Archive for the ‘Progressives’ Category
Burlington Progressives Pick Two More Candidates for March Ballot – Seven Days
Burlington Progressives endorsed two more candidates for the Town Meeting Day ballot at a special caucus on Thursday night.
Dan Castrigano is running as a Progressive in Ward 4, and Lena Greenberg is running as an independent in Ward 5. The candidates are challenging Democratic incumbents Sarah Carpenter and Ben Traverse, respectively, on March 5.
The Progressive-endorsed candidates, who ran unopposed, won the backing by electronic ballot. Nine people participated in the virtual forum.
Progs have endorsed candidates in all eight wards, which are up for reelection on March 5.Democrats, meantime, are running candidates everywhere but in Ward 2, leaving Progressive incumbent Councilor Gene Bergman unopposed. The Dems, though, may still nominate someone before the January 29 filing deadline,Burlington Democratic Party chair Adam Roof said this week.
Burlington Progs Hightower, Magee Won't Run for Reelection
By Courtney Lamdin
News
Castrigano, a New North End resident, works for ReSOURCE's YouthBuild job training program. He's also an organizer with Flight Free Vermont, whose mission is to reduce air travel, and Safe Landing BTV, a campaign to halve carbon emissions at Burlington International Airport by 2030. Both he and Greenberg want to close the city's biomass-fueled McNeil Generating Station.
Castrigano's robust council climate platform includes mandating environmental education in Burlington schools, banning gas-powered lawn and garden equipment, and launching a city-wide tree planting campaign, his website says. He would also push for building more bicycle parking and bus stop shelters.
Castrigano supports rent stabilization, building transitional housing for people with substance-use disorder and opening an overdose prevention center. He also wants to upzone neighborhoods around major employers to reduce vehicle emissions.
"We have to legalize more housing within the city," Castrigano said at Thursday's caucus. "A dense, mixed-use city is strong, safe, more socially connected and more fiscally sound."
Caucus-goer Colin Larsen, who nominated Castrigano, said the candidate would bring new ideas to the council. "We need leaders who are going to push against the status quo," he said. "Dan is someone who always pushes."
Greenberg, who uses they/them pronouns, lives in the King/Maple streets neighborhood and serves on the Ward 5 Neighborhood Planning Assembly steering committee. They work as a consultant focused on food and climate issues in urban areas.
Greenberg supports moving to an income-basedmunicipalproperty tax and offering rent rebates to help low-income tenants, according to their website. They alsowant the city to hire more unarmed social workers; install needle disposal boxes in public parks; and help fund organizations that provide emergency food, such as food shelves and mutual aid groups.
Burlington Council Approves Change to Allow Housing in South End District
By Courtney Lamdin
News
On Thursday evening, Greenberg said the housing shortage underlies other challenges in the city, including public safety.
"If we take the time to build affordable housing and work in [the] community, we are going to see change in a way that adding more police is not going to," Greenberg said.
Council races will be competitive this election cycle, particularly with a contested mayoral race. Democrats will seek to retain their functional majority on the council, and Progressives will try to win back some of the seats they've lost in recent elections.
The Progs also wants to keep the seats that party incumbents are vacating. Councilor Zoraya Hightower is stepping down in Ward 1 and will be replaced by either Progressive Carter Neubieser or Democrat Geoff Hand. Councilor Joe Magee isn't running again in Ward 3, opening the door for either Prog-backed Joe Kane or Dem contender Malik Mines.
A win by Castrigano or Greenberg in Wards 4 and 5 would be an upset and not just because they'd knock off incumbents: A Prog hasn't held either seat for more than a decade.
Burlington Dems Cruise to Victory on Town Meeting Day
By Courtney Lamdin
News
"There is so much potential for change in this city that we haven't tapped into yet," Greenberg said. "That really excites me."
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Burlington Progressives Pick Two More Candidates for March Ballot - Seven Days
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Are Young People Actually Progressive? – New York Magazine
Students at a DeSantis speech in April. Photo: JUSTIN IDE/REUTERS
For the past two decades, young people were widely assumed to have an ironclad loyalty to the Democratic Party. Democrats believed this, as did Republicans and journalists. So deeply ingrained was this belief that when polls began to show President Biden losing to Donald Trump in the 2024 race, critics sometimes disregarded them on the grounds that these surveys showed young people favoring Trump a result nobody could accept.
