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OTTAWA Today, NDP Critic for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Jenny Kwan called out the Liberal government for requiring Afghan interpreters to complete even more bureaucratic red tape before they can bring their families to safety in Canada. Only days after the interpreters held a protest and hunger strike to highlight the already frustrating and lengthy process in March, the government requested even more documentation from their family members seeking asylum.

Afghan interpreters and their families have gone through enough, said Kwan. Just days after their protest, the government decided to complicate the process even more for these Afghan interpreters and their family members threatened by the Taliban. While the families flee for their lives in Afghanistan, the government is burying their loved ones with more onerous paperwork. For some, this may as well be a death sentence.

In an email to Afghan interpreters, the government says they have 30 days to submit additional documents, or their families applications may be refused. The families have already submitted abundant documentation to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) when they first applied. Now, eight months later, the government is putting up more hurdles for the families. Justin Trudeaus Liberals need to make good on their promise to bring the families of Afghan interpreters to safety in Canada.

Former Afghan interpreters are part of the Canadian military family they deserve recognition, said Kwan. They have already gone through layers and layers of vetting and security checks when they served with Canadian troops. The Canadian military has vouched for them with certifications. At the Special Afghanistan Committee, all the former interpreters said that they will vouch for their family members. If the government doesnt stop with this bureaucratic red tape, more lives will be lost.

The NDP is calling once again on the Liberals to waive the documentation requirements, issue single travel journey documents to the family members to reach a third country and, from there, organize evacuation flights to reunite them with their loved ones in Canada. The NDP is also calling on the government to waive the refugee determination requirements and allow Afghans to apply for the special immigration measures from within Afghanistan.

Reactions from former Afghan interpreters:

I do not know how to reply or submit these when I have no contact with my family. They are hiding from the Taliban. They are barely surviving. They do not have the luxury of accessing computers. One of my brothers has gone missing and I fear that he may have been captured by the Taliban. As the government delays the process, the risks for our family members increases. Eventually their luck will run out and they will lose their lives. Safiullah Mohammad Zahed

Previous to this, we have received numerous requests from IRCC and different government departments asking for many of the same documentations. The families have submitted what documentations we could get our hands on already. For some, they have had to burn them fearing that the Taliban will find them. How can we produce documents that have already been burned? This was all explained to the government. Now they are asking for them again but this time with a 30-day deadline. We have supported Canadaat the risk of our lives and the lives of our familiesand now it seems as though the government is getting back at us for speaking out. I cant help but to think that they are just trying to get rid of us by coming up with a reason to refuse our applications. Ghulam Faizi

All we are asking for is that our families be treated the same as Ukrainian nationals. We understand what they are going through and we support them wholeheartedly. They are trying to escape the violence and death inflicted by the Russians. We have been there. Now, our family members are trying to escape the Taliban. Are our lives not worth the same as Ukrainian nationals? Ahmad Sayed

Read the original:
Liberals must remove red tape to bring families of Afghan interpreters and collaborators to Canada - New Democratic Party

Western Australia has long been a fortress for the Liberal Party in federal elections.

The last time Labor won more WA federal seats than the Liberals was in 1990, when Bob Hawke won his fourth election with heavy hitters in his cabinet like Kim Beazley, John Dawkins and Peter Walsh.

If federal Labor is to topple this decades-long dominance and potentially influence a tight election, it needs to pick up three seats the most likely being the Perth metropolitan electorates of Hasluck, Pearce and Swan.

Labor, which holdsfive out of the 15 WA seats, has also been helped by the abolition of the Liberal-held seat of Stirling in the redistribution last year.

Its chances are best in Pearce, with a margin of 5.2 per cent, and Swan, with a 3.2 per cent margin, which also have both of their sitting members retiring.

The boundaries of Pearce, held by former Attorney General Christian Porter, were dramatically redrawn in the electoral redistribution and now largely overlap with the City of Wanneroo.

So it's probably no surprise that the two main candidates are connected with thecouncil;its mayor Tracey Roberts is contesting the seat for Labor against fellow councillor Linda Aitken.

Notre Dame University political analyst Martin Drum believes threekey factors the recent controversies surrounding Mr Porter, the changed composition of the electorate and Ms Roberts' high profile in the area play more in Labor's favour.

"It would give them an added chance, certainly beyond what they would normally have in that seat," he said.

Swan is the Liberals' most marginal seat, where the two candidates,chemical engineer Zaneta Mascarenhas for Labor and media commentator Kristy McSweeney for the Liberals,are both trying to win their first election.

