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If there is one thing that 2020 has taught me, it is that the real political and cultural divide in our country is not between Republicans and Democrats, or even conservatives and liberals, but between traditionalists and progressives.

At the core of progressivism is not the optimistic American belief that things are improving and that our children can live better lives than we did, but the belief that man is a perfectible product of evolutionary forces. Rather than being made in Gods image and then fallen, progressives believe we must throw off the shackles and prejudices of the past in order to move forward to build utopia.

The traditionalist is not against growth and change, but he recognizes, as Edmund Burke did in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, the danger of trying to remake society and man in the image of a new ideology that radically redefines such words as truth, justice, and equality. The progressive has no qualms about running roughshod over the established beliefs, institutions, and mores of a nation if he can only achieve his goals. At its most extreme, progressivism can justify to itself any present-day atrocity as long as it claims to be helping usher in a future brave new world of absolute egalitarianism.

The genealogy of progressivism runs from Jean-Jacques Rousseaus nave belief in the noble savage to the bloody social engineering of the French Revolution to the deterministic dialectical materialism of Karl Marx, out of which arose the horrors inflicted on their own people by Lenin and Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot, Fidel Castro and Kim Jong-Il. According to all these progressive leaders, history was moving unstoppably toward their workers paradise, and anyone who sought to hinder its arrivalby deed, word, or thoughtwas backward, unenlightened, and, to use a cherished word of Marxist elites, atavistic.

Since the true face of progressivism revealed itself in the French Revolution, a number of brave critics have risen up to expose its destructive pretensions and its false view of man. A short list of these critics includes Burke, Alexis Tocqueville, the authors of the Federalist Papers, Cardinal John Henry Newman, G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, George Orwell, C. S. Lewis, and Pope John Paul II. The critic, however, who saw and understood the dangers most clearly, partly because he suffered greatly at the hands of progressivism run amok, was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Born one year after the Russian Revolution, Solzhenitsyn was raised as a loyal Soviet and even served as an officer in the armyuntil he was arrested in 1945 for saying something negative about Stalin. He spent eight years in the prison camps of the Gulag.

After being released, he lived in exile in Kazakhstan, where he taught physics. He later returned to Russia and published a novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), which he based on his experiences in the Gulag. Although he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1970, when his literary expos, The Gulag Archipelago, appeared in the 1970s, he was forced to flee the country, eventually moving to the United States in 1976.

Hailed as a hero of democracy and freedom, Solzhenitsyn was invited to give the commencement address at Harvard University in 1978. After sincerely praising American freedom, Solzhenitsyn went on to criticize Western secularism, rationalism, and materialism. His address lost him the support of many in the media and academy, but it stands as a bold witness to the poisonous excesses of the progressivist spirit.

Similarly, when he was awarded the Templeton Prize in England in 1983, his speech, which drew a straight line from godlessness to the Gulag, caused him to be further labeled as old-fashioned, out of touch, reactionary, and, yes, atavistic. Solzhenitsyn, ostracized by the liberal thinkers who had once hailed him as a champion of freedom, lived the life of a recluse in Vermont until, remarkably, he was allowed to return to Russia in 1994, where he lived out the remainder of his long life in peace.

Like Ivan Denisovich, all of Solzhenitsyns major novels incorporate autobiographical elements. The three-volume The Gulag Archipelago critiques and exposes both Leninism-Stalinism and Western secular rationalism. Cancer Ward is a profound meditation on death by an author who almost died of cancer.

The First Circle is a conversation between inmates in a Soviet white-collar prison for educated scientists, with one of the characters based on the authors own younger self as he moved from rationalism to religion. The four-volume The Red Wheel is a re-imagining of the Russian Revolution that blends fiction and non-fiction, historical documents and Solzhenitsyns own incisive analysis of how the fated revolution could have been avoided by different choices on the part of free, volitional individuals.

Thankfully for those who are familiar with Ivan Denisovich and the Harvard Address but have yet to work up the energy to read his long, complex, circuitous novels, a collection of essays has appeared that illuminates the many facets of Solzhenitsyn the man, the writer, and the prophet.

