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If I have to read one more article blaming liberal condescension toward the red states and the white working class for the election of Trump, Im moving to Paris, France. These pieces started coming out even before the election and are still pouring down on our heads. Just within the last few weeks, theNew Republichad Michael Tomasky deploringelite liberal suspicion of middle America for such red-state practices as churchgoing and gun owning andThe New York Timeshad Joan Williams accusingDemocrats of impugning the social honor of working-class whites by talking about them in demeaning and condescending ways, as exemplified by such phrases as flyover states, trailer trash, and plumbers butt. Plumbers butt? That was a new one for me. And thats not even counting the 92,346 feature stories about rural Trump voters and their heartwarming folkways. (I played by the rules, said retired rancher Tom Grady, 66, delving into the Daffodil Diners famous rhubarb pie. Why should I pay for some deadbeats trip to Europe?) Im still waiting for the deep dives into the hearts and minds of Clinton supporterswhat concerns motivated the 94 percent of black women voters who chose her? Is there nothing of interest there? For that matter, why dont we see explorations of the voters who made up the majority of Trumps base, people who are not miners or unemployed factory workers but regular Republicans, most quite well-fixed in life? (I would vote for Satan himself if he promised to cut my taxes, said Bill Thorberg, a 45-year-old dentist in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Im basically just selfish.) There are, after all, only around 75,000 coal miners in the entire country, and by now every one of them has been profiled in theTimes.

In her fascinating recent bookStrangers in Their Own Land, the brilliant sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild asks readers to climb the empathy wall and really try to understand the worldview of Trump votersas she did, spending over five years getting to know white Southern Louisianians, many of them Cajun, who have extreme free-market, anti-government Tea Party politics although they live in Cancer Alley, an area where the petrochemical industry, abetted by the Republican politicians they voted for, has destroyed nature, their communities and their health. Hochschild has a deep grasp of human complexity, and her subjects come across as lovely people, despite their politics. As she hoped, I came away with a better understanding of how kindly people could vote for cruel policies, and how people who dont think theyre racist actually are so.

But heres my question: Who is telling the Tea Partiers and Trump voters to empathize with the rest of us? Why is it all one way? Hochschilds subjects have plenty of demeaning preconceptions about liberals and blue-statersthat distant land of hippies, feminazis, and freeloaders of all kinds. Nor do they seem to have much interest in climbing the empathy wall, given that they voted for a racist misogynist who wants to throw 11 million people out of the country and ban people from our shores on the basis of religion (as he keeps admitting on Twitter, even as his administration argues in court that Islam has nothing to do with it). Furthermore, they are the ones who won, despite having almost 3 million fewer votes. Thanks to the founding fathers, red-staters have outsize power in both the Senate and the Electoral College, and with great power comes great responsibility. So shouldnt they be trying to figure out the strange polyglot population they now dominate from their strongholds in the South and Midwest? What about their stereotypes? How respectful or empathetic is the belief of millions of Trump voters, as established in polls and surveys, that women are more privileged than men, that increasing racial diversity in America is bad for the country, that the travel ban is necessary for national security? How realistic is the conviction, widespread among Trump supporters, that Hillary Clinton is a murderer, President Obama is a Kenyan communist and secret Muslim, and the plain-red cups that Starbucks uses at Christmastime are an insult to Christians? One of Hochschilds subjects complains that liberal commentators refer to people like him as a redneck. Ive listened to liberal commentators for decades and have never heard one use this word. But say it happened once or twice. Feminazi went straight from Rush Limbaughs mouth to general parlance. One of Hochschilds most charming subjects, a gospel singer and preachers wife, uses it like a normal word. Equating women who want their rights with the genocidal murder of millions? How is that not a vile insult?

Im sure I have stereotypical views of people who live in red statesincluding forgetting that, as Tomasky points out, all those places have significant numbers of (churchgoing, gun-owning) liberals. I try not to be prejudicedmost people are pretty nice when you dont push their buttonsbut I probably have my fair share of biases. But so what? What difference does it make if I think believing in the Rapture is nuts, and hunting for pleasure is cruel? So what if I prefer opera to Elvis? What does that have to do with anything important? Empathy and respect are not about kowtowing to someones cultural and social preferences. Theyre about supporting policies that make peoples lives better, whether they share your values, or your tastes, or not.

