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In a relatively rare move, progressive Democratic lawmaker Rashida Tlaib is planning to give a response to President Joe Biden's State of the Union speech. Her speech has raised concerns that it'll underscore party divisions as the midterm elections draw near.

The Working Families Party announced on Wednesday that it had selected Tlaib to deliver its response to Biden's address. Tlaib, who has previously clashed with party leaders and moderates, hinted that her speech will criticize the White House and Congressional Democrats for not moving more aggressively on legislative priorities while they still control the House and Senate.

"It should not be this hard to deliver on health care, climate, housing, child care, safety, voting rights, clean water and so much more," Tlaib said in a statement. "Democrats are in the majority and must set a new course that moves with a sense of urgency. Our communities deserve for us to act now."

Tlaib was first elected in 2018 to a Detroit-based House seat. As a member of the so-called "squad," a group of left-wing lawmakers, Tlaib has rankled House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for not being receptive to their approaches on the environment, health care and other issues.

More recently, Tlaib, along with other like-minded lawmakers, last year voted against the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill after failing to link it to the expansive Build Back Better social spending package. She has also criticized Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema as "corporate" Democrats over their opposition to the package.

The Build Back Better package, voting rights reform and other Democratic priorities have since stalled, raising debates about the party's direction as it heads into what's expected to be a bruising midterm.

Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman turned party critic, said on Twitter that Tlaib's speech would hurt the party.

"It is highly unusual for anyone FROM THE PRESIDENT'S OWN PARTY to give a response to the SOTU speech," Walsh said. "This is a silly political mistake. This is an in-kind donation to the Republican Party. This will only help Republicans take back the House & Senate."

Although a third party, the Working Families Party rarely runs its own candidates. Instead, it typically backs candidates that support its progressive policies. The party in a statement pointed to its efforts to elect Georgia Democrat Raphael Warnock to the Senate in 2020 while electing progressive state legislators across the country.

According to the Working Families Party, Tlaib's response isn't the first time it has recruited Democrats to offer a response to the State of the Union. Previously, the response was given by Representative Jamaal Bowman in 2021, Representative Ayanna Pressley in 2020, Wisconsin Lieutenant Governor and former WFP national committee member Mandela Barnes in 2019 and former Representative Donna Edwards in 2018.

"Obstructionist Republicans and a handful of corporate Democrats have ground Washington to a standstill while child poverty spikes and costs continue to rise for housing, health care, and child care," Working Families Party National Director Maurice Mitchel said in a statement. "It doesn't have to be this way. Rashida will articulate a progressive vision for how we can meet the basic needs of the American people, and ensure all of us can thrive."

Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds is slated to give the Republican Party's rebuttal to Biden's address on Tuesday.

Newsweek has reached out to Tlaib, the Working Families Party and the White House for a response.

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Dem Division on Display as Progressives Plan Response to State of the Union - Newsweek

I recently read Jessica Troutstines Segregation by Design. Like other commentators on segregation, Troutstine discusses segregationist policies such as exclusionary zoning and so-called "urban renewal." But she also uses quantitative analysis to address factors that are associated with "segregation ... between cities rather than within them"in other words, "white flight" to suburbs. If I am reading her analysis correctly, she suggests that where central cities "elect minority mayors [and] when they spend more money" white flight increases, while "wealthy white residents choose to remain in the central city when budgets are more austere." Similarly, federal desegregation orders apparently led to more white flight.

Troutstines conclusions seem inconsistent with the conventional wisdom that liberals are pro-urban and conservatives are anti-urban. But in the name of equity, progressives sometimes favor policies that tempt affluent voters to move to suburbs. As Troutstine points out, high taxes do make cities less attractive to middle-class taxpayers (especially where the quality of government services does not keep up with tax rates). And in the 1970s, school desegregation policies favored by liberals made city schools less attractive because suburban schools were generally not subject to court orders requiring racially balanced schools. This meant that if you lived in the city, your children had to go to an allegedly desegregated school with lots of underprivileged children, while if you lived in the suburbs, you could go to a public school dominated by children from well-off households. On the other hand, when the Supreme Court refused to extend desegregation into the suburbs, the pro-suburb majority was dominated of the Courts more conservative justices, while more liberal justices favored desegregation of suburban schools. I suspect that had desegregation orders been extended into suburbia, suburban schools would have been less appealing to white parents.

