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A soldier stands in front of a courthouse in Pittsboro, N.C. He stands at ease, his fingers wrapped around the barrel of a bronze musket, his Confederate uniform gone green with age. He has stood there peacefully for more than a century but just last August, the Chatham County Board of Commissioners ruled that the statue was to be taken down.

Protestors gathered in two groups by the statue, on either side of the adjoining Sanford Road. On the left side of the street were progressives holding anti-racist signs, demanding that the statue a symbol of a racist history be demolished. To the right of the road were Chatham residents who stood in the defense of their heritage, waving Confederate flags.

The scene at the protests, each side spitting rude labels across the road, embodies the long-standing clash between progressive and conservative values in America. It is easy to point to the achievements of progressive movements emancipation, suffrage, civil rights, labor laws and decide that the clash has been settled: Progressives move history forward, while conservatives dig their heels into the ground to hold it back. The argument is not without merit; throughout the arc of history, every bend toward justice has been met by the conservators of an unjust status quo.

But this argument also leaves us with a troubling, divisive stereotype: Progressives are the party of justice, while conservatives stand in the way of progress. The very connotation held by these words progression against conservation leaves us with a reductive and unhelpful view of their underlying philosophies. Similarly unhelpful stereotypes are made of progressives, that they are the starry-eyed idealists, their naive aspirations having no hold on the real world.

The fact that these philosophies have come to be associated with Democrats or Republicans sticks us, politically, on either side of Sanford Road. Each group misapprehends the goals of the other, thus turning their opponents into boogeymen. Conservatives become guardians of broken, racist and unjust systems, while progressives are intent on ruining the nation in their attempts to perfect it.

The true ideology of conservatism has nothing to do with bigotry or injustice. Its foundations are in the respect for tradition and a belief in the maintenance of certain values whether these be religious, constitutional or cultural.

Take the policies of democratic socialism, one of the most progressive movements currently moving through our nation. The movement aims to take the policies of socialist countries like Sweden and Denmark and apply them to America. Democratic candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders has said of these policies: When I talk about democratic socialism, what I mean is moving away from where we are right now.

To a conservative, the idea of trading away ones values and way of life for free health care and college tuition is fundamentally objectionable. In light of the fact that Sweden and Denmarks socialist giveaways have saddled them with some of the highest tax rates in the world, the conservative desire to maintain American traditions seems somewhat more reasonable.

But what about the great American traditions of injustice, racism and inequality? Many criticize conservative thinking as regressive, the kind of stuck-in-its-ways mentality that has allowed injustice to persist for as long as it has. Even today, many necessary advancements are stalled back by a desire to keep things more or less the same.

Still, conservatism cannot be written off as regressive, or worse, racist in itself. The respect for tradition is not a bad thing; there are a great many traditions that we would respecting a respect for the rules of our Constitution. This respect is only faultworthy where the traditions are unjust, and though progressives have historically challenged injustice and exclusion, this does not make progressivism the righter of conservative wrongs.

Progressivism is often enough wrong or at least misguided on its own. The democratic socialist idea of free college tuition sounds like a fair and promising progression, but the same could not be said of its likely outcomes.

One reason for this is that free tuition actually raises drop out rates, as there is less incentive for students to complete their degrees. One Manhattan Institute study found that graduation rates were actually higher in G-7 countries that charged tuition as opposed to those with free college. This, on top of a host of other practical issues a direct harm to private colleges, an overcrowding of schools and a $70 billion price tag shows us that a more conservative approach might be better suited to the problem.

The bottom line is that neither progressivism nor conservatism can be removed without our country stagnating. Without a healthy clash of ideology, the state has only one voice and one direction not necessarily the right ones. The idea that growth is always achieved by progressives keeps us shouting from either side of the road; it keeps us from meeting somewhere in the middle and moving forward.

Dillon Cranston is a sophomore writing about politics. His column, Holding Center, runs every other Wednesday.

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Progressivism is not better than conservatism - Daily Trojan Online

President Donald Trump made an unannounced visit Saturday afternoon to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

The White House said the visit was for a "quick exam and labs" to kick-off the initial phase of his annual physical exam in anticipation of a "very busy 2020," according to CNN. Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham told Fox News' Jeanine Pirro on Saturday evening that the president is as "healthy as can be."