How much empathy did Louisiana Republicans show when they electedand reelectedBobby Jindal, who, backed by Republican legislators, cut taxes, slashed spending on education, health care, and social programs and gave massive tax breaks to the very petrochemical companies that poisoned Republican voters themselves? In Oklahoma, a growing number of schools are now open only four days a weekvoters, ultimately, made the choice to cut taxes instead of pay for a decent education for the states children. You can go down the most uncontroversial list of social goodshospitals, libraries, schools, clean air and water, treatment for mentally ill people and drug addictsand Republican voters label them Big Government and oppose them. And when the consequences get too big to ignore, as with climate change, they choose to believe whatever nonsense Fox News is promoting that week, as if at least 97 percent of the worlds climate scientists are just elitists who think they know so much. True, by the time the world burns to a crisp, todays voters will mostly be dead, but wheres the empathy for their own grandchildren?

Sorry, self-abasing liberal pundits: If you go by actual deeds, liberals and leftists are the ones with empathy. We want everyone to have health care, for example, even those Tea Partiers who in the debate over the Affordable Care Act loudly asserted that people who cant afford treatment should just die. We want everyone to be decently paid for their labor, no matter how low they wear their pantssomehow the party that claims to be the voice of working people has no problem with paying them so little theyre eligible for food stamps, which that same party wants to take away. We want college to be affordable for everyoneeven for the children of parents who didnt start saving for college when the pregnancy test came out positive. We want everyone to be free to worship as they pleaseincluding Muslimseven if we ourselves are nonbelievers.

What should matter in politics is what the government does. Everything else is just flattery, like George H.W. Bushs oft-cited love of pork rinds. Unfortunately, flattery gets you everywhere.

Katha Pollitt is a columnist for The Nation.

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The Tired Myth That Progressives Lack Empathy Is Hardly the Problem - AlterNet

REDLANDS >> Is health care a right?

Some of the citys conservative and progressive thinkers tackled that question at a forum Wednesday in an attempt to reach common ground.

I ask how can life be a democratic right without a system of universal health care that guarantees everyone access to medical care to sustain life regardless of economic status? said Jennifer Nelson, member of Redlands for Progressive Change.

The common ground is, of course, people need to be able to have access to medical care but that does not mean government should be providing it across the board on a free basis, responded Julie Biggs, president of the Redlands Republican Womens Club Federated.

The forum, held at the University of Redlands, was the first installment of the Common Ground Conversation Series, a collaborative effort between Redlands For Progressive Change and the Redlands Republican Womens Club Federated.

The forums are a way to get those from both sides of the political spectrum together to find agreement on issues and build relationships in the community, said Denise Davis, founder of Redlands For Progressive Change.

In order to truly move forward as a united, and emphasis on united, States of America, we believe its critical to have conversations with our neighbors, Davis said. We arent hiding behind a computer, a phone screen. Were not just watching these debates play out on television. We believe the real change happens when we sit in the same room together listening to one another.

Representing the progressive point of view were Nelson, professor and director of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies Program at the University of Redlands and expert on the history of social justice movements for health care and human rights; Mark Pavelchak, director of institutional research at Cal State Los Angeles, former assistant professor of business administration at the University of Redlands and member of Redlands for Progressive Change; and Iqbal Pittalwalla, science writer, public relations practitioner, math and physics tutor who was born in India and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2003.

On the conservative side were Biggs, attorney, board member of the Lincoln Club and elected member of the San Bernardino County GOP Central Committee; Sean Flynn, professor of economics at Scripps College, board member of the Lincoln Club and Republican congressional candidate in 2016; and Dale Broome, physician, delegate for the California Republican Party and member of the Redlands Tea Party Patriots.

Each panelist was given time to address the question, Is health care a right? Afterward, panelists on the opposing view discussed points of common ground, which were written on a chalkboard.

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Following the panels discussion, members from the audience shared their opinions and points of agreement.

The group found agreement on a need to provide emergency care and coverage for catastrophic events, limiting governmental involvement in health care decisions, closing loopholes and fixing weaknesses in the Affordable Care Act.

