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Remember wedge issues? You still see the term from time to time, but its popularity has diminished since the 1980s and 90s. Thats probably just as well; Metaphorical expressions like this one usually confuse more than they clarify, although it seems to have been replaced by the equally figurative and probably more confusing dog whistle.

A wedge issue, if you dont go back that far, is a controversial topic used by one campaign to create dissension within an opposing campaign. If I sense that a significant number of my opponents voters disagree with him or her on some question, I will raise it in an attempt to get them to doubt their support.

The salient characteristic of a wedge issue, at least in the common usage by commentators and journalists a generation ago, is its substantive unimportance. The wedge issue was almost always a social or cultural issue: something about race, religion or sex. When a journalist referred to gay rights, say, as a wedge issue, the implication was usually that the candidate raising the issue didnt really care about it. The issue didnt affect voters lives in any direct or appreciable way, but the candidate forced it into the debate in a cynical attempt to disunite the other sides constituency.

This is more or less the way Thomas Frank uses the term in his 2004 book Whats the Matter with Kansas? Franks argument, if I could oversimplify, is that Kansas voters naturally tend to the left on subjects such as education, taxes and health care, but that Republicans have learned to use cultural issues school prayer, smut on the airwaves, abortion and so on to fool Kansans into abandoning their own interests and voting GOP.

Frank is far too cavalier about what other people should regard as their own interests: His argument reflects the ideological tendency of Americas commentariat, for whom fears of cultural transformation are always unfounded. But he has a point. There is no good reason that a statehouse election, for example, should turn on the question of euthanasia or transgender bathrooms. The winner will have no power to affect policy on such a question; its function in the race is that of a wedge, a non-germane controversy designed to shake the loyalties of the other side.

Now consider Donald Trump.

Let me put this point as plainly as I can, and do forgive the overstatement, if there is any. American progressives are playing the role of Republican-voting would-be Democrats in Thomas Franks vision of Kansas too paranoid or too thick to realize that the things upsetting them arent all that important. Trump himself is the greatest of all wedge issues, but in reverse: He distracts the other side and causes them, without their even knowing it, to ignore their own interests.

Exactly what is it about Trump, after all, that embitters progressives so badly? They will have noticed, surely, that his candidacy was opposed by the great majority of conservative intellectuals for the excellent reason that he is not, in fact, a conservative. That alone should keep progressives from despair. If we confine the discussion to policies and actual decisions what Trump will sign or veto, what hell actually do with executive power its not clear that progressives have all that much to fear. President Trump will probably nominate a conservative judge to the Supreme Court, but so, one assumes, would any Republican president.

Trump is far from a progressive, and he will effect policies that progressives abominate. But that hardly explains the panicked, visceral hatred to which many progressives have yielded. Mitt Romney stands to Trumps right on most points, and progressive Boston Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham issued an apology to Romney on the grounds that she now saw how bad bad can be.

There were of course excellent reasons to oppose Trumps candidacy, and there are legitimate reasons to worry about what the president might do in office. But that doesnt explain the turgid expressions of detestation issuing from many of his leftward-most adversaries. These unhappy souls fear and abhor Trump less for what he might do than for how he might act and what he might say. What troubles them, if Im right, isnt so much political as aesthetic:

Trump is proudly, ostentatiously nouveau riche. He embosses his comical surname on buildings.

He gloats about his successes and doesnt bother with the faux humility of ordinary political parlance.

He boasts of political conquests, as in former times he boasted of sexual ones.

He speaks ineptly about race (the blacks) and cruelly about the physical appearance of women he doesnt like.

He cultivates a preposterous hairdo, which he seems in all sincerity to believe is a physical asset.

His political pronouncements are brash, sometimes brutal, and he feels no obligation to make them consistent with one another, so immensely does he enjoy confounding his adversaries.

I regret all these things in a man who will be president of the United States. I find Trump hard to take even if, like reruns of an 80s sitcom, he grows on me. But most of what bothers me and I suspect most of what progressives detest about the man has mainly to do with appearance, attitude, style and language.

American progressives should decide which they would prefer: a principled and winsome conservative from whom they could expect few concessions other than rhetorical ones; or an ostentatiously moneyed agitator who says dumb things but who might shift left or right depending on the circumstances and his mood. If they were smart, they would take the latter. But Im not sure theyre smart.

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Why progressives shouldn't despair over Trump - Washington Post

For eight years I had the indescribable honor of serving in President Obamas White House, most recently as Special Assistant to the President & Director of Rapid Response. I played a lot of different roles, but going back through the 2008 transition and even back to the DNC during that campaign, Ive served as a nexus between the White House and progressive advocates, bloggers, journalists, and pundits I thought it might be worth sharing some of my perspective publicly with any progressive that cares to read it.

