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May 22, 2017; Vox

This fall, when Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election, many people felt it as more than a political loss. They despaired or felt unsafe, as though they and their communities were being attacked and their fellow citizens only watched silently. It has been frustrating to watch as years of progress on a number of issueswomens rights, climate protection, education, criminal justice reformare stymied or reversed. To many progressives, it feels as the past has intruded upon the present and hidden holders of unpopular opinions have come out of the woodwork in greater numbers than were ever anticipated.

But is that whats really happening? Vox recently collected polls on major issues from numerous sources, and found some surprising results. Nearly two-thirds of Americans agree that immigration helps the United States more than it hurts and oppose the much-touted wall on the Mexican border; more than half of Americans say they want a government that does more to solve problems and meet peoples needs rather than leaving it to businesses; nearly three-quarters of Americans see foreign trade as an economic opportunity, not a threat.

We are not at war with our fellow citizens; we agree on more than we think. This isnt to say there arent people with extreme views or that issues like climate change, civil rights, and economic justice championed by liberals and progressives dont still need constant attention. But if these numbers are anything to go by, advocacy works. Lots of these progressive-conservative ratios have flipped within the last 10 years. But what are we doing with that consensus?Given those figures, Democrats should have triumphed, but instead they were beaten in the great majority of races, resulting in a net gain of almost 1,000 federal and state offices for the GOP since 2008. If most Americans support foreign trade, how did we get a president who threatens to pull out of NATO and NAFTA?

This is not the place (if there ever is one) to analyze the election, but to ask where the work of nonprofits is needed or supported and what shape it should take. If most Americans opinions on climate change and immigration align with the values of progressive civic society, how can we connect that to policies and policymakers who hold those views as well? Do we have a wider base of funding and support than we thought?

As Vox points out, part of the disparity between the views shown in the chart and those represented in government is due to gerrymandering; in several states, progressive candidates got more than half of the popular votes but less than half of the Congressional seats. Racially biased voting districts have been challenged in North Carolina and other places, but voting rights are not yet universal and districts reflect that bias.

Part of it has to do with the story we tell about our society and how people feel they fit into it. People understand themselves and their history through stories; white Americans are used to being the protagonists of Americas story, and that may be more important to voters than gun control or tax policy. In fact, as NPQ reported, racial identity played a major role in the results. Yuval Noah Harari wondered in The New Yorker if liberalism was at an end, saying, As people lose faith in the systems ability to fulfill their expectations, they become disillusioned even amid unprecedented peace and prosperity. As pure liberalism proves itself inadequate to deal with huge problems like climate change or cybersecurity, as alternative histories brought to light by civil rights campaigns threaten the story white Americans grew up hearing about themselves, reactionary voting can result in representation that doesnt align with (some) policy values. But perhaps theres an opportunity here to bridge a divide.

The opportunity for nonprofits is to capitalize on and expand the areas of consensus. Most Americans support public intervention to help solve big problemsa decidedly illiberal view in economic terms, but one that is great news for the public sector. The story of nonprofit advocacy and civic values did not stop or swerve with the November election; there is reason to believe that the good work being done is having an effect. Now, as Voxs Ruy Teixeira said, you may return to your regularly scheduled panic.Erin Rubin

Erin Rubin is the Editorial Coordinator & Community Builder at the Nonprofit Quarterly. Previously, she worked as an administrator at Harvard Business School and as an editorial project manager at Pearson Education, where she helped develop a digital resource library for remedial learners. Erin has also worked with David R. Godine, Publishers, and the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, & Writers. As a member of the TEDxBeaconStreet organizing team, she works to communicate innovative ideas and translate them into action

Originally posted here:
Vox: Populist Surge Led to a Surge of Formerly Inactive Progressives - The Nonprofit Quarterly (registration)

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The proposal eliminates a number of programs with the rationale that the programs have been proven to be either ineffective or are duplicated in other areas.

The plan calls for a $1 billion increase for Title 1 for new Furthering Options for Children to Unlock Success (FOCUS) grants that would be awarded to school districts that enhance school choice opportunities.

The budget also seeks a $167 million increase for the Charter Schools Grants program to allow states to launch new charter schools or expand current ones.

Former U.S. Education Secretary under President Barack Obama, John B. King Jr.,said in an interview with establishment education media Education Week that Trumps budget is really an assault on the American Dream.

King criticized the Trump administrations elimination of the Professional Development and 21st Century programs, and the changes in the student loan forgiveness program.

The former secretary said the budget plan is an attack on the very resources students in high-needs communities need to be successful.

The heads of the nations largest teachers unions also weighed in on the proposed budget.

