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In a 2006 interview, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer said the Constitution is basically about one word democracy that appears in neither that document nor the Declaration of Independence. Democracy is Americas way of allocating political power. The Constitution, however, was adopted to confine that power in order to secure the blessings of that which simultaneously justifies and limits democratic government natural liberty.

The fundamental division in U.S. politics is between those who take their bearings from the individuals right to a capacious, indeed indefinite, realm of freedom, and those whose fundamental value is the right of the majority to have its way in making rules about which specified liberties shall be respected.

Now the nation no longer lacks what it has long needed, a slender book that lucidly explains the intensity of conservatisms disagreements with progressivism. For the many Americans who are puzzled and dismayed by the heatedness of political argument today, the message of Timothy Sandefurs The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty is this: The temperature of todays politics is commensurate to the stakes of todays argument.

The argument is between conservatives who say U.S. politics is basically about a condition, liberty, and progressives who say it is about a process, democracy. Progressives, who consider democracy the source of liberty, reverse the Founders premise, which was: Liberty preexists governments, which, the Declaration says, are legitimate when instituted to secure natural rights.

Progressives consider, for example, the rights to property and free speech as, in Sandefurs formulation, spaces of privacy that government chooses to carve out and protect to the extent that these rights serve democracy. Conservatives believe that liberty, understood as a general absence of interference, and individual rights, which cannot be exhaustively listed, are natural and that governmental restrictions on them must be as few as possible and rigorously justified. Merely invoking the right of a majority to have its way is an insufficient justification.

With the Declaration, Americans ceased claiming the rights of aggrieved Englishmen and began asserting rights that are universal because they are natural, meaning necessary for the flourishing of human nature. In Europe, wrote James Madison, charters of liberty have been granted by power, but America has charters of power granted by liberty.

Sandefur, principal attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation, notes that since the 1864 admission of Nevada to statehood, every states admission has been conditioned on adoption of a constitution consistent with the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration . The Constitution is the nations fundamental law but is not the first law. The Declaration is, appearing on Page 1 of Volume 1 of the U.S. Statutes at Large, and the Congress has placed it at the head of the United States Code, under the caption, The Organic Laws of the United States of America. Hence the Declaration sets the framework for reading the Constitution not as basically about democratic government majorities granting rights but about natural rights defining the limits of even democratic government.

The perennial conflict in American politics, Sandefur says, concerns which takes precedence: the individuals right to freedom, or the power of the majority to govern. The purpose of the post-Civil Wars 14th Amendment protection of Americans privileges or immunities protections vitiated by an absurdly narrow Supreme Court reading of that clause in 1873 was to assert, on behalf of emancipated blacks, national rights of citizens. National citizenship grounded on natural rights would thwart Southern states then asserting their power to acknowledge only such rights as they chose to dispense.

Government, the framers said, is instituted to improve upon the state of nature, in which the individual is at the mercy of the strong. But when democracy, meaning the process of majority rule, is the supreme value when it is elevated to the status of what the Constitution is basically about the individual is again at the mercy of the strong, the strength of mere numbers.

Sandefur says progressivism inverts Americas constitutional foundations by holding that the Constitution is about democracy, which rejects the framers premise that majority rule is legitimate only within the boundaries of the individuals natural rights. These include indeed, are mostly unenumerated rights whose existence and importance are affirmed by the Ninth Amendment.

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George Will: Progressives are wrong about the essence of ...

A hundred years ago, any soapbox orator who called for womens suffrage, laws protecting the environment, an end to lynching, workers right to form unions, a progressive income tax, a federal minimum wage, old-age insurance, the eight-hour workday and government-subsidized healthcare would be considered an impractical utopian dreamer or a dangerous socialist. Now we take these ideas for granted. The radical ideas of one generation are often the common sense of the next. When that happens, give credit to the activists and movements that fought to take those ideas from the margins to the mainstream. We all stand on the shoulders of earlier generations of radicals and reformers who challenged the status quo of their day.

Unfortunately, most Americans know little of this progressive history. It isnt taught in most high schools. You cant find it on the major television networks or even on the History Channel. Indeed, our history is under siege. In popular media, the most persistent interpreter of Americas radical past is Glenn Beck, who teaches viewers a wildly inaccurate history of unions, civil rights and the American left. Beck argues, for example, that the civil rights movement "has been perverted and distorted" by people claiming that Martin Luther King Jr. supported "redistribution of wealth." In fact, King did call for a "radical redistribution of economic power." Using his famous chalkboard, Beck draws connections between various people and organizations, and defines them as radicals, Marxists, socialists, revolutionaries, leftists, progressives or social justice activistsall of which leads inexorably to Barack Obama. Drawing on writings by conspiracy theorists and white supremacists, Beck presents a misleading version of Americas radical family tree.