Edited by David P. Deavel, co-director of the Terence J. Murphy Institute for Catholic Thought, Law, and Public Policy at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, and Jessica Hooten Wilson, Louise Cowan Scholar in Residence at the University of Dallas, Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West explores Solzhenitsyns links to Russian culture, Orthodoxy, politics, and other Soviet writers, as well as the influence that he and his fellow Russians have had on twentieth-century American writers. Although the collection is wide-ranging in its analysis, its especially valuable for illuminating what Solzhenitsyn can teach us about the dangers of progressivism today.

In the opening essay, The Universal Russian Soul, Nathan Nielson, a graduate of St. Johns College, quotes this passage from Solzhenitsyns 1993 speech The Relentless Cult of Novelty: And in one sweeping gesture of vexation, classical Russian literaturewhich never disdained reality and sought the truthis dismissed as next to worthless. Denigrating the past is deemed to be the key to progress. And so it has once again become fashionable in Russia to ridicule, debunk, and toss overboard the great Russian literature, steeped as it is in love and compassion toward all human beings, and especially toward those who suffer.

Needless to say, the fear Solzhenitsyn prophetically expresses here has been realized in increasingly shameless attempts by American universities to ridicule, debunk, and toss overboard our Western heritage as a prelude to building an egalitarian, multicultural society, despite the fact that the legacy they want to jettison has provided the sole foundation for liberal democracy and individual freedom. Solzhenitsyn knew that no stable future could be built on hatred of the past, since hatred of the past inevitably leads to hatred of the self, not to mention hatred of ones neighbor and ones society.

The two essays that follow, The New Middle Ages and The Age of Concentration, are not analyses of Solzhenitsyn, but reflections by a modern Russian novelist, Eugene Vodolazkin, who shares Solzhenitsyns spirit and his mistrust of all progressive attempts to build a perfect society.

It is wrong to think of utopias as harmless dreams, he warns. Combined with the idea of progress, utopian thought is a dream that motivates action. It establishes a goal so lofty that it cannot be reached. The more ideal it becomes, the greater the stubbornness with which it is pursued. There comes a time when blood is spilled. Oceans of blood. In one way or another, all of Solzhenitsyns novels work out just that terrifying cause and effect, ripping away the faade of humanitarianism or revolutionary consciousness or classless equality to reveal the beast within.

In that vein, David Walsh, professor of politics at Catholic University, locates in The Red Wheel a central struggle between those who seek to remake Russia in accordance with their own idea of it and those who seek to submit to the idea of Russia as itself the guiding principle of their action. It is the difference between ideology and truth. The protagonists of ideology are driven by the conviction of the superiority of their conception to all that has existed. The servants of truth subordinate themselves to what is required to bring what is already there more fully into existence.

What is at issue here is not only the destructive nature of ends-justifies-the-means thinking, but the anti-humanistic arrogance that invests Marxist ideology (dialectical materialism, economic determinism, identity politics) with a sacred imprimatur for radically remaking society.

In his analysis of The Gulag Archipelago, Gary Saul Morson, Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University, considers a question that Solzhenitsyn asks himself: Why do Shakespeares greatest villains kill only a few people while Lenin and Stalin killed millions?

The reason, Morson explains, is that Macbeth and Iago had no ideology. Real people do not resemble the evildoers of mass culture, who delight in cruelty and destruction. No, to do mass evil you have to believe it is good, and it is ideology that supplies this conviction. All of us are capable of small, independent evil acts, but progressivism, by allowing governments to submerge their moral qualms beneath a sea of ideology, unleashes that evil on all of society.

Joseph Pearce, who interviewed Solzhenitsyn in Russia in 1998 and wrote an excellent biography, teases out Solzhenitsyns anti-progressivism by contrasting him with Leo Tolstoy. Unlike Tolstoy, Pearce argues, Solzhenitsyn laments the modern belief in eternal, infinite progress which has practically become a religion, adding that such progressivism was a mistake of the eighteenth century, of the Enlightenment era. Technological progress in the service of philosophical materialism was not true progress at all but, on the contrary, was a threat to civilization. In his novels, Solzhenitsyn drives these points home, not by offering philosophical disquisitions, but by incarnating these ideas in the lives of flesh-and-blood characters.