Today, progressives tend to oppose exclusive magnet schools (colloquially known as "exam schools") in my city and other American cities. These schools are limited to the most academically gifted students and as a result have reputations as good as those of suburban schools, thus making the city more attractive to middle-class parents.* Conservatives tend to favor continuing these schools in their current form, thus taking what seems to me to be a pro-urban position.

Some progressives believe that the police should be defunded and that only the most serious crimes should be punished; for example, Manhattan's newly elected district attorney has suggested refusing to prosecute a wide variety of minor crimes, and that violent crimes should lead to imprisonment only when "a deadly weapon causes serious physical injury." But both in the 1960s and in recent years, declines in imprisonment rates have been followed by increased crime.** Between 1950 and 1970, the imprisonment rate fell by over 20 percent, and crime began to rise in the early 1960s. Since 2009, the imprisonment rate has fallen by 16 percent, and the most violent crime has started to rise again over the past few years. If this pattern continues and cities grow more violent, they will be less appealing to some people who can afford to live elsewhere. So if we want cities to be appealing to those people, urban politicians should perhaps pump the brakes on their desire to decriminalize and decarcerate.

More broadly, it seems to me that conservatives (or, in cities where there are almost no conservatives by national standards, moderates) tend to be focused on making a city more desirable to people who can afford to live elsewhere, while liberals are more focused on the interests of marginalized people and groups.

Having said that, conservatives tend to be anti-urban in some respects. In my citys municipal politics, progressives are more willing than conservatives to support bike lanes and pedestrian-friendly streets, while Republicans mostly represent the interests of outer-borough motorists. At the national level, liberals are relatively pro-transit, while conservatives are typically more supportive of sprawl-producing highways.

Another important issue, housing, cuts across ideological lines. Ideally, enough urban housing would be built to satisfy regional needs, thus eliminating the need for people priced out of cities to move to suburbs. But here both extremes seem to coalesce against the middle. In New York politics, the most left-wing politicians tend to oppose new housing in their neighborhoods because they fear gentrification, or at least favor creating procedural obstacles to new housing in the name of community engagement. On the other hand, many Republican politicians oppose upzoning their outer-borough neighborhoods and suburbs, perhaps because they fear that cheap housing might lead to an influx of poor households. The strongest supporters of new housing seem to be relatively moderate Democrats, such as Kathryn Garcia (who finished second in the 2021 mayoral primary).

In sum, political arguments about the proper shape and size of our cities is sometimes a liberal vs. conservative argumentbut not always.

*A common progressive counterargument is that city schools are underfunded, and that if city schools received as much money as suburban schools, they would be just as appealing and there would be no need for exam schools. But in fact, some urban school districts outspend suburbs, so this claim is misleading. On the other hand, it could be argued that low-income urban children cost more to educate than wealthier suburban children; however, I am not sure if there is any objective way of quantifying this difference, nor am I persuaded that any politically feasible level of spending will equalize achievement levels enough to make poverty-packed schools as attractive to middle-class parents as more affluent schools.

**The progressive position is that if we just spend enough money on social services, crime will decline to European levels. But poverty nosedived between 1960 and the mid-1970s, when crime exploded more rapidly than at anytime before or since. Similarly, the explosion of anti-COVID public spending was very successful in reducing poverty, but was extremely unsuccessful in reducing the U.S. homicide rate. By contrast, crime declined in the fiscally conservative, tough-on-crime 1990s and 2000s. One might argue that during the high-crime periods, crime might have increased under any circumstancesfor example, because of the 1950s baby boom. The fact remains that anti-poverty spending was not the hoped-for magic bullet.