President Trumps budget proposal is manifestly cruel to kids, said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. It is catastrophic to the public schools our most vulnerable and at-risk students attend, while being a windfall for those who want to profit off of kids or make education a commodity rather than a great equalizer and an anchor of democracy.

Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president the National Education Association said Trumps plan is a wrecking ball aimed at our nations public schools.

Their reckless and irresponsible budget would smash the aspirations of students, crush their dreams, and make it difficult for them to go to college and get ahead, she added.

U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, however, said in a statement that the plan reflects a series of tough choices we have had to make when assessing the best use of taxpayer money.

It ensures funding for programs with proven results for students while taking a hard look at programs that sound nice but simply havent yielded the desired outcomes, she said.

Trumps budget plan would save over $1 billion by eliminating subsidized student loans, and an additional $859 million would be saved by ending student debt forgiveness for those who enter public service.

The administrations budget proposes to streamline student loan repayment by consolidating several income-driven repayment (IDR) plans into one single plan. IDR plans provide student borrowers with the option of making lower monthly payments according to other factors such as income and family size.

The single IDR plan would cap a borrowers monthly payment at 12.5 per- cent of discretionary income, the budget states. For undergraduate borrowers, any balance remaining after 15 years of repayment would be forgiven. For borrowers with any graduate debt, any balance remaining after 30 years of repayment would be forgiven.

The Trump budget would guarantee that all student borrowers who use the IDR pay an equitable share of their income.

The Obama administration allowed even more student borrowers to reduce their monthly student loan payments based on their income.

CNN Money reported in December of last year, however, that Obamas policy could result in twice the costs for the federal government, i.e., taxpayers, as expected:

The program loses money because some participants, over the life of their loans, will pay less than they would under a standard repayment plan.

Its difficult to predict how much the program will cost in the future. But theGovernment Accountability Officeestimates that loans issued between 2009 and 2016, originally projected to cost $25 billion, will cost $53 billion.

Its an expensive program thats bigger than anyone ever told us it would be, said Jason Delisle, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

The GAO found that the government will lose $21 for every $100 in student loans issued to someone who takes advantage of an income-driven repayment plan.

According to Time, Natalia Abrams, executive director of advocacy organization Student Debt Crisis, said that over 550,000 borrowers are currently enrolled in the debt forgiveness program.

We need to make it easier for people to go to and pay for college, this budget does the exact opposite, Abrams said, although the Education Department said those students already in the loan forgiveness program would not be affected by the proposed changes.

The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program was initiated in 2007 with the hope that university graduates would respond to the incentive by accepting government jobs and teaching positions in remote rural areas. The program allows the student borrowers debt to be forgiven after 120 payments, or 10 years.

The Trump education budget also would save $1.2 billion by eliminating the 21st Century Community Learning Centers (21st CCLC), a program that allowed expansion of before- and after-school and summer school programs.

The Budget proposes eliminating the 21st Century Community Learning Centers (21st CCLC) program given performance data demonstrates that the program is not achieving its goals, and the program has low participant attendance rates, the administration states. Nearly 60 percent of students attended a 21st CCLC center for 30 days or fewer during the 2014-2015 school year.

The proposed education budget would end as well the International Education program, which is designed to improve American education in foreign languages and international studies.

Other Federal Agencies whose primary mission is national security implement similar programs and are better equipped to support the objective of these programs, the budget document states.

The Trump administrations full budget for education for FY 2018 would make some long-overdue cuts at the Department of Education, eyeing reductions in spending totaling $9.2 billion a 13.6 percent cut in the agencys current $68 billion annual budget, said Lindsey Burke, director of Heritages Center for Education Policy.

That type of reduction signals a serious commitment to reducing federal intervention in education a necessary condition to make space for a restoration of state and local control, she added.

See the original post:
Progressives: Trump Education Budget 'Wrecking Ball,' 'Assault on American Dream,' 'Cruel to Kids' - Breitbart News

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Liberals find President Trump's corruption, ignorance, atrocious judgment, and authoritarian instincts self-evidently appalling, just as they are instinctually disgusted by the undisguised cruelty of the administration's proposed federal budget and the health-care bill passed by the Republican majority in the House. That's my reaction, too.

But too many liberals also assume that this reaction will be automatically shared by everyone, if only the facts are presented to them.

This assumption is false. It's an outgrowth of the deeply rooted liberal belief in progress. Most liberals really do believe, sometimes deep down but often right on the surface, that they are bound to prevail, inevitably, in the fullness of time, and quite likely very soon, just around the corner, despite minor setbacks like the election of Donald Trump.

This isn't an empirical claim. It's a confession of faith one that liberals desperately need to rein in and check if they hope to make gains in upcoming election cycles.