"He has more energy than anybody in the White House. That man works from 6 a.m. until very, very late at night," Grisham added.

Assurances from the White House did little to quash rumors and speculation about the 73-year-old president's health and joke about possible ailments.

Vox journalist Aaron Rupar tweeted that "Trump's trip to the hospital was 'routine' in the same way his call with the Ukrainian president was 'perfect.'" Meanwhile, progressive website DailyKos published a post early Sunday morning titled "Trump and his 'chest discomfort' go to Walter Reed" with screenshots of unsubstantiated internet rumors about the president's health.

Former Hillary Clinton campaign staffer Charlotte Clymer joked the "chest pain" rumors were "absurd" since "Trump doesn't have a heart," she tweeted.

Feminist author Amy Siskind used the occasion to attack Trump and urge journalists to investigate his hospital visit, as it could push the GOP to abandon the president. "I hope our media is digging into the truth behind this. We all know that dictators are only able to maintain power from strength. The moment Republicans smell weakness, they will turn on Trump like hyenas," she said on Twitter.

Progressive political pundit Bill Palmer joked that Trump's visit to Walter Reed was the start of a bad day that could culminate with the president "going to prison."

Another former Clinton aide, Claude Taylor, speculated on Twitter that the president was being treated for a "panic attack."

Whatever may have prompted the president's visit to Walter Reed Hospital on Saturday, Trump was apparently back to his usual self by Sunday.

The commander in chief addressed his unannounced trip and spent much of the day tweeting. "Visited great family of a young man under major surgery at the amazing Walter Reed Medical Center, said the president. "Also began phase one of my yearly physical. Everything very good (great!). Will complete next year."

President Trump then spent much of the morning praising allies, like Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) and former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, as well as taking shots at foes, including the New York Times' Paul Krugman and former Republican Matthew Dowd.

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Progressives joke and speculate about Trump's health after an unscheduled hospital visit - TheBlaze

Today, geographer Scott Warrenis scheduled to be tried for the second time by the U.S. Department of Justice for acting on his faith. His first trial ended in a hung jury last June. Arrested in 2018, Warren was charged with harboring certain aliens for providing food and water to two men he encountered wandering the Arizona desert. His attorneys have explained that, because of his spiritual beliefs, he could not in good conscience turn away two exhausted, injured men seeking food, water and shelter.

Warren is among dozens of people nationwide targeted by the U.S. government for acting on their religious beliefs. Despite the Department of Justices stated commitment to religious liberty, its lawyers have challenged these faith practitioners in court. Often, the DOJ disputes the notion that they are legitimately religious, arguing that non-conservatives who bring religious liberty claims are acting on their political, rather than faith-based, commitments.

Take Warren: Citing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) the law that allowed Hobby Lobby to not pay for its employees contraceptives he has argued that he should be permitted to help migrants as required by his faith. In court, Warren explained: [F]or me, we most definitely do unto others as we would want to have done unto us. When we come into interaction with another person, that person is us and we are that person.

In response, DOJ attorneys tried to cast doubt on Warrens religious identity, suggesting that he is not entitled to protection because he is not a member of any formal denomination. In a hearing, the federal prosecutorasked whether Warren practiced Judaism, Islam or the Bahai faith, which he does not.

Yet religious liberty rights in the U.S. apply to all people of faith, not just members of organized religions. The prosecutors unsuccessful attempt to paint Warren as not legitimately religious merely because he does not belong to a formal denomination is just one example of a larger problem within the current Justice Department. Warrens hearing is by no means the only, or even the most egregious, example of the DOJ impugning people of faith whose religious beliefs are at odds with the Trump administrations policy goals.

After a group of Catholics was arrested for protesting at a military facility in Georgia, they brought a religious liberty defense, explaining that their protest was a prophetic action to raise the consciousness of society about the immorality of nuclear weapons. The Justice Department countered that their claim was an effort to propagandize and obtain secular public policy revisions tinged with post-hoc religious justification.