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Conservatives, Progressives, and Cities - Planetizen

WE have said that recent debate in the House of Commons has created despair among progressives, and made the reactionaries jubilant. It remains only to add that both the despair and jubilation are premature as well as shortsighted. No single debate in the House of Commons or any other body, and for that matter no number of such debates, can alter the nature of things, the fundamental conditions that govern the destinies of a nation or determine its place in the progressive self-fulfilment of humanity. If a temporary triumph of the forces of reaction could have availed the party of vested interests, then the world would still have been in its infancy, whether politically or socially. Every student of history knows that such triumphs fill more than half the pages of the history of every known country that has successfully accomplished its transition from absolutism to democracy. There is a familiar saying which tells us that Providence is always on the side of big battalions. Whether that be so or not, it is undeniable that Providence does not, as a rule, favour the party of self-government until its strength has been tested, until the time and the conditions are ripe for a successful change from the old order. Till then there are ups and downs, attempted short-cuts to liberty followed by setbacks. The point to be borne in mind both by progressives and by reactionaries is that these setbacks are never permanent, that after each setback there is a renewed attempt more vigorous than the preceding one, that with every such attempt one more nail is driven into the corpus of the existing order of things, whose final defeat and transformation are determined by the same law which determined so many of its earlier successes.

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PROGRESSIVES AND REACTIONARIES - The Tribune India

There was a time when liberals and conservatives could settle their differences as true citizens who took their solemn Constitutional oaths seriously.

The progressives who have been around for about 100 years were originally called eugenists, now again called progressives. Basically, they are the culture of death and war. It's their way or the highway. They never apologize. They never back down. They always press forward. They always mock and block.

Classic liberals are stuck unless they either drive out the forces of the left or form a new party.

I stopped using the term "liberal" while addressing the gross evils being committed against the country and the world by the Obama/Biden globalist cabal.

"Leftist" is about the nicest term I can think of. Culture of death covers it more thoroughly as their affiliation and complicity with the Klaus Schwab World Economic Forum. Their plans and methods, plus unlimited capital, ink, woke and cancel culture that has infected almost all major corporations.

The planned pandemic and the draconian unlawful mandates they put on the whole world is the perfect vehicle to instill fear and compliance, especially among people who have grown weak, largely because of a loss of faith in God.

Ephesians 6: "Finally, be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can make your stand against the devils schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this worlds darkness, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms."

We have our marching orders.

Jerry Todd, Bakersfield

Originally posted here:
Letter to the editor: Liberals and progressives | Letters to the Editor | bakersfield.com - The Bakersfield Californian

There are two lines of attack in the current culture wars. The first is slow, steady and discreet, marching by stealth through Britains institutions. The second is a brazen, loud artillery attack armed with cliches and buzzwords that are fired out across the media.

The recent speech from the Conservative party chair, Oliver Dowden, to the Heritage Foundation in Washington is an example of the latter. It was a word salad into which he lazily and dispassionately (repeating this stuff really must get very boring) tossed a target list of vague and intangible concepts such as cancel culture, woke psychodrama, obsessing over pronouns and attempts to decolonise mathematics.

If the purpose of this kind of quick-fire attack is recruitment, then the slower, more covert attacks are for annexation. An example of the latter also came about recently, in the form of new guidance by the Department for Education on political impartiality in Englands classrooms. The document singled out topics such as empire, racism and the climate crisis as political issues that should be treated with care, moving the parameters of what teachers and students perceive as neutral and what is ideological another inch to the right. This side of the culture wars takes its time to cover ground by influencing education and culture.

Those advancing this line of attack in government often act behind closed doors, so that by the time their goals are made public its too late to challenge them. Last month, the government announced that BBC funding from the licence fee would be frozen for the next two years, raised concerns about the BBCs impartiality and groupthink, and suggested that its public funding model could face abolishment (although it later softened its stance). So opaque was the process that Richard Sharp, the chair of the BBC, said the broadcaster was blindsided by the decision being announced not to those concerned at the BBC itself, but via briefings to the Sunday papers. He told BBC Radio 4 that he hadnt anticipated learning what I learned over the weekend as discussions had been ongoing with the government and were, as far as he knew, inconclusive. But discussions had been concluded elsewhere. At the end of 2020, a 10-person panel was appointed to help decide the BBCs future and funding model. It was not set up under Cabinet Office guidelines, met only in secret, and freedom of information requests for a record of the proceedings were refused.