James F. Pontuso, Patterson Professor of Political Science at Hampden-Sydney College, offers an example of this incarnation. In The First Circle, writes Pontuso, Solzhenitsyn captivatingly captures the allure of ideology in the character of Lev Rubin. Despite all evidence to the contrary, including his own undeserved arrest and imprisonment, Rubin is devoted totally and insensibly to the Communist cause. . . . Rubin fails to acknowledge what he experiences; instead he accepts what he chooses to believe. For him every crime committed in the present is justified by the glorious future of peace, prosperity, and universal brotherhood that Marxs principles purport to bring about.

Such is the power of Marxs progressive ideology that Rubin discounts his personal experience. If such self-deception in the name of ideology sounds unbelievable, just think of the American politicians and media people who, during the summer of 2020, watched businesses being looted and burned but could only see peaceful protests in the name of racial justice and economic equity. They are those who not only live and propagate the lie, but who come to believe it themselves.

Perhaps the best summation of what Solzhenitsyn can teach us about the dangers of progressivism is found in a reconsideration of The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn scholar Daniel J. Mahoney. Central to Solzhenitsyns moral and political vision, he explains, is the nonnegotiable distinction between truth and falsehood. Solzhenitsyns target was precisely the ideological Lie that presented evildoing as a historically necessary stage in the fated progress of the human race. He always asserted that the ideological Lie was worse than violence and physical brutality, ultimately more destructive of the integrity of the human soul.

I can think of no better analysis of the true legacy of 2020: Not the Coronavirus itself, but the way it was used to justify the illegal power grabs of bureaucratic, progressivist elites; not the riots themselves, but the lie they were justified by (that America is riddled with systemic racism); not the attacks on Donald Trump per se, but the fact that his enemies in the government, media, and big corporations were willing to tell any lie to take him down.

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Alexander Solzhenitsyn Takes On The Progressives - The Federalist

Early in the morning on Jan. 6, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio woke up pleasantly surprised. Democratic victories in both Georgia Senate runoffs the night before meant he was suddenly poised to become chairman of the Senate Banking and Housing Committee, whose expansive purview includes oversight of the nations central bank, our financial system, the housing market and a wide network of executive branch agencies.

Only hours later, Mr. Brown found himself sheltering in place in a secure location with 74 other senators as an insurrectionist mob of Trump supporters laid siege to the Capitol building to stop the certification of President-elect Joe Bidens victory in Novembers election.

On Tuesday, six days after the attack on the Capitol, still determined to pursue a populist economic agenda amid impeachment debates and the Covid-19 crisis, Mr. Brown briefed me on his priorities for the committee, one the most powerful lawmaking beachheads in Congress.

He talked about his willingness to work around the filibuster and how he and his allies will push Mr. Biden to embrace a host of major reforms that could empower the executive branch, the Federal Reserves egalitarian mandate and bolster the working class.

Evading Republican obstruction and convincing Mr. Biden, an instinctually cautious politician, to go it alone if necessary is certain to put his earnest Midwest optimism to the test.

Talmon Joseph Smith: President-elect Joe Biden is expected to announce the details of an economic stimulus proposal thats set to be in the trillions. What do you want to see out of that package?

Sherrod Brown: We have to avoid the wave of evictions that was inevitable before Congress passed the scaled down but important December recovery act and extend the moratorium on evictions and the $25 billion for rental assistance. The other important components will be what we do with significant dollars for state and local government and getting significantly better treatment for unemployed workers and more help for small business.

Then, very important long term components should be expanding the child tax credit, the earned-income tax credit, and that they be entirely refundable. The child tax credit, in some sense, disadvantages lower income people, because its not fully refundable.And there is huge interest in the Democratic caucus for fixing that from Bernie Sanders to Joe Manchin.

I would combine that with something we want to do in this committee, but that will not be part of this package: Set up Fed accounts so that anybody that wants a bank account in this country a no-fee bank account, where they dont get nickeled and dimed and payday lenders dont swoop down on them can have basic banking access.

TJS: Speaking of the Fed, I wanted to ask if you support reopening any Federal Reserve emergency lending facilities similar to the Municipal Lending Facility and the Main Street Lending Facility that the Trump Treasury Department and Republican senators shut down during the last set of negotiations? Mayors have said the interest rate and the three-year payback window that was offered to cities by the Fed was far too onerous.

SB: Yeah, I opposed Secretary Mnuchins doing that at the time. And I leave it up to the administration on where they want to go. But the reason I opposed Mnuchin then was that there was no avenue for state and local governments. This new Biden economic proposal will surely include, I would think, hundreds of billions of dollars for state and local governments. So I am really looking to what the administration wants to do, where they want to go on whether to resurrect them.

