Views » July 12, 2005

The Progressive Promise

By Rep. Lynn Woolsey

We are in the midst of a progressive awakening in this country. In my 12 years in Washington, I have never been more confident and optimistic about the future of progressive politics. Nothing has united and mobilized the left like George Bush and this Republican Congress.

Time after time, on issue after issue, the President and his allies have shown nothing but contempt for the values of justice and equal opportunity. Their guiding political philosophy is that the “haves” should have more … and everyone else be damned.

They have said “No” to health care reform, to funding education, to a higher minimum wage, to a clean environment, to stem cell research, reproductive freedom, to civil rights and voting rights.

But “Yes” to reckless tax cuts, to media concentration, to the PATRIOT Act, to undermining the Bill of Rights and basic constitutional freedoms, to privatizing Social Security, to John Bolton, to abuse at Guantánamo and to the immoral doctrine of pre-emptive war.

The American people are catching on. National polls show that barely one-third of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing. And not even one-fifth agree with the priorities of the Republican leadership.

People are also getting wise to the fact that this is one of the most corrupt Congresses in American history. They’re realizing that Tom DeLay, Grover Norquist, Karl Rove and the rest take their cues not from the American people, but from Jack Abramoff and the K Street crowd.

As one of the two co-chairs of the 60-member Congressional Progressive Caucus, along with my colleague, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), we are prepared to help lead our caucus in forceful, impassioned and organized opposition.

But Progressive Caucus members want to do more than speak out against extremism from the right. We want to take on the Bush agenda by providing a comprehensive, thoughtful progressive alternative—what we call the Progressive Promise.

The Progressive Promise is rooted in three core principles: First, fighting for economic justice and security for all. Second, protecting and preserving our civil rights and civil liberties. And third, promoting global peace and security.

We look forward to working closely with our House Leadership and our friend, Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who has the daunting responsibility of representing our diverse Democratic Caucus and truly building a big tent under which all Democrats can stand and be heard.

We in the Progressive Caucus believe in that big tent. We will reach out to recruit new members who share our goals and want to join our fight.

What we won’t do is compromise our values. We won’t become conservatism lite. We won’t embrace warmed-over moderate proposals. We believe that the road back for our party and our movement lies in being an unapologetic champion for progressive ideas.

President Bush recently addressed our nation on the situation in Iraq. Not surprisingly, he failed to acknowledge the tragic life-and-death mistakes he’s made. He won’t admit that the war in Iraq was built on a campaign of deception, concede that the insurgency is not in its “last throes” as Vice President Cheney asserts, or come clean and say that we’re spinning our wheels in Iraq. He stubbornly refuses to provide a concrete plan to finally bring our troops home.

As progressives, we are not going to accept the same head-in-the-sand denial, the same stubborn detachment from reality and the same failed leadership. The fact is that a majority of the American people are ahead of many of their elected representatives on many issues. For example, at least 60 percent of Americans want U.S. troops out of Iraq.

That is why there is a growing progressive network taking shape around the country and manifesting itself.

Get out of Washington, D.C. and you witness more and more progressive organizing such as the Progressive Legislators Action Network (PLAN) at the state, city, and community levels. Go online. There is more progressive blogging and Internet traffic. Progressive media are taking advantage of new opportunities to cut through the homogenized corporate-drivel. And inside the Beltway, progressive scholars and think tanks—established and new ones—are speaking truth to power.

Within the Progressive Caucus, we have for the first time hired a full-time executive director, Bill Goold, to help us focus and coordinate our action agenda. Until we have updated and established a dedicated Web site link, you can contact us at 202-225-5161.

I am committed to helping progressives inside and outside of Congress work together more closely and effectively than ever before to make good on the Progressive Promise. We won’t rest until it is enacted into law.

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• Reader Comments

  The Congresswoman is whistling through her
  teeth. There is no progressive revival.
  Anti-Bush sentiment does not a philosophy
  make, the same people were pushing this ABB
  line last year and they got buried at the polls.
  There has been much harsher and more consistent
  criticism of Bush on the libertarian lew rockwell
  and antiwar.com sites than in all of the left.
  Americans want lower taxes, to keep their guns
  and cars, oppose affirmative action, oppose
  Kyoto Treaty,letting social security & medicare
  slide into bankruptcy and unfortunately 56% of
  them even oppose US troop withdrawal from Iraq.
  The Dems have no new ideas, just the old New
  Deal retreads.

