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In his heroically doomed 48-year campaign to promote the Washington Monthly, Charles Peters hit upon one especially apt (if un-catchy) slogan: If youre not afraid of being right too soon.

Peters founded his little magazine in 1969. From the start, he needled mainstream liberals about issues that werent getting enough attention at the time: income inequality, entrepreneurship, Wall Streets money culture, gay rights, the downside of meritocracy, the importance of reforming and supporting the military. Peters made a career of being annoyingly prescient.

Now, as the Democratic Party struggles to remake itself after a catastrophic loss to Donald Trump, I hope Peters again serves as a leading indicator. In a new book summarizing his once-iconoclastic ideas, he weaves a synthesis of mainstream and progressive, centrist and populist thought that would re-anchor the Democratic Party, both in its own traditions and in outreach to the restless, angry swath of the country that elected President Trump.

The fact that Peters is from West Virginia helps him get the big thing right: He knows that Democrats win when they embrace the aspirations of what country singer Jason Aldean calls the fly over states. They lose when they become seen as the party of the coastal elites and special-interest groups.

I should confess here that Peters has been my mentor, guilty conscience and friend for 45 years. I was one of several dozen journalists who were lucky enough to hear sermons from his political gospel and get raindanced as he edited my articles for his magazine. In a journalism world made up mostly of unmemorable characters, Peters is an American original.

Peters titled his book We Do Our Part, choosing the slogan of Franklin Roosevelts National Recovery Administration. His core argument is that the Democrats are doomed unless they seek to rebuild the United States as a fairer country, less obsessed with money and status but still respecting the wealth-creating power of our entrepreneurial capitalist economy.

Peters is blunt in describing how the Democrats let FDRs New Deal coalition and his legacy of fairness slip away. The unraveling started during Lyndon Johnsons presidency, in a shift that Peters characterizes in one chapter as From Doing Good to Doing Well. It accelerated with the Vietnam War, which Peters saw as creating class cleavages between those who fought and those who didnt. A classic Washington Monthly piece on this theme was Let Those Hillbillies Go Get Shot by Suzannah Lessard.

What Peters saw earlier than any commentator I know was that meritocracys rise would create a United States more unequal in its division of income and nastier in its class and status divides. You could be indignant about not being born a Roosevelt or a Rockefeller, but it was harder to complain about not getting high enough SAT scores for the Ivy League.

Peterss chapters about The Snob Factor and The Price of Glamour are devastating, and no less powerful for his own mild status obsession and name-dropping. (The reader will discover that our Huck Finn was pals with Allen Ginsberg, Katharine Graham, Warren Buffett, Jay Rockefeller and other luminaries.)

The saddest figure in this story of the implosion of the old Democratic Party is former president Bill Clinton. On his way to the White House, Clinton was passionate about politics, in touch with his Arkansas roots and, as Peters says, among the first to detect where the Democratic Party was going wrong in the 1970s. He created a new political center stitched with ideas from Peterss canon of neoliberalism that would keep faith with working people even as it built a bridge to the future by modernizing the economy and helping workers find their place in it.

But the Clintons, after leaving the White House, came to represent the loss of the Democrats connection with the ordinary American. As Peters writes, they entered a world where it seemed natural that Chelseas apartment in New York would cost $10million and that Hillary would be paid $225,000 for a speech to Goldman Sachs executives.

Peters applauded President Barack Obama in principle but saw him as more comfortable with Wall Street than with the working-class voters of FDRs coalition.

Its grotesque that the aspirations of working-class Americans came to be represented by a braggart billionaire from New York who masks his shameless elitism with rhetoric about making the country great again.

But as Peters illustrates, the Democrats loss of connection with the country is largely their own fault. The interdependence that was captured by FDRs slogan We Do Our Part got lost along the way. Peterss book explains where to find it again.

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How Democrats lost their way and how they can find it again - Washington Post

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The Congressional Progressive Caucus is not an organization that gets a lot of press attention. With the Democrats out of power, they've been ignored as powerless fringe figures, with a scant 75 members in the House and one in the Senate to their name.

Yet there are plenty of reasons to start paying closer attention to them especially this week, as they've just released their yearly budget plan. There is a strong chance in the future that the CPC budget will be the basic policy framework for the Democratic Party, which has a solid chance to retake power within the next few years.

A good place to start is by comparison with House Republicans. For the past several years, the policy views of this group have received close attention in the press. The party's ultra-conservative wing, the "Freedom Caucus," got special attention due to their outsize influence and radicalism. So with the GOP in control of the House since 2011, and the Senate since 2015, watching them closely made good sense.