First and foremost: I say in all honesty that very little would have gotten done without you, and its become even more clear to me in these final days that your constructive criticism/pushing/occasional outrage helped make this White House a better White House, and this president a better president.

Looking forward, as bleak a moment as this is in many ways, Im optimistic for the future of progressives and the Democratic Party. As contentious as things can sometimes seem within our side, I think theres remarkable consensus on the kind of progressive change we need, captured in great detail through the hard work of the unified Democratic platform. I think a lot of the goals we had coming into 2009 have seen immense measurable accomplishment, more so than virtually any pundit would have thought possible at the time. On so many issues, progressives and President Obama have helped move the Overton window in the right direction (take some time to reflect on political conventional wisdom in 2008 and I think youll agree).

But part of progress is having to defend that progress, sooner or later, with your back against the wall. That time came sooner than expected, but it was always going to come. And reversing it is going to be a lot harder than Republicans advertised, because the benefits are just so damned real.

As we all continue to grapple with the elections aftermath, theres one critique that Ive heard from the media, from some supporters of the incoming administration, and from some folks on the left who I truly respect, that I want to take on namely that the Democratic Party and/or Obama didnt fight for working people.

When Obama passed the Recovery Act, a bigger stimulus than the New Deal, the infrastructure spending, the investments in clean energy manufacturing, and the Making Work Pay tax cuts were for working people.

When we passed the Affordable Care Act, that was aimed straight at working people white working people, black working people, Hispanic, Asian, and tribal and Republicans are now finally having to face up to that fact. Not just the 20+ million who got coverage, but the ~150 million with pre-existing conditions and the vast majority of Americans who get their coverage through work who were always at risk of getting screwed by some insurance company loophole. It was for people like my parents who are self-employed and could never afford real insurance for our family while I was growing up.

When we passed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, that was for working people who were getting screwed every which way by predatory financial industries.

When Obama executed the auto bailout, despite shudder-inducing unpopularity at the time, a million working people kept their livelihoods.

When Obama ended the Bush tax cuts for millionaires, even as he extended working class tax cuts like the Child Tax Credit, Earned Income Tax Credit, and the new American Opportunity Tax Credit, that was for working people.

When we repealed Dont Ask, Dont Tell, and helped make marriage equality a reality, that was for working people who wanted to live free of discrimination in a loving relationship or serving their country.

When we implemented Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), that was for working people who just wanted to come out of the shadows and contribute to this country in the light of day.

When Obama signed the law to reduce crack/cocaine sentencing discrepancies, and pushed the sentencing commission for reform, and made a cause out of his presidential commutation power, and pushed to ban the box on employment forms, that was for working people who wanted to make a living for themselves and their families, and not have their lives destroyed by some drug offense that a wealthy kid might have gotten a slap on the wrist for.

When the president brought more than 90 percent of our troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, stayed out of a full blown ground war quagmire in Syria despite constant criticism, and used diplomacy to block Irans nuclear program and avoid another war, that was for the working people who make up Americas military white working people, black working people, Hispanic, Asian, and tribal who want to serve their country and get an education they might not otherwise be able to afford, and who are treated like cannon fodder by Washingtons war hawks.

When Obama took on toxic pollution on things like mercury and countless other rules, that was for working people, who are the ones who bear the brunt of that toxicity, saving tens of thousands from sickness and death.

Setting aside the fact that climate change will destroy the planet that working people work on, he has also pushed against widespread skepticism, constant political criticism, and even mockery, to make clean energy a source of manufacturing jobs for working people for decades ahead, and there is now widespread agreement that the clean energy revolution has begun and cant be reversed.

When Obama took major executive actions and pushed to make fair pay and paid leave central to the political debate, to recognize them as economic issues and not solely gender equality issues, that was, obviously, about working people.

Executive actions on overtime pay, payday lenders, crooked retirement brokers: working people.

And when Obama pushed for the American Jobs Act, for immigration reform, for universal background checks, for universal pre-K and free community college and for minimum wage increases, and was blocked by Republicans, that was all for working people.

Obama wasnt perfect; with any president you can find shortcomings, and more people that could have or should have been helped; we owe it to those people to learn lessons and do better in the future. But I honestly believe he will be remembered as one of our greatest presidents, precisely because fighting for working people is literally what got him (and his staff) out of bed in the morning, what made him love and cherish the job up to the very last day. And the Democratic Party, which buckled down and sacrificed huge numbers of its members for the sake of insuring tens of millions of people, and which in vast majority stood strong to stop war in Iran, has been a party I can believe in as a vehicle for change, for all its warts.