The Constitution of the United States is designed to protect people and their rights from government, from the government taking over and making decisions for you that affect your personal life, Biggs said. When government decides to provide medical care for people, it makes the decision as to who will receive that and who wont receive that.

Pavelchak agreed with some of Biggs statements.

You mentioned government should not step in to make governmental health care decisions for people and that especially hits home with regard to womens reproductive rights, Pavelchak said. I think women should be allowed to make those choices without government saying no, you cant.

Davis asked the audience for their feedback on the forum, which was an experiment, to find out if theres an interest in the community for future forums, she said. Members of the audience voiced positive responses to the discussion.

The purpose of this is not for us to walk away agreeing 100 percent, Davis said. The purpose is to find some points of agreement and some points of common ground. I think weve been able to do that tonight, which is great.

Original post:
Redlands progressives, conservatives meet to find common ground on American healthcare - Redlands Daily Facts

The United States Constitution is the supreme law in America. Anyone not subject to its jurisdiction is, by definition, not a citizen (14th Amendment). Progressives have sought to change the original Constitution over more than a century. They were successful in changing the states' selection of senators to popular election.

They passed Prohibition. They added direct taxation of income. Justices of the Supreme Court have considered international and Shariah law in their decisions making their oaths a lie.

Progressives have passed treaties which created a "right" to medical care, and invented a "right" to same-sex marriage. Health care law is constitutional as a tax.

At the same time, they obligated the United States to transfer a lot of its wealth to the rest of the world with the Bretton Woods agreements and the Marshall Plan. We pay at least 20 percent of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations and many other entities.

The head of the World Bank is American; the head of the IMF is French; and the U.N. has 15 "equal" members on the Security Council and about 190 members total. Our national sovereignty is diminished by these global entities which create "rights."

Climate agreements require the United States to clean up its act which it has done with the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Environmental Protection Agency, etc. and pay for the cleanup of developing nations like China.

As a scientist I can agree that climate change summer, fall, winter and spring is real. It is caused mainly by the sun and the obliquity of the ecliptic. Humans exhale carbon dioxide, but the effect on the global climate is not significant when compared with water vapor caused by the sun and ash clouds from erupting volcanoes.

Math models do not consider unpredictable things like volcanic eruptions even though the effect can be globally significant (see Krakatau, August 1883). Faux scientists make an error when they extrapolate a day in laboratory conditions to a billion years.

Blaming Hurricanes Katrina and Rita on global warming was easily proven false in 2006 when few hurricanes and no major hurricanes occurred. For a decade no hurricanes made landfall on Florida coasts. Still Sandy was blamed on global warming. Some scientists are hardcore. If global warming is the cause, then shouldn't every year get worse? True science is observable and testable. Big Bang and Evolution ideas are conjecture, not science.

Chuck Tatum

North Augusta

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Letter: Progressives are changing Constitution - Aiken Standard

YOUNG RADICALS: IN THE WAR FOR AMERICAN IDEALS By Jeremy McCarter Published by Random House, 400 pages, $30

Yesterday, I began my review of Jeremy McCarters new book Young Radicals and today I should like to conclude.

The lives of the young radicals are nothing if not fascinating. I kept wondering if there are young people today whose lives are so consumed with that rare combination of intellectual vigor and progressive optimism that the five protagonists display. Do people anymore start a theater troupe one summer, writing scripts and performing the plays, only to have one of their number show up one night with a friend, and the friend is a young Eugene O'Neill? But, that is what happened to Jack Reed one summer in Provincetown.

Reed and Walter Lippmann, friends at college, walk very different paths through the decade. Reed is flamboyant, the prince and the prankster of the Greenwich Village scene. When Reed takes up with a married woman, Freddy Lee (whose husband is a mutual friend of both Reed and Lippmann), Lippmann finds himself the recipient of a barrage of letters from Reeds last paramour, Mabel Dodge, pleading for his aid, as Reed had asked him to comfort Mabel when the news of his new love struck her. It is too much. McCarter writes: "Lippmann has plenty of affection for both of his friends, but the frivolity of Greenwich Village, and the people who play there, seem more and more ridiculous to him, more remote from his life. He has responsibilities; he has work to do; there is a war on. Like Prince Hal, he is ready to turn his back on Falstaff and all his pranks, and turn his gaze to the palace." This fine bit of prose is emblematic of the entire book which makes it such an easy read.