However, many observers, myself included, drastically underestimated the difficulty that Republicans would have in passing their own agenda. When Obama was president, Republicans passed dozens of repeals of ObamaCare. In this the ultras were the main driver, yowling constantly about how the policy was the death knell of freedom. I therefore thought that with Trump as president, they would simply repeat some version of that process, smashing whatever legislative barriers stood in their way. By the second week or so of the Trump administration, ObamaCare and most of Medicaid would be dead.

But when time came to actually enact some legislation, Republicans ran headlong into two things: First, that their health-care policy ideas are brutally horrible; second, that they had been constantly lying about them for years, to the public and to themselves. Even many Republicans in bright red districts looked down the barrel of voting to destroy the insurance of tens of thousands of their own constituents, after having promised that any ObamaCare replacement would cover more people for cheaper, and got cold feet. Meanwhile, the ultras balked at leaving too many people insured, and so the first effort failed.

Now, a potential repeal of ObamaCare is still very much in the cards. But it turns out that trying to pass policy which will kill thousands of people is a tough political lift, even for a party as diseased and morally bankrupt as the GOP.

By comparison, the CPC is much better politically situated to actually enact their proposals, should Democrats win power. Perhaps most importantly, they are not lying about what's in them. It's all laid out, clearly and honestly, with realistic assumptions and funding mechanisms. As laid out by the Economic Policy Institute, it would run a large short-term fiscal stimulus to reach true full employment. Additionally, it would boost food stamps, unemployment spending, and the Earned Income Tax Credit. It would also spend $2 trillion on infrastructure over 10 years.

It would partially pay for all this stuff with modest cuts in defense spending and a reduction in health-care price growth, as well as new progressive taxes (putting the budget deficit on a sustainable path, but only after full employment was reached). This would reduce inequality, push money down the income ladder, and a new financial transactions tax would also soak Wall Street a bit while improving financial services for everyone else.

More importantly, the CPC budget is by far the most realistic and serious proposal on offer to deal with the problems in the American economy. Obama's stimulus package was not nearly big enough, and the proportion of prime working-age Americans with a job is still lower today than it was at the bottom of the previous recessions (despite much improvement since 2009). Despite fairly low unemployment, the economy is still deeply structurally weak we have quite simply been crying out for something like this since at least 2010. Indeed, as Dean Baker points out, that enormous-sounding infrastructure package is only 1 percent of GDP, and merely brings the figure up to par with historical averages.

The moderate wing of the Democratic Party is, of course, resistant to this sort of spending, because it would horn in on their fundraising and post-officeholding buckraking. But their political position is much weaker than it appears. Half-measure policies like ObamaCare are not good enough, irritating and only popular insofar as they're better than nothing. Against such left-wing arguments, elite centrist Democrats posed electability it's simply the best we can do, sorry! But then their great avatar and leader, Hillary Clinton, lost to the most unpopular opponent in the history of presidential polling.

So in the future, the CPC has an enormously convincing argument, which has only started to take hold: Democrats might as well shoot for the moon and run on actually good policy, instead of fiddly little tax credits. The party has little left to lose.

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The Democrats are getting ready to govern again - The Week Magazine

But his election brought about one of the most significant but ignored progressive policy victories in years: He expanded Medicaid. With the stroke of a pen, Edwards brought one of the poorest states into the fold of the largest expansion of the welfare state since the 1960s, extending access to basic health care to almost 400,000 people.

No other state in the South, besides Arkansas, has done the same. He also ran his campaign on establishing a state minimum wage and reducing incarceration rates, in a state with an abiding love of prisons. He is an unapologetic friend to the teachers unions, in a state that has embraced charter schools and vouchers.

Edwards is by no means a lefty, but neither does he fit with the Ivy League, corporate-friendly Dems who dominate the partys center. Hes not Bernie Sanders, but neither is he Cory Booker. Hes something else someone whose biography and public profile is suited to the politics of Louisiana.

Before Edwards, Louisiana Democrats were at a historic low point. They completely lost control of state government in 2010, after which Governor Bobby Jindal ruined the states finances. In 2014, Mary Landrieu, the last Democratic senator from the Deep South, lost her seat. Columnist Michael Tomasky told Democrats it was time to write off the South and forget about the whole fetid place, in the same way some national Democrats now speak about the Midwest.

So when Republican Senator David Vitter ran for governor, he was at first thought to be a shoo-in, despite his high-profile involvement in the D.C. Madam scandal. The race pitted three Republicans against Edwards in Louisianas unusual jungle primary system. When Edwards and Vitter ended up in the runoff, Republicans defected to Edwards, because they respected him and found him broadly palatable. In polls, he has significant bipartisan approval.

In the aftermath of Trumps election, many Democrats want to rebuild the party at the local level. This is admirable and right. But many who strongly advocate this view have a very specific idea of what a Democrat should look like, and what positions they should hold.