When a Philadelphia nonprofit attempted to open a safe-injection site for drug users as an exercise of its board members faith, noting on its website that [a]t the core of our faith is the principle that preservation of human life overridesany other considerations, the DOJ claimed the board members true motivation is socio-political or philosophical not religious and thus not protected by RFRA.

Although the DOJ has questioned the faith of litigants it perceives as politically progressive, Attorney General William BarrWilliam Pelham BarrBarr defends Trump's use of executive authority, slams impeachment hearings GOP eager for report on alleged FBI surveillance abuse DOJ watchdog won't let witnesses submit written feedback on investigation into Russia probe: report MORE has condemned progressives as militant secularists. In a recent speech, Barr claimed: Secularists, and their allies among the progressives, have marshaled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry and academia in an unremitting assault on religion.

But Barr cant condemn the left as anti-religious while disputing the legitimacy of any religious beliefs that contradict his own. Numerous people have gone to court seeking the right to exercise their beliefs by, among other things, welcoming migrants, protesting nuclear proliferation and serving drug users. And while the departments own guidelines instruct agencies to accommodate religious practices to the greatest extent practicable and permitted by law, it has fought these requests aggressively.

A new report by the Law, Rights, and Religion Project at Columbia Law School, Whose Faith Matters? The Fight for Religious Liberty Beyond the Christian Right, offers a sweeping overview of the often-ignored religious liberty activism taking place outside of the conservative movement, including by those whose faith motivates them to assist immigrants, protect the environment, protest capital punishment, provide abortions, and preserve church-state separation.

The report challenges the right-wing campaign to conflate religious liberty with conservative Christianity and to paint those outside the right as anti-faith. Only by erasing their religious identity can Barr and the Trump administration claim to value religious freedom while putting Scott Warren and others behind bars for acting on their faith. In lifting up religious liberty activism outside the Christian right, we can recognize that it is the administration itself not the militant secularists that is engaged in an unremitting assault on the rights of conscience.

Elizabeth Reiner Platt is director of the Law, Rights, and Religion Project at Columbia Law School. The Projects faculty director submitted amicus briefs in the cases of Scott Warren, Safehouse and the Catholic anti-war protestors. Follow her on Twitter @lizrplatt.

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Losing their religion: AG Barr should recognize the faith of progressives | TheHill - The Hill

For many progressives, Jacindamania is waning, and its only natural to look around for a new champion. Some especially the young are looking to 25-year-old Green party MP Chle Swarbrick. There is talk across New Zealand of the Swarbrick effect, which saw a surge of young candidates in recent local government elections, supposedly inspired to stand for office by her political career.

The growing interest in Swarbrick comes as progressives have to watch Jacinda Arderns government struggle to fulfil the leftwing agenda many believed was promised at the election. From problems in housing, taxation, inequality, and the environment, the expectations of liberals and leftists have been repeatedly let down by a government making compromises, U-turns, or just failing to implement radical change.

Swarbricks rise to prominence was rapid. In 2016, at the age of 22 and entirely unknown, she ran for the mayoralty of Auckland, winning a creditable third place. This got her the attention of the Green party, which placed her at number seven on its party list. She was then elected as one of eight Green MPs in 2017, becoming our youngest MP for over 40 years.

Swarbrick is certainly capable of talking radically, and is willing to critique her own party publicly. In a recent opinion piece, she lamented the weakness of her partys own landmark Zero Carbon Bill (which passed in parliament last week), saying it was legislation a massive number of New Zealanders do not consider to be bold or progressive enough to deal with the problems of climate change.

Over her first two years in parliament, she has shone, being easily the most impressive of her 2017 intake of MPs. Shes also considered by many as the Greens top-performing MP, despite the fact that shes near the bottom of the caucus rankings, and her senior colleagues are government ministers.

Swarbrick led the public debate on drug law reform ahead of a binding referendum at next years election, and argued in favour of much greater government intervention and expenditure in the long-neglected area of mental health. She has talked openly about her own struggle with clinical depression.

Her star power got an unexpected boost when she hit the headlines across the globe for her sarcastic OK boomer retort to a political opponent in parliament. It underscored her status as some sort of new generational warrior.