When a Washington PostABC News poll in September found a ten-point Trump lead, for example, analyst G. Elliott Morris dismissed it as an outlier in part because it showed voters between the ages of 18 and 29 favoring Trump over Biden 48-to-41 percent. Morris noted that an ABC News exit poll from the 2020 election showed Biden winning that group by 24 points, which would mean a 31-point swing toward Trump in the past few years more than twice as much as the overall population shifted.
Morris conceded it was possible if young people and people of color are dissatisfied with the progress Biden has made or upset that he is running for reelection, they could be withholding their support for him in polls as a way to register their displeasure with the situation. Ultimately, however, they may vote for him anyway. In other words, young voters might say they are voting for Trump because they are upset Biden isnt liberal enough. But they couldnt really mean it. Right?
It seems, alas, that they do. A New York Times poll published in December is the latest to find Trump leading Biden among young voters. The unthinkable has become, at least for the time being, undeniable.
The reverberations from this change run even deeper than the obviously profound implications for the presidential race and the future of American democracy. The progressive movement made a giant bet on mobilizing young voters. That strategy, invested with buoyant hopes and vast sums of money, is now in ruins.
Two decades ago, demographer Ruy Teixeira and journalist John B. Judis wrote The Emerging Democratic Majority, which posited educated professionals were defecting from the Republican Party to join with the Democrats base of racial minorities, union members, and the poor. After Barack Obamas two election victories, the prophecy seemed to be at hand: a potential coalition with greater numbers than the GOPs dwindling core of older white voters.
In this new world, the Democrats task was to actualize their emerging majority by bringing young voters heavily nonwhite and presumed to be progressive to the polls. Republicans believed the same thing, which is why they responded to Obamas elections by obsessively closing down polling locations, reducing early voting, requiring voters to jump through bureaucratic hoops to cast a ballot, and enacting other restrictions meant to suppress the youth vote.
Liberal donors poured resources into an endless array of supposed grassroots organizations designed to turn out young, and especially nonwhite, voters. The theory was that these potential voters held left-wing views and would be roused to vote only if they could be convinced Democrats would take firm progressive positions. Democrats desperately need a bold, progressive agenda and to build the kind of relationships in Florida that cant be forged overnight, argued one activist in 2019, echoing what activists were saying in other states.
Activists tended to import the language and concepts of the academic left into their work. Young people have expressed that true engagement means investing in young people as leaders and amplifying work already being done in their communities, centering social justice and intersectionality, and meeting young people where they are, wrote one. These, in turn, found their way into the rhetoric of Democratic politicians like Hillary Clinton (We face a complex set of economic, social, and political challenges. They are intersectional, they are reinforcing, and we have got to take them all on) and Bernie Sanders (In order to transform this country into a nation that affirms the value of its people of color, we must address the five central types of violence waged against black, brown and Indigenous Americans: physical, political, legal, economic, and environmental).
The primary analytic failure in this strategy was a mistaken assumption an assumption, to be clear, I made that race would be the determinative factor in future elections. The 2012 presidential election turned out to be the apogee of racial polarization in the electorate with 93 percent of Black voters going for Obama over his rival Mitt Romney. Republicans there-after gained voting share among minority voters not by moving to the center on immigration and other social issues, as some of them wished to do after Romneys debacle, but by nominating Trump.
And contrary to the belief that nonwhite voters would anchor the Democratic Partys progressive wing, theyve actually anchored its moderate wing. As political analyst Lauren Harper points out, Black Democrats are more likely than white Democrats to identify as moderate or conservative and take more moderate positions than white Democrats on a host of issues: They favor stricter immigration enforcement, prioritizing fossil-fuel production over mitigating climate change, increasing spending on reducing crime, opposing abortion, etc. (Hispanics are generally in the middle: to the left of Black Democrats but to the right of white ones.)
Progressive activist groups have built a business model out of claiming they represent the beliefs of young nonwhite voters and warning Democrats must endorse their positions or risk demoralizing these crucial constituencies. The media has often accepted these claims uncritically. After Bidens 2022 State of the Union address downplayed climate change and argued for greater law-enforcement resources, the Associated Press concluded his speech could alienate the coalition of Black people, young people, progressives, and independents and his call for police funding in particular was seen by some as a tone-deaf overture to white voters at the expense of millions of Black Americans.