Randolph Bourne joins Lippmann at The New Republic as it starts in 1914 and the two become friends. He marvels at Lippmann's productivity and Lippmann is one of the first guests at Bournes summer home in Caldwell, New Jersey. But Bourne does not share his friends' ideas, especially about the nature of America society as dueling essays in 1916 demonstrate. As McCarter notes, "Watching Bourne and Lippmann address the same subject is a chance to trace the differences in their radicalism. In Lippmann's 'ideal of Americanism,' two concepts are pitted against each other. He wants America to be 'a union of people rather than a congeries of groups, provinces and racial stocks.' Bourne shares Lippmann's desire for a union of people, but the point of the trans-national ideal [that Bourne champions] is that people form that union while still belonging to different groups and feeling affinity with separate racial stocks." Bourne would complete his thesis by introducing Josiah Royce's concept of "Beloved Community."

Sunday marks the two-year anniversary of the publication of Laudato Si'. Explore Pope Francis' environmental encyclical with our complimentary readers' guide.

Alice Paul's life does not permit her the luxury of contemplating communities, beloved or otherwise. The suffragette is constantly looking for ways to force President Wilson to endorse a constitutional amendment extending the franchise to women nationwide. She disrupts a parade in Chicago. She and her colleagues protest outside the White House. When they are arrested and sent to jail, they start a hunger strike. Paul is unrelenting in her determination and, unlike the men in this story, she gets a large chunk of what she wants before it ends: Universal suffrage is enacted. Full equality for women, Paul's ultimate goal, like the socialistic or progressive goals of the other protagonists in this story, is something still beyond our societal grasp.

Max Eastman doesn't join The New Republic, he mocks it and "those mighty young bronze beasts who edit the New Republic." But like his less radical friends, Eastman must wrestle with how the war has forced a reexamination of basic assumptions and, curiously, like Lippmann, he does not surrender his ideals. "I do not believe a devastating war in Europe will stop the labor struggle," Eastman writes in The Masses. "I believe it will haste the day of its triumph. It will shake people together like dice in a box, and how they will fall out nobody knows. But they will fall out shaken; that everybody knows." I read those sentences and my mind went immediately to our own time in which President Donald Trump, not a "devastating war in Europe," will leave us all shaken although no one knows exactly how yet.

The most fascinating part of the book comes when the U.S. enters the World War in 1917. "The young radicals are about to face a whole new set of consequences from their decisions to pursue their ideals in the tumult of public life," writes McCarter. "They had made those choices against a backdrop of peace and relative stability. A world of abundant promise now seems a world of unknowable danger. The question is no longer Will you work to see your ideals realized? The new reality asks them How far will you go? How much risk can you handle? How much pain can you endure?"

Lippmann goes to work for President Wilson while Reed goes to St. Petersburg and gets swept up in the Russian Revolution. The old college chums find themselves both engaged in propaganda, McCarter notes. Eastman is charged under the Espionage laws, stands his ground at trial and is acquitted. Later in life, he will go on to write for Reader's Digest, that "squarest and least radical magazine in America." Bourne publicly breaks with his mentor, John Dewey, as well as the editorial stance of The New Republic. He writes some of the most powerful and trenchant critiques of war I have ever read. An example: After noting the claim that they are leaders made by the editors of The New Republic, and noting that those pushing for war all along had been the jingoists, the plutocrats and the conservatives, he writes: "Only in a world where irony is dead could an intellectual class enter war at the head of such illiberal cohorts in the avowed cause of world-liberalism."

I shall let the reader discover the rest of this fascinating tale, written both powerfully and carefully on every page, researched with exhaustion and written with panache. My only criticism would be directed not at the story itself but at McCarter's epilogue. The steady hand that wrote the book is lost as he contemplates the Women's March the day after the inauguration of President Trump. "American conditions feel so precarious as I'm writing this in early February 2017 that any prediction might seem foolish by the time you read it. It might seem foolish by the time I finish typing it. But the scale and the zeal of the Women's March suggests that we've entered a new phase in the history of American idealism." He should have listened to his caveats: It is so far quite foolish to think our country has entered a new phase of idealism. Where is the evidence?