  Posted by Martin on Jul 12, 2005 at 6:43 PM

  Michael Hardesty, aka Martin, Mikey, Peter, Jack Barnes, etc., is a PAID CONSERVATIVE TROLL who has conversations with himself under numerous screen names (including using others’ screen names - like mine), in order to disrupt liberal dialogue. IGNORE HIM.

  Do a Google search for “Michael Hardesty” and you’ll see he does the same thing on other liberal message boards.  How pathetic is that?

  Posted by Lefty on Jul 12, 2005 at 7:03 PM

  The bottom line is that there can be no road back for liberals until 1) they get the voting mechanism out of the clutches of the corporate whores who have an incentive to cheat, 2) the corporate whores who control most of the broadcast and print media are forced to divest those assets.

  Without an informed public, and a vote count that accurately reflects the intent of the voters, the road back is blocked.

  Posted by Lefty on Jul 12, 2005 at 7:07 PM

  There is a growing progressive movement, which at this time is only a portion of the Democratic Party. The dawning is certainly the realization at how the conservatives have worked so hard over some 40 years to acheive their power through melding of diverse groups (religious right, big business, neocons, etc.) within their ideology, in effect they created a new ideology by thinking long term and allowing different aspects of the diverse groups to win at different times. It has been a success.

  Progressives meanwhile drifted apart and concentrated on individual pet issues over those same years. We thought we had won the big battles in the 1960’s and essentially basked in our victories feeling that our issues would continue to win the day, simple complacency.

  The mistake being made by the previous poster is thinking that all Democrats are considered progressives, not so at all. The Clinton fused Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was an attempt to bring about a middle ground, they moved the party to the right rather than defend the high ground. The DLC is a battle that progressives will face.

  The conservatives learned that Americans want positive sounding ideas based on easily understood positions, they developed their ideas and then learned to frame them. They noticably have used deception, but that deception became acceptable to Americans because they had been framed over many years to sound good. 

  Tax relief, sounds great doesn’t it? They’ve pounded this term into the brains of voters for years and now trying to defend taxes as something good for society has become hard to do. We’ve been cornered into using their terms, not ours. Taxes should be thought of as “investments in a strong America.”

  Family values, who would be against that? The conservatives invented this phrase and call it their own, yet families have many definitions as to what that means. Progressive issues are family values, we just didn’t plan a framing assault for years to claim it for ourselves.

  We need to start framing our ideas, so that Americans can come to understand what our ideas are. We believe in families as much as conservatives (maybe more), we believe in workers, we believe in a society that works together. We believe in “teamwork,” whether in a family, a workplace, a community. The word “teamwork” has not been used as a frame by the conservatives, yet. Start using teamwork to describe some of our progressive ideas.

  Progressive is a better framing than liberal. Someday (the sooner the better) the debating talking heads on TV will be thought of as progressives vs. conservatives.  The soundbite TV shorthand will someday be pro vs. con, and which sounds better from the get go? Pro is also positive in that it conjures up the word professional as con reminds one of convict.

  Framing will help, but we need to work on the ideas foremost. And those ideas are not neo-liberal, they are the true left of the previous decades but adapted to our current societies.

  Equality for instance. People in this country are disappointed (to say the least) in our corporate leaders. We must strive for creating more equality in the workplace (meaing top to bottom incomes/benefits), more democracy within a corporation (CEO/executive accountability). Build the arguement, create solutions for change, frame the issue.

  There are so many issues that I could go on for many paragraphs. Essentially anything the conservatives are for, we are against. But the idea is to make our stance sound like we are for something, not sound like we oppose the conservatives. 

  It will happen. Conservatives spent many decades building to their position of power. Fortunately, their ideas put to the test are becoming unraveled. As well, we live in a fast society and progressives could catch up quickly. There will be a day that the Democratic Party will be run by true progressives, not Republican-lites and that day is approaching sooner than we might expect.

  Posted by Jon on Jul 12, 2005 at 8:15 PM

  Taxes are loot taken by force from
  producers to subsidize nonproducers.
  They are not investments in America
  or club dues or the price of civilization
  or whatever other code word nonsense that
  Lakoff comes up with.
  You can use whatever label you want but it
  still has the same odor at the end of the day.
  Most people do not believe in such a spurious
  concept as equality but prefer individuality
  and liberty.
  The Democratic Party is getting more
  irrelevant by the day.
  As bad as W and the neocons are, these Dem
  losers are worse yet !

  Posted by Martin on Jul 12, 2005 at 8:26 PM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 51 posts.

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