Common Dreams | Progressives Are Adapting to the Activist Surge Common Dreams Progressive movement leaders described this period following Trump's election as an extreme mobilization and a moment when civil disobedience went mainstream. Donations and memberships surged among left organizations, which are now grappling ... |
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Progressives Are Adapting to the Activist Surge - Common Dreams
After the election, there was a lot of talk about liberal bubbles, this idea that those of us on the coasts of America were living lives far removed fromalt-right loyalists in the countrys South and Midwest. But if theres anything we should keep in mind in the wake of the hatred in Charlottesville on Saturday, its that there are bubbles within the bubbles.
Many white people reacted to the Unite the Right rally with shock and confusion, with hashtags like #ThisIsNotUs.For people of color, what happened this weekend was disheartening but by no means surprising.
For many of us, it doesnt take an overt performance of white supremacy to know that white supremacy is woven deeply into the tapestry of this country. A gathering of angry white men carrying tiki torches is a violent act no different, indeed very much the same, as the angry white man who hurled racist insults and then killed two men on a train in Portland in May.
Right now, there are Confederate flags that are proudly and freely displayed on lawns and t-shirts and on the bumpers of cars by people who live in towns just hours away from Manhattan. Indeed, there are over 700 Confederate monuments across the United States, including in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Iowa.
Right now, black and white children in cities like New York, Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles are living de facto segregated lives, going to segregated schoolswith strikingly different resources, support, and expectations for their futures.
Right now,there are 917 hate groups currently operating in the U.S., including active white supremacy groups in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and California.
The hatred that fueled the rally fuels all of these different realities of racism in America.
The trap we (white people especially) must not fall into is one of our own design: the sense of complacency that says this problem of racism is only a symptom of the South, only a symptom of a certain kind of person. Its convenient when you can think of racism as something close enough to look on with disgust, horror and smug moral superiority, but far enough to not feel responsible for it.
Its harder when you must acknowledge that white supremacy is not on some far off distant planet called the South, that it indeed is all around you, and that while you may not be a white supremacist, you benefit from white supremacy.
This is not a personal attack. It's reality.
You benefit from white supremacy in a historical, political and social context. You benefit by generally escaping the stereotyping and generalizations that people of color do, especially in interactions with the law, in the workplace, and in the media. You benefit from access to educational and economic resources that people of color rarely do. You benefit from rarely having to think about race, because "white" has long been positioned as the default in society.
As Teen Vogue writer Lauren Duca explained on Monday, "Getting a job because your name is Geoff is not the same thing as joining the KKK, but that privilege is precisely the thing white supremacists were working to reassert in Charlottesville."
These are things that you must reckon with, and that no person of color should have to walk you through at this point. For some people, in order to avoid grappling with the complexity of their complicity, they lash out -- they grab torches and march against being "replaced."
But its in acknowledging this inconvenience that things may actually begin to change.White people who consider themselves allies must reckon with is the fact that what happened at UVA is just one, ugly side to the multi-faceted racism in this country.
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The Myth About Racism White Progressives Shouldn't Fall For - HuffPost
Jay Moor wonders what the moral difference is between teenagers refusing to assist a drowning man and politicians opposing the Affordable Care Act.
Let me take a stab at answering.
In the world of the progressive, government is everything. If there isnt a government program, nothing is being done. Changing a program will kill millions. If government isnt spending oodles more money, its immoral.
Progressives love to lecture us about morality. They never stop talking about their superior values. They are self-avowed sole authorities regarding matters of faith, and they are quite certain Jesus agrees with them.
If your morality is different than theirs, you are immoral. Youre not like Jesus. Progressive morality is so much better that it should be imposed on you via the strong arm of government. But, you are required to keep your morality out of politics. Because theocracy.
Progressives believe it is moral to for government to take your money and spend it on someone else. Thats like Jesus. But Jesus would never ask a progressive to actually help someone in need. In fact, personal compassion is immoral, because only Bible-believing extremists reject second-hand government compassion and actually go out and help people.
It doesnt matter that no government social program has ever succeeded in fixing the problem for which it was created. It isnt relevant that under ACA insurance rates are skyrocketing, insurance carriers are leaving in droves, and 8 million people paid the ACA tax penalty last year.
Lets not discuss that the uninsured rate is 11.3 percent (36,499,000 people!) this year, up from 10.9 percent in 2016. And keep it quiet that there are 10 million people who actually have insurance but cant pay their medical bills, or that 62 percent of bankruptcies are due to medical expenses.
Because their morality is better than yours.
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Progressives believe their morality better than rest - The Bozeman Daily Chronicle
ATLANTA When Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) mentioned President Trump during a Saturday morning speech, the more than 1,000 activists at the progressive Netroots Nation conference booed.
But when she mentioned a so-called Democratic strategist who wanted her party to move to the center, the boos rang even louder.
