"We think that the dividing lines are becoming clearer and that, increasingly, Democrats are being forced to make a choice between obeying corporate contributors or responding to their party base and to independents and progressive third-party activists with the Greens and state-based groupings such as the Vermont Progressive Party. This is healthy because the Democratic Party has, for too long, tried to have it both ways: presenting itself as an advocate for working Americans while often implementing a corporate agenda on issues such as trade policy and banking reform. :: The key, now, to do exactly what the progressive movement of a century ago and the civil rights and anti-poverty movements of 50 years ago did: we must turn the radical demands heard on the street into radical demands at the ballot box and in the legislative process. Our only concern is that there is a pressure to dumb-down and diminish the demands of these movements as they enter the political process. That doesn’t work; it never has. Compromise dulls the appetite for real change. We’re not arguing for absolutism. But we are saying that activists should not be cautious about demanding real reforms. :: If there is an essential point to our book - beyond exposing the extent of the current crisis - it is to suggest that the failure of progressives in recent decades has not been that they have asked for too much. It is that they have asked for too little."
Posted on: Wed, 14 Aug 2013 20:51:15 +0000
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