Mediaboss Marketing

I get it, many of you are baffled and depressed as we enter the presidential election year. Nationally, democracy feels threatened and traditional barometers of political popularity no longer seem to apply.

Despite a laudable post-pandemic record and a rebounding economy, polls suggest President Joe Biden is deeply unpopular. Many in the media echo Republican talking points that blame Biden for problems he cannot influence.

Why? Perhaps we underestimate how the pandemic has diminished our nations collective capacity for optimism and confidence.

In fishing for causes, an obvious contributor is often overlooked: the pandemic itself, opined David Wallace-Wells in the New York Times recently. It not only killed more than a million Americans but also threw much of daily life and economic activity and public confidence into profound disarray for several years, scarring a lot of people and their perceptions of the country, its capacities and its future.

At year-end, though, lets focus on happier tidings inside Wisconsin.

This past year-plus has been the most hopeful period in state politics for democracy and for Democrats small d and capital D both in more than a decade.

Results havent been this favorable since before those dark days in 2010 when Scott Walker and Ron Johnson rode a national Republican wave to victory as governor and U.S. senator, respectively.

Republicans that year also won majorities in both chambers of the Legislature. Worse, that election coincided with the 2010 U.S. Census, which dictated an update to political districts.

The GOP worked in secret and passed the nations most gerrymandered, anti-democratic political maps. As you know too well, Republicans have maintained voter-proof majorities in the Legislature ever since.

But 2023 brought welcome change on multiple fronts.

The good news began with the November 2022 elections. For four years, Republicans had tried to undercut the authority and belittle the record of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, reflexively refusing any compromise.

But Evers won in what was, by Wisconsin standards, a landslide. His three-point victory was triple the razor-thin margin of his 2018 defeat of Walker. Voters embraced Evers as the authentic, center-left leader he had always been.

Equally noteworthy was that Republicans narrowly failed to attain super-majorities in the state Assembly. That outcome, combined with a GOP super-majority in the state Senate, would have allowed the party to consistently override Evers. Republicans won 64 of the Assemblys 99 seats, two short of the two-thirds needed.

The truly stunning vote, though, came months later, when Janet Protasiewicz, a Milwaukee County circuit court judge, won election to the Wisconsin Supreme Court by an astonishing 11 percentage points, flipping the court to a 4-3 progressive majority.

Huge turnout by younger voters, especially in Dane County, sent GOP strategists back to the drawing boards to try to figure out how to suppress future youth turnout. Appealing on issues wont work. The suppression of reproductive rights and the racist culture wars that are at the core of the modern GOP are overwhelmingly unpopular with young voters.

The Protasiewicz triumph was made more gratifying when, in its aftermath, desperate Republicans tried and failed to drum up support to impeach the new justice because she had stated the obvious while campaigning that the states current political maps are rigged.

Their whining was laughable given the conservative courts longstanding subservience to legislative Republicans. The state Democratic Party mounted a well-financed campaign of ads and door-knocking against the idea of impeachment. Democratic efforts also succeeded in getting the state and national media to focus on Republican efforts to subvert the election outcome.

It worked. Republicans backed down.

Republicans didnt come to their senses about democracy, Democratic state party chair Ben Wikler told the Washington Post at the time. But they realized they didnt have cover.

While the court race got the big headlines, spring elections also brought more good news: progressive victories in mayoral races in Racine and Green Bay. Both mayors are former Democratic state representatives.

On the governing front, Evers again served as an effective bulwark against the statehouse extremism that prevailed during the Walker years. With a boost from federal infrastructure funding, Evers focused on rebuilding roads, bridges and other infrastructure projects throughout the state. He also fought for more financial support for local governments and schools.

Republicans tried to pass regressive state income tax cuts, assuming they could bully Evers. He wouldnt dare veto lowering taxes, would he?

Well, yes, he would. He also won the war of words that followed.