Dr Drum also thinks the retirement of long-time Swan MP Steve Irons benefits Labor in this seat, because his popularity boosted the Liberals' margin by around 2 per cent.

Removing this margin makes Swan a more even contest.

"That's a 50-50 line ball before you consider any swing Labor might get against the Liberals," he said.

Winning Hasluck is a tougher job, with its sitting member, Minister for Indigenous Australians Ken Wyatt,defending it against Labor challenger and former Woodside manager Tania Lawrence.

"If Labor gets a decent swing, they should get the other two seats," Dr Drum said.

"But if they do really well, they'll win a third, so this would be the cherry on top, I guess, for Labor if they were to win this seat."

But Labor will also have to defend its most marginal seat of Cowan, held by Anne Aly on a slim margin of0.9 per cent.

It has also changed with the electoral redistribution, absorbing a chunk of the abolished seat of Stirling.

So Dr Aly's challenger,Stirling MP Vince Connolly,already has some local recognition in the north metropolitan seat.

Another fascinating seat aside from the traditional Labor-Liberal tussle will be Curtin, where high-profile independent candidate and corporate manager Kate Chaney is challenging Liberal member Celia Hammond.

Ms Chaney is being backed by the Climate 200 campaign, which is supporting some high-profile, pro-climate and pro-gender equality candidates across Australia, including Allegra Spender in Wentworth and Rebekha Sharkie in Mayo.

Dr Drum says the geographically bigger seats in Perth, compared to more densely populated inner-city electorates in other cities, could make it harder for independents to get traction.

"Your work is cut out trying to raise your visibility across the electorate," he said.

"So it doesn't mean she can't win, it just means her challenge is certainly tougher than some of the comparable seats in Sydney and Melbourne."

While there's much speculation about the impact of WA Premier Mark McGowan's sky-high popularity on the federal Labor vote, Dr Drumbelieves there's plenty of evidence to show that Western Australians vote differently in state and federal elections.

For example, Mr McGowan seized power after the landslide election of 2017, yet Labor failed to win any new seats in the 2019 federal poll.

But the electoral drubbing of the WA Liberals at last year's state election is really hurting their federal campaigning, from their fundraising ability to the nuts-and-bolts issue of staffing an election campaign.

Theyhave also lost or are losing some of their highest-profile local representatives, including former Finance Minister Mathias Cormann and Mr Porter.

Another new potential factor in the campaign is the 86,000 young Western Australians who will be able to vote in a federal election for the first time this year and who have come-of-age during the past nine years of a federal Liberal government.

Australian National University political researcher Intifar Chowdhury saidthe main issues that would influence the vote of these and other young voters includepolitical inaction on climate change, housing affordability and the treatment of women in the workforce.

Ms Chowdhury says her research shows that young voters, aged between 18 and 27, were just as engaged with traditional electoral processes, like political parties and elections, as older generations.

But the key influence on their voting behaviour were the issues which were front of mind on election day, a reason why she thinks the one-off cost-of-living payment announced in the recent federal budget will play well for the Liberals.

Australian Electoral Commission data from December show that one in five voters in Pearce and Swan is aged between 18 and 29, with 18 per cent of Cowan and Hasluck electors in this demographic.

Their vote is an untested variable in an election where WA, the last state to close the polls on election day, could determine who gets their hands on the key to the Lodge.

Continued here:
Federal election 2022: Why the Liberal Party could lose its dominance in WA - ABC News

But the group, known as APP, first and foremost brands itself Americas top defender of the family, lobbying in favor of bills that ban transgender girls from participating in high school sports and prevent trans children from receiving any type of gender-affirming care. (Medical associations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association, support certain gender-affirming care for adolescents such as counseling or providing medication that delays puberty.)

APP President Terry Schilling has called pediatricians who provide gender-affirming care groomers, meaning pedophiles, and referred to transgender women as biological males who believe they are women. The group has also delved into racial issues, describing the Black Lives Matter movement as a rhetorical Trojan horse pursuing an identiarian race-based caste system for the U.S.

While those are messages that some left-leaning antitrust advocates call discriminatory and hateful, others insist that working with people you disagree with even on fundamental social issues is worth the compromise.

Consolidated corporate power is the biggest problem that were facing right now in our politics, said Matt Stoller, research director at the anti-monopoly group American Economic Liberties Project, who regularly works with populist figures on the right, including APP. He said divisions within both parties about antitrust changes mean that supporters have to cobble together a majority.