Loud and quiet goes the pattern of culture war advance, like the childrens song: loud and quiet, fast and slow. Of recent wins, the expropriation and ubiquitisation of the word woke has been the quickest. Most people dont actually know what woke means. But, to quote Will Ferrell in Blades of Glory explaining the nonsensical lyrics to a song: Nobody knows what it means but its provocative. It gets the people going. All that matters is that people pick up on its implications and intimations.

Different permutations of wokeness have always been useful, leveraged by the right to portray any social change as a matter of exuberant and unhinged vandalism to the status quo. This is not a new tactic (little in the culture wars is): wokeness is the new loony left or PC gone mad, a swapping of terms to portray the left as an absurdity and threat which has been around since at least the 1950s.

What is frustrating is that for a tactic that has been used for so long, progressive politicians still do not seem to have understood that the only way to beat the charge is to own it. To say when confronted with an issue presented as a matter of wokeness: What do you mean by woke? To expose and mock the term for its threadbareness, or to question its very pejorative use. Ill take anything really at this point, as long as it is delivered with authenticity and swagger. Imagine hearing a politician say something like: If by woke you mean ending racism and inequality, reforming our curriculums so that they are factual and representative both of historical truth and how Britain is changing, and striving for a world where your chances in life are determined as little as possible by your birth, then sign me up. I would think I was hallucinating.

The signal the left sends by letting the term be claimed by the right is so powerful that Labour politicians are now in the bizarre position of denying the existence of the culture wars but being simultaneously afraid of being called woke. In an interview with the Telegraph earlier this year, Labours shadow culture secretary, Lucy Powell, showed how cornered and defeated progressives can be by letting the term woke go uncontested, while being entirely pinned down by its assaults. She said there is a lot of false division created by the right on matters such as statues that she would not indulge as culture secretary. She then fell right into the biggest false division of all. I wouldnt say Im woke. Im not woke, but Im not anti-woke either, she said, like Schrdingers cat. Im just kind of fairly ordinary. I will absolutely sort of cry my eyes out at Strictly Come Dancing where a deaf woman wins it and a same-sex couple are the runners-up. I think that was a fantastic kind of illustration of where woke and anti-woke meet.

Dont laugh woke and anti-woke is actually a good summary of Labours response when it comes to the culture wars. Its risk avoidance. What it really means is that the party is taking the moral high ground on the basis that it cares only about tangible issues that impact peoples lives in a strict economic sense, but is otherwise, to put it bluntly, frit. To engage in clear, studied defendable positions on hot button issues such as racism and colonialism that influence school policy, the media, and cultural institutions risks them being smoked out in the open about things that, through Labours appeasement in the culture wars, may well be poll kryptonite and tabloid ammunition.

What helps this state of acquiescence is that there are lulls, missteps and retreats in the culture wars, inviting speculation that its all a distraction or running out of steam, an artefact of an ebullient post-Brexit Conservative party. And yes, sometimes it is a distraction, sometimes these issues do go away for a while. But the potential for new momentum is always there, ready to be accelerated further by a media that loves a good war, whatever the speed. Just look at the vigour with which newspapers ran front pages on the education secretary, Nadhim Zahawis, latest guidelines and Dowdens Washington speech, amping them up to claim that Black Lives Matters biased views are to be avoided (the Times), that students are being indoctrinated (the Daily Mail), and that Dowdens words must be translated into action (the Telegraph). You dont have to have a sophisticated grasp of what woke means to absorb the message being sent here: if you dont vote for the Conservative party again and again, bad things are going to happen.

With a zombie prime minister and a Brexit wrung of populist opportunities, culture wars campaigning will likely intensify in the lead-up to the local elections in May and the next general election. There will be a lot of Mr Dowden goes to Washington silliness about woke maths, but there will also be a lot of gravely serious, opinion-forming, institution-changing propaganda and policy that we on the left cannot simply pretend we are rising above. In fact we are just hiding, hoping and praying that these moves wont be crucial to refreshing the chances of a desperate government out of ideas. That sounds pretty risky to me.

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Scared to be woke? Its time for progressives to take a stand in the culture wars - The Guardian