I have been voting since 1972 and in that time I have only voted for one winner, 1976….not something to be proud of I realize but it also says a lot about the quality of the candidates……basically the quality sucks!
I have said over the years that liberals have great ideas but truly suck at the game of politics. They seem to not have the balls to go after the prize with gusto they sit back and pray for bi-partisanship….a pipe dream.
The New Republic tries to explain why liberals are such pansies when it comes to politics.
The editors ask if today’s liberalism is equipped to win “this battle,” too sprawling a question rooted in too runny a concept. We have more than just one current battle! Then, after the mystery of the “battle,” there’s the gooey concept of “today’s liberalism.” For this historian, “today” reaches back into the early twentieth century, where “liberalism” as a living, breathing, inspiring-but-myopic phenomenon resides in my own historical imagination. I know histories of liberalism date its origins to anti-monarchy, to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. But in American history, where monarchy was a foreign idea and slaveholding handicapped the Founding Fathers’ civic imagination, liberalism only truly starts to come alive in the Progressive era. The founding of The New Republic in 1914 embodied liberalism institutionally. While definitions of liberalism vary tremendously, The New Republic and its history offer means of thinking about a concept with a political history that is, in large part, a partisan history.
Erstwhile TNR editor Franklin Foer sees former Republican President Theodore Roosevelt as a crucial figure in The New Republic’s birth. Roosevelt’s 1912 National Progressive Party presidential campaign did not succeed, but his campaign platform called for including a minimum wage and “a single national health service.” Roosevelt’s blessing signaled TNR’s founders of the approval, Foer says, of “T.R.’s social set—Harvard and Yale men with an intellectual proclivity and a progressive bent.” At the time, they were most likely Republicans.
TNR’s founders were the crème de la crème of American “progressivism,” a description they initially preferred to “liberalism,” which they associated with Democratic President Woodrow Wilson’s Southern, states’ rights, small government creed. TNR’s founders’ book titles broadcast their optimism: Herbert Croly, a Harvard man married to a wealthy wife, had published The Promise of American Life in 1909 and Progressive Democracy in 1914, both with the Macmillan Company, among the most prestigious publishers of the time. Walter Weyl, a Wharton School-Penn man who also married into wealth, published The New Democracy: An Essay on Certain Political and Economic Tendencies in the United States with Macmillan in 1912. Another founder, Walter Lippmann, also a Harvard man, had published his influential A Preface to Politics with the New York publisher Mitchell Kennerley in 1913. These were no obscure, self-publishing radicals, and they received sizable and repeated infusions of money from the cotton-gin-Whitney heiress Dorothy Payne Whitney and her investment banker husband, Willard Straight, a Cornell man.
The Progressive Party’s 1912 platform included a brief “Equal Suffrage” plank advocating voting rights for women but made no mention of the disfranchisement of Black men in the South. This omission carried over in the Progressive Party’s credentials committee’s recognition of white Southern delegates and its refusal to seat Southern Black delegates. This is where early-twentieth-century liberalism gets personal for me.
https://newrepublic.com/article/182384/liberalism-race-gaza-trumpism
A very nice trip down memory lane but it did not address the lack of backbone of liberals once elected.
I think the Progressive Party had great ideas and a goddamn shame they did not get a chance to prove it…..their ideas translate well into the 21st century….and then money happened.
There has always been money in politics I am not naive but the court allowed boat loads of it to travel through the political system…..and when you have that much corruption you get the system as it is today….broken and dysfunctional.
But that is what I think.
Educate, Agitate
I Read, I Write, You Know
cognito ergo agito
Daily Agitator 
I agree that the liberals/progressives (we really need a better term for this because the GOP has co-opted those terms and turned them into knee jerk insults) have been pretty much totally ineffective. Part of it is that they lack leadership with the strength of character to herd them all together and develop a unified message to counter the far right’s campaign of fear. Without a single, unified message, they’re scattered all over the place. “We should do this” or “maybe this would be a good idea”, or “it would be nice if we could do that”… The end result is that there is nothing unifying that they all can support without reservation. And the American people, for better or worse, can’t focus on more than one concept at the same time, it seems.
The media doesn’t help things, either. Going back to the late 1800s to the days of Hearst and Pulitzer the media has almost always gone down the path of yellow journalism, concentrating on dramatic and often misleading headlines, sensationalism, exaggeration, etc. instead of actual facts, in order to pump up sales. And it’s gotten worse until today most of the mainstream media is little more than a joke. So they latch onto the outrageous claims of the far right, their scapegoating, fear baiting, etc. because it generates page views while the democratic message is either buried or not covered at all unless it becomes the focus of the extremists rantings.
I agree….that to me is our single problem….one issue voters….it seems they cannot do any real work on issues just take some overpaid clown ‘s word for it. (I will be using this one in a post today)…..chuq
Whatever name they use, their opponents with their slavish cult followers only ever read or hear ‘Communist’. And some of those progressives might well be seduced by money and influence once they actually win an election.
Best wishes, Pete.
Knowing the greed of Americans I fear for that as well. chuq
The neoliberal revolution of Reagan/Thatcher achieved some truly transformational goals, most importantly:
It took decades to implement, but once it was achieved the Democratic Party in the U.S. became compliant and subordinate. Now, the Democratic establishment is an enforcement mechanism for that system. Its candidates will say anything to get elected as a means to serve their own self-interest and have no intention whatsoever to actually do what they said. This is the epitome of corruption.
Regarding the historical, ideological divisions within the Democratic Party, I wrote a dissertation in 2013 which made some headlines in progressive circles. It is a little dated now, but still relevant:
The difference between Liberals and Progressives and why it matters | The Secular Jurist
A great piece I differ from you on some points but they are minor….excellent job Robert. chuq
Thanks, chuq. It is a little dated now.
Sound observation…well done chuq