorative and racist connotation and that anyone who is inclined to use the word should talk to your immediate supervisor. Translation: Best not use the word at all, if you want to stay employed. So what to call looters? Non-paying shoppers? That doesnt quite tell the story: Ordinary shoplifters dont usually bust up all the windows. How about self-appointed retail-justice-commandos? Revolutionary mass goods-redistribution agents?

Harvard, which in 2015 abolished the name House Master for professors in charge of residential houses, is being sweated by a group called the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard that decided to be triggered by the term Board of Overseers, an alumni panel dating back to the 17th century that selects the university president. Past members include John F. Kennedy. The Coalition proclaimed that the name must be changed because Overseer also refers to men hired by plantation owners during that same time period to violently control and abuse enslaved people. Plantation overseers were paid to elicit the most work out of enslaved etc. I didnt finish the paragraph because my stupidity alarm was ringing in my ears. In June, the University of Louisville ditched the name overseer from student government organizations because of slavery.

In Houston, a Realtors association announced it would no longer use terms such as master bedroom or master bathroom not because any sane person ever associated a nice Mediterranean-style 4BR with Kunta Kinte getting whipped in Roots but because some yellow-blazered property guru thought this would be a way of expressing generalized racial niceness. Is any single black person better off because of this word-juggling? No, but people are confusing gestures with actions more than ever.

Twitter, which is saturated with woke-campus paranoia, this month announced that it was blacklisting the word blacklist, along with other supposedly non-inclusive terms such as grandfathered (ageist, I guess), guys (too gendered) and sanity check, which is something most of us could use a little more of in our lives, but Twitter desperately needs on a daily basis, the way Uma Thurman needed that adrenaline shot in Pulp Fiction.

But any noun that has any association with anything bad in anyones mind, or ever did at any point in history, is now under scrutiny. Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah says the Texas Rangers name is racist. Now that the woke left has succeeded in getting the Washington Redskins to change their name a decision that despite nonstop cheerleading by the media never enjoyed more than 29 percent support in polls every other team name is under scrutiny.

The teams name is not so far off from being called the Texas Klansmen, Attiah wrote.

Wait till she finds out what cowboys did. For that matter, doesnt the term Vikings trigger deep-seated fears of marauding, raping and pillaging, often carried out by people wearing horns they had cut out of the heads of innocent animals? I feel unsafe. Clearly the Minnesota football franchise should stop celebrating a people associated with bloodshed and rename themselves the Conflict De-Escalation Counselors. Rethinking every noun in America is the only way forward, people. Or do you want to be considered one of the Klansmen?

Kyle Smith is critic-at-large for National Review.

Continue reading here:
These are the innocuous words progressives want to ban you from using - New York Post

WASHINGTON Congress went two-for-two swatting down measures to slash the national security budget by $74 billion, rejecting a proposal Wednesday from Sen. Bernie Sanders to redirect the money toward domestic needs.

The Senate voted 23-77 against an amendment to its version of the $740.5 billion annual defense policy bill. Progressives floated the plan to use defense dollars (excluding salaries and health care of military personnel) to address the pandemics economic fallout.

The amendments sponsors argued the social spending would better align with peoples needs and views, and that national security should be redefined in the wake of the global pandemic. They said the military budget is loaded with waste and unjustly benefits defense contractors.

Given all the unprecedented crisis the country faces, now is not the time to increase the Pentagons bloated $740 billion budget, said Sanders, I-Vt. At a time when 30 million Americans are in danger of losing their jobs, now is not the time to be spending more on national defense than we did during the Cold War, the Vietnam War and the Korean War.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., encouraged senators to vote against the amendment. McConnell accused Democrats of trying to decimate the defense budget and chided Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., for throwing Sanders his support.

The Democratic leader, who in almost every floor speech tries to accuse this administration of being too soft on Americas adversaries, wants to literally decimate our defense budget to finance a socialist spending spree, McConnell said. Defense spending demonstrates our will to defend ourselves and our interests in a dangerous world. Keeping our nation safe is our foremost constitutional duty. We cannot shirk it.

Progressives hoped to spark an internal debate among Democrats, who were evenly split by the Senate vote.