When I interviewed Evers in July, he asked me rhetorically: Do I allow the 11 wealthiest people in the state to get an average of a $1.8 million tax cut or do I veto it?

The state still has a big budget surplus and Evers has said he would support a tax-cut plan focused on the middle class, but that does not seem to interest Republicans, who are always beholden to their donor class, whatever their populist rhetoric.

Other favorable budget news was a shared-revenue deal that increased the amount of state tax money that flows to local municipalities. Milwaukee also gained the much-needed authority to levy a local sales tax, prompting Milwaukee-area columnist Dan Shafer to write, For the first time in a generation, Milwaukee is not making cuts, and is beginning to turn the dial in the other direction and invest in its future.

Then there were the revelations around the 2020 fake electors plot. Kenneth Chesebro, the pro-Trump lawyer who helped concoct a strategy to get Republican toadies to cast fake electoral votes in several states Donald Trump lost, is cooperating with Wisconsin investigators after pleading guilty to conspiracy in Georgia. That may suggest an investigation by Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, though Kaul has made no announcement.

Finally, and as a marvelous pre-Christmas crescendo last week, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled, 4-3, that the states current legislative district maps are unconstitutional and that new maps must be drawn before the 2024 elections.

Evers said of the ruling, At long last, the gerrymandered maps Wisconsinites have endured for years might soon be history.

The GOP has said it will try an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, but interpretation of state constitutions is the province of state courts and any claim that Protasiewicz should have recused herself appears far-fetched.

Undeniably, 2024 will bring political angst. But someday, political scientists and historians might cite 2023 as the year when Wisconsin again allowed voters not politicians to decide who represents them.

And, just maybe, it will be marked as the year when the politics of resentment began to truly recede.

Originally posted here:
Opinion | For Wisconsin progressives, 2023 was a very good year - The Capital Times

Abundance Agenda Shifts Left-Wing Politics, Faces Progressive Opposition in 2024

As the 2024 U.S presidential race heats up, a significant ideological shift is unfolding within the left-wing political sphere. This change has birthed the abundance agenda, a movement that champions the economic interests of the middle and working classes. Advocates of this agenda call for reduced regulations and minimal government interference that often puts small businesses and consumers at a disadvantage. This resurgence of a liberal view that endorses free markets as a means to elevate living standards for working Americans is not an entirely novel concept.

The philosophy has roots in the deregulation efforts of President Jimmy Carter, Senator Edward Kennedy, and Ralph Nader, among others. It also echoes the neoliberalism of the Clinton Administration. Interestingly, the abundance agenda shares certain similarities with libertarian values, particularly as some conservatives appear to step away from dogmatic free-market principles.

This unusual alignment of ideologies has sparked discussions about a possible alliance between abundance progressives and libertarians. Such a coalition could potentially reshape the political landscape, offering a fresh perspective on economic policies that veer away from the entrenched views of both the left and right sides of the aisle.

Despite its potential, the abundance agenda faces formidable opposition from prominent progressive figures like Senator Bernie Sanders, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and FTC Chair Lina Khan. Particularly, Khan, known for her critical stance against big techs market power, represents a newer progressive trend that favors a more interventionist antitrust policy over the consumer welfare standard, which has been the dominant approach since the 1980s.

The abundance agendas journey ahead is fraught with challenges and uncertainties. However, it offers a plausible challenge to Khanonomics and could pave the way for political realignments, leading to the formation of two major coalitions with contrasting economic visions. The full impact of these ideological shifts may become more apparent by 2028, when the fear of Donald Trump no longer holds as much sway over the Democratic Party, mirroring an internal debate within the Republican Party over the principles of limited government.

View original post here:
Abundance Progressives: A New Ideological Shift - BNN Breaking

In a new essay in the progressive magazine In These Times, writers Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet grapple with the contemporary version of an old phenomenon: erstwhile leftists decamping to the right.