All of that is to say that Im proud, and I hope youll be proud too of what youve been a part of and witnessed. Because it is now all under threat from the party thatactuallydisdains the working class. Take stock of what weve done together, because the time to defend it has already come. And the fight is not for Obamas legacy, nor would he want it to be. Its for working people, be they white, black, Hispanic, Asian, tribal even Trumps own voters.

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An Obama Staffer's Parting Note To Progressives - Huffington Post

Ron Sachs/dpa/picture-alliance/NewscomIt's telling that a lot of criticism of Betsy DeVos as Donald Trump's choice to head the Department of Education are about things like the fact that she didn't send her children to public schools and that she's not terribly familiar with the vast federal legal bureaucracy overseeing public education.

These are critiques that come also entirely from those who are embedded within the entrenched public education system and who have a stake in maintaining and expanding the status quo. Some senators seem aghast at the idea that DeVos was unfamiliar with all sorts of federal laws about how local schools are required to behave in order to receive federal funding.

But this just puts DeVos on the same footing as everybody outside the education system who have to interact with it and feel little control. While there are indeed parents who are familiar with these federal regulations because they have kids with special needs, this approach on DeVos feels very much like an attempt to keep the Department of Education under the control of insiders.

In reality, many, many parents want to make the same choices for their children as DeVos did, and it has nothing to do with them being rich or overly Christian. School unions and the politicians they bankroll may be able to stop DeVos' nomination, but they can't stop the growth of school choice and what it means, because parents love it.

And we've got the numbers to show it. The Reason Foundation's report on school choice and privatization for 2016 shows yet another major increase in the number of families sending their kids into charter school programs. Charter school enrollment increased by 250,000 students during the 2015-16 school year and 400 new charter schools opened. It's a 9 percent increase over the previous year. There are close to 3 million students getting educations from charter schools.

What DeVos wants is the same was what many parents want, completely independent of political affiliations. Deep in the heart of the bluest of blue cities like New York and Los Angeles, charter schools thrive with the extremely loud, committed support of parents in the face of opposition of public school officials who are allegedly supposed to serve these same consumers.

It's remarkable how much opposition to the growth of charter schools absolutely ignores the parents' support and embrace of them (other than trying to mislead the public that access is confined to wealthy surburbanites with the right connections). I've had people connected to the public education tweet at me or respond to me that charter schools aren't truly "public" because they lack the accountability of open school board meetings. We've all seen the words "for-profit" to be used as a bludgeon to suggest corrupt intent. All those billions of dollars changing hands suddenly become clean when they're passed along to the right people, as in those currently in control of the education system.

But school choice actually has the ultimate form of oversightparents can yank their kids out if they're not happy. By all means, let's talk about test scores and whether they're better or worse or the same. By all means, go over charter school finances with a fine-tooth comb. Heck, you can even try to deliberately mislead people about whether economists support market choices in education. But when parents show up at school board meetings begging for their charter schools to remain open, you're a fool to pretend that fighting this movement is about protecting anybody but the interests of entrenched educators and administrators.

School choice is a populist movement that is heavily supported by the families the educational system is supposed to be serving. Those Democrats who are going after DeVos need to keep in mind one of the big reasons why Hillary Clinton lost: Voters stayed home. And many who voted didn't even select a candidate for president. To choose unions over parents in urban environments ignores what voters want. Many state- and district-level politicians can get away with this because unions are so locally influential. But on a federal level, attempting to stop the growth of school choice is a doomed effort that will turn many parents offeven Democratic ones. I can't imagine how telling parents they should not have control over where their kids get educations pays off in the polls.

Next week will be National School Choice Week, and expect a lot of coverage here at Reason. It's an area where libertarians and conservatives often find themselves working alongside urban Democrats as supporters. Senators like Elizabeth Warren and Tim Kaine ignore this at their peril. They're absolutely not representing the views of poor minorities by opposing choice.

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Hey Progressives: You Can Fight DeVos, but You Can't Stop School Choice - Reason (blog)

A Colorado State University student explains his campaign for "Nobody 2016." Valerie Mosley

Protesters wave signs in support of the Affordable Care Act outside U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner's Fort Collins office Tuesday, January 10, 2017. A few dozen protestors met with staff members while others voiced their concerns on Shields Street to passing traffic.(Photo: Austin Humphreys/The Coloradoan)Buy Photo

Greg Speer never considered himself active when it came to politics. At least not when it came to waving signs or organizing protests.