As LGBTQ rights dominate political discourse leading up to the 2022 midterms, antitrust advocates who also work on social justice issues are increasingly reckoning with the anti-gay and anti-trans rhetoric from their counterparts across the aisle. And the compromises theyre willing or unwilling to make could determine whether Congress is able to put into action its biggest antitrust effort in a century.

Democrats dont have votes to pass tech antitrust bills on their own, so theyre prepared to rely on Republican supporters in both chambers. House Speaker Nancy Pelosis office told POLITICO in March that she is willing to put the antitrust bills on the floor even if their passage will require GOP support.

So progressives have been coordinating with APP on strategy and messaging. Jon Schweppe, APPs director of policy and government affairs, attends a semi-regular private meeting in which progressive and Republican activists discuss the status of antitrust legislation in Congress. Meeting attendees have included other Republican antitrust advocates and left-leaning groups like Demand Progress and AELP. Conservative groups that support antitrust reform, including the Internet Accountability Project, did not return a request for comment.

There have been some left groups that weve partnered with, mostly in terms of sharing intelligence and talking about bill text, Schweppe said in an interview. I dont have great intel by myself on whats happening on the Democratic side and a lot of these left groups dont have great intel on the right side. So we share information. Schweppe declined to name the groups.

Schweppe himself has said there is a major overlap between trans people and furries, a name for people who dress up as animals. He has advocated for conversion therapy, a term for attempting to change an individuals sexual orientation or gender identity, which is opposed by mainstream scientific groups and banned in some states as a form of abuse. APP is opposed to the Equality Act, which would amend civil rights law to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. It lobbied against marriage equality and has pivoted to advocating against trans rights in recent years.

But those stances havent deterred many progressive advocates from working with the group. One progressive antitrust advocate, who requested anonymity to discuss the dynamic candidly, said that given they have the same goal as APP on this issue, theres no reason to be oppositional to them out of spite.

Another Democratic strategist who works on antitrust issues said the Democrats need support from populist Republicans to push bills across the finish line, so intel sharing across a variety of groups of varying ideologies is vital.

Not everyone in the progressive antitrust world is willing to make the compromise.

It doesnt make sense to work with someone that doesnt share our values and doesnt share our goal, said Jeremie Greer, co-founder and executive director of economic rights group Liberation in a Generation. I dont think were fighting for the same thing. Greer argued that the push for antitrust reform is essentially about increasing equality and strengthening democracy and a group fighting against LGBTQ and minority rights is fundamentally opposed to that work.

Even if they share information behind closed doors, APP and progressive antitrust groups dont often promote each other publicly. APP mainly leads letters and campaigns geared towards the GOP while left-leaning groups target Democrats. Thats partially because some progressives dont want to give the group a bigger platform and also its just a matter of marketing. In terms of official partnerships, it doesnt make sense for either of us, Schweppe said. If APP partnered with a left group and sent a letter to Democrats, the Democrats in the Senate would be like, Huh?

APPs Schweppe estimated he spends about 30 percent of his time advocating against the big tech companies, while the rest is spent on APPs other priorities. He said hes aware that some of the left-leaning groups disagree with his views on gay and trans rights but that hes heartened it has not stopped them from working with him.

Still, Schweppe said he was blacklisted from a recent public day of action in support of the legislation, dubbed #AntitrustDay by the organizers. Schweppe said he signed up APP to participate in the days advocacy, which included petitions, outreach to lawmaker offices and a social media campaign but his groups name was left off the website when the day rolled around on April 4.

It looked like the coalition was much more interested in being a left-only coalition than a bipartisan one, Schweppe said.

Evan Greer, director at digital rights group Fight for the Future and one of the days organizers, confirmed that APP signed up and her group chose not to list the group. Greer said it was because the day of action was for small businesses and human rights/consumer protection groups.

The divisions among advocacy groups are a microcosm of the larger tensions in the movement to break up the major tech companies. Progressives and Trump-aligned Republicans agree that its time to reduce the power of the tech giants in the economy a dynamic that has created strange bedfellows like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), or Reps. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) and Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash).

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) speaks at the Practical Federalism Forum hosted by American Principles Project in Hooksett, N.H., Oct. 3, 2015.|Cheryl Senter/AP Photo

That coalition has required lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to turn a blind eye to areas they diverge. Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), the top Republican co-sponsor of the antitrust bills that passed out of the House Judiciary Committee last year, this week criticized Apple for its lobbying against bills that limits protections for trans and gay people. He worked on those bills hand-in-hand with House Judiciary antitrust chair David Cicilline (D-R.I.), who is openly gay and the chair of the LGBTQ-friendly House Equality Caucus. Bucks tweet was deleted within 24 hours.

