“America can’t build housing. We can’t deploy high-speed rail. We’re struggling to harness the promise of clean energy. And because government has failed in *all* these realms—because confidence in public authority has waned through the years—progressives have found it difficult to make a case for themselves.
Nothing seems to work. And for all the efforts Democrats make to invest in the future—the bipartisan infrastructure law, the Inflation Reduction Act—progress too often remains a version of Charlie Brown’s football. Reformers tout an achievement, but then a housing plan is abandoned after local opposition, a high-speed rail line is shelved for exorbitant costs, or an offshore wind farm is blocked by local fishermen. Often enough, *both* sides in any given debate—those who want to change things and those who fear that change will be destructive—are well intentioned. But the movement’s inability to resolve its conflicting impulses has turned progressive policy making into what drag racers call “warming the tires.” A driver steps on the brake and the accelerator at the same time. The wheels spin. The tires screech. But the car remains in place.
The *political* effect of the ensuing paralysis has been profound. In the early 1960s, nearly four in five Americans professed trust in Washington to “do what’s right.” By 2022, that figure had fallen to one in five. Progressives have been arguing for decades that power can’t be trusted—that government is captured by moneyed interests; that it lines the pockets of the powerful few; that it is a tool of white supremacists, xenophobes, sexists, and worse. No one can deny that centralized power can be used for ill. But even given that reality, attacking government turns out to be, for progressives, a ham-handed way of convincing ordinary people that government should be empowered to do *more* to pursue the public interest.”
YaGetSkeeted0n on
lest someone think it’s just progressive bashing, here’s the final takeaway:
>That, in the end, is the best argument for full-circle progressivism. The Jeffersonian retrenchment, now more than 50 years old, has run its course. Today, the core obstacle to progressivism’s substantive success—to greater economic equality and prosperity, to more social justice and responsibility, to a more robust response to climate change, to more housing, to greater mobility—isn’t centralized power. It’s the absence of centralized power. Populism takes hold not when democracy works well, but rather when it doesn’t deliver. No amount of righteous sanctimony can substitute for the political benefits of making public authority serve the public interest. That should be the progressive movement’s north star.
privatize_the_ssa on
TLDR; Localism is a dangerous ideology, the new left is regressive, left wing lolberts are evil, Hamilton is better than Jefferson, and the stollers and naders are evil.
LtCdrHipster on
I did not read this article. I do not know the thesis. All I know is that NIMBYs delenda est.
bashar_al_assad on
> And for all the efforts Democrats make to invest in the future—the bipartisan infrastructure law, the Inflation Reduction Act—progress too often remains a version of Charlie Brown’s football. Reformers tout an achievement, but then a housing plan is abandoned after local opposition, a high-speed rail line is shelved for exorbitant costs, or an offshore wind farm is blocked by local fishermen.
Certainly it’s not good that the implementation of these bills struggles to happen, but not all of these groups are inherently progressive – what exactly are the politics of local fishermen? And in my area (NoVa) for example it’s the younger, generally renters, more progressive people that want to build more housing and the older, homeowner, more moderate people that are the ones fighting against it. In other areas (such as the implementation of the ACA) the groups fighting the most against it were conservatives, with the supreme court limiting the ways it could be implemented and then red states refusing literally free federal money to expand Medicaid.
So
> If progressives put making government work not on the periphery of the movement’s agenda but at its center, voters might be less vulnerable to the sirens of the populist right.
I think this is more than a little naïve, but making government work better is a good goal anyway so sure. But if we want to accomplish this at a national level, it needs to come with a plan to pack the Supreme Court to actually happen (which is fine by me tbh). If we want to accomplish this at a state or local level, well I don’t have an issue with that, but again – a lot of the people that first need to lose their primaries aren’t particularly progressive (might not be an issue for the author, probably more of an issue for the people here who’s answer to everything is “be more moderate”).
> Those of us who style ourselves progressive typically gloss over that tension for a simple reason: It’s awkward and confusing. Most progressives want to both empower government to combat climate change and curtail government’s authority over a woman’s right to choose. And squaring that circle is more intellectually difficult than standing strong against Trumpism
I actually don’t think it’s particularly difficult to hold both of these views tbh.