Yet, there he was. The retired emergency room doctor was one of roughly 40 people atthe Fort Collins office of U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner last week, demanding that the first-term Republican preserve the federal Affordable Care Act.

Like hundreds of others in Fort Collins, Speer felt a new urgency following November's election, in which Donald Trump clinched the vote for president andRepublicans retained theirhold on Congress, giving the nation itsfirst unified Republican government in a decade.

Speer called the ascendancy of Trump the "greatest threat to our nation and our democracy in our lifetime." It's not an uncommon refrain inliberal-leaning Fort Collins, which overwhelmingly re-elected all of its Democratic legislators and pushed Clinton ahead of Trump in Larimer County.

FORT COLLINS COLORADOAN

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"I feel like I didn't really have an alternate but to resist the bad things coming down the pipe to the best of my ability," Speer said.

That urge to resist has spurred a groundswell of progressive efforts in the city that many say hasn't been seen here before. Half a dozen groups or more have organized since the election and are turning talk into action, be it midweek protests at Gardner's office or rallies in Old Town.

Gardner said he appreciates hearing from all constituents, and singled out those "devastated" by premium hikes, plan cancellations and other health care industry issues that he blamed on the ACA, also known as Obamacare. He is "committed to repealing Obamacare and working to repair its damage."

A woman shows her concerns outside U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner's Fort Collins Tuesday, January 10, 2017.(Photo: Austin Humphreys/The Coloradoan)

Speer heard about the Jan. 10protest at a meeting hosted by Fort Collins for Progress, the group that organized the downtown rally the weekend after Trump's election. Many people there were a part of the Northern Colorado Action Network, another group that formed following the election. Patricia Miller, who is helping to resurrect immigrant rights group Fuerza Latina in Fort Collins, also waved signs outside Gardner's office.

Elsewhere in the city, members of the newly forming chapter of the National Organization for Women, going by NOCO NOW, were renting buses to take supporters to Saturday's Women's March on Denver, a solidarity showing in response to the incoming White House administration. More groups still were working to form and find a way to fit into this blossoming new ecosystem of progressive organization.

"It's going to be interesting to see how this all shakes out and what sticks," Colorado State University professor Courtenay Daum said."It says a lot about how people feel like they have to do somethingand take some type of action."

FORT COLLINS COLORADOAN

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Daum herself is helping to organize NoCo Spark, a group seeking to spur progressive change and community in Fort Collins. (Daum said she is making sure to separate her efforts as a private citizen from her role as a professor and teacher at CSU.) For her, the movements could be described as every action having an equal and opposite reaction. Trump, after all, likes to describe his ascendancy as a "beautiful movement."

"There was a big groundswell of support for Trump from people who weren't happy with the system," Daum said."That sort of angst and frustration helped Trump win the presidency. And now, angst and frustration and uncertainty about what a Trump presidency will mean has driven a lot of other people to get active."

Janine Davis organizes a group of people outside U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner's Fort Collins office to meet with staff in regards to the possible repeal of the Affordable Care Act Tuesday, January 10, 2017. A few dozen protestors voiced their concerns with signs on S. Shields Street near the office.(Photo: Austin Humphreys/The Coloradoan)

The sheer number of local groups forming will also need to coalesce to stop from butting against each other, she warned. It's a danger many of the organizers are aware of. But it also means that potential activists have a lot of avenues for getting involved, said Mary Roberts, the outreach director for NOCO NOW.

Roberts, who joked that she's lost count of the number of protest marches she's joined in her life, said she felt the "flame of resistance" was ignited in both veteran protesters and people new to activism. She started looking for a new entry into activism when she found NOCO NOW and said it was like finding her tribe.

"I know that's what's happening with the other organizations, I know that," Roberts said. "You walk into a room and feel, 'I've found my people.'"

She and other organizers said the various groups are keeping in contact to make sure efforts are coordinated.

The different groups may overlap some social justice and equality are broad umbrellas, after all but theyalso carry subtler characteristics in efforts to appeal to different people, Roberts said. Her group may appeal to older folks she said many at meetings she's attended are 50-plus years old while others may hit younger demographics.

COLORADOAN

Governor Hickenlooper wants Trump to succeed

Then there are groups like Fuerza Latina, with a relatively narrow focus. It aims to educate immigrants of their rights and to work with the community to help it understand a group of people organizers describe as seeking to build a better life.In the past, it has hosted legal clinics for people registering with the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and fought laws deemed anti-immigrant by its members.