Lobbyists for the major tech companies have seized on the ideological differences between the Democrats and Republicans working on antitrust, seeking to erode their alliance.

Theres probably some people reexamining who their allies are in these fights, said Adam Kovacevich, CEO of Chamber of Progress, a tech trade group that brands itself as left-of-center. Its increasingly becoming a Republican talking point to go after companies for supporting social inclusion. That should raise questions for Democrats about what is motivating these bills.

Some left-leaning activists say they do think its important to consider where Republicans are coming from, even if it could affect bipartisanship.

Its hard because, when it comes to Big Tech, we need the votes, said Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, an anti-monopoly group. I would argue that breaking the power of the big tech companies is critical to the future of multi-racial democracy and a vibrant, equitable economy.

Mitchell, who said she has not worked with APP and is not familiar with it, said its a delicate balancing act for progressives. Her group does not work with Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), for instance, in part because of the support he showed on Jan. 6 for the throng of Trump supporters and white nationalists who ransacked the Capitol.

Many Democrats involved in regulating the tech companies have also declined to work with Hawley since the Jan. 6 insurrection. But liberals have not mounted a similarly consistent push when it comes to shunning or working with people who espouse anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.

Just because youre kind of racist or bigoted on LGBTQ issues doesnt mean we should not acknowledge the overlap in concerns about concentration, said the progressive antitrust advocate who supports working with anti-trans groups. Its self-defeating to fight with each other about something you agree on.

More:
Behind closed doors, progressives fighting 'Big Tech' work with anti-trans group - POLITICO

Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly kicked progressive advocates in the teeth by signing a rightwing political stunt masquerading as legislation on Monday.

The law supposedly bans sanctuary cities in the state. What it really does is target undocumented Kansans and those who worked patiently to pass an ordinance protecting them in Wyandotte County. The bill was introduced by Kellys gubernatorial rival, Attorney General Derek Schmidt, and pushed through in the last days of the legislative session.

No doubt Kelly saw the writing on the wall. A veto would tar her as insufficiently tough on border issues (never mind that Kansas actual border issue is businesses moving to Kansas City, Missouri). The Legislature had enough votes to override a veto anyway.

The cold, calculating decision? Sign the bill, blame the U.S. Congress, and move on to a pleasant photo op designating the Sandhill plum as the official state fruit.

Both Republicans and Democrats in Washington have failed to address immigration issues for decades. We need a national solution and we need it now, the Democratic Kelly said, conveniently blaming both parties and removing herself from the equation altogether.

Kellys political course should be clear to everyone at this point. Shes working to make sure as little daylight exists between her and Schmidt as possible. Where distinctions exist, she angles to make them as advantageous as possible.

Kellys political course should be clear to everyone at this point. Shes working to make sure as little daylight exists between her and Schmidt as possible. Where distinctions exist, she angles to make them as advantageous as possible.

For instance, the governor consistently called for a full repeal of the states sales tax on groceries. Schmidt has supported cutting the tax, but not necessarily to zero. While Republicans in the Legislature grumble about critical race theory and attempt to pass parents bill of rights legislation, Kelly will tout her commitment to fully funding public schools without gimmicks.

Progressive advocates dont appear to have other options. Are they going to vote for the Republican Schmidt instead? And are there enough of them to be decisive in a statewide vote for governor? Kelly has dared them, in essence, to stay home on Election Day and suffer the consequences.

I expect that when November rolls around, most of these advocates will turn out and vote for Kelly. They might grit their teeth and curse, but they will vote.

Politics works on two fundamental principles: power and fear. Those in the political sphere work to accumulate the first. Their relationships with others are determined by the second. Politicians who have gained power fear the folks who can legitimately put their electoral prospects or legislative majorities at risk. Thats why folks take the Kansas Chambers calls.

Kelly rightly fears what national and state Republicans could do to her reelection bid if she vetoed the sanctuary city bill. She didnt fear what national and state progressives would do. Indeed, for many conservative voters, the spectacle of her kicking liberals in the teeth might earn their grudging respect. It shows shes not like the rest of those silly, pie-in-the-sky Democrats.

This was, as I wrote last week, a bill that no one wanted. Precious few voters called for it. But the fact that it passed by wide margins and was signed by Kelly shows vividly who holds power in Kansas politics.