Sign up for our Early Bird Brief Get the defense industry's most comprehensive news and information straight to your inbox

Subscribe

Enter a valid email address (please select a country) United States United Kingdom Afghanistan Albania Algeria American Samoa Andorra Angola Anguilla Antarctica Antigua and Barbuda Argentina Armenia Aruba Australia Austria Azerbaijan Bahamas Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belgium Belize Benin Bermuda Bhutan Bolivia Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana Bouvet Island Brazil British Indian Ocean Territory Brunei Darussalam Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burundi Cambodia Cameroon Canada Cape Verde Cayman Islands Central African Republic Chad Chile China Christmas Island Cocos (Keeling) Islands Colombia Comoros Congo Congo, The Democratic Republic of The Cook Islands Costa Rica Cote D'ivoire Croatia Cuba Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Djibouti Dominica Dominican Republic Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Estonia Ethiopia Falkland Islands (Malvinas) Faroe Islands Fiji Finland France French Guiana French Polynesia French Southern Territories Gabon Gambia Georgia Germany Ghana Gibraltar Greece Greenland Grenada Guadeloupe Guam Guatemala Guinea Guinea-bissau Guyana Haiti Heard Island and Mcdonald Islands Holy See (Vatican City State) Honduras Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Iran, Islamic Republic of Iraq Ireland Israel Italy Jamaica Japan Jordan Kazakhstan Kenya Kiribati Korea, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Republic of Kuwait Kyrgyzstan Lao People's Democratic Republic Latvia Lebanon Lesotho Liberia Libyan Arab Jamahiriya Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Macao Macedonia, The Former Yugoslav Republic of Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Maldives Mali Malta Marshall Islands Martinique Mauritania Mauritius Mayotte Mexico Micronesia, Federated States of Moldova, Republic of Monaco Mongolia Montserrat Morocco Mozambique Myanmar Namibia Nauru Nepal Netherlands Netherlands Antilles New Caledonia New Zealand Nicaragua Niger Nigeria Niue Norfolk Island Northern Mariana Islands Norway Oman Pakistan Palau Palestinian Territory, Occupied Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Pitcairn Poland Portugal Puerto Rico Qatar Reunion Romania Russian Federation Rwanda Saint Helena Saint Kitts and Nevis Saint Lucia Saint Pierre and Miquelon Saint Vincent and The Grenadines Samoa San Marino Sao Tome and Principe Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia and Montenegro Seychelles Sierra Leone Singapore Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia South Africa South Georgia and The South Sandwich Islands Spain Sri Lanka Sudan Suriname Svalbard and Jan Mayen Swaziland Sweden Switzerland Syrian Arab Republic Taiwan, Province of China Tajikistan Tanzania, United Republic of Thailand Timor-leste Togo Tokelau Tonga Trinidad and Tobago Tunisia Turkey Turkmenistan Turks and Caicos Islands Tuvalu Uganda Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom United States United States Minor Outlying Islands Uruguay Uzbekistan Vanuatu Venezuela Viet Nam Virgin Islands, British Virgin Islands, U.S. Wallis and Futuna Western Sahara Yemen Zambia Zimbabwe

Thanks for signing up!

By giving us your email, you are opting in to the Early Bird Brief.

SASCs ranking member, Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., said the amendment would jeopardize defense-related jobs and upend the carefully negotiated bipartisan budget agreement from 2018, which set spending levels for defense and domestic spending for two years. He acknowledged Congress needs to address historically neglected communities.

This across-the-board approach, its good for a headline, its good to make a point, but were here to make policy, and I hope we do make policy, Reed said.

Winning 23 Democratic votes was the most significant step forward in recent years, to reduce the militarys budget, Sanders said in a statement afterward.

We are going to continue building a political movement which understands that it is far more important to invest in working people, the children, the elderly, and the poor than in spending more on defense than the next 11 nations combined, he said.

On Tuesday, the House rejected a companion bill, 93-324, which is roughly a 3-to-1 margin. Democrats split, 92-139, while 185 Republicans voted no.

After the House vote, advocates and the measures co-sponsors said change was on the horizon.

Ninety-three members of Congress stood together to oppose a bloated $740 billion defense budget, tweeted Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., who co-chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Though our amendment didnt pass, progressive power is stronger than ever. We will keep fighting for pro-peace, pro-people budgets until it becomes a reality.