Apparently, the path forward is to go back to locking up nonviolent drug offenders and ripping more holes in our economic safety net, Warren said sarcastically, in a Saturday morning speech. Were not going back to the days when universal health care was something Democrats talked about on the campaign trail but were too chicken to fight for after they got elected.
Warrens party, locked out of power in Washington and most of the country, has spent 2017 opposing Trump while also fighting about what it really stands for. Both trends were on display at Netroots, as huddles over how to block Republican bills alternated with protests of Democrats who were seen to be belittling black candidates, LGBT rights or Native Americans.
[Shouting trust black women, Netroots protesters disrupt speech from white Georgia candidate]
The evidence from Atlanta suggested that Democrats might march into 2017 and 2018 elections still arguing about how to win without dividing the party.
The high-profile problems of the Democratic National Committee were part of that discussion, but the larger focus was about what progressives were building outside the party, untainted by the Democratic brand. Just as the tea party complemented the work of the Obama-era GOP, progressives want to build organizations, national and hyperlocal, to turn out voters who might be turned off by Democrats.
Ninety percent of Americans think that the Republicans put corporations ahead of American citizens, and 80 percent say that the Democratic Party does, said Tom Steyer, whose political advocacy group NextGen America had already budgeted $8 million for 2018 election turnout operations. For people under the age of 30, Ive seen data on how 44 percent of them thought there was no difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on the issues. I mean, that's insane.
The 12th annual Netroots Nation conference, which was the first to immediately follow a Democratic loss in a presidential election, revealed the scope of what Barack Obamas White House once deemed the professional left. The Working Families Party, which began in New York and grew across the Northeast and Midwest, announced new state chapters. Activists organized under the Indivisible handbook, a guide created by former congressional staffers with advice on how to pressure their bosses, taught short sessions on how they organized rural campaigns some which lost, all of which would continue into 2018.
MoveOn.org, fresh off organizing protests to save the Affordable Care Act from repeal, was promoting a Resistance Summer in which thousands of activists would talk to their neighbors about progressive politics. Our Revolution, the group founded by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) after his 2016 presidential bid, promoted its own Summer of Progress activists getting congressional Democrats on record behind eight left-wing bills designed to ease voter registration, create universal health insurance, raise the minimum wage to $15, and reform the criminal justice system.
[Obama campaign successor teams up with progressives to train full-time activists]
The Democrats who came to Atlanta to meet potential supporters often had more positive things to say about the activists than about their party. Andrew Gillum, the mayor of Tallahassee now running for governor of Florida, framed his own campaign as a challenge to an establishment that seemed to specialize in losing elections.
A lot of people are hugely suspect of the organized party, and they question whether or not the will of the people will truly be felt without the influence of party poobahs, Gillum said. In the past, those leaders galvanized, they chose, they cleared the field, and our voters werent on the same page as them. The fate we suffered was 20 years of Republican leadership in Florida.
The Democratic National Committee itself had a minor presence at the conference. DNC Vice Chairman Keith Ellison, a congressman from Minnesota who lost a progressive-backed bid for chairman, was on hand to defend the partys 2016 platform and its Better Deal economic policies.
[Keith Ellison: Irresponsible Trump could bring about first strike by North Korea]
It was not an easy sell. At a Friday panel, Ellison visibly sighed when one activist lectured him on why she had joined the Green Party after Sanderss defeat, and after a Native American activist said his use of the term nation of immigrants had been offensive. Ellisons advice was not to defend the Democrats but to influence them from the grass roots until the party changed.
Its not moral, and its not just, but its reality, Ellison said.
The DNC also dispatched Raffi Krikorian, the partys new chief technological officer, who arrived this year from Uber and Twitter. He told activists that the DNCs innovations and data would be more available than under the old regime. For some, however, the DNC was an afterthought; asked about the DNCs data operation, Steyer of NextGen laughed and said the organization had its own, superior analytics for turning out votes.
Candidates from Georgia and elsewhere, who had watched their parties collapse in the final years of the Obama presidency, often sounded a lot like Steyer. In a Politico column that ran shortly before the conference, former Sanders digital fundraising manager Michael Whitney suggested that the DNC faced a donor crisis. Despite bear-hugging the resistance movement, the DNC had raised just half as much money as the Republican National Committee in 2017 $38 million to $75 million and lagged almost as badly among donors giving less than $200 apiece.
Republicans have quietly taken a decisive edge over Democrats when it comes to small-dollar fundraising, wrote Whitney.
At Netroots, there was little worry about Democratic fundraising, apart from the structural advantage that wealthy donors earned from the 2010 Citizens United decision.
The metric on which they focused: donations to individual campaigns. Randy Bryce, an ironworker running against House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), said that more than 28,000 people had donated to his bid since it began in June. Georgia state Rep. Stacey Abrams, a candidate for governor, emphasized the work she had done through the New Georgia Project, a third-party group, to register voters.