Many historians, including Howard Zinn in his classic A Peoples History of the United States and Eric Foner in The Story of American Freedom, have chronicled the story of Americas utopians, radicals and reformers. Every generation needs to retell this story, reinterpret it and use it to help shape the present and future. Unless Americans know this history, theyll have little understanding of how far weve come, how we got here and how progress was made by a combination of grassroots movements and reformers.

Progressive change happens from the bottom up, as Zinn argued. But movements need leaders as well as rank-and-file activists. Movement leaders make strategic choices that help win victories. These choices involve mobilizing people, picking and framing issues, training new leaders, identifying opportunities, conducting research, recruiting allies, using the media, negotiating with opponents and deciding when to engage in protest and civil disobedience, lobbying, voting and other strategies.

This list includes fifty peoplelisted chronologically in terms of their early important accomplishmentswho helped change America in a more progressive direction during the twentieth century by organizing movements, pushing for radical reforms and popularizing progressive ideas. They are not equally famous, but they are all leaders who spurred others to action. Most were not single-issue activists but were involved in broad crusades for economic and social justice, revealing the many connections among different movements across generations. Most were organizers and activists, but the list includes academics, lawyers and Supreme Court justices, artists and musicians who also played important roles in key movements.

The list includes people who spent most of their lives as activists for changelong-distance runners, not sprinters. Many of them were born in the nineteenth century but gained prominence in the twentieth. Some important activists who lived into the twentieth century but whose major achievements occurred in the previous centurysuch as labor organizer Mary Harris "Mother" Jones; environmentalist John Muir; African-American journalist, feminist and anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells; agrarian Populist leader Mary Lease; and Knights of Labor leader Terence Powderlyare not included.

Although many politicians were important allies of progressive movementsincluding Senator (and Governor) Robert La Follette; Senators Robert Wagner, Paul Douglas and Paul Wellstone; Congress members Victor Berger, Jeannette Rankin, Vito Marcantonio, Bella Abzug and Phil Burton; Mayors Tom Johnson, Fiorello LaGuardia and Harold Washington; as well as Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and (for his domestic social programs) Lyndon Johnsonthe list excludes elected officials. (Eugene Debs, Harvey Milk and Tom Hayden, who were elected to public office, are included because they made their reputations primarily as activists.)

A few of the people on the list expressed views, at some point in their lives, that progressives consider objectionable, such as Margaret Sangers endorsement of eugenics, Earl Warrens support for rounding up Japanese-Americans during World War II, Bayard Rustins support for the Vietnam War and Jackie Robinsons attack on Paul Robeson. They made mistakes, which may be understandable in historical context, but which should be acknowledged as part of their lives and times.

There is, of course, much room for dispute about who belongs on the listwho is missing and who might be replaced. This listing is simply a starting point for further debate and discussion, which we invite you to join on The Nations website.

1.Eugene Debs (18551926). Through his leadership of the labor movement, his five campaigns as a Socialist candidate for president and his spellbinding and brilliant oratory, Debs popularized ideas about civil liberties, workers rights, peace and justice, and government regulation of big business. In 1893 he organized one of the nations first industrial unions, the American Railway Union, to unite all workers within one industry, and he led the Pullman Strike of 1894. He was elected city clerk of Terre Haute, Indiana, and served in the Indiana State Assembly in 1884. In 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912 and 1920, Debs ran for president on the Socialist Party ticket. His speeches and writing influenced popular opinion and the platforms of Democratic and Republican candidates. His 1920 campaign took place while he was in Atlantas federal prison for opposing World War I; he won nearly 1 million votes.

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The Fifty Most Influential Progressives of the Twentieth ...

The Progressive Party of 1924 was a new party created as a vehicle for Robert M. La Follette, Sr. to run for president in the 1924 election. It did not run candidates for other offices, and it disappeared after the election except in Wisconsin. Its name coincides with the 1912 Progressive Party, which La Follette opposed and which was defunct by 1919. The 1924 party was composed of La Follette supporters, who were distinguished from the earlier Roosevelt supporters by being generally more agrarian, populist, and midwestern in perspective, as opposed to urban, elite, and eastern. The 1924 party carried only Wisconsin with thirteen electoral votes, but carried many counties in the Midwest and West with large German American elements or strong labor union movements.[1]

Years before, La Follette had created the "Progressive" faction inside the Republican Party of Wisconsin in 1900. In 1912 he attempted to create a Progressive Party but lost control to Theodore Roosevelt, who became his bitter enemy.[2]