I dont have pleasant answers or easy solutions for this situation. Ambitious progressives are often told to go build power at the local level. Beyond that, they are often told to participate in the committee process at the Statehouse through testimony.

Well, progressives did both for the Safe and Welcoming ordinance. They created a local groundswell of support in Wyandotte County and then defended the measure as best they could in Topeka. They did everything right, and look at what it got them.

A mouthful of bloody, broken teeth.

Building progressive political power in Kansas will take serious investment from those inside and outside the state. It will take a commitment of years, if not decades, to build institutions with enough clout to instill fear in politicians of both parties. Most importantly, it will recognize that simply electing a Democratic governor doesnt mean that liberals suddenly seized political power. It means a canny politician figured out how to win a specific race.

Kelly will do what she thinks she needs to win. Ive pointed out before that shes uncommonly agile as a candidate. She may well earn another term. Perhaps she will even use that term to do good for undocumented folks.

Thats cold comfort in the moment, however, to Kansans targeted in Wyandotte County.

See original here:
Kelly signs anti-sanctuary city bill, and Kansas progressives face a moment of truth - Kansas Reflector

I have never liked the term public intellectual, but like its 19th-century predecessor, publicist, it describes a social type that plays a useful role in liberal democracies in which at least some government decision-making is influenced by open debate rather than secret discussions behind closed doors. To influence voters, public intellectuals write for a general educated public (not necessarily the less-educated majority) in ordinary language, not jargon. Like the policymakers whom they also seek to influence, they are necessarily generalists. In the service of what the Brazilian American public intellectual Roberto Unger calls a strategic program, public intellectuals ponder connections among different policy realmseconomic, foreign, and culturalif only to ensure that one policy does not contradict another. Public intellectuals tend to annoy their own side by probing its internal weaknesses, while trying to convert members of the other team rather than simply denounce them.

The centralized and authoritarian control of American progressivism by major foundations and the nonprofits that they fund, and the large media institutions, universities, corporations, and banks that disseminate the progressive party line, has made it impossible for there to be public intellectuals on the American center left. This is not to say that progressives are not intelligent and/or well-educated. It is merely to say that being a progressive public intellectual is no longer an option, in an era in which progressivism is anti-intellectual.

If you are an intelligent and thoughtful young American, you cannot be a progressive public intellectual today, any more than you can be a cavalry officer or a silent movie star. Thats because, in the third decade of the 21st century, intellectual life on the American center left is dead. Debate has been replaced by compulsory assent and ideas have been replaced by slogans that can be recited but not questioned: Black Lives Matter, Green Transition, Trans Women Are Women, 1619, Defund the Police. The space to the left-of-center that was once filled with magazines and organizations devoted to what Diana Trilling called the life of significant contention is now filled by the ritualized gobbledygook of foundation-funded, single-issue nonprofits like a pond choked by weeds. Having crowded out dissent and debate, the nonprofit industrial complexProgressivism Inc.taints the Democratic Party by association with its bizarre obsessions and contributes to Democratic electoral defeats, like the one that appears to be imminent this fall.

Consider center-left journals of opinion. In the 1990s, The New Yorker, The Nation, Dissent, The New Republic, The Atlantic, and Washington Monthly all represented distinctive flavors of the center left, from the technocratic neoliberalism of Washington Monthly to the New Left countercultural ethos of The Nation and the snobbish gentry liberalism of The New Yorker. Today, they are bare Xeroxes of each other, promoting and rewriting the output of single-issue environmental, identitarian, and gender radical nonprofits, which all tend to be funded by the same set of progressive foundations and individual donors.

You cannot be a progressive public intellectual today, any more than you can be a cavalry officer or a silent movie star.

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It is not surprising that the written output of this billionaire-funded bureaucratic apparatus tends to read like an NGO word salad with crunchy croutons in the form of acronyms that stud post-intellectual progressive discourse: DEI, CRT, AAPI, BIPOC, LGBTQ+. Wokespeak is Grantspeak.

Meanwhile, in one area of public policy or politics after another, Progressivism Inc. has shut down debate on the center left through its interlocking networks of program officers, nonprofit functionaries, and editors and writers, all of whom can move with more or less ease between these roles during their careers as bureaucratic functionaries whose salaries are ultimately paid by Americas richest families and individuals. The result is a spectacularly well-funded NGO-sphere whose intellectual depth and breadth are contracting all the time.