Because weve been under Republican control for so long, we do not have the robust infrastructure that other states have, said Abrams of the Georgia effort. The competition existed much more acutely when we [Democrats] had more resources. Well come together; there are much more skirmishes than actual battles.
Not all battles were created equal. There was almost no discussion about the partys potential candidates in the 2020 presidential election; when Warren made a reference to putting a woman in the Oval Office, the cheers of Run, Warren, Run were scattered and brief.
At a panel on what 2017s special elections had taught Democrats about the upcoming midterms, defeated Georgia candidate Jon Ossoff repeatedly criticized the hot take media culture for suggesting that arguments about policy were holding Democrats back.
Get offline and go knock on doors, Ossoff said. Democrats are united, no matter what you hear on cable news or in the hot takes we dont have to beat ourselves up over the fact that theres a range of views and strategies. Lets get on with it, and take back the House.
Read more at PowerPost
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Progressives are building outside of the Democratic Party to win in 2018 - Washington Post
Progressives have a problem. When it comes to their message, its all noise and no signal. For instance, in a recent Washington Post poll, only 37 percent of respondents said that the Democratic Party had a clear policy and stood for something. To remedy this, late last month the leaders of the Democratic Party unveiled their new platform under a new slogan, A Better Deal.
On the surface this rebranding, as such, seems a good idea. It promises to (1) make it easier for the base to identify what the party represents, and (2) furnish daylight between the progressive program and the Trump-led GOP. The new message is geared to win working-class whites through a razor-sharp focus on economic policy. But this strategy will not only fail to win additional votes, it will risk alienating almost half of the partys base by ignoring race and issues associated with racism.
A Better Deal proposes the following solution: pursuit of a clear economic agenda, one that will compete for the working-class white voters whom Trump carried by wide margins. To do so, Democrats plan to fix a broken economy by addressing issues such as spiraling drug prices and business monopolies. The business monopoly piece is important insofar as monopolies limit competition, which in turn increases prices even as it depresses wages. The partys platform also proposes investment in infrastructure as a means of creating jobs. Ultimately, this new progressive strategy is essentially a paean to working-class politics, specifically the white working class, to the exclusion of everything else especially issues of race.
This approach suggests that Democrats refuse to cede the mantle of populism to Trump and the Republicans. After all, classical populism is about economic justice, a conflict pitting corrupt elites against the virtuous, exploited people. Leaders of the Democratic Party insist upon appealing to the economic anxiety of white voters. If were keeping it real, theyre trying to peel off some of Trumps voters. If progressives hope to make gains in 2018 and win the White House in 2020, however, this is a flawed strategy for at least two reasons.
First, if Trump is a populist, then it is assumed that his supporters were driven by economic anxiety. Populism originated with the Farmers Alliance of the 1870s, but it was initially racially tolerant. Black farmers were included in the populist coalition, at least until political pressure from Democrats then the segregationist party that dominated the white South forced Populists to purge blacks, leading the movementto assume a more racially militant posture.
Todays populists are no different. Recent studies indicate that economic anxiety failed to have any tangible impact on whether or not people voted for Trump. What did? More than anything else, it was racism.
But wait: What about those who voted for Barack Obama in 2016 but flipped to vote for the GOP candidate in 2016? Approximately 13 percent of Trump supporters 8 million people or so voted for the 44th presidentagainst Mitt Romney in 2012. Clearly, if they voted for Obama over a white Republican, they were motivated to support Trump more out of economic anxiety than racism, right? Wrong. In a recent paper authored by Loren Collingwood and colleagues, the results suggest that those who flipped to Trump were more motivated by anti-Latino and anti-immigrant sentiment than by economic issues.
If Democrats insist upon the integrity of A Better Deal, it poses the following problems. For starters, people of color constitute nearly half the Democratic base, about 46 percent. It stands to reason that people of color will be reluctant to forge an alliance with working-class whites who are far more likely, relative to other white people, to harbor racist sentiments. It seems to be the case that many white working-class folks dont believe people of color share their values.If that isnt alarming enough, the fact that the political behavior of people of color is always more influenced by race than by class suggests that focusing so intently on appeals to the white working class is a losing strategy; people of color will refuse to turn out.
Second, and just as important, its not even clear that working-class whites are the problem in the first place. If Trumps support had really been driven by populist appeals for economic justice, i.e., bringing back well-paid manufacturing jobs and so on, he should have cleaned up among those in the bottom half of the income distribution. He didnt. Trump won only 35 percent of that group. In other words, Democrats already won the working-class white vote, by any reasonable definition. So a hardcore economic strategy is unlikely to win them any additional votes.
Surely Democrats can come up with a better deal than the Better Deal. If they dont fix this problem now, theyll remain in the minority, and wonder why.
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Democrats' Better Deal is a bum deal for progressives and won't win elections - Salon