Progressives On The Rise

[Me.]

My point with all these progressives rising posts is that we needn't despair. In the face of evidence that would seemingly tell us we are on the losing end of what is happening in this country, we are not. The hope and changes are there, it just hasn't coalesced into a big enough picture for everyone to see in its entirety.

“To be clear, there's reason for optimism, as this is a temporary situation and we've made enormous progress since 2002. There are more self-identified liberals today than there have been since 1972, independents are swinging far to the left, and the base Democratic vote is making the difference in elections. The Democratic Party of 2007 is much more progressive than that of 2002, and at the rate we're gaining reliable liberal votes (10/year), there will be an unbreakable progressive House majority by 2012. The overall intellectual environment, the shattering of the right-wing careerist foreign policy community, the increasing efficiency of liberal advocacy groups, the increased participation of progressive economy sectors in the political sector, and the liberalization of the White House and Senate, can also have significant effects. Our politicians are obviously behind the curve, with Clinton quasi-supporting the surge and Obama in his most recent Iowa ad doesn't call himself a Democrat. But this is temporary.

I don't have a good strategy on how to 'fix' the Senate, but to get to a progressive working majority in the House, we need to pick up 41 more reliable votes, either by beating Republicans or by converting or beating Blue Dog Democrats. If we can get to an uncompromising progressive majority in the House, then the Senate will be dragged along through conference committees and a Democratic White House. In the Senate, we'll need 16 for a clear progressive majority, but because of institutional dynamics we'll probably need less to have a working majority.

There are several paths to making this happen in the House.

Pick Up Safe Seats Progressives: cont…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matt-stoller/waking-up-to-a-working-re_b_59839.html


Liberalism Rising, and Obama Republicans
by: Matt Stoller
Thu Aug 09, 2007 at 11:11:18 AM EDT

“To follow up on my post from last night, liberalism is getting stronger among base voters as well as politicians.

It's more antiwar than at any time since 1972. Support is growing for such traditionally liberal values as using the federal government to help the poor. And 40 percent of Democrats now call themselves liberal, the highest in more than three decades and twice the low-water mark recorded as the conservative Reagan revolution swept the country in the early 1980s...

The Democrats' shift to the left carries some risk, but probably much less than it would have in years past. That's because independent voters - the ones who swing back and forth and thus decide elections - also have turned against the war and in favor of many more liberal approaches to government...

Fewer than half of Democrats now agree with the adage that military strength is the best way to secure peace, a drop of 16 percentage points in the last decade, according to a series of polls by the Pew Research Center.

Independents also lost faith in the value of military strength over the same period, though their support dropped by only half as much as Democrats' did. Republicans' trust in military strength increased by 7 percentage points.: cont…

http://openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=660

[Me.]

1. To My Point

“The article, titled The American Right Under the Weather, is but one piece in the new overall issue covering the leftward shift of American politics in recent months. As anyone who has read the magazine knows, the editorial staff of The Economist is certainly no friend to Democrats, favoring a decidedly corporatist agenda valuing "free trade over "fair trade" and a foreign policy usually at odds with progressive values. As a result, however, they find themselves increasingly at odds with the social conservatives who have all but taken over the Republican party's activist base: in fact, they say so directly in the cover article:” cont…

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=1555201&mesg_id=1555201