The rest is here:
Progressive effort to cut defense fails twice in Congress - DefenseNews.com

New York (AFP) - Energized by the US's massive anti-racism protests, history-making progressives from New York -- young, black, Latino and gay -- want to shake up Congress's status quo when they are likely elected in November.

Mondaire Jones, 33, and Afro-Latino Ritchie Torres, 32, are set to become the first black, openly gay members of the House of Representatives following the November 3 vote.

Galvanized by the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, they recently won primaries to become the Democratic Party's candidates in districts that overwhelmingly vote Democrat, all but securing their election to Congress's lower house.

Although they recognize the significance of the moment, they say they aren't going to be content with just being the first, and aim to engineer real change.

"I am not running for Congress to make history as the first openly gay black," Jones told AFP.

"But it is not lost on me the power of representation. Growing up, I never imagined that someone like me came to run for Congress, let alone win, because it had never happened before," he added.

The pair will be joined by 44-year-old Jamaal Bowman, who is black. He is a school principal and has three children with his wife.

Bowman stunned 16-term veteran Eliot Engel in the June primaries despite the 73-year-old being backed by the Democratic Party's elite, including Hillary Clinton and House leader Nancy Pelosi.

The trio's victory proved that the surprise election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress in 2018 when she was in her late 20s was no one-off. She stunned the party establishment by taking the seat from a Democrat who had been in the House for 20 years.

"It's a victory for the new left," said David Barker, an expert on government at American University in Washington.

"The more overtly socialist wing of the Democratic Party did not really used to exist at all until not that long ago and now is a major force," he told AFP.

The presumptive congressmen are part of a wave of New York politicians belonging to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party who are unseating veteran, mostly white, legislators.

Story continues

Fans of senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, these men want to shake up their party and push it further to the left.

President Donald Trump is using their ascendency to score his own political points, arguing the Democratic Party is becoming controlled by "a radical left."

He has said the Republican Party will beat "Marxists, anarchists, and agitators" during his re-election bid.

- Coronavirus -

Mass protests following the killing of George Floyd in police custody in May and the racial and economic disparities highlighted by the coronavirus pandemic helped spur the New York trio's candidacies.

Torres will represent an area of the Bronx that is one of the poorest in the country.

Jones won in an overwhelmingly white district where only ten percent of the population is black.

"We are undergoing a shift within the Democratic Party: new voices, diverse voices that bring a sense of urgency about the climate crisis, about the health care crisis, about the housing crisis," said Jones.

They have pitched themselves as champions of the poor and universal healthcare. Forty million Americans lost jobs due to the COVID-19 crisis, which has killed blacks and Latinos in disproportionately large numbers.

Jones was brought up in poverty by his grandparents in the New York suburbs. He studied at Stanford University and then Harvard Law School before working in the US Justice Department during Barack Obama's presidency.

He suggests some of the old guard have not done enough and must "be replaced by people who understand what's at stake, especially under the presidency of Donald Trump."

In addition to championing racial justice, Jones and Torres pledge to fight for LGBTQ rights.

"Their voices are going to make a tremendous difference," said Elliot Imse of the LGBTQ Victory Institute, which helps LGBTQ people win elected office in the United States.

Barker -- the politics expert -- notes that Democratic representation in Congress has become much more diverse with regards to gender, race and religion, in recent years.

"But the opposite has been true with respect to Republicans," which is getting more male, more white, and more Christian, he said.

Currently, only two of the US Senate's 100 members and seven of the House's 435 representatives identify themselves as LGBTQ.

Although the LGBTQ community comprises 4.5 percent of America's population, members occupy only 0.17 percent of elected roles, according to the Victory Institute.

"We certainly have a long way to go," Imse told AFP.

Read the original:
Black and gay: New York progressives aim to shake up US Congress - Yahoo News

(Courtesy of Verso)

What is the way forward for progressives in a time when it seems both centrism and authoritarianism are resurgent? What should be the character and scope of a national program that progressives in and outside the Democratic Party can and should embrace? There are many places to look for answers to these questions, and no doubt the answers will have many inspirations.Ad Policy

One of the most incisive articulations of an American progressive alternative is that of Roberto Mangabeira Unger, a Harvard Law professor, philosopher, and former Brazilian politician. He has written over two dozen books addressing an unusual diversity of topics, including critical legal theorywhich he helped developeconomics, philosophy, and religion. Given this range, it would be unfair to reduce Ungers work to one core idea. But perhaps the major theme of his work is summed up in his argument that society is made and imagined, that it is a human artifact rather than the expression of an underlying natural order.