But that is unlikely to happen if liberals keep listening to the likes of political scientist Ruy Teixeira.

No personal offense to Teixeira intended. He's clearly very smart, and he seems like a nice guy. But he's also the co-author of The Emerging Democratic Majority, the 2002 book that did more than any other to convince liberals that the future would be theirs if only they waited for it to land in their laps. Demography is destiny, after all, and demographic groups that vote Democratic (mainly minorities) are growing while those that vote Republican (mostly whites) are shrinking. The result? A future that's bound to belong to liberals.

It would be one thing if the inevitable Democratic triumph appeared merely to be stalled or if Teixeira responded to recent discouraging election results by changing his incorrigibly optimistic tune. But neither is the case. The "emerging Democratic majority" hasn't just been delayed; it's been reversed at every level of government (federal, state, local), with the party left (as one prominent pundit put it in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election) a "smoking pile of rubble." (The premises of the original demographic thesis have also been called into question.)

As for rethinking, Teixeira shows no signs of backing down from his happy talk. Back in April, he took to Vox to spell out "7 reasons why today's left should be optimistic." (Reason #5: "The left's coalition is growing while the right's is declining.") And now he's back to tell us that, according to polls, liberalism is "surging." (Vox should consider embedding an audio player queued up with "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning" the next time Teixeira files a piece, to put readers in the proper mood.)

Do some polls show liberal gains since the election that delivered the White House to Trump? Yes, they do. And it's certainly possible that the full-court dysfunction, putrid odor of scandal, and outright brutality on flamboyant display in Republican Washington might be enough all on its own to deliver power to Democrats across the country in 2018 and 2020.

But nothing at all in recent political history gives liberals reason to think that they'll benefit by complacently waiting around for the other party to self-destruct. Because his optimism inspires such complacency, Teixeira is a dangerous man for Democrats to have around.

Consider the disaster of the Hillary Clinton campaign. The candidate and her team were thrilled to be facing Trump in the general election. What a gift! Clinton's opponent was so self-evidently awful that she might not even have to campaign that hard!

How do we know that this was their reaction? Because Clinton didn't campaign that hard! From the end of July (just after the Democratic convention) until the eve of the first debate on Sept. 26, Clinton stayed largely out of the public eye. And in the crucial last six weeks of the campaign, she devoted an inordinate (utterly unprecedented) amount of time, energy, and resources to highlighting Trump's extremely well-known dreadful behavior (which was already receiving wall-to-wall coverage in the media).

What she didn't do was articulate a compelling contrary vision of her own that would respond more positively and productively than Trump himself to the discontent that propelled him to his party's nomination (and also fired the surprisingly formidable primary campaign of Bernie Sanders). She thought standing there, pointing, and looking appalled at the Republican candidate would be sufficient.

It wasn't then. It isn't now. And it won't be in the future.

What liberals need is not optimism, which can easily breed arrogance and cockiness as much as complacency. They need passion (fueled by anger at Republicans), a compelling alternative vision of the country's future, and a commitment to persuading voters to support it. And they need to press the fight, relentlessly, at all levels of government.

Hearing from Teixeira and other Panglossian pundits that the effort is bound to prevail can make for a nice pep talk, but it's also likely to make liberals less hungry, less focused on the need to fight for every square inch of ideological territory against a ruthless opponent.

If a Democratic majority really is going to emerge, liberals will need to work for it, hard. Telling them they're bound to enjoy the fruits of victory no matter what they do runs the considerable risk of sabotaging that very outcome. Which is a very good reason to avoid telling them any such thing.

Originally posted here:
The foolish complacency of optimistic liberals - The Week Magazine

Ivanka Trump is seen at a ceremony where her father received the Order of Abdulaziz al-Saud medal from Saudi Arabia's King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud.(Photo: Mandel Ngan, AFP/Getty Images)

Media bubbles: everybody's got one and everybody thinks the other side's stinks. For those of you who may lean conservative and not know what's trending on your liberal brother-in-law's Facebook page, here's a look at what was hot from left-leaning media and commentators this week. And for liberals, here's what the right was reading.

Daily Kos writer Jen Hayden implied last weekend that there was a link between the massive$110 billion arms deal President Trump inked with Saudi Arabia and the$100 million contributionfrom Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to a global women's initiative championed by Trump's daughter, Ivanka. Citing a CNN report, Hayden points out that Ivanka's husband Jared Kushner may have helped secure the arms deal. Shethen lays a heavy dose of sarcasm on the denialsthat the global women's fund and the White House are linked:

The donations and the White House are not tied. Definitely not. No way!It is a total coincidence the $100 milliondonation is being made the same weekend a $110 billion arms deal is announced. And never mind that Ivanka Trump is traveling to Saudi Arabia in her official capacity as an assistant to the president of the United States.