TJS: Looking at so many of your priorities: A lot of it seems impossible unless you all pass things through simple majorities rather than through the bipartisan wrangling needed to get to the 60-vote filibuster-proof threshold required under normal circumstances.

The incoming Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders plans to push for using the reconciliation process to pass, via simple majorities, a much larger follow-up relief bill than what could be possible with a typical 60-vote threshold. But he also wants to push other major reforms through reconciliation which will push the processs legal limits. How far do you think you all can responsibly go?

SB: As far as we can go! I would start with what has unanimous or close to unanimous support in the Democratic Caucus. And, you know, there are many of Bernies plans that dont. So I start with that. But I take it from a different direction, I would say, What can we get done?

Ill illustrate it this way. If we were to bring to the floor the $2,000 direct payment, I think that we could very well get 10 Republicans to vote for that. I would like to do as many of these things as we can through regular order. But we cant allow this health crisis to turn into even more of a housing crisis and then turn in to a financial-slash-banking crisis, which it will if we dont address it in a much bigger way than [Senator Mitch] McConnell was willing to.

TJS: Finance experts I spoke to said that, as a consequence of the regulatory rollbacks in the latest relief bill which allow major banks to hide from the markets the scale of their troubled pandemic-related loan restructuring even civil servants at the Fed have no clear idea about whats actually going on with banks balance sheets right now.

Is there action that you all on the committee can take if not through legislation, then through hearings to get some more insight into whats going on here?

SB: Id answer it this way: The days of Wall Street running the banking committee are past, and with Democrats in control of the Banking/Housing Committee, things are going to be different. It will mean hearings to unearth special deals that Wall Street has extricated. When Wall Street runs things, the stock market goes up and C.E.O. pay explodes, but wages barely budge, the middle class shrinks those days need to be over.

TJS: One of Joe Bidens plans that didnt get as much coverage was his proposal to greatly expand the Section Eight Housing Choice Voucher Program, by essentially taking that federal rental assistance program and making it available to every family who qualifies.

As you know, around 11 million people who qualify are left out right now. Housing advocates say you all could actually pass this expansion with a simple majority. So is that on the docket?

SB: I dont really know from a parliamentary aspect whether that can go through with a simple majority or if it cant. But youve heard some of these numbers that, before the pandemic, 25 percent of renters in this country paid more than half their income in rent and utilities one thing goes wrong, their car breaks down, their child gets sick, they miss a week of work because of a minor injury, and theyre evicted and their lives are turned upside down.

I see it in my city. I was talking to a banker in Cleveland yesterday about how there are a lot of homes that are livable, that with a few $1,000 renovations could be a pretty nice, decent place to live. They would maybe only cost $40,000 or $50,000 to buy. But people cant get a loan for it because the banks dont lend for that. And how do we deal with that? We need to figure that out.

Some of its what youre saying Section 8, some of its tax credits of some sort. Some of its just how we figure out how to provide loans to make this neighborhood that was a prosperous working-class neighborhood be that again.

TJS: You saw how there was palpable concern in Washington that a Republican-led Senate would have veto power over President-elect Bidens appointments.

SB: You did and then we won two runoff elections.

TJS: Exactly. So with that threat now presumably removed, whats the reason for not, along with others in your caucus, pushing the incoming administration to appoint people with strong progressive track records and clearly projected plans to unlock some of the dormant powers within these agencies? Democrats have had a tendency to hand out some of these roles as rewards for party loyalists.

SB: Progressives like me are going to be pretty happy with some of these regulatory people. Im thrilled with Janet Yellen. In the coming days, I think that were going to see people in a number of these agency offices that are good progressives. I wouldnt have necessarily done it the same way. But I didnt run for president.

And people like me are going to put pressure on these agencies to make sure theyre doing the right thing, because theyre getting plenty of pressure from the other side.

TJS: It is almost impossible under current congressional rules to incentivize Senator Joe Manchin, or anybody else who might be a crucial vote, to line up in favor of legislation that they have serious doubts about. Thats because of the current ban on earmarks, which allow lawmakers to add special provisions to bills that fund spending in their local districts and states. Do you support bringing them back?