What this means is that nothing in our societythe economy, liberal democracy, the legal order, etc.is predetermined toward some definitive end. They are human creations, artifacts whose forms can therefore be challenged, transcended, and ultimately reoriented for the purpose of greater human liberation, individually and collectively.

What makes Ungers progressive vision of society unique are its religious and prophetic elements. He sees human beings as having a divinelike capacity to transcend their societal circumstances to achieve greatness. What prevents them from doing so is the false assumption that there can be no substantial alternative to inherited political institutions. His work exposes this false necessity while providing progressive social, political, and economic alternatives to it. In this regard, his work can offer progressives key resources for exposing the false necessity of the American liberal status quo and thinking constructively about a different progressive vision for the United States.

The Nation recently spoke with Unger about his proposal for an alternative progressive track for American politics. Along the way, we discussed racial injustice in the United States, Donald Trumps election, democratizing new technologies, the future of education, and progressive taxation. Of pressing importance is the topic of structural economic and political change, and in turn, whether Ungers vision is impractical. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: Right now the streets are filled with protesters demonstrating in the aftermath of George Floyds brutal killing by Minneapolis police. Progressives have long struggled to confront and overcome racial injustice in the United States. You have criticized their approach, the dominant approach, to racial oppression. What is your understanding? And what is your proposal?

Roberto Mangabeira Unger: To grasp the meaning of this moment for the future of the country, it is useful to begin by distinguishing the immediate backgroundthe failure of the established approach to racial injustice in the United Statesfrom the larger context of which this failure forms a part: the disorientation of American progressives and the long-standing absence in American politics of any program responsive to the needs, interests, and aspirations of the working-class majority of the country, white or black.

The prevailing response to racial injustice in the United States has been the integrationist orthodoxy. It treats racial injustice as a threshold issue, to be addressed before all problems of economic equality and opportunity. Its signature expression is affirmative action. It has done little for those who most require protection, the vast number of black people who languish in prisons and dead-end jobs. This approach has offended the white working-class majority, who believe themselves to be victims of a conspiracy between sanctimonious white elites and the representatives of black workers. And it has provided a model for the identity politics that has addressed legitimate demands for respect and recognition only by diverting the country from engagement with its structural problems.

There is an alternative. The alternative is to distinguish individualized racial discrimination from the advancement of the unequipped, the excluded, and the impoverished. Individualized racial discrimination should be criminalized, as it is in many countries. Social advancement should be predicated on real disadvantage or exclusion, wherever it is found. Racial stigma should serve as only one of the standards that, together with other forms of disadvantage, trigger such advancement. Race should be combined with class rather than separated from it.

DSJ: How did the country arrive at its present situation, with the presidency in the hands of Donald Trump, after decades in which millions of working-class voters abandoned the Democratic Party? MORE FROM Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

RMU: The principal vehicle of American progressives, the Democratic Party, failed to come up with a sequel to Franklin Roosevelts New Deal. The sequel would have had to be very different from the original, which focused on economic security rather than economic empowerment and offers no model for how to bring more American workers into the good jobs of the most productive parts of todays economy.

Let us look coldly at what has happened since then. Having begun under Lyndon Johnson by treating the poor as an insular minority in need of support and blacks as another insular minority in need of rights, progressives offered nothing to the working-class majority of the country other than later to dissolve them into a series of group identities and special interests. Conservatives responded with the formula by which, under Democratic as well as Republican administrations, they won and wielded power for half a century: combining material concessions to the moneyed class with moral concessions to the moneyless classes. For this whole period, the United States has had no economic growth strategy other than cheap money, delegated by the federal government to the central bank, and productivity growth has stagnated. The majority of American workers have feltand beenabandoned.

Into the expanding vacuum that resulted from these successive abdications came the plutocratic populism of Donald Trump: a big fat hoax, given that it has done nothing for the abandoned majority other than to wage war against low-skill immigrants while continuingit must be acknowledgedto get high employment, with relatively few good jobs, on the basis of the cheap-money policy. What an opportunity for the progressives, if they had a program. They dont.