The article does mention a Wall Street Journal story that points out that Ivanka herself does not solicit donations for the initiative, but doesn't address the fact that German ChancellorAngela Merkel is also a sponsor of the World-Bank managed fund.

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New York Magazine slammed the Trump administration for a $2 trillion "double-counting" error in its first budget proposal. The White House said its proposal would balance the budget within in 10 years,partly by assuming a $2 trillion revenue increase spurred by coming tax cuts. The problem? The budget proposal assumes the $2 trillion in added revenue will both balance the budget and offset the tax cuts, and experts are clear that you can't count the same money twice.

New York Magazine delivered this burnin response tothe White House's fuzzy math:

It seems difficult to imagine how this administration could figure out how to design and pass a tax cut that could pay for itself when Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush failed to come anywhere close to doing so. If there is a group of economic minds with the special genius to accomplish this historically unprecedented feat, it is probably not the fiscal minds who just made a $2 trillion basic arithmetic error.

President Trump was widely ridiculed on social media for a video the appears to show him shoving aside the prime minister of Montenegro during a meeting of NATO leaders in Brussels Thursday. The Huffington Post jumped on atweet fromHarry Potter author J.K. Rowling in which sheshared a GIF of the incident, along with the caption, "You tiny, tiny, tiny little man."

The Supreme Court ruled 5-3 Monday that race played an excessive role when North Carolina lawmakers drew congressional maps after the 2010 Census in favor of Republicans. To the delight of progressives, the staunchly conservativeJustice Clarence Thomas joined in the majority decision.

As Slate's Mark Jacob Stern wrote:

The broad ruling will likely have ripple effects on litigation across the country, helping plaintiffs establish that state legislatures unlawfully injected race into redistricting. And, in a welcome change, the decision did not split along familiar ideological lines: Justice Clarence Thomas joined the four liberal justices to create a majority, following his race-blind principles of equal protection to an unusually progressive result.

Republican candidate Greg Gianforte won Montana 's special election for its open House seat Thursday, despite being cited for assaulting a reporter on the eve of the election. Salon politics writer Amanda Marcotte said Gianforte's actions reflect a growing trend towardpolitical violence among conservatives.

"Whats interesting about these alt-right wannabe street brawlers is that they invariably frametheir violent impulses in terms of self-defense, arguing that they need to crack skulls and spray mace into crowds to protect themselves against violent revolutionary left-wingers," Marcotte wrote.

Alt-right street fighters are a tiny fringe right now, and the danger they pose shouldnt be needlessly exaggerated. But there are startling parallels between their rhetoric and what Gianforte and his supporters have said in seeking to defend or minimize his alleged actions.

Republican Greg Gianforte won Montana's U.S. House seat on Thursday, one day after he was charged with assaulting a reporter. Gianforte apologized to Ben Jacobs by name, saying he should not have responded the way he did, and that he's sorry. (May 26) AP

Don't forget to check out the conservative-leaning content that was trending on social media this week.

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What really fired up liberals this week? - USA TODAY

Democrat Rob Quist / Getty Images

BY: Andrew Kugle May 26, 2017 10:00 am

After the Republican candidate won Montana's special election on Thursday, liberals took to social media to express their disbelief and anger at the outcome.

Republican Greg Gianforte beat Democrat Rob Quist in a special election forMontana's lone at-large House seat. The office was vacated by former Rep. Ryan Zinke (R., Mont.), who left to become interior secretary.

The election gained national attention when Gianforte was charged with assault after reportedly body-slammingGuardian reporter Ben Jacobs, one day before the election. The altercation occurred when Jacobs tried to ask Gianforte about the CBO score of the Republicans' health care bill. Witnesses of the altercation said Gianforte grabbed Jacobs by the neck and threw him to the floor, where he continued to hit Jacobs. Gianforte was charged with assault.

Gianfortereleased a statement about the incident, alleging that Jacobs was aggressive. But after Gianforte declaredvictory, he apologized for his actions.

"When you make a mistake, you have to own up to it,"Gianforte said during his victory party. "That's the Montana way. Last night I made a mistake and I took an action that I can't take back and I'm not proud of what happened. I should not have responded in the way that I did and for that I am sorry. Ishould not have treated that reporter that way and for that I am sorry Mr. Ben Jacobs."

Liberals on social media reacted to the news that Gianforte won despite being charged with assault.

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Liberals React to Dem Loss in Montana - Washington Free Beacon