All is forgiven, however, even in the epilogue, by McCarter's ability to craft beautiful sentences that contain poignant ideas. He concludes the book: "Whatever happens, we ought to be braced by the example of the young radicals; how they discovered their ideals, made a decision to fight for them, and went on fighting even when the battle turned against them. Their defeats were painful, but not final. Battles for ideals never are. Ruins stop being ruins when you build with them."

Now that this review is published, I shall call McCarter and pose him a particular question: There seems to be a complete absence of any religious tone or content in these five young radicals. Did that not hinder them in a culture where religious language and imagery is still so redolent? And, in our own day, is it still necessary to find at least some of the resources for cultural renewal and progressivism in religious idioms? McCarter does not address this question in his book, and I am glad he didn't: He sticks to the narrative and lets the protagonists tell their own story, which is why it is such an engaging read. (Letting the protagonists tell their own story without the author getting in the way is also a lot harder to do than it looks!) But, if he truly discerns in the Women's March a new progressivism, did the march organizers' decision to bar pro-life feminists from participating evidence a healthy or unhealthy strain in contemporary progressivism?

If this still young thinker and writer is wondering what to write next, I would propose he look at the nexus of religion and progressivism in the lives of other emblematic Americans. I would read that book too and I am confident I would delight in it as I did in this one. But that is all in the future. For now: Read this book! You wont be disappointed.

[Michael Sean Winters covers the nexus of religion and politics for NCR.]

Original post:
'Young Radicals' follows progressives' pursuit of ideals into World War I - National Catholic Reporter (blog)

Chokwe Antar Lumumba, a human-rights lawyer, won the mayoralty of Jackson, Mississippi, in June with 93 percent of the vote. (Illustration by Louisa Bertman)

With a clenched fist held high and the promise of amovement of the people, Chokwe Antar Lumumba asked the voters of Jackson, Mississippi, to elect him as their mayor in a race he pledged would lead to the transformation of a Deep South city in a deep-red state. Victory for his civil-rights-inspired, labor-backed campaign for economic and social justice would send shock waves around the world, said the 34-year-old human-rights lawyer as he vowed to make Jackson the most progressive city in the country.1

Too radical? Too bold? Not at all. Backed by a coalition that included veteran activists who fought segregation, along with newcomers who got their first taste of politics in Bernie Sanderss 2016 presidential campaign, Lumumba won 55 percent of the vote in a May Democratic primary that saw him oust the centrist incumbent mayor and sweep past several other senior political figures in Mississippis largest city. A month later, he secured a stunning 93 percent of the vote in a general election that drew one of the highest turnouts the city has seen in years.2

That victory renewed a radical experiment in community-guided governance and cooperative economics that his father, the veteran radical activist Chokwe Lumumba Sr., began during a brief mayoral term that ended with the senior Lumumbas untimely death just eight months after his own 2013 election as mayor. Governing magazine speculates that the younger Lumumbas tenure may offer striking evidence of a nationwide trend: strongly progressive policies being pushed in big cities, even in deep red states. Thats true. Unfortunately, Lumumbas June 6 win didnt get anything close to the media attention accorded a handful of special elections for US House seats in districts that are so solidly Republican that Donald Trump was comfortable plucking congressmen from them to fill out his cabinet.3

This is the frustrating part of Lumumbas shock waves around the world calculus: His election should have sent a shock wave. The same holds true for the election of progressives in local races from Cincinnati to St. Louis to South Fulton, Georgia, in a season of resistance that began with the Womens March on Washington and mass protests against President Trumps Muslim ban but has quickly moved to polling places across the country.4

The list of victories thus far on this years long calendar of contestsmayoral, City Council, state legislative, and even statewideis striking. Many of them are unprecedented, and most are linked by a growing recognition on the part of national progressive groups and local activists that the greatest resistance not just to Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan but to right-wing governors could well come from the cities and states where the day-to-day work of governing is done. Municipal resistance is crucial because these Republican governors often do the bidding of the Koch brothers and the corporate-sponsored American Legislative Exchange Council.5

Our nation will only change from the grassroots up. Dan Cantor, national director of the Working Families Party