DSJ: What, then, should be the character of a national alternative that progressives in and outside the Democratic Party can embrace?

RMU: The progressive program the country needs would address the supply as well as the demand sides of the economy, production as well as consumption. It would seek to innovate in the economic, educational, and political arrangements that shape the primary or fundamental distribution of advantage and opportunity rather than devoting itself solely, as the humanizers of the supposedly inevitable have, to the after-the-fact correction, through progressive taxation and redistributive social spending, of market-generated inequalities. More generally, the individual should be secured in a haven of capability-assuring educational and economic endowments and of safeguards against private and governmental oppression. Society all around him, however, should be opened up to contest, experiment, and innovation. In that storm, the individual, once safe and equipped, can move unafraid. The storm does not arise spontaneously. It needs to be arranged.

The true aim of the progressives should be a deep freedom, achieved by changing the structure of social life, rather than a shallow equality. The struggle against entrenched and extreme inequality is subsidiary to the larger goal, to become bigger together. And the method should be structural changethe criterion of depthchange in the established institutional arrangements and ideological assumptions. Real structural change is not the replacement of one indivisible, predetermined systemsocialism for capitalismby another. It is fragmentary but cumulative. The goal of shared empowerment and the refusal to take the established institutional form of society as an unsurpassable horizon are what together oppose the progressive to the conservative.

These generalities mark a direction. They do not excuse us from proposing the initial steps by which to begin to move in that direction in a particular society and time. A combination of innovations in the economy, education, and democratic politics would start to give shape to the alternative that the country lacks.

DSJ: You have argued in your most recent book, The Knowledge Economy, that progressives need an approach to the supply side of the economy. What does such an approach entail for the future of the American economy and the situation of American workers?

RMU: At the heart of the economic part of a progressive program must be the attempt to develop a socially inclusive form of todays most advanced practice of production, the knowledge economy, informed by science and devoted to perpetual innovation. It exists in every sector of the American economyin intellectually dense services and even in precision agriculture, as well as in the high-tech industry with which we tend, too narrowly, to identify it. In every sector, however, it appears only as a fringe, a series of insular vanguards of production excluding the overwhelming majority of businesses and workers. Practices, more than technologies, are what set the knowledge economy apart. These practices bring production closer to discovery. The insularity of the knowledge economy results in both economic stagnation and economic inequality. It causes economic stagnation by denying the most advanced practice to most economic agents. And it roots economic inequality in a lengthening chasm between the advanced and backward parts of production.

To move toward an inclusive knowledge economy, the country needs to develop a 21st century equivalent to the 19th century system of agricultural extension by which it created, on its agrarian frontier, family-scale agriculture with entrepreneurial attributes. That would require establishing between the government and the producers an intermediate cadre of support centers, with wide autonomy and professional management and financed by a combination of subsidies and fees, to give a wider range of small- and medium-size enterprises broader access to advanced practice and technology, as well as to capital, and to identify and disseminate best practice.

But it is not enough to lift up businesses. It is also necessary to reach out, by analogous means, to people who have little or no relation to business organizations. The best place to begin is the middle part of the job structurethe part most hollowed out by the economic changes of recent decadesimproving the equipment and skills of people such as machine repair technicians and nurse practitioners. The goal would be to turn them into technologically equipped artisans. From there, it is possible to move, with similar methods and intentions, both up and down the job hierarchy.

This second wing of the productive uplift effort in turn merges into initiatives designed to strengthen labor in its relation to capital. No dynamic of inclusive rise in productivity can flourish against the background of low-wage and insecure labor. In the United States, as around the world, stable employment is ceasing to be the norm. More and more jobs are temporary, part-time, or otherwise insecure. The reality of labor performed under decentralized contractual arrangements, rather than as part of a stable labor force assembled in large productive units, cannot be reversed. It results from changes in the forms of production. But it can be mastered by the law to prevent flexibility from meaning insecurity. The free-for-all gig economy must not become the rule. The counterpart to productive uplift is new labor lawto organize, represent, and protect unstable labor.

Get unlimited access: $9.50 for six months.

DSJ: Progressive politicians like Bernie Sanders and progressive academics like Thomas Piketty have emphasized the role of redistributive taxesincluding taxes on wealthin diminishing inequality. Why do you resist? And what do you see as the proper place of taxation in a progressive program?