In 1924 his new party (using the old 1912 name) called for public ownership of railroads, which catered to the Railroad brotherhoods. La Follette ran with Senator Burton K. Wheeler, Democratic Senator from Montana. The party represented a farmer/labor coalition and was endorsed by the Socialist Party of America, the American Federation of Labor and many railroad brotherhoods. The party did not run candidates for other offices, and only carried one state, Wisconsin. La Follette continued to serve in the Senate as a Republican until his death the following year, and was succeeded in a special election in 1925 by his son, Robert M. La Follette, Jr.[3]

The La Follette family continued his political legacy in Wisconsin, publishing The Progressive and pushing for reform. In 1934, La Follette's two sons began the Wisconsin Progressive Party, which briefly held power in the state and was for some time one of the state's major parties, often ahead of the Democrats.[4]

Hiram W. Johnson, backed by suffragette and early feminist Katherine Philips Edson,[5] was a candidate for California governor in 1910, the Progressive Party vice presidential nominee in 1912, and was reelected as Governor of California on the Progressive ticket in 1914. In 1916, he was elected as a Progressive to the U.S. Senate and continued his affiliation with the state party throughout his decades in the Senate, while simultaneously winning the Republican nomination. While Johnson was personally close to Theodore Roosevelt, he was much closer ideologically to Robert La Follette. Johnson sat out the general election in 1924 after unsuccessfully challenging President Coolidge for the Republican nomination. Johnson personally disliked La Follette but grudgingly admired his quixotic third-party bid and generally agreed with his 1924 platform.[6]

In 1934, when the La Follettes founded the Wisconsin Progressive Party, the California Progressive Party obtained a ballot line in California and ran seven candidates (all unsuccessful, although Raymond L. Haight got 13% of the vote for Governor of California, running as a moderate against socialist and Democratic nominee Upton Sinclair). In 1936 they elected Franck R. Havenner as Congressman for California's 4th congressional district, and garnered a significant portion of the votes in some other races.

Havenner became a Democrat before the 1938 race; Haight defeated eventual winner Culbert Olson in the Progressive primary election, but received only 2.43% of the vote in the general election as a Progressive; and by the time of the 1942 gubernatorial election, the Progressives were no longer on the California ballot. By 1944, Haight was again a Republican, a delegate to the Republican National Convention.[7]

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Progressive Party (United States, 1924) - Wikipedia, the ...

The Passionate Citizen Intensive: A 10-Week Live Training with the NSP

To learn more about the training, clickhere. NSP & Tikkun Community members will receive a $50 discount off the cost of the training.To join, go tospiritualprogressives.org/join and then email Leila atLeila@tikkun.org who can then send you a link to register at the reduced price.

Course sessions are on Tuesdays at5:00pm PTstarting onJune 16th, but theyll be recorded so even if you cant join us live you can listen to the calls at your convenience and also receive transcripts. There will also be an online community in which to participate.

Have questions about the Passionate Citizen Intensive?Listen to a Q&A with Rabbi Lerner and Cat Zavis here.

We do hope youll join us for this transformative opportunity. Together we have the ability to affect a great deal of change and we cant wait to begin our work together.

Heres what is spiritual: Ethics, aesthetics, love, compassion, creativity, music, altruism, generosity, forgiveness, spontaneity, emergent phenomena, consciousness itself, and any other aspect of reality not subject to empirical verification or measurement.

Many scientists are also spiritual: They understand that the scientific method is appropriate for describing regularities in the natural world, but not for understanding all of reality. Those aspects of reality that cannot be reduced to publicly observable and verifiable behavior we call spiritual.

What Is A Spiritual Progressive? (Hint: You dont have to believe in God or Be Part of a Religion).

YOU are a spiritual progressive ifyou endorse the New Bottom Line:A New Bottom Line is one that judges the efficiency, rationality, and productivity of our institutions (education, healthcare, legal, etc.), government (and its policies), corporations and even our personal behavior based not on the old bottom line of whether they maximize money and power, but instead assessing them on the extent that they maximize love and caring, kindness and generosity, empathy and compassion, social and economic justice, peace and nonviolence, and environmental sustainability, as well as encourage us to transcend a narrow utilitarian approach to nature and other human beings.

You dont have to believe in God, deny science, or be part of a religion to be a spiritual progressive.

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Network of Spiritual Progressives NSP members and ...

This article appears in the Winter 2015 issue ofThe American Prospectmagazine.Subscribe here.

Ann Kirkpatrick was surely toast in 2014. The two-term Democrat represented one of the most sprawling and politically unpredictable House districts in the country, an Iowa-sized expanse of northern and eastern Arizona dotted with fiercely conservative small towns, heavily Democratic small cities like Flagstaff and Sedona, and 12 Native American tribal lands with varied political loyalties. An affable Anglo who grew up on the Fort Apache Reservation, where her father ran a general store, Kirkpatrick owed both her winsin 2008 and 2012to presidential-year turnout in the half-minority First District; without it, in 2010, she lost. No Democrat, in fact, had won a midterm election in this district, which was once represented by John McCain, since 1950.