"Our strength is in our flexibility," said Cheryl Distaso, a coordinator with umbrella organization Fort Collins Community Action Network. "So, we've been able to respond to positive things like (President Barack) Obama's DACA announcement, but we've also responded to deportations."

She added, "We don't know what the Trump administration is going to do, but it won't be positive for the immigrant community."

Miller, who legally immigrated as a young girl from El Salvador during its civil war, said her own history drove her to get involved, even if she had never been much of an activist before. She noted that Trump started his presidential campaign by describing Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals.

"The election of Trump removed a veil from a lot of us that everything was OK," Miller said. "That we lived in a progressive society ...but there are so many other forces at play."

She added, "Things that we fought in the '60s need to be fought again."

FORT COLLINS COLORADOAN

Fort Collins sends climate change letter to Trump

An incomplete list of progressive action groups formed or starting to form in Fort Collins:

NOCO NOW:A National Organization for Women chapter.

NoCo Spark:A progressive group with the mission of spurring civic engagement via education, local nonprofit support and political mobilization.

Fort Collins for Progress:A progressive group that has been organizing protests and rallies.

Fuerza Latina:A group dedicated to preserving the rights of immigrants and building empathy for that group in the community.

Some of the entertainment worlds biggest stars plan to protest Donald Trumps inauguration the night before his big day. Nathan Rousseau Smith (@fantasticmrnate) has the story. Buzz60

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Spurred by Trump, Fort Collins progressives mobilize - The Coloradoan

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Tuesday, January 17, 2017, 2:21 PM

As it stands right now, Democrats control the governments of just four states California, Oregon, Hawaii and Rhode Island. Thats not a typo. In 46 states, if you want to get a law passed, you now have to go through a Republican legislature or a Republican governor or both. While we all celebrated eight years of having President Obama in the White House, the Republican Party did the long, hard organizing work of taking over the country state by state.

We can blame gerrymandering. We can and should discuss Voter ID laws. We should also discuss racism and white supremacy. All of those were genuine factors in how we got here, but it still took grassroots organizing for Republicans to do what they have done.

In less than 100 hours, Donald Trump will be inaugurated President of the United States. Republicans control the Senate and the House of Representatives. The only true progressive and Democratic strongholds left in this nation, outside of those four coastal states, are Americas largest cities.

If we arent careful, through gentrification, rising rents and low wages, conservatives may even begin taking over our urban centers. Thats why its time for us to stop giving Democratic or progressive mayors and city councils and district attorneys all over this country a pass. Representation is great. Its good to see someone who looks like you or claims to see the world like you do, in office. But for far too long weve celebrated elections when we need to be celebrating results.

Schumer, Dems will vote against Sessions over civil rights issues

A person who claims to be a progressive, but then fails to keep their promises on progressive policies, isnt a progressive. Theyre just a smiling face.

When the people in Americas largest cities are facing a steady onslaught of police brutality, they need a hell of a lot more than a smile or dap or even your presence at a funeral. They needed you before the funeral. They need change.

During President Obamas time in office, the Justice Department issued scathing reports, called consent decrees, on police department after police department across the country. The reports, while thorough and damning, were nothing but PDFs if local leaders werent serious about making sweeping changes happen.

Guess who controls so many of the cities with police departments featured in those reports? Democrats. Be it Chicago, Baltimore, or Cleveland, time and time again the cities with the worst police brutality had Democratic leaders at the helm. In most of those cities, it is the mayor who oversees those police departments.

At least 26 Democratic lawmakers will boycott Trump inauguration

Rahm Emanuel, now in his second term as Mayor of Chicago, is responsible for the corruption and brutality of the Chicago Police Department. He oversees it and it has been on his watch that the city has failed to make the substantive changes that activists there have been calling for.

My sincere guess is that progressives are going to have very little sway in the state and federal government over the next few years. Sadly, because of all of the political losses over these past eight years, that means Democrats are going to be playing non-stop defense to try their best to stop destructive policies on issues like health care, womens rights, LGBT rights, the environment, war, trade and wages.

But while we play defense in those circles, we must have serious, substantive offensive strategies in our cities. We must demand that every major city in America enact progressive policies on policing and criminal justice. We must demand that every major city in America institutes a living wage. We must demand that every major city in America protects the rights and safety of marginalized groups be they immigrants, the elderly, the LGBT community, the homeless, or anyone else.

I honestly think a lot of Americas mayors thought they were about to serve in the Hillary Clinton administration. Now that that dream has been deferred, they must serve us. But heres the thing, they will only do what we demand they do. They will only keep the promises we force them to keep.

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KING: Progressives must hold Democratic politicians accountable - New York Daily News