In the 1990s, you could be a progressive in good standing and argue against race-based affirmative action, in favor of race-neutral, universal social programs that would help African Americans disproportionately but not exclusively. Around 2000, however, multiple progressive outlets at the same time announced that the debate about affirmative action is over. Today race-neutral economic reform, of the kind championed by the democratic socialist and Black civil rights leader Bayard Rustin and the Marxist Adolph Reed, is stigmatized on the center left as colorblind racism, and progressives in the name of equity are required to support blatant and arguably illegal racial discrimination against non-Hispanic white Americans and white-adjacent Asian-Americans, for fear of being purged as heretics.

Immigration policy provides an even more striking example of the power of Progressivism Inc. to stifle debate on the center left. Up until around 2000, libertarians and employer-class Republicans wanted to weaken laws against illegal immigration and expand low-wage legal immigration, against the opposition of organized labor and many African Americans, who for generations have tended to view immigrants of all races as competitors. The Hesburgh Commission on immigration reform, appointed by President Jimmy Carter, and the Jordan Commission, appointed by President Bill Clinton and led by Texas Rep. Barbara Jordan, the pioneering civil rights leader who was left-liberal, Black, and lesbian, both proposed cracking down on illegal immigrationby requiring a national ID card, punishing employers of illegal immigrants, and cutting back on low-skilled, low-wage legal immigrants. As late as 2006, then-Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both voted for 200 miles of border fencing in the Southwest.

Then, virtually overnight, the progressive movement flipped and adopted the former talking points of the Chamber of Commerce cheap-labor lobby. While Democratic politicians deny that they oppose enforcing immigration laws, center-left journals and journalists keep pushing the idea of open borders, in alliance with crackpot free market fundamentalists. On April 12, 2022, David Dayen in the American Prospect wrote that declining immigration rates since the pandemic have contributed to labor shortages in key industries and harmed Americans who rely on those services. Dayen linked to an article in the libertarian Wall Street Journal bemoaning rising wages as a result of lower immigration. On Feb. 20 of this year, The New Yorker published a long essay by Zoey Poll, The Case for Open Borders, a fawning profile of the libertarian ideologue Bryan Caplan, author of Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration, which, appropriately, takes the form of a graphic novelthat is to say, a comic book.

Back in 2015, Ezra Klein, then editor of the progressive outlet Vox, asked Sen. Bernie Sanders about the idea of sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders. Sanders replied in alarm: Open borders? No, thats a Koch brothers proposal. The lobby FWD.us, funded by Facebook and other large tech corporations that prefer hiring indentured servants (H-1Bs) bound to their employers instead of free American citizen-workers and legal immigrants, denounced Sanders for holding the totally-debunked notion that immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs and hurting Americans. Vox then published an article by Dylan Matthews titled Bernie Sanderss fear of immigrant labor is uglyand wrong-headed. If I could add one amendment to the Constitution, Matthews declared, it would be the one Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Robert Bartley once proposed: There shall be open borders. In 2018, the progressive author Angela Nagle was canceled by Progressivism Inc. when she published an essay in American Affairs, The Left Case Against Open Borders. By 2020, when Matthew Yglesias, a co-founder of Vox, published One Billion Americans, the purging of dissidents and the fusion of the Progressivism Inc. party line on immigration with the anti-union, cheap-labor policies favored by The Wall Street Journal and Silicon Valley was complete.

The energy debate provides another example of the closing of the progressive mind. As recently as the early 2000s, some environmentalists favored reducing atmosphere-heating carbon emissions by expanding nuclear power, replacing coal with lower-carbon natural gas, or both. By 2010 these positions had been thoroughly anathematized by Progressivism Inc. Not only all fossil fuels but all nuclear energywhich provides 20% of utility electric generation in the United States, roughly the same as all renewable energy sources put togethermust be completely eliminated from the energy mix, according to the green commissars. Insofar as only around 11% of global primary energy, and only around a quarter of global electricity, comes from renewable energy (chiefly hydropower, which has limited potential for expansion), the green fatwah against nuclear energy seems self-defeatingas well as certain to shovel American money to China, which holds near-monopolies on the rare earth metals and production facilities used to make things like solar panels and lithium batteries. China also happens to be a major source of the fortunes of some of the billionaires who fund progressive media and NGOs.

At this point in history, the foundations and advocacy nonprofits of Progressivism Inc. do not even bother to go through the charade of public debate and discussion before imposing a new party line. Half a century of debate, discussion, and activism gradually led to a majority consensus among American voters in favor of negative liberty for gay men and lesbian women, whose right to be free as individuals from discrimination in employment, housing, and military service need not require other Americans to change either their actions or their views.