There have been plenty of high-profile defectors from the left in recent years, among them comedian Russell Brand; environmentalist-turned-conspiracy-theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; and journalist Matt Taibbi, a onetime scourge of Wall Street, who was recently one of the winners of a $100,000 prize from the ultraconservative Young Americas Foundation.

What gives this migration political significance, however, are the ordinary people following them, casting off what they view as a censorious liberalism for a movement that doesnt ask anyone to do the work or check your privilege. Joyce and Sharlet write, We, the authors of this article, each count such losses in our own lives, and maybe you do, too: friends you struggle to hold onto despite their growing allegiance to terrifying ideas, and friends you give up on, and friends who have given up on you and the hope you shared together.

Naomi Klein described similar losses in her great book Doppelgnger, which follows the exploits of one of the most infamous of recent progressive apostates, Naomi Wolf, a former liberal feminist who became an anti-vax influencer and a regular on Steve Bannons podcast. Almost everyone I talk to tells me about people they have lost down the rabbit hole parents, siblings, best friends, as well as formerly trusted intellectuals and commentators, wrote Klein. People, once familiar, who have become unrecognizable.

A key question for the left is why this is happening. For some celebrity defectors, the impetus seems clear enough: They lurched right after a cancellation or public humiliation. Klein writes that a turning point for Wolf was widespread mockery after she was confronted, live on the radio, with evidence that the thesis of the book she was promoting was based on her misreading of archival documents. Brands right-wing turn, as Matt Flegenheimer wrote in The New York Times Magazine, coincided with the start of investigations into sexual assault accusations against him. But that doesnt explain why theres such an eager audience for born-again reactionaries and why, in much of the Western world, the right has been so much better than the left at harnessing hatred of the status quo.

Part of the answer is probably that the culture of the left is simply less welcoming, especially to the politically unsure, than the right. The conservative movement may revel in cruelty toward out-groups see, for example, the ravening digital mobs that descended on podcaster Julia Mazur for a TikTok she made about the pleasures of life without children but the movement is often good at love-bombing potential recruits. People go where people accept them, or are nice to them, and away from people who are mean to them, the Marxist Edwin Aponte, one of the founders of the heterodox but socially conservative magazine Compact, told Joyce and Sharlet.

But I think theres a deeper problem, which stems from a crisis of faith in the possibility of progress. Liberals and leftists have lots of excellent policy ideas but rarely articulate a plausible vision of the future. I sometimes hear leftists talk about our collective liberation, but outside a few specific contexts the ongoing subjugation of the Palestinians comes to mind I mostly have no idea what theyre talking about.

Its easy to see what various parts of the left want to dismantle capitalism, the carceral state, heteropatriarchy, the nuclear family and much harder to find a realistic conception of what comes next. Some leftists who lose hope in the possibility of thoroughgoing transformation become liberals like me, mostly resigned to working toward incremental improvements to a dysfunctional society. Others, looking beyond the politics of amelioration, seek new ways to shake up the system.

The right has an advantage in appealing to dislocated and atomized people: It doesnt have to provide a compelling view of the future. All it needs is a romantic conception of the past, to which it can offer the false promise of return. When people are scared and full of despair, lets go back to the way things were is a potent message, especially for those with memories of happier times.

One common interpretation of the sort of ideological journeys Joyce and Sharlet wrote about for In These Times is horseshoe theory, the idea that at the extremes, left and right bend toward each other. But plenty of the people whove followed a rightward trajectory were never particularly radical; Wolf was a fairly standard Democrat, as was Elon Musk, now king of the edgelords.

As Klein argues, a better framework is diagonalism, coined by scholars William Callison and Quinn Slobodian. Diagonalists, they write, tend to contest conventional monikers of left and right (while generally arcing toward far-right beliefs), be ambivalent or cynical about electoral politics, and blend convictions about holism and even spirituality with a dogged discourse of individual liberties. At the extreme, they write, diagonal movements share a conviction that all power is conspiracy. Public power cannot be legitimate, many believe, because the process of choosing governments is itself controlled by the powerful and is de facto illegitimate.