Inspired not merely by their opposition to Trump but in many cases by the experience of the Sanders campaign, these next-generation progressive candidatesoften running with the backing of Our Revolution, the national group developed by Sanders backersshare a belief that effective opposition begins with saying no but never ends there. They recognize that an alternative vision can be proposed and put into practice in communities where taxes are levied, services are delivered, commitments to fight climate change are made, resolutions to establish sanctuary cities are adopted, and questions about poverty, privatization, and policing are addressed. Our nation will only change from the grassroots up, says Dan Cantor, national director of the Working Families Party, which backed Lumumba as well as the progressive winners of a hotly contested primary for Philadelphia district attorney, a statewide race for the top education post in Wisconsin, and a New York election that saw a Trump-backing GOP district pick a resistance-preaching union activist for an open legislative seat.6

Cantor is right to suggest that these victories make a powerful case that a new resistance-and-renewal politics is sending a signal to conservative Republicans and cautious Democrats alike about the ability of bold progressive populists to win in every part of the country. Thats why it is so worrisome that these electoral shock waves have been crashing against the wall of ignorance and indifference that surrounds a Trump-obsessed Washington media.7

Even before the 2016 elections, the national media were far too focused on Beltway intrigues. When the Trump-centric punditocracy hang on the 45th presidents every tweet, election results that cannot be tied directly to whats happening in Washington barely exist in their eyes. This is a damaging phenomenon: Even in an era of rapidly evolving social media, the validation that comes from traditional media coverage should not be underestimated. In the none-too-distant past, things changed because down-ballot races were closely monitored for evidence of the zeitgeist; the tangible signs of electoral progress for civil-rights campaigners in the late 1960s came initially in the form of election results for the mayoralties in places like Gary, Indiana, and Cleveland, and they inspired the next wave of campaigns in cities like Atlanta and New Orleans. City Council elections in Berkeley, Madison, and Ann Arbor in the early 1970s revealed the political potency of radical movements and lowered voting ages, just as Harvey Milks 1977 election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors told us that LGBTQ Americans were transforming urban politics. And a remarkable series of election results in 1983, beginning with Harold Washingtons election as mayor of Chicago, signaled the rise of a rainbow coalition that would inspire not just the Reverend Jesse Jackson but a young community organizer named Barack Obama.8

Lumumbas big win in Jackson and similar breakthrough victories across the country are powerful indications of todays emerging resistance. His overwhelming primary victory occurred on the same day that progressive Cincinnati Councilwoman Yvette Simpson shocked even herself when her power of we campaign finished first (ahead of a conservative incumbent) in that citys mayoral primary. Annie Weinberg, electoral director of Democracy for America, which has waded into dozens of down-ballot contests, said the message is clear: In 2017, voters are ready to make cities everywhere into bastions of resistance to the Trump regime by electing bold progressive leaders who run on, and are committed to fighting for, racial and economic justice.9

Weinbergs point was confirmed on May 16, when Philadelphia Democrats nominated veteran civil-rights lawyer Lawrence Krasner for district attorney. Krasner, who had defended Occupy Philadelphia and Black Lives Matter protesters, beat a crowded field of contenders with a campaign that promised to make the City of Brotherly Love a model for criminal-justice reform. Along with victories last year by Cook County States Attorney Kim Foxx in Chicago and Orange-Osceola State Attorney Aramis Ayala in Orlando, Florida, Krasners win reflects the political appeal of new approaches to policingones first voiced by protesters on the streets of American cities, and that the Trump administration and too many politicians in both parties continue to callously dismiss. The headline of a Philadelphia Daily News column by Will Bunch announced: This wasnt just a primary victory. This was a revolution. The columnist saw in Krasners victory nothing less than the stirrings of a whole different kind of revolution from the city that gave America the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rightsa revolution aimed at finally undoing a draconian justice regime that had turned the Cradle of Liberty into a death-penalty capital and the poster child for mass incarceration.10

Many recent progressive victors were Bernie Sanders supporters or Sanders DNC delegates last year.