RMU: No progressive program is feasible without a substantially higher tax than the United States now implements. Comparative fiscal experience reveals the truth about taxes. Structural or institutional change reshaping the fundamental distribution of opportunity and advantage decisively overshadows anything that can be achieved by retrospective redistribution through tax and transfer. Moreover, in determining the overall impact of the budget on both its revenue-raising and spending sides, the aggregate level of the tax take and how it is spent count for more than the progressive profile of taxation. A tax that is neutral toward relative prices may make it possible to raise much more public revenue with much less economic trauma, as the European social democracies do through heavy reliance on the avowedly regressive value-added tax, and then to spend it on redistributive public services.

That is not a reason to reject the steeply progressive taxation of both individual consumption and wealth, so long as we understand that the redistributive effects of these taxes are likely to be modest unless we have the power and will to radicalize them and to tolerate the resulting economic disruption. Evidently, many progressive politicians prefer pietistic gestures to transformative effects. Bereft of a structural program, they simply want to show on whose side they are. And some of them are now distracted by the pleasant thought that, regardless of special circumstances, they can evade the whole problem by printing money instead of raising it.

DSJ: The economic changes that you propose, including a socially inclusive knowledge economy, seem to have far-reaching implications for education. What are they, and how can they be reconciled with a class divide that is also an educational divide in America?

RMU: The United States suffers from a severe form of educational dualism. Its schools are some of the best and the worst among high-income countries. There are two tasks. The first task has to do with the institutional setting of the school system. In this vast, unequal country, organized as a federation, the priority is to reconcile the local management of the schools with national standards of investment and quality. Such a reconciliation is incompatible with the exclusive dependence of the schools on local public finance. And it requires cooperation within the federal system to take over failing schools and school systems, fix them, and return them fixed.

The second task is to recast education on a model of teaching and learning that gives primacy to the acquisition of analytic and synthetic capabilities over the mastery of information. That does so by preferring selective depth to encyclopedic superficiality in dealing with content. That puts teamwork among students, teachers, and schools in the place of individualism and authoritarianism in the classroom. And that deals with every subject from contrasting points of view. This approach is no less suitable to practical, vocational training than to general education, once the focus of such training shifts from job-specific and machine-specific skills to the higher-order capabilities required by the knowledge economy and its technologies. But it does depend on the creation of a nationwide teaching career through cooperation within the federal system.

The school under democracy should not be the instrument of either government or the family. It should be the voice of the future and recognize in each young person a tongue-tied prophet.

DSJ: Can these alternatives in the economy and in education advance unless we remake our political institutions? Our democracy was not organized to facilitate structural change unless crisis forces transformation.

RMU: A deepening of democracy must accompany, in a progressive project, the economic and educational changes for which I have argued: Political institutions set the terms under which change in all other areas can happen. The mark of such a deepening is to strengthen our collective ability as citizens to master the shape of society rather than to have it imposed on us by history or necessity. As a result, it diminishes the need for crisis to serve as the enabling condition of change and weakens the power of the past to determine the future.

Here there are three major focal points for institutional innovation. The setup of the government, as defined in the Constitution, which powerfully shapes our ability to change society through politics: the pace of politics. The arrangements that influence the level of popular engagement in political life: the temperature of politics. And the relation of the national government to the states and towns: the federal system.

A defining feature of the constitutional architecture of the United States is its combination of a liberal principle of fragmentation of power with a conservative principle of the slowing down of politics, expressed in Madisons plan. Americans believe mistakenly that these two principles are naturally and necessarily bound together. They are not. They are connected by design to inhibit the transformation of society by politics. We can reaffirm the liberal principle but repudiate the conservative one, for example, by allowing either of the political branches to call early elections for both branches in the presence of an impasse. But it is futile to raise this issue in the United States now. The constitutional setup is revered as part of the national political identity. Those who have dissented from this view, beginning with Thomas Jefferson, have gone unheard.

Of the other two areas of possible innovation in the arrangements of democracythe level of participation and the reshaping of federalism, progressives have given priority to the first and dismissed the second as marginal to their aims. The initiatives that would raise the level of organized popular engagement in political life would reform the relation between money and politics, the terms of free access to the means of mass communication by political parties and organized social movements, and the electoral regime. They are indispensable to a progressive program. Placing them first, however, is a misjudgment. All are highly contentious, legally as well as politically. By contrast, the reenergizing of federalism has immense potential appeal, cutting across divisions between left and right and offering a wonderful device for developing the economic and educational alternatives the country needs.