The danger is not that young voters, massively demoralized by Biden, will merely sit on their hands in 2024. Its that they will actually vote for Republicans. This dynamic also applies to the latest issue where Biden is bleeding support from young people: the war in Gaza, which has pushed young voters toward Trump. This suggests that, while many young voters have views on the Middle East roughly aligned with the left wing of the Democratic Party rather than its centrist flank, many of those who oppose Israels actions in Gaza are also alienated from progressive ideas in general.
Instead of racial polarization, the electorate has increasingly been defined by educational polarization. Democrats have gained college-educated white voters and lost nonwhite voters who lack college degrees. This shift has flipped the traditional assumptions about voter turnout upside-down.
The old model was that Democrats thrived in high-turnout elections, like presidential contests, while doing poorly in low-turnout midterm elections. Political analysts increasingly talk about two American electorates: the one that picks presidents (and has awarded Democrats the popular vote in five of the past six presidential races) and the one that determines midterms (which have usually favored Republicans since 1994), wrote commentator Ronald Brownstein in 2014.
Thats all out the window now. In the 2022 midterm elections, as well as in a series of other low-turnout special legislative elections and ballot referenda that tend to attract the most dedicated and organized citizens, Democrats performed shockingly well. But this shouldnt be a shock at all. The Times finds Biden doing noticeably worse among young voters who didnt vote in 2020 than among those who did. The new rule is that the fewer people who show up to vote, the better Democrats do. It would be a delicious irony if the GOPs relentless enforcement of voter-suppression laws ultimately does Trump in. But hoping for low turnout is a thin reed on which to base the salvation of democracy.
Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 1, 2024, issue of New YorkMagazine.
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Are Young People Actually Progressive? - New York Magazine
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Democrats and progressives react to Gov. Scott’s State of the State – WPTZ
Democrats and progressives react to Gov. Scott's State of the State WPTZ
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Democrats and progressives react to Gov. Scott's State of the State - WPTZ
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Let’s Seize This Opportunity to Destroy Harvard! – The Intercept
The entrance to Harvard Yard in Cambridge, Mass., on Jan. 2, 2024.
Should Claudine Gay have resigned as president of Harvard? Are conservatives right that a rabidly pro-Hamas left has captured Harvard? Are liberals correct that the fascistic right has launched an all-out assault on academic freedom, at Harvard? The New York Times has explored these questions (about Harvard) over the course of almost 17,000 articles.
These are indeed fascinating topics. However, they ignore a key issue: That for anyone with a progressive perspective, Harvard should neither be reformed (to eliminate its wokeness) nor protected (from the forces of reaction). Rather, it should be razed to the ground.
Then, after Harvard has been razed, we must salt the earth, Carthage-style, so a new Harvard does not grow in its place. Next we have to destroy the rest of the Ivy League. Finally, anyone with enough energy left over should sail an emissions-free ship through the Panama Canal to California and obliterate Stanford.
Lets start with a story that explains why Im so personally committed to this cause. Then we can move on to a more rational explanation of why you should be too.
On January 16, 1991, I was a senior at Yale. That night at 9 p.m., George H.W. Bush, president of the United States and Yale alumnus, announced the commencement of the first Gulf War.
This was a time of such barbarism that there was no internet. Almost no students had a television in their room. So the only way I could find out what was happening was to go to my dorms common room, which did have a big TV.
When I got there that night, there was a single person there. She was not a Yale student, and she was not a Yale professor. She was a woman who worked in the dining hall. Anyone familiar with Yale and New Haven, Connecticut, will know this means she was likely either Italian American or African American; she was African American.
She was watching CNN with fervent concentration. I soon learned this was because her son was in the Marines and was stationed in Saudi Arabia on the border with Kuwait, and she was (she did not say this) terrified that he was about to die. I had never before seen a human being whose every atom was vibrating with fear.
It was impossible for me not to think about the debate about the coming war Id already had with Yale friends. Some supported it; some didnt. But we all wanted to talk about whether we would be willing to fight in it if the draft was reinstated. I finally said: This is all moot. If things go so badly that they have to draft people out of Yale, the U.S. government will wrap it up. The people who run America dont care about this so much that theyd risk their own children.
This sounds like a nice tale about how sensitive and wise I was as a young man. Theres more to it, though. As I watched Baghdad being bombed, and untold numbers of humans being converted into wet, red scraps of flesh, a tide of emotion swept over me unbidden. It was exultation.