If the goal is a truly national party, capable of achieving meaningful policy gains for a significant portion of the population, figures like Edwards have important roles to play.

Too often, Democratic candidates come from somewhere in the mushy none of the above camp. They might be technocrats, or they might just be people with impeccable rsums and a lot of money. These people sometimes win elections, but theyre limited in their ability to authentically appeal to citizens. Most candidates need a message beyond competence.

The GOP used to be the party of the big tent, but now it has a simpler platform: white nationalism. How much regional and ideological variation should the Democrats accept in order to fight it? Thats a difficult conversation for a party that has never been more geographically concentrated. But if Democrats are serious about fighting for the well-being of working people everywhere, its one that needs to happen.

This article appears in the April 2017 issue of the Texas Observer. Read more from the issue or become a member now to see our reporting before its published online.

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What Democrats Can Learn from Louisiana (No, Really) - The Texas Observer

Across the world, the American Dream the idea that anyone who has the talent, intellect and drive can succeed no matter how humble their beginnings draws hundreds of thousands of people to the United States each year. Instilled in this notion is meritocracy, one of the core qualities that has historically distinguished this country from the Old World class-bound societies, where ones position in life was largely determined by lineage and birth.

Today, the U.S. remains a meritocracy in many respects, but not in one notable area: its immigration system. This is why PresidentDonald Trumps call for an immigration policy overhaul in favor of applicants whose skills and talents are most likely to benefit the country is so important. Such a merit-based policy would be a radical departure from the way we now select immigrants but one our nation desperately needs. We should not let history hold us back any longer.

For the last half century, America has maintained an immigration policy that can only be described as codified nepotism. Of the approximately 1 million new immigrants who are legally admitted to the United States each year via green cards, about 60 percent enter for no other reason than that they have a relative in most cases a recently settled immigrant living in this country. Only about 15 percent of immigrants are admitted because of their skills, while the remainder are admitted on humanitarian grounds.

Under our current immigration system, admission as a family member is not limited to the traditional nuclear family. We allot immigration benefits to parents, adult children and siblings. All of these extended relatives and their spouses, in turn, are eventually eligible to invite their own extended family members to come live in the United States.Its a nepotistic system that contains the seeds of its own growth.

Fred Prouser / Reuters

This family-based process means that every time we admit someone as an immigrant the line for future immigration gets longer, not shorter. This results in endless chains of relatives, long and frustrating backlogs and no objective assessment of the individual merits of the majority of the people who are let in.

In addition to a skills deficit, our family chain migration system also means that we often end up with those who need more support from our economy rather than those who would help boost it. In 2012, more than half of immigrant-headed households in the United States relied on at least one welfare program, compared with 30 percent of households headed by a native-born citizen, according to a report based on data from the Census Bureaus Survey of Income and Program Participation.

Put simply, our current immigration system fails to serve any identifiable national or public interests. And this isnt the first time its flaws have been brought to our attention.

In the 1990s, a bipartisan blue-ribbon commission chaired by civil rights icon and former Rep. Barbara Jordan (D-Texas), came to precisely that conclusion and offered a framework for true immigration reform. The Jordan Commissions recommendations for a merit-based immigration policy were widely endorsed, including by then-President Bill Clinton. Theywere revived by Donald Trump.

In his first address to a joint session of Congress in February, Trump called for a merit-based immigration policy. It is time for Congress to respond to his call and the demands of the American people and implement a merit-based immigration system. Here are some broad objectives such a reform should take into account:

Paul J. Richards/Getty Images

All prospective immigrants to the U.S. should be evaluated based on objective criteria. These include education, job skills and English proficiency. Admission should be granted to those who are most likely to be net contributors to our economy, complement our existing labor force and successfully assimilate into the mainstream of American society. The criteria for admission must also be fluid, understanding that the needs of the country and our economy change over time.

A merit-based immigration policy should not discriminate for or against applicants based on race, religion or national origin. All applicants, regardless of background, should have an equal opportunity to apply for admission to the U.S. based on what they have to offer this country, rather than on having a relative here.

The United States should not apologize for pursuing immigration policies that are mutually beneficial to those who seek to come here and to the American people. Like all public policies, the primary stakeholders in U.S. immigration policy are the American people. Merit-based immigration maximizes the likelihood that people we admit will be self-sufficient and minimizes the possibility that their presences here will undermine the interests of American workers and taxpayers.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

We are a nation of immigrants, is not a policy. We must understand and honor our history, but in no other area of public policy do we do things just because its the way we did them in the past. A 21st century nation should not be bound to a 19th century immigration policy.