SB: Yeah, I think earmarks make sense. I think earmarks work for good government. Im not going to be spending a lot of time advocating for the change in policy, but Im fine with it.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Opinion | Sherrod Brown: Progressives Will Be Pretty Happy With Biden - The New York Times

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been a wellspring of truly terrible ideas for years, but her new one might be her worst on yet: A Ministry of Truth.

During a live stream on her Instagram page, Ocasio-Cortez was asked by a viewer if, to help with national healing, there were congressional plans to institute any truth and reconciliation or media literacy initiatives.

The socialist congresswoman replied that, yes, indeed, she and some of her colleagues have been exploring media literacy initiatives to help rein in the press and combat misinformation after last weeks riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Its one thing to have differentiating opinions but its another thing entirely to just say things that are false, Ocasio-Cortez added. So thats something that were looking into.

Oh, are they?

Now, perhaps in the political systems favored by AOC citizens are impelled to look to government for ultimate truth, but thats not the case in the United States. At least, not yet. Here, the Constitution reins in Congress from intruding on the speech of citizens, journalists, or any private institutions, not the other way around.

As a practical matter, we can already envision from lived experienced as a progressive might say how sanctioning the state to adjudicate the veracity of journalism can be abused.

We need only point to our media factcheckers, journalists with political and ideological biases who have regularly, and arbitrarily, labeled completely debatable contentions as falsehoods, while either ignoring or justifying scores of other unsettled contentions. Are these the arbiters of facts who will be manning the government commission appointed by those storied truthtellers in congress?

Only this fall, the traditional news media teamed up with Big Tech platforms to censor inconvenient reporting by The New York Post, which had uncovered the shady business dealings of the president-elects son, Hunter Biden. The pretext for this concerted and blatant attack on open discourse and journalism was the alleged need to uphold accuracy and standards.

As some of us suspected, and we all soon learned, the entire act was put on to shield the preferred candidate of elites. The Posts reporting was accurate, which is not something anyone can say about the four years of endless conspiracy theorizing by major media outlets regarding Trumps alleged criminal collusion and Russias alleged theft of American democracy.

Has anyone ever proposed a truth commission to heal the nation from those wounds?

This kind of state intrusion into discourse on whatever level AOC envisions it would, like all other facets of society lorded over by Congress, inevitably lead to giant rent-seeking corporations like CNN, ABC, NBC, Washington Post, The New York Times, gaining favor with government and consolidating power. The less powerful would either be left to contour their speech to please the states factcheckers or be branded liars. The press should challenging those in power, not obsequiously trying to earn gold stars from unelected bureaucrats on a state-run committee.

For those unaware, the truth and reconciliation commission the AOC fan asked about was most famously used in South Africa after the fall of apartheid as means of restorative justice. The insinuation by those who use this phrase is that 74 million Americans who voted for the Republican presidential candidate are racist thugs in need for similar programs. Its a disgusting smear, and speaks to the dangerous and illiberal inclination of progressives.

As for AOCs ideas: Its just creepy, not to mention wholly un-American, for an elected official to advocate the state as adjudicator of veracity of our political speech.

Its also crassly hypocritical. If anyone could use a truth commission, its Congress.

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AOC and other progressives have a new goal: Silence the press - New York Post

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Former vice president Joe Biden holds a rally ahead of the Nevada Democratic Caucuses on January 10, 2020. (Trevor Bexon / Shutterstock)

EDITORS NOTE: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvels column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrinas column here.

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Last week exposed both the poison and the promise of America. Not surprisingly, the poisonWednesdays riot at the Capitol by a mostly white mob that looked, as Mike Davis noted, much like a big biker gang dressed as circus performers and war-surplus barbariansreceived global attention. Meanwhile, the promisethe stunning election of an African American and a Jew to represent Georgia in the Senatewas virtually lost in the universal condemnation of the mob and President Trump. Yet, while prosecution of the perpetrators and repudiation of Trump are imperative, the incoming Biden administration should focus on building on the success in Georgia.