In striking contrast, in a few years the ideology of gender fluidity went from being an obscure strain of thinking on the academic left to becoming the centerpiece of a radical program of social engineering from above carried out simultaneously by progressive, corporate, and academic bureaucracies. During President Obamas second term, the federal government reinterpreted Title IX, a civil rights law passed as part of the Education Amendments of 1972, and suddenly threatened federal lawsuits and the cut-off of federal funding for public schools that did not allow boys and girls to use the bathrooms of the opposite (biological) sex, and demanded that boys and young men with gender dysphoria be allowed to join girls sports teams and use female locker rooms and showers. States that resisted this bizarre misreading of Title IX, which eliminated legal distinctions grounded in biological sex that the statute was written to protect, found themselves boycotted by multinational corporations and sports leagues. Corporate employees and university personnel who questioned the new party line now did so at risk of being fired or punished. All of this happened just between 2012 and 2016, with no public debate or discussion within the progressive camp, and no attempts to persuade conservatives, libertarians, liberals, or even pre-2012 progressivesonly a sudden diktat from above, accompanied by contemptuous threats of punishment. In 2012, progressives were allowed to agree with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton at the time that, while lesbian women and gay men should have access to civil unions, marriage should be between a biological man and a biological woman. By 2020, you were a hateful reactionary conservative bigot if you did not agree that some men can be pregnant and some women have penises.

Who decides what is and is not permissible for American progressives to think or discuss or support? The answer is the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Foundation, the Omidyar Network, and other donor foundations, an increasing number of which are funded by fortunes rooted in Silicon Valley. It is this donor elite, bound together by a set of common class prejudices and economic interests, on which most progressive media, think tanks, and advocacy groups depend for funding.

Read more by Michael Lind

The center-left donor network uses its financial clout, exercised through its swarms of NGO bureaucrats, to impose common orthodoxy and common messaging on their grantees. The methods by which they enforce this discipline can be described as chain-ganging and shoe-horning.

Chain-ganging (a term I have borrowed from international relations theory) in this context means implicitly or explicitly banning any grantee from publicly criticizing the positions of any other grantee. At a conference sponsored by the Ford Foundation that I attended more than a decade ago, an African American community activist complained to me privately: Immigration is hurting the people in the neighborhoods we work in. The employers prefer illegal immigrants to young Black workers. But if we say anything about it, Ford will cut off our money.

Shoe-horning is what I call the progressive donor practice of requiring all grantees to assert their fealty to environmentalist orthodoxy and support for race and gender quotas, even if those topics have nothing to do with the subject of the grant. It is not necessary for the donors to make this explicit; their grantees understand without being told, like the favor-seeking knights of Henry II: Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest? In the last few years, even the most technocratic center-left policy programsadvocating slightly higher earned income tax credits or whateverhave often rewritten their mission statements to refer to climate justice and diversity and routinely sprinkle grantspeak like the racial reckoning and the climate emergency throughout their policy briefs in the hope of pleasing program officers at big progressive foundations.

Thanks to the buy-out of the American center left by Progressivism Inc., there is literally nothing for a progressive public intellectual to do. To be sure, there are plenty of other kinds of mental work that you can perform as a member of the rising generation of young progressives even in the absence of a functioning public intellectual sphere. You can keep your head down and doubts to yourself, as you work on the technocratic policy that appeals to you the most: raising the minimum wage or free school lunches, perhaps. Or you can write endless variants of the same screed denouncing Republicans and conservatives as rabid white nationalists threatening to create a fascist dictatorship right here in America. Or you can join mobs on Twitter and social media to take part in Two-Minute Hate campaigns against individuals or groups singled out for denunciation that day by Progressivism Inc. Or you can try to obtain fame and bestseller status and wealth and tenure by getting the attention of the MacArthur Prize committee and editors at The Atlantic by auditioning for the role of designated spokesperson for this or that protected class or minority identity groupnonbinary Middle East or North African MENA), for example, not low-income Scots Irish Appalachian heterosexual Pentecostalist.

You can even be a professor. High-profile American progressive academics like Paul Krugman and Jill Lepore and Adam Tooze who moonlight as public affairs commentators are not public intellectuals, because they have the pre-approved left-liberal opinions on all topics that are shared by nine-tenths of the U.S. academic bureaucracy, from the richest Ivy League superstars to the lowliest adjunct at a commuter college. Back in the early 1990s, when as a young neoconservative Democrat I worked for The National Interest, our publisher, Irving Kristol, exploded in comic exasperation one day: People are calling professors intellectuals! Professors arent intellectuals. Intellectuals argue with each other in cafes and write for little magazines. Professors are boring people who take out their dusty 20-year-old notes and give the same lecture over and over again.