Such conspiratorial politics have rarely, if ever, led to anything but catastrophe, but that doesnt lessen their emotional pull. Both Sharlet and Joyce are longtime chroniclers of the right its ambitions but also its divisions and contradictions. But in this age of Trump, his presence and his shadow, weve witnessed more right-wing factions converging than splitting, putting aside differences and adopting new and ugly dreams, they write. They, of course, do not see the dreams as ugly, but beautiful.

To compete with them, the left needs beautiful dreams of its own.

Excerpt from:
MICHELLE GOLDBERG: What's driving former progressives to the right? - Indiana Gazette

A progressive activist is warning voters against reelecting President Joe Biden, whom she describes as a "dictator" and being "worse than Trump."

"Biden is already a dictator, folks. Fascism is already here under Biden," Bree Newsome said in a Wednesday post on X (formerly Twitter). "Please pay attention to how popular will is being completely ignored because Biden doesn't give af what the public thinks if he can maintain his grip on power."

Newsome, who made national headlines for removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina Statehouse grounds in 2015, has staunchly opposed a second Biden term since the Israel-Hamas war began on October 7. She's repeatedly criticized the president's pro-Israel response, accusing him of funding a Palestinian genocide and vowing to not vote for him in 2024.

Her stance on Biden reflects the growing outrage that some progressives and young voters have felt over the president's handling of the war. Prominent left-leaning voices have echoed her remarks and pushed back on the popular Democratic narrative that Biden is the solution to the Donald Trump threat.

Newsweek reached out to the White House via email for comment.

Newsome said on X that Biden and Trump were equally "dangerous" but then took a further shot at the president, whom she accused of having "already caused more international & murdered more people than Trump."

Other X users went even further in their criticisms, blasting Biden as being "more dangerous" than his predecessor and alleging that his administration has "embraced Trumpian tactics, policies & personnel while giving people permission to check out because it's presumed the 'serious adults are back in the room.'"

Biden's progressive critics have called out what they see as the "hypocrisy" of his administration and the Democratic Party, arguing that liberals are willing to support Biden even when he adopts attitudes and behaviors that he criticizes Trump for.

"If Trump was circumventing Congress to send bombs being used to blow up babies at Christmas & we were all seeing the videos & aftermath & Bethlehem literally cancelled Christmas, Dems would be apoplectic," @CravenCarpenter said in response to Newsome's tweets. "The hypocrisy is so thick you could cut it with a knife."

In other posts, Newsome wrote, "If it's Trump's genocide, maybe Democrats will finally be willing to admit genocide is bad" and "'Don't be a one issue voter' Says the crowd that can't engage in any political nuance beyond 'Trump bad.'"

But not everyone has agreed with Newsome's arguments. Many flooded the comments to criticize Newsome over her use of the word fascism.

"This is what happens when you think 'fascism' means anything you don't like," writer Tom Nichols said.

Cornell professor Spencer Beswick wrote, "There are plenty of things to critique Biden for, but calling him a fascist is incredibly misguided, totally ignores the specificity of what fascism is, drastically underestimates the actual threat fascism poses, and leaves us unprepared to confront it."

@ArmandDoma wrote, "The only people naive enough to believe Biden is a dictator are Americans, who have been spoiled by the fact that they have never lived under one."

Last week, Newsome argued that Biden has been able to maintain his grip on the party only because of fears that Trump could win back the White House. Once again, she said, this sets Biden up for a unique election where voters cast their ballots in opposition to a candidate rather than in support of one.

"The fear of a Trump re-emergence is the main thing keeping Biden in power & he knows it, which again reveals something about Biden's own character," she wrote. "In another time, under more functional govt, Biden wld be gone w/o question & ppl wld tell the truth about his disastrous actions."