Democrats wins last week demonstrated that, with intensive organizing and passionate mobilization, the emerging majority can overcome both historical and current obstruction. As Eric Foner wrote for The Nation, Georgias history includes the 1915 lynching of the Jewish factory superintendent Leo Frank, the turn of populist Tom Watson into a rabid racist and anti-Semite in wake of electoral defeat, and the Atlanta Race Riot of 1906 in which white mobs killed between 25 and 40 African Americans. Wednesdays runoff resulted from a 1963 law that required office seekers to receive more than 50 percent of votes, a measure enacted to block the victory of a Black-supported candidate if several conservatives split the white vote. More recently, the states beleaguered Republican Party has systematically deployed modern mechanisms to suppress the vote, from purging the voter rolls to reducing early voting days to closing polling places.

Overcoming these obstacles required extraordinary long-term organizing, led by Stacey Abrams and LaTosha Brown of Black Voters Matter among others, courageous candidates and a majority of Georgians rejecting Republicans hysterical claims that a GOP-controlled Senate was the last redoubt against radical socialism. But the victories of the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the pastor of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.s historic church, and Jon Ossoff were more than symbolic. They displaced Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the master of obstruction, as majority leader and elevated Democrats to Senate control and committee chairmanships. That Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will likely head the Budget Committee demonstrates the sea change involved.

Read the full text of Katrinas column here.

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Progressives Know How to Turn the Page on the Trump Years. Biden Should Listen. - The Nation

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Covid-19, mass unemployment, police violence, a burning planet, and a defeated president refusing to concede made 2020 the year Americans couldnt wait to end. Yet 2020 also saw a heroic pandemic response by frontline workers, mass protests against systemic racism, and a growing recognition of the necessity for big agendas: cash payments to the unemployed, Medicare for All, and a Green New Deal. The most valuable progressives of 2020 kept hope alive with activism, ideas, and music to inspire transformational change in 2021.1

(Cheriss May / NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Stacey Abrams2

When Abrams announced on December 14 that Georgias 16 electoral votes had been cast for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, applause erupted for the first Democratic presidential win in the state since 1992and for Abrams, the 2018 gubernatorial candidate who had argued all along that voter mobilization could flip swing states against Donald Trump. With her group Fair Fight, Abrams championed voter registration and mobilization drives in Georgia, Wisconsin, and other battleground states. They figured out how to draw new Black, Latinx, and Asian American voters to the polls, circumvent voter suppression, and navigate the challenges of a pandemic election, with a savvy emphasis on mail-in voting, early voting, and safe in-person voting on Election Day that will be a national model going forward. That merits applause. And the cheering will be even louder in 2022 if, as many suspect, Abrams runs for (and wins) Georgias governorship.3

(Jeff Kowalsky / AFP)

Bernie Sanders4

The senator from Vermont didnt receive the Democratic nomination in 2020, as seemed possible after his New Hampshire and Nevada wins briefly made him the front-runner in the primary race. Sanders did, however, play a critical role in securing the presidency for the Democratsworking with Biden to establish unity task forces that framed the partys agenda, and arguing relentlessly that Trump was an existential threat to democracy who must be removed from office. Sanders closed the year with a courageous effort to secure $2,000 checks for Americans who are struggling to get by in a pandemic-ravaged economy. That fight will continue in 2021, and Sanders will no doubt continue to be the Senates boldest battler for economic, social, and racial justice; for the planet; and for peace.5

(Win McNamee / Getty Images)

Ilhan Omar6

As the representative from the Minneapolis district where George Floyds death during a brutal arrest in May sparked nationwide protests, Omar immediately recognized that this police killing of a Black man was part of a broader crisis. We are not merely fighting to tear down the systems of oppression in the criminal justice system, she announced. We are fighting to tear down systems of oppression that exist in housing, in education, in health care, in employment, in the air we breathe. Trump staked his bid to win Minnesota on a campaign that viciously attacked Omars challenge to systemic racism. The congresswoman responded with a turnout drive that boosted Democratic numbers in her district and helped Biden sweep the state.7

(Office of Rashida Tlaib)

Rashida Tlaibs Justice for All Act8

A civil rights lawyer with Detroits Sugar Law Center for Economic & Social Justice before her election to Congress, Tlaib wants to put the teeth back into civil rights laws that have been undermined by conservative courts determined to give corporations and the government a license to discriminate if they just use the right code words and proxies for race, gender, and other aspects of who we are. The Michigan Democrats new Justice for All Act seeks to guarantee that victims of discrimination can vindicate their rights in the courts by restoring and expanding the protections of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the Age Discrimination Act of 1975, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. National Lawyers Guild president Elena Cohen says legislation like Tlaibs is sorely needed in order to protect all people of this country.9