Unlike academics who recite the approved current center-left positions on all issues, genuine intellectuals, even if they happen to be employed by universities, are unpredictable. Often they are unpopular, because they criticize their own allies and appreciate what other schools of thought get right. They do not indulge in contrarianism for its own sake but tend to be controversial, because they put loyalty to what they consider to be truth above party or faction. Needless to say, such intellectual mavericks tend to perform quite poorly when it comes to the boot-licking, rote repetition of political slogans, acronym-juggling, groupthink, and donor servicing that constitute the forms of intellectual activity favored by big foundations and NGOs, whether of the right or of the left.

Young progressives who prefer a life of significant contention to a career of lucrative grant-mongering may take some solace from the fact that we have lived through this kind of foundation-driven, extinction-level event in our nations intellectual life before. In Why Intellectual Conservatism Died, published in Dissent back in 1995, I wrote that instead of boldly attacking falsehoods wherever they are found, conservative editors tend to print only what they believe will confirm the prejudices of the program officers. The addiction to foundation dollars has reinforced the disastrous no enemies to the right policy. The last thing the foundations want is for one set of grantees to criticize the policy views or intellectual standards of other grantees.

Sound familiar? In hindsight, the end of the Cold War under Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush witnessed a golden age of discussion and controversy on the American right, as neoconservatives debated paleoconservatives and religious-right thinkers, and national security hawks debated isolationists and foreign policy realists. Around 1992 that window suddenly closed, as right-wing foundations like Bradley and Olin made it clear that the only nonprofit organizations and journals that would receive funding would be those that espoused a new version of fusionismuniting neoconservative fantasies of American world domination in foreign policy, libertarian fantasies about privatizing Social Security, and religious-right wishful thinking about a Christian or Judeo-Christian revival.

Thanks to blacklisting and censorship, foundation-imposed groupthink triumphed on the right, consolidating Conservatism Inc. and driving away those of us who sought to put the life of the mind above the life of the party. A decade later, President George W. Bush attempted to implement fusionist conservatism with a rigor that Reagan never attempted. In foreign policy, the Bush administration used 9/11 as an excuse to invade Iraq and attempted to realize the conservative fantasy of an American global empire, plunging the Middle East into chaos and bringing Iraq War critics Barack Obama and Donald Trump to power. In domestic policy, Bush tried to partly privatize Social Security, creating a voter backlash. The 2004 Bush-Rove campaign against gay marriage, calculated to bribe working-class evangelicals into voting for the party of tax cuts for the rich, backfired and led to majority acceptance of gay men and lesbians and the defection of many younger Protestant evangelicals.

On todays center left, as on the bygone center right, the groupthink imposed by behind-the-scenes donors and their favored nonprofits and media allies is resulting in electoral disasterthis time, for Democrats. The progressive foundations, billionaires, and woke corporations backed a California initiative to legalize anti-white and anti-Asian discrimination; it lost, in part because so many Black and Hispanic Americans support the ideal of a colorblind American society. Democrats underperformed dramatically in 2020, even after COVID killed the economy and terrified most Americans, because the slogans of foundation-backed nonprofitslike Defund the Police and comparisons of the U.S. border patrol to the Gestapoalienated many Democratic voters as well as swing voters. Black Democrats have favored candidates like Joe Biden and New York City Mayor Eric Adams who oppose anti-police radicalism. And a major reason for the political shift of Hispanic voters in Texas border counties is their opposition to the Democratic Partys toleration of mass illegal immigration, summed up in the fatuous slogan No human being is illegal.

Conservatism Inc., including flagship journals like the National Review and flagship think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, remains a museum of mummies. Today, Progressivism Inc. is equally brain-dead. What survives of intellectual politics in the United States today consists of a growing number of exiles from establishment wokeness on Substack and an assortment of dissident leftists, conservatives, and populists, some of whom have come together in new publications like American Affairs, Compact, and The Bellows, and in quirkier couture shops like Tablet.

Having watched from up close over the past four decades as cliques of foundation program officers, individual billionaires, and their nonprofit retainers lobotomized first the American right and then the American left, I hope that I may live to see the American center left free itself from top-down orthodoxy and welcome dissension, discussion, and debate once again. But I doubt I will live that long.

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The End of Progressive Intellectual Life - Tablet Magazine