Yet, the incident hasnt been entirely helpful for her credibility on the political left. Her new-found notoriety for being focused on generational politics might actually be detrimental to her progressive credentials. In time, it could be seen as a turning point in which Swarbricks political stock actually started falling.

Although it was a throwaway line, the use of the OK boomer meme does reflect a view of inequality and climate change through a generational lens. Some radicals and intellectuals on the left have pushed back strongly against this approach, pointing out that the problems of society arent going to be solved by millennials going to war with boomers.

They suggest Swarbricks approach is not only superficial, but dangerous and reductionist, obscuring some of the deeper and more important issues and divisions that are key to understanding whats wrong with New Zealand society.

Swarbrick is undoubtedly one of the more interesting politicians of the moment, and shes helping keep some progressive voters onside with a government that is otherwise disappointing them. Yet, she has said that she often considers leaving parliament, and she hasnt yet decided whether to stand again for election next year. If she remains, and the Greens stay in government, she will surely ascend to a ministerial position. That, of course, would be the true test of her radicalism.

If Swarbrick does step down, it will be another blow for those looking for more transformational or radical leadership than the Ardern-led Government is currently offering. Such expectations are probably unreasonable to put on a 25-year-old first-term MP. As Swarbrick has few actual achievements as a political leader to date, the expectations reflect more a view amongst progressives that the various Boomers and Gen-Xers making the big calls now including Ardern are not OK at all.

Bryce Edwards is a senior associate at the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies at Victoria University, Wellington

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Chle Swarbrick is the voice of young progressives but can she stay the distance? - The Guardian

About a month before Deadspin was throttled by its new private equity owners, those same owners shut down Splinter, the progressive politics website I contributed to for a little over a year. Last week, at an emergency all-hands meeting, G/O Medias editorial director, Paul Maidment, elaborated on the decision to kill Splinter. Progressive politics is a very, very difficult sector to operate in, he said, according to audio of the meeting provided to me. And its a sector thats essentially operating at a bigger and bigger deficit.

Maidment said, in my opinion, a lot of dumb shit during his seven-month tenure as editorial director. (He resigned last week following the Deadspin implosion he set off.) But hes not entirely wrong about progressive media, thanks in large part to pushing a largely anti-capitalist agenda in a ruthlessly capitalist industry.

This trend has been devastating across the journalism industry. Some 7,200 jobs have disappeared this year alone. I have been laid off. Almost all of my friends have been laid off, at least once. This has happened across mainstream networks, local newspapers, alt-weeklies, and online web empires, but its effects have been felt acutely in recent months by outlets writing from a defiantly leftist point of view.

When the mainstream press does cover contentious issues, it often paves over clear moral distinctions in favor of impartiality.

Salon, struggling for years, was forced in May to sell its assets to undisclosed owners for just $5 million. In September, ThinkProgress, one of the longest-running sources for progressive news online, was abruptly shut down by the liberal think tank behind it, Center for American Progress, as the Democratic machinery circled its wagons for the 2020 election. That was that: no more lefty blogging. Splinter followed the next month, ceasing publication in the middle of a Democratic presidential primary pitting two of the most progressive presidential candidates ever, including one democratic socialist, against the poster child for outdated centrism. Deadspin, which had for years incorporated irreverent, left-wing takes on politics, pop culture, and anything else its deranged writing staff chose to write about, was told to stick to sports, which promptly collapsed the site.

While leftist websites are far from the only publications struggling to adapt to the pressures of online capitalism, theyre one of the most endangered species in an extremely hostile ecosystem. For the past two centuries, there have been left-wing, radical, and pro-labor publications in the United States. These publications argued from across the spectrum of leftist ideology, but often pushed for progressive goals in the workplace and a rejection or skepticism of capitalism. Upton Sinclair worked stockyard floors undercover for the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, publishing his work before it was turned into The Jungle andspurred the creation of the Food and Drug Administration. Ralph Nader launched his crusade for auto safety in a 1959 article for the Nation, years before Unsafe at Any Speed. In 1967, the new left magazine Ramparts published a blistering, full-color pictorial of the effects of U.S. napalm bombs on Vietnamese children, which Martin Luther King Jr. said convinced him to publicly oppose the war. In this century, Mac McClelland was one of the first reporters to expose grueling working conditions in Amazon warehouses for Mother Jones; her colleague Shane Bauer worked undercover in the private prison system for months on another expos. Amanda Sperber, writing for the Nation earlier this year, reported on a U.S. bombing campaign in Somalia causing widespread civilian casualties that Army leadership previously denied. These are investigations that most mainstream newspapers do as well, but often members of the leftist press got there first, because they know who the publics enemies are.