(Steve Apps / Wisconsin State Journal via AP)

Josh Kaul10

When Trump threatened to use federal agents to crack down on Black Lives Matter protests in cities like Milwaukee, Wisconsins attorney general decried the presidents fascist tactics, including his demonization of immigrants, his attacks on communities with large minority populations and the elected representatives of those communities, the blatantly illegal use of force against protesters near the White House, and the deployment of secret federal police to Portland, Ore. He pledged to take any appropriate legal action to prevent agents from interfering with peaceful protests, stating, I dont use the phrase fascist tactics lightly. But there is no more accurate way to describe this administrations repeated resort to and incitement of racism, xenophobia, and violence.11

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Native Vote, Menikanaehkem12

Voting is sacred. My people know that. We were not universally granted the right to vote until 1962, said Representative Deb Haaland, a tribal citizen of the Pueblo of Laguna in New Mexico who is now Bidens nominee for interior secretary, speaking at the 2020 Democratic National Convention. Grassroots organizing by groups working in tribal communities and outreach by Every Native Vote Counts, a national campaign of the nonpartisan group Native Votes, boosted turnout in swing states like Arizona and Wisconsin. Wisconsins Menikanaehkem focused on Menominee County, which shares boundaries with the Menominee Indian Reservation. In November, the county saw the sharpest swing to the Democratic ticket of any in the state and produced the highest support for Biden82 percent. Increased turnout by Indigenous voters mattered in Wisconsin, where Democrats won by just 20,682 votes.13

Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA)14

Trump won Arizona by more than 90,000 votes in 2016, but he lost it by 10,457 votes in 2020. What changed? The Arizona Republic reported that increased turnout among Latinx voters was critical for Democrats, as 63% of their votes went to Biden and 36% to Trump, according to exit polls. Many unions and grassroots organizations contributed to the turnout spike. One of the most innovative was LUCHA, a group born in the struggle against anti-immigrant laws, which in cooperation with Seed the Vote and Peoples Action embraced an innovative deep-canvassing strategy designed to reach out to undecided and conflicted voters and engage in real conversations. It worked.15

American Constitution Society, Alliance for Justice, Demand Justice16

To counter the Federalist Societys relentless drive to pack the federal bench with right-wing activists, the American Constitution Society, led by former senator Russ Feingold, came up with a plan to jump-start the Biden-Harris administrations judicial selection process. Immediately after the election, the ACS delivered a list of hundreds of qualified prospects that would bring diversity to the courts. The Alliance for Justice, led by nomination expert Nan Aron, and allied groups also provided a list of potential nominees. And Brian Fallon and the crew at Demand Justice were already formulating strategies to get Bidens nominees confirmed.17

Rossana Rodriguez Sanchez18

When former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, once a key fundraiser and power broker in Bill Clintons administration, was floated for a top job under Biden, Rodriguez, the Chicago alderwoman and member of the City Councils powerful caucus of Democratic Socialists, penned a scathing letter putting him on a DO NOT HIRE list. That letter evolved into a petition to Biden signed by thousands of Chicagoans, which recalled that Emanuel covered up the 2014 police murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald and closed 50 elementary schools. The petition stated, If you want to root out systemic racism, defend democracy, and build a society that leaves no one behindall worthy goals mentioned in your victory speechwe can think of few people worse for the job than the man who earned the nickname Mayor 1%. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Representative-elect Jamaal Bowman amplified the themes as the outcry went national. The pushback showed how progressives can and must put pressure on the new administration.19

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Representatives Barbara Lee and Mark Pocan and the Defense Spending Reduction Caucus20

Faced with a pandemic and an economic meltdown, Wisconsins Pocan argued in May, Increasing defense spending now would be a slap in the face to the families of [those who] have died from this virus. Pocan and Californias Lee rallied 93 House votes for a July amendment to cut Pentagon spending by 10 percent; Vermonts Bernie Sanders secured 23 Senate votes. Lee and Pocan then formed the Defense Spending Reduction Caucus. Lee, who was recently honored by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft for her long struggle to move U.S. foreign policy away from endless war and toward vigorous diplomacy, has warned that warped budget priorities harm Black and brown people the most. We cant keep spending billions for weapons while leaving our people defenseless against COVID, she said.21