Cooperative federalism, vertically among the three levels of the federal system and horizontally among the states and municipalities, can serve as the initial stage of determined and broad-based experimentation in American public life. Contrary to common prejudice, strong initiative by the national government and the empowerment of state and local government are not opposites. It is possible to have more of both at the same time, so long as we define clearly which responsibilities of each part of the federal system are exclusive and which are concurrent. Later on and within limits designed to prevent oppression and abuse, parts of the United States should be able to diverge from the predominant policies and arrangements in the country and create countermodels of the national future. Without such a dialectic of dominant and dissident solutions, no vital democratic experimentalism can take hold.

DSJ: Arent you demanding and expecting more than political reality allows? Cant your views be dismissed as utopian? For a leftist or any sort of progressive, isnt there a choice in the end between inadequate reform and impossible revolution?

RMU: I am a revolutionary by conviction as well as by temperament. I believe it is likely that I am living in a counterrevolutionary interlude in a long revolutionary period in the history of humanity. I am determined that my thoughts and actions not be controlled by the biases of the interlude. But I understand that revolutionary change today must differ in form and method as well as in substance from what it was in the past. For any program, the direction and the choice of the initial steps are crucial. It does not matter that the steps are longer or shorter. It matters that they be the right moves in the right direction. My criticism of the American progressives is not that the steps they take are too small. It is that they are steps in the wrong direction, taken under the influence of bad ideas about the future, the present, and even the past. The notion of a sudden leap into another regime of social life is a fantasy. Its practical role today is to serve as an excuse for its opposite. Once its fantastical nature has been exposed, what remains for the disappointed fantasists is to sweeten the world that they have despaired of reimagining and remaking.

DSJ: For the alternative you defend to advance, step by step, it needs a social base, a coalition, that doesnt yet exist. What base does your program imply? And how can it become a majority coalition without winning support from groups, such as the small-business class, that have been mainstays of American conservatism?

RMU: Every consequential agenda for change in society builds its own base over time. But that effort has to begin by engaging the classes, communities, and forces that exist. It must move them to revise, little by little, their imagination of the possible as well as their understanding of their interests and identities. A program like the one that I have outlined must go in search of a transracial progressive majority. That convergence needs to include large parts of the blue-collar and white-collar working class, of the racially stigmatized underclass, of the small-business class, and even of the restless aspirants of the professional and business class. Such a majority is within reach. Nothing in the alternative direction that I have described is incompatible within any part of this majority. The single most dangerous bias of the left is its prejudice against the small-business class, which has always had an outsize influence on the countrys self-understanding. That class now shades into the growing legions of the self-employed. To give up on it and on them is to prepare defeat.

DSJ: Even when you deal with economic and political practicalities, your ideas have a prophetic undertone. Another recent book of yours is called The Religion of the Future. The country has had its prophets. Does it really need new ones?

RMU: When politics is most serious, it is also about who we are and what we can and should become. It turns into a struggle over consciousness as well as over institutions. The message of the American prophetsincluding Emerson, Whitman, and Lincolnwas that the individual shares in the divine attribute of transcendence over context and becomes more human by becoming more godlike. Under democracy, which puts its faith in the constructive genius of ordinary men and women, this idea comes down to earth and informs the organization of society.

It is not good enough to say that the message has failed to be enacted and that the country should return to its founding ideals. The message itself should be rethought. From the outset, it bore a double taint, which compromised and corrupted it. It misrepresented the relation between self-construction and solidarity, failing to do justice to the presence of the latter within the former. As a result, it tempted Americans to think of themselves as little self-crowned Napoleons. The second stain on the prophetic teaching was to exempt American institutions from the reach of challenge and change and hold them up as the definitive form of a free society. The exemption amounted to a species of idolatry, for which the American republic has paid and continues to pay a terrible price. The prophetic voice must speak again in the United States. In breaking its silence, it must also correct its message.

Go here to see the original:
Roberto Mangabeira Ungers Alternative Progressive Vision - The Nation