In the same way she felt it was "imperative" to remove Trump from office in 2020, she now feels the need to vote Biden out of the White House, Newsome said. Both presidential candidates would be "a danger to the world" and a 2024 rematch would ultimately be "a contest between two men who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the Oval Office again."

"Never thought anyone could be worse than Trump but if anyone could pull it off, Biden is the one," Newsome said.

Others said that even though both candidates are undesirable, they'd be willing to let Trump win by choosing not to vote.

"If Trump is the bullet I have to eat to stop Bidens murderous slaughter of children then I will grit my teeth and take it by not voting for either," @model_daughters tweeted. "And if Trump makes it his genocide then guess what - we're in exactly the same boat but a year late in doing anything about it."

Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.

Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.

See the original post:
Joe Biden Is a 'Dictator' and 'Worse Than Trump': Progressive Activist - Newsweek

The ruling centre-right New Democracy party (affiliated with the European Peoples Party EPP) lost the municipalities of Athens and Thessaloniki in the second round of Greeces regional and municipal elections. Analysts now estimate that a new political landscape is emerging with the collaboration of progressive parties to be in the spotlight.

In the first round last week, candidates of New Democracy ranked first in both Athens and Thessaloniki. However, progressive parties joined forces in the second round, changing the picture.

Particularly, in Athens, New Democracys current mayor, Kostas Bakoyannis (nephew of Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis), was defeated by Charis Doukas, a candidate from the socialist Pasok party who was publicly supported by the leftist Syriza candidate Kostas Zachariadis, who ranked third in the first round.

After announcing the results, Doukas thanked Zachariadis publicly for his support.

The situation was similar in Thessaloniki and other municipalities, as almost everywhere progressive parties joined forces, they managed to beat ruling New Democracy candidates.

On a regional level, New Democracy lost five out of six regions as their candidates were defeated by independent right-wing candidates who did not have the support of the ruling party or by other progressive candidates.

It wasnt a particularly good night, Greek PM Mitsotakis said.

Greek media reported that the results were a blow to the ruling New Democracy and the Greek PM himself, considering that between the first and second rounds, Mitsotakis got actively involved by openly supporting his partys candidates in public appearances and statements.

The main opposition, the Syriza party (EU Left), commented that the results were a first step to ending the countrys nepotism.

Heres what the progressive world does when it comes together [] Tonight is the first major crack in the Mitsotakis regime, a Syriza source told media.

The newly elected Syriza leader, Stefanos Kasselakis, who, after the first round, called on the partys voters to back progressive candidates against conservatives, hailed the result, saying the next milestone will be the 2024 EU elections.

The collaboration between socialist Pasok and leftist Syriza has been in the spotlight for a long time but re-emerged on the surface again after the July national elections, in which New Democracy triumphed.

According to the current polls, Syriza remains the main opposition, followed by Pasok.

In Brussels, the official member of the EU socialist party is Pasok, while Syriza belongs to the EU left. However, EU socialists consider Syriza ideologically close to them and invited former leftist leader Alexis Tsipras to their meetings.

Many EU socialists in the past publicly expressed their hope for these two parties to join forces to take down conservatives. However, based on Greek political features, such a collaboration on a national level still has a long way to go.

Syriza has been more open to such an alliance, while Pasok is more reluctant.

People need a strong progressive force that will send New Democracy into opposition, Pasok leader Nikos Androulakis said on Sunday.

Androulakis hopes Pasok will eventually become the main opposition force and lead the progressive camp in Greeces political spectrum.

Pasok also does not see in a positive light the flirt between Syriza and the EU socialists.

Analysts estimate that the results of the regional and local elections will mount pressure on Pasok to reconsider its stance.

(Sarantis Michalopoulos | Euractiv.com)

Visit link:
Greek progressives deal ruling New Democracy severe blow in local elections - EURACTIV