Fair and Just Prosecution22

The ranks of progressive prosecutors swelled in November with the elections of George Gascon in Los Angeles, Monique Worrell in Orlando, Fla., and Jos Garza in Austin, Tex. Nationwide, innovative district attorneys are generating fresh ideas for police accountability, ending mass incarceration, reforming drug laws, and addressing systemic racism. Fair and Just Prosecution brings them together to share strategies for moving away from past incarceration-driven approaches and advancing new thinking that promotes prevention and diversion and increases fairness.23

(Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

Bonnie Castillo24

Unions were on the front lines of the pandemic, protecting their members and their communities as Covid-19 swept America. No labor leader battled harder than Castillo, a registered nurse and the executive director of National Nurses United. Starting in January, the union demanded that nurses get protective gear to save their own lives and the lives of their patients. NNU forced hospitals to change policies, demonstrated outside the White House, and kept an eye on the big picture. Explaining that so much injustice in our society is amplified by Covid-19, Castillo decried the racial inequities of a for-profit health care system and championed Medicare for All. As legendary United Farm Workers union leader Dolores Huerta said, Bonnie does not just work to heal patients; she works to heal society.25

Zephyr Teachout, Jennifer Taub, Stephanie Kelton26

Recovery from the many crises of 2020 will require bold thinking, and three great public intellectuals provide it with books that challenge monopoly power, neoliberalism, and corruption. Teachouts Break Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom From Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money (All Points Books) argues for trust-busting as a necessary response to inequality, climate change, the consolidation of economic power, and the systemic disenfranchisement of women, immigrants, and people of color. Taubs Big Dirty Money: The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime (Viking) explains that the crimes of the billionaire class are never victimless. Keltons The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the Peoples Economy (Public Affairs) provides an antidote to deficit hawks who claim theres not enough money for Medicare for All and a Green New Deal.27

Amy Hanauer28

Since taking over in 2019 as executive director of Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, Hanauer has been calling out the economic fallacies that pass for policy in Washington. When Senate Republicans gamed the Covid-19 relief debates, Hanauer warned, Senator McConnell is circulating a hoax of a plan withtwo enormous giveaways to corporations: a liability shield for companies whose policies contribute to their employees getting sick, and a tax deduction for business meals. Making the connection between regressive tax policies and rising inequality, Hanauer and her team crunch numbers and build arguments for taxing the rich and lifting up the working class.29

Hood to the Holler30

When Louisville Black Lives Matter activists and their allies demanded justice for Breonna Taylor, a Black medical worker shot and killed during a police raid, Kentucky legislator Charles Booker joined them on the streets. He didnt stop there. Booker took the racial justice message to rural Kentucky, mounting a campaign that almost had him winning the Democratic nomination to run against Mitch McConnell. After the primary, Booker formed Hood to the Holler, a grassroots movement to build a new Southern strategy that breaks down barriers to discussions of racial justice and generational poverty.31

Long Time Passing: Kronos Quartet and Friends Celebrate Pete Seeger32

Commissioned by the FreshGrass Foundation to celebrate the 2019 centennial of Seegers birth, the always innovative string quartet and talented vocalists like Maria Arnal, Sam Amidon, and Aoife ODonovan reimagined the folk singers songbook and added numbers from artists influenced by his radical humanity. Long Time Passing (Smithsonian Folkways) is both musically and politically brilliant. Its version of Zoe Mulfords The President Sang Amazing Grace, featuring the Ethiopian American singer Meklit, achieves the rare feat of being painful, beautiful, and healing at the same time.33

(Julien Hekimian / Getty Images)

Janelle Mones Turntables34

Turntables ignites with the singers call for a different vision with a new dream and this promise: We kicking out the old regime. Written for Stacey Abramss voting rights documentary, All In: The Fight for Democracy, the song (and a brilliant accompanying video with a spoken-word invocation from James Baldwin) aligns history with a new generations demands for systemic change. Its release capped a remarkable year for Mone, which began with a riveting Academy Awards performance that saw her celebrating Black History Month and pioneering women before declaring, Im so proud to stand here as a Black queer artist telling stories.35

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These Progressives Helped Keep Hope Alive in 2020and Prepare Us for 2021 - The Nation