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“America can’t build housing. We can’t deploy high-speed rail. We’re struggling to harness the promise of clean energy. And because government has failed in *all* these realms—because confidence in public authority has waned through the years—progressives have found it difficult to make a case for themselves.
Nothing seems to work. And for all the efforts Democrats make to invest in the future—the bipartisan infrastructure law, the Inflation Reduction Act—progress too often remains a version of Charlie Brown’s football. Reformers tout an achievement, but then a housing plan is abandoned after local opposition, a high-speed rail line is shelved for exorbitant costs, or an offshore wind farm is blocked by local fishermen. Often enough, *both* sides in any given debate—those who want to change things and those who fear that change will be destructive—are well intentioned. But the movement’s inability to resolve its conflicting impulses has turned progressive policy making into what drag racers call “warming the tires.” A driver steps on the brake and the accelerator at the same time. The wheels spin. The tires screech. But the car remains in place.
The *political* effect of the ensuing paralysis has been profound. In the early 1960s, nearly four in five Americans professed trust in Washington to “do what’s right.” By 2022, that figure had fallen to one in five. Progressives have been arguing for decades that power can’t be trusted—that government is captured by moneyed interests; that it lines the pockets of the powerful few; that it is a tool of white supremacists, xenophobes, sexists, and worse. No one can deny that centralized power can be used for ill. But even given that reality, attacking government turns out to be, for progressives, a ham-handed way of convincing ordinary people that government should be empowered to do *more* to pursue the public interest.”
lest someone think it’s just progressive bashing, here’s the final takeaway:
>That, in the end, is the best argument for full-circle progressivism. The Jeffersonian retrenchment, now more than 50 years old, has run its course. Today, the core obstacle to progressivism’s substantive success—to greater economic equality and prosperity, to more social justice and responsibility, to a more robust response to climate change, to more housing, to greater mobility—isn’t centralized power. It’s the absence of centralized power. Populism takes hold not when democracy works well, but rather when it doesn’t deliver. No amount of righteous sanctimony can substitute for the political benefits of making public authority serve the public interest. That should be the progressive movement’s north star.
TLDR; Localism is a dangerous ideology, the new left is regressive, left wing lolberts are evil, Hamilton is better than Jefferson, and the stollers and naders are evil.
I did not read this article. I do not know the thesis. All I know is that NIMBYs delenda est.
> And for all the efforts Democrats make to invest in the future—the bipartisan infrastructure law, the Inflation Reduction Act—progress too often remains a version of Charlie Brown’s football. Reformers tout an achievement, but then a housing plan is abandoned after local opposition, a high-speed rail line is shelved for exorbitant costs, or an offshore wind farm is blocked by local fishermen.
Certainly it’s not good that the implementation of these bills struggles to happen, but not all of these groups are inherently progressive – what exactly are the politics of local fishermen? And in my area (NoVa) for example it’s the younger, generally renters, more progressive people that want to build more housing and the older, homeowner, more moderate people that are the ones fighting against it. In other areas (such as the implementation of the ACA) the groups fighting the most against it were conservatives, with the supreme court limiting the ways it could be implemented and then red states refusing literally free federal money to expand Medicaid.
So
> If progressives put making government work not on the periphery of the movement’s agenda but at its center, voters might be less vulnerable to the sirens of the populist right.
I think this is more than a little naïve, but making government work better is a good goal anyway so sure. But if we want to accomplish this at a national level, it needs to come with a plan to pack the Supreme Court to actually happen (which is fine by me tbh). If we want to accomplish this at a state or local level, well I don’t have an issue with that, but again – a lot of the people that first need to lose their primaries aren’t particularly progressive (might not be an issue for the author, probably more of an issue for the people here who’s answer to everything is “be more moderate”).
> Those of us who style ourselves progressive typically gloss over that tension for a simple reason: It’s awkward and confusing. Most progressives want to both empower government to combat climate change and curtail government’s authority over a woman’s right to choose. And squaring that circle is more intellectually difficult than standing strong against Trumpism
I actually don’t think it’s particularly difficult to hold both of these views tbh.