I had no idea before that moment that this potential existed inside of me. I knew nothing at all of the history of the Middle East or the specifics of that war. So this didnt emerge from my cerebrum, the part of our brains that thinks. It was from my amygdala, the part of our brains that probably hasnt changed much since we were Homo erectus a million years ago. I had unknowingly absorbed a vague sense that there were these dusky foreigners out there, led by a two-bit dictator whod gotten too big for his britches, who thought that they could defy us, and were being taught that they could not.
The us part was key. Us didnt mean America, but rather the small group of people in charge of America. And I had unconsciously come to believe that, as a Yale student, I was a member of this groups junior varsity.
I find this excruciating to think about today. But Im glad I experienced it, because it gave me a visceral sense of how the world feels to the people who ultimately run places like Harvard and Yale.
So thats my personal animus. But it should be shared by everyone whod like the U.S. to be a real democracy.
Heres a measure of the stranglehold the Ivy League has over the commanding heights of the U.S. political system: From 1989 to 2021, a period covering 32 years, five presidents, and eight presidential terms, every U.S. president went to an Ivy League school as an undergraduate or graduate. Even more incredibly, for 28 straight years from 1989 to 2017,the president went to either Harvard or Yale or, in the case of George W. Bush, both. Then the Harvard/Yale streak was broken by Donald Trump, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. Joe Biden went to the non-Ivy University of Delaware.
Over this time, Americans rarely had the option to vote against the Ivy League. Its not just that all of the candidates who won the elections between 1988 and 2016 went to Ivy League schools: Six of the eight candidates who lost went to Harvard or Yale. The two exceptions were Bob Dole in 1996 (Washburn University) and John McCain in 2008 (U.S. Naval Academy).
Then look at the Supreme Court. Eight of the current nine justices went to law school at either Harvard or Yale. The one exception, Amy Coney Barrett, replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who went to Harvard Law.
On its face, our era of Ivy dominance is the sign of a society thats calcified. You need access to Americas networks of money and power to rise to the tippy top, and going to an Ivy League school is now a requirement for that access.
This gatekeeping would be bad enough if these schools or anyone could reliably measure some type of merit. People change all their lives, and we shouldnt have to rely on a cohort of 50-year-olds who fit through an incredibly narrow aperture when they were 18 or 22.
But of course Ivy League colleges dont actually admit students based on anything recognizable as merit. Anyone whos attended one knows they look for young people who are 1) extremely good at figuring out what the rules are and then faithfully following them, and 2) clubbable and ingenuous with their elders.
I dont agree with Reihan Salam, the head of the conservative Manhattan Institute, about much. (Christopher Rufo, the right-wing activist instrumental in bringing down Claudine Gay, is senior fellow and director of the initiative on critical race there.) But Salam Harvard 01 once argued, Kids who attend elite schools are a mixed bag, and the vast majority are crashing bores. The admissions process tends to select for crashing bores. He was correct.
Harkness Tower stands on the Yale University campus in New Haven, Conn.
This doesnt mean progressives should join in the current conservative crusade against Harvard. The right opposes education in general, because they realize that people thinking for themselves is the only thing that could make their greatest fear a democratization of the U.S. come to pass. And they recognize that even at Ivy League schools there is a danger this kind of thinking can occasionally happen.
Progressives should not defend Harvard. We could defend the concept of academic insulation from donor pressure, but this is a concept much more than a reality. Harvards $50 billion-plus endowment makes it one of the 10 largest hedge funds in the U.S. Above all, we have to understand Harvard will never defend us; it will always be on the side of the money.
However, our program of destroying Harvard and its brethren should be in service to a larger, positive agenda. What we want is a country of education for everyone: high-quality public universities open to people of all ages and incomes, beautiful public schools for everyone before that, and enormous libraries in every American neighborhood.
If you went to an Ivy League school, you know enough to nod knowingly when anyone mentions this famous James Madison quote: Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
But whats not taught in class is that this was from a letter Madison wrote to a friend about the importance of public education of all forms everywhere, including in Kentucky specifically. Learned Institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty & dangerous encroachments on the public liberty, he wrote. They multiply the educated individuals from among whom the people may elect a due portion of their public Agents of every description.
What Madison didnt say was, Lets just have a few colleges like the place I went, Princeton, and choose every president from them. We can recover Madisons vision, but first we need to bulldoze the institutions in its way.
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Let's Seize This Opportunity to Destroy Harvard! - The Intercept
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