A similarly revolutionary result came in St. Louis on April 4, when Natalie Vowell won a citywide school-board seat with an intersectional campaign that focused not just on education policy but addressed the housing, employment, and criminal-justice issues that often determine whether students succeed. A Sanders delegate to the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Vowell promised to empower parents across the economic spectrum and stop equating poverty with apathy.11

Developing detailed platforms that recognize the links between local, state, and national issues has characterized these recent victories. Winning candidates have made opposing Trump a local issue, with commitments to defend immigrants and fill the void created by federal budget cuts; but they have also rejected the austerity, deregulation, privatization, and intolerance of statehouse Republicans. For example, Dylan Parker is a 28-year-old diesel mechanic and member of the Quad Cities chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. In 2016, Parker was a Sanders delegate; in early April of this year, he was elected to the City Council of Rock Island, Illinois, with a campaign that updated the sewer socialist municipal politics of the 1930s by focusing on providing universal high-speed Internet access and expanding Rock Islands publicly owned hydroelectric power plant. Two weeks later, another DSA member, khalid kamau (who lowercases his name in the Yoruba tradition that emphasizes community over the individual), was elected to the City Council of South Fulton, Georgia. A Black Lives Matter and Fight for $15 organizer and also a Sanders delegate, kamau campaigned on a bold economic and social-justice vision that seeks to make the newly incorporated community of South Fulton the largest progressive city in the South.12

In Scott Walkers Wisconsin, April voting saw Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers win a statewide nonpartisan race after being targeted by conservative backers of the school choice schemes favored by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. While his challenger embraced DeVos and called her selection a positive development for education, Evers challenged the Trump appointees promotion of taxpayer-subsidized parochial or private schools that are part of the choice program and said DeVos should be paying attention to public-school students. We need her to be an advocate for those kids, explained the teachers union ally, who calls for the increased funding of public education, especially for schools serving African-American, Latino, and rural students. Evers won 70 percent of the vote in a state that narrowly backed Trump last fall.13

While DC pundits have kept a reasonably close watch on congressional special elections in the districts won by Trumpand have seen signs of political movement some of the clearest signals are coming from special elections for seats in the state legislative chambers that will redraw congressional district lines after the 2020 Census. Progressive Democrats running in historically Republican districts in New Hampshire and New York won breakthrough victories in May. Republicans should absolutely be concerned: Two Republican canaries died in the coal mine yesterday, GOP political consultant William OReilly said after the results were announced. He explained that Trump voters and other Republicans simply didnt show up, and voters from the left did.14

THE STAKES ARE HIGHER NOW THAN EVER. GET THE NATION IN YOUR INBOX.

The New York special-election winner, elementary-school teacher and union activist Christine Pellegrino, described her victory as a thunderbolt of resistance. But it was also something else: Pellegrino, another 2016 Sanders delegate, wasnt the first choice of Democratic strategists and local party leaders. She gained the nomination with the help of the group Long Island Activists, which was born out of the Bernie Sanders movement, and she ran an edgy anticorruption campaign that recognized the mood among voters frustrated with both major parties. As observers hailed her victory in a district that gave Trump a 23-point edge last November, Pellegrino explained that her winning strategy wasnt all that complicated: A strong progressive agenda is the way forward.15

Pellegrino proved her point by taking 58 percent of the vote in one of the 710 legislative districts nationwide that have been identified by Ballotpedia as including all or part of the so-called Pivot Countiesthose that voted for Democrat Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and then voted for Republican Donald Trump in 2016. As the website explains: 477 state house districts and 233 state senate districts intersected with these Pivot Counties. These [districts comprise] approximately 10 percent of all state legislative districts in the country.16

For progressives, figuring out where to win and how to winnot merely to resist, but to set the agendais about more than positioning. This is the essential first step in breaking the grip of a politics that imagines large parts of the country will always be red, and that says the only real fights are over an elusive middle ground where campaigns are fought with lots of money but little substance. The resistance-and-renewal politics thats now gathering momentum rejects such empty politics and embraces what Chokwe Antar Lumumba identifies as the struggle [that] does not cease: to give people the jobs and freedom they need to shape their own destinies. That makes every election in every community matter, because the point isnt merely to resist one bad president; as Lumumba reminds us, it is to change the order of the world.17

View original post here:
A Progressive Electoral Wave Is Sweeping the Country - The Nation.