After pulling off a 9,000-vote squeaker in 2012Mitt Romney more than doubled her margin of victory as he also carried the districtKirkpatrick landed immediately on the National Republican Congressional Committees list of the seven top Democratic targets for 2014. Which meant she would be facing not just another likely Republican wave, not just another whiter and older midterm electorate, and not just a powerful and well-connected opponentAndy Tobin, Republican speaker of the state Housebut a Dresden-level air assault from outside groups as well.

If you asked the political wizards of Washington, Kirkpatricks only hope would have been to sing from this years midterm hymnal: Run away from Obama and the Democrat label as hard and fast as humanly possible; vow to fix the Affordable Care Act rather than defend it; hit your opponent for being anti-woman; promise nothing but bipartisanship and deficit-reduction if youre sent back to Congressoh, and run a superior field operation to draw out the minority voters youve been ignoring with your Republican-Lite campaign. Model your campaign on Michelle Nunns Im as Republican as my opponent run for Senate in Georgia, say, or Senator Kay Hagans Obama-dodging effort in North Carolinatwo campaigns that Democratic strategists considered pure genius all the way to Election Day. (In a National Journal Insiders Poll taken just before the midterms, both Democratic and Republican leaders deemed those the best Democratic campaigns of 2014 by a wide margin.) And if you must choose an issue to run on, follow Nunns and Hagans lead and try something inoffensive like education, or debt reduction. Just dont wade into any pesky details.

The One and Only Freshman Democrat: MichiganSenator Gary Peters, who ran as a progressive populist

Few Democrats in Congress were as well positioned as Kirkpatrick to undertake a campaign of Clinton-style triangulation. She voted just 89 percent with President Obama, according to the Sunlight Foundationone of the lower partisan-purity tallies on the Hill. But Kirkpatrick had tried the no-D Democratic approach before, in 2010, when she spent the campaign on the defensive after voting for Obamacare, insisting she was actually a model of independence and pledging fiscal responsibility and aisle-crossing. She got whomped. So this year, Kirkpatrick made the curious strategic decision to run as herself: a deal-cutter who brings millions in grant money to her cash-starved district; an opponent of EPA regulations when they threaten local jobs, and an environmentalist otherwise; and, most important, a progressive populist on such defining issues as immigration reform, corporate taxation, and health-care reform. Shed talk about her independent streak, surebecause its realbut the meat of her campaign would be about what government can, and should, be doing for local folks in need. And rather than focus her efforts on conservative white voters, she would spend much of the campaign on tribal land, which accounted for 25 percent of Kirkpatricks total votes in 2012. (By contrast, her Republican opponent won only 3 percent of his votes on the reservations.) Shed invest in the most targeted effort to turn out Native Americans that anyone had seen. In sum, Kirkpatrick woulddisaster alert!play the role of herself in the campaign, and try to reassemble the minority coalition that elected her in 2008 and 2012.

This was not supposed to work in 2014. Nor were the defiantly populist campaigns of Senators Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Al Franken of Minnesota, and Jeff Merkley of Oregonalong with Representative Gary Peters in Michigan, who logged untold miles on his motorcycle as he defended the seat being vacated by retiring Democratic Senator Carl Levin. Like Kirkpatrick, these Democrats were being challenged by hand-picked Republican opponentschosen for their winnabilityand would be bombarded from spring to fall by outside dark-money groups that would invest millions to make the vulnerable Democrats look like the mirror images of Barack Obama himself. But while other top-of-the-ticket Democrats ran to the middle, these candidates planted their feet where they were. In the case of Kirkpatrick, the foot-planting would be literal as well as symbolic, and it would be a turning point in her unlikely campaign.

Kirkpatrick campaign advertisement

These Boots Are Madefor Winnin: Arizona Representative Ann Kirkpatrick (shown above right at a 2012 campaign event) was supposed to lose but didnt.

As soon as the state House speaker secured the Republican nomination in late August, the bombardment commenced in earnest. The NRCC started with a slickly produced spot that showed, from the waist down, a well-dressed woman in high heels wheeling a suitcase back and forth. When Ann Kirkpatrick comes back to Arizona from Washington, she carries a lot of baggagePresident Obamas baggage, the voiceover began. The ad hit the congresswoman for refusing to fix Obamacare, and for voting to raise the debt ceiling. Shes not independent; she just votes the party line, the narrator concluded.

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How Democratic Progressives Survived a Landslide