In an economy that increasingly demands an educated and skilled labor force, 28 percent of all working-age adult immigrants in the United States, according to the Census Bureaus Survey of Income and Program Participation, possess a high school diploma or less. This is particularly troublesome as the U.S. figures out how to deal with automation.

A report by Forrester Research, a business and technology research and advisory firm, estimated that automation will create about 15 million new jobs, but wipe out close to 25 million a net loss of about 10 million jobs. In addition to training existing workers in this country to fill the 15 million jobs projected to be created, we need to evaluate carefully whether our immigration policy is admitting people who are equipped to do the jobs that are likely to be created, or whether our policy is adding to the pool of workers whose skills qualify them for the 25 million jobs that are likely to disappear.

If we continue down our current path, the result will likely be an increase in competition for the 15 million jobs that are left and an increase in the number of people in this country who are unemployed. Bottom line: we need to act fast to diversify our ranks.

The Washington Post via Getty Images

The United States is now a nation of about 320 million people. At current levels of legal and illegal immigration, our population is projected to reach about 438 million by 2050.Immigration-driven population growth of this magnitude is ecologically and socially unsustainable and serves no national interest. The Jordan Commission recommended that admissions be capped at 550,000 a year, while others, including my organization, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, support lower levels.

Family-based immigration should be limited to nuclear families. People who choose to immigrate to the United States are making the decision to live apart from their extended families. There should be no reasonable expectation on the part of people who immigrate to the U.S. that our laws will guarantee them the right to have their entire extended families join them here. Moreover, in an age of modern communications and relatively affordable travel, extended family connections can be maintained without chain migration.

Yuri Gripas / Reuters

As we are all painfully aware, very little gets done in Washington just because it serves the best interests of the American people. The narrow entrenched political and economic interests that are benefiting from the current immigration policies will not give up without a fight. But a large part of the reason why Donald Trump is president is because the American public wants him to disrupt the status quo.

Left to its own devices, the congressional leadership will do little to reform our immigration policies, even though they are widely acknowledged to be a failure. Affecting real change will require the president to put pressure on Congress by making the appeal for a merit-based immigration policy directly to the voters who put him in office.

Trump has demonstrated his ability to shake up the system in his unlikely rise to the Oval Office. Now, he must use those same skills to fulfill the promises he made to transform our immigration policy into one that serves the best interests of the nation.

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Trump Is Right: America Needs A Merit-Based Immigration Policy - Huffington Post

Fox News host Tucker Carlson began his show Tuesday by debating with an illegal immigrant on the issues of immigration reform and Mondays violent May Day protests and it went about as well as could be expected.

Speaking withjournalist Jose Antonio Vargas, an illegal immigrant from the Philippines, Carlson wanted to know why the American political left so readily embraces violence.

But instead of answering the question, Vargas immediately pushed back over Carlsons word choice.

I dont know if weve talked to all of those people protesting and asked them if all of them arefrom the left, Vargas said using air quotes. How do you know that? Did you talk to all of those people?

Those shouting left-wing slogans are left-wing, Carlson shot back. Almost all of the political violence in the past five months has been perpetrated by the left in the name of fighting against fascism.

Well first of all, I really take offense to the very simplistic left and right way youre framing this. It suits your viewers and Fox News, but it doesnt suit reality, Vargas replied.

Carlson explained that in the U.S.right now its only a subset of the left that uses violence as a means to obtain and advocate their political goals.

Im merely saying: Where are people who agree with these folks standing up and saying, Youre not allowed to block traffic. You cant break things, you cant set fires? Carlson asked. Its pretty simple.

Vargas, however, didnt answer the question and began to steer the debate toward immigration.

What I can tell you is that for many of us this issue is, not just political, its personal, Vargas said. Were talking about millions of people who are related to undocumented immigrants that you call criminal every day.

I, as a person, am not illegal, he explained.

Carlson explained that when someone says illegal immigrant, theyre not deeming the immigrant as a bad person, just simply stating that the immigrants status is in violation of the law.

He then pressed Vargas over whether or not he believes Americans should have a say in immigration policy, given that people born in the U.S. see their country changing and becoming really chaotic.

Your argument appears to be that they have noright to have a say in who comes here, Carlson said. Youre here illegally, and youre basically saying: I dare you to do something about it.

Carlson went on to statethat he doesnt believe illegal immigrants should have a say in American immigration policy given their legal status.But Vargas again took issue with Carlsons words.

Im not from Mars, he said, noting his disagreementwith Carlsons use ofthe words illegal and alien to describe illegal immigrants.

Toward the end of the interview, Carlson pressed Vargas for nearly two minutes over how many immigrants the U.S. should allow in each year. But Vargas failed to give Carlson a real answer citing a lack of time.

Ill give you eight minutes next time to tell me the number, Carlson said before ending the interview.

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