When the mainstream press does cover contentious issues, it often paves over clear moral distinctions in favor of impartiality, something a leftist press has always understood is not a necessary prerequisite for journalism. People mostly assume that the mainstream media leans left, but that only really holds up if you hold that Fox Newss open calls for a white ethno-state are the center. John F. Harris, a founding editor of Politico, realized this in a remarkably self-aware column last week: The mainstream media is biased toward status-quo centrism, not toward the left.

The problem with punching up is that the people above you have all the money.

Truly progressive or leftist publications dont fall into these traps, but in doing so, they often violate the norms that most of the mainstream press adheres to. In short, as Alex Pareene wrote for the New Republic, theyre fucking rude. The problem with punching up the core aspect of leftist writing is that the people above you have all the money.

And the people with the money dont tend to be all that leftist. Billionaires who do fund journalism, such as the Washington Posts Jeff Bezos and the Los Angeles Times Patrick Soon-Shiong, arent putting money behind work that threatens their net worth they own safe, mainstream publications. Pierre Omidyars support of the Intercept is the closest to crossing that line, but even then, a billionaires whims are fickle.

The right wing, unfortunately, does not have this problem. They are propped up by big-money donors who are content to let Breitbart News, National Review, the Federalist, and many others publish basically whatever they want. Charles Koch gives a massive amount of funding to right-wing media sources, including the Daily Caller News Foundation, which mostly churns out content that goes on the Tucker Carlson-founded Daily Caller. The Koch Institute also runs a private journalism fellowship that mostly funnels graduates into right-wing and libertarian think tanks, PR shops, and media outlets.

Just this August, Splinter reported on leaked emails that showed several journalists at well-known right-wing institutions, including the Daily Caller News Foundation, were participating in a close network of white nationalists and neo-Nazis. Some of the people Splinter exposed lost their jobs, but the outlets they worked for are doing just fine. The left, in other words, is getting its ass kicked by the worst people in the country, who have the financial support and moral flexibility to abuse Americas fucked-up relationship to a free press.

Things are not yet so dire that the left lacks for choice. The Young Turks has developed a loyal following online by embracing new mediums, from podcasts to Twitch streaming, and mainstays like Democracy Now! still chug along on public radio stations. Putting out the level of content required to keep up with the daily news cycle, however, requires resources usually outside of many outlets reach. Magazines are perhaps slightly more healthy: The New Republic, traditionally liberal, went on a poaching spree of leftist writers earlier this year, including Pareene. The Baffler, a 30-year-old leftist standby, just started a labor column called Working Stiff written by labor journalist Kim Kelly. Jacobin has quickly become a must-read for the generation of young people who swelled the Democratic Socialists of Americas ranks following the 2016 election. Mother Jones veers a bit toward mainstream liberal sensibilities, but is a home for electric advocacy reporting, andthe Nation continues to reliably publish leftist writers at length. But theyre all vulnerable to the same crises facing every magazine in the country.

The leftist press cant rely on ranks of billionaires to dump in funding. Instead, we need to look for new ways to support the tradition in all its rude, flippant, and profound glory. These could be worker-owned collectives, nonprofit newsrooms, or publicly owned, editorially independent media networks or some combination of all three. It also needs electoral measures and elected leaders that support journalism or candidates who have a plan to break big tech and finances grip on the industry.

If the medias lesson from the Trump era is to retreat into a shell of flavorless, craven impartiality, taking both sides to the clear injustices at play, the right will continue to eat up every inch of space its given. Its every progressives job to make sure their own press doesnt get left behind.

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The Progressive Press Is Facing Mass Extinction - Common Dreams