Tag: progressivism
Is The Left Really Wary Of Clinton?

Is The Left Really Wary Of Clinton?

The hard left can be an unforgiving crowd, not always mindful of the give-and-take required to get things done. Donald Trump’s fascist-lite ravings are anathema to them, but with moderate Republicans migrating to Hillary Clinton, some on the left worry that a President Clinton might feel less obliged to push a vigorous liberal program.

Or perhaps not. The political media thrives on a boiling pot. Clinton’s widening lead in the polls drains some drama from the big story. The political punditry needs to drum up conflict, so why not revisit the alleged schism between Clinton and archliberals? The result is a largely fictional trend resting on a cherry-picked quote or two, but there you have it.

If the alliance between Clinton and moderate conservatives means finding common ground with reasonable Republicans, that would be a positive development, would it not? It would be a throwback to the era when the two parties made war but also made legislation.

Some of our friends on the right are saying, “Don’t get your hopes up too high. This support for Clinton is a one-time deal.” Once we bury the candidacy of the appalling Trump, it’s back to the races.

That’s one possibility. Another is that Trump spreads his collapse down the ballot and a party (Republican or a new one) emerges from the rubble creating a right-of-center coalition able to work with the left-of-center one.

It’s hard to imagine sophisticated liberals doubting Clinton’s devotion to the cause after her recent speech on economic policy. Unless it’s been forgotten. (Clinton gave it a whole week ago.)

So let’s refresh memories. Clinton called for raising taxes on the rich and adding new taxes on high-frequency traders and companies moving overseas. She would gradually raise the federal minimum wage from today’s paltry $7.25 an hour to $12 an hour.

Clinton would also hike spending on roads, airports and other infrastructure — and on green energy — by nearly $300 billion, creating some 7 million jobs. She’d make state and community colleges tuition-free for middle-class families.

These are core progressive proposals, some inspired or pushed along by Bernie Sanders’ campaign. The Democratic Party platform, meanwhile, is being called the most progressive in history.

So what would liberals complain about? It can’t be that she welcomes the support of officials from the George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan administrations. The “we can’t shake hands with the other party” is vulgar tea party militarism. (The Trump team would be doing backflips if prominent Democrats were defecting to its side.)

We get it. Some liberals would prefer that the race center more on their good proposals and less on what’s so horrifying about Trump.

That could explain why Adam Green of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee framed Clinton’s desire to do big-tent politics as a “double-edged sword.” Green also noted that revulsion toward Trump could bring more progressives into Washington, and that would be a good thing.

By the way, “moderate” is not a dirty word,” but “mandate” may be becoming one. Some on the right are already saying, in the words of a former Ted Cruz aide, “Clinton is not likely to emerge with a legislative mandate.”

Let us recall that in the election of 2000, George W. won by 537 votes in Florida while losing the popular vote by a half-million. Nonetheless, he claimed a mandate, pushing through deep tax cuts for the rich, among other radical policies.

The mandate is whatever the winner decides it is. And if you want to win the presidency in this highly divided country of ours, two blades are better than one.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached atfharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Photo: Hillary Clinton speaks during a campaign event with Vice-President Joe Biden in Scranton, Pennsylvania. REUTERS/Charles Mostoller

Will Jill Stein Be 2016’s Ralph Nader?

Will Jill Stein Be 2016’s Ralph Nader?

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are soaking up the spotlight — for now. But there are others chasing the presidency and a record number of voters dissatisfied with those two choices.

Bernie Sanders’ endorsement of Hillary Clinton last Tuesday released a wave of anger from the purists among his supporters. And at least some of them are turning away from the Democratic Party altogether — towards Green Party nominee Dr. Jill Stein.

The #NeverHillary movement among progressives is bigger than you think: A Bloomberg poll conducted July 10-13, before Sanders’ endorsement, found that only 55 percent of Sanders supporters were ready for Hillary — and after Sanders’ endorsement of Clinton, the Green Party’s Dr. Jill Stein is making an appeal to voters looking for a third way, co-opting much of Sanders’ “revolutionary” messaging. 

Stein’s push to bring Sanders supporters over to the Green Party may provide some financial relief, at least: According to her campaign, donations increased by nearly 1000 percent after Sander’s endorsement of Clinton.

Since last Tuesday, when Sanders endorsed Clinton, the Green Party received over $80,000 in donations, more than half of which came from first-time donors, it said. Half of these contributions were under $50, and about 615 of them were $27 donations, which is the average amount people contributed to Sanders’ campaign, a factoid that became a catchphrase in his stump speeches.

Several of Sanders’ most well-known supporters have moved to support Stein. Activist and scholar Cornel West, recently appointed by Sanders to the Democratic Convention’s platform committee, announced that he will back Stein, calling her “the only true progressive woman in the race.”

“This November, we need change. Yet we are tied in a choice between Trump, who would be a neo-fascist catastrophe, and Clinton, a neo-liberal disaster. That’s why I am supporting Jill Stein. I am with her — the only progressive woman in the race — because we’ve got to get beyond this lock-jaw situation,” West said in an editorial for The Guardian.

In 2012, West led an effort to find a Democratic primary challenger to run against President Obama. When that failed, he backed Obama’s reelection, though reluctantly. “American politics are not a matter of voting your moral conscience — if I voted my moral conscience it would probably be for Jill Stein,” West said in an interview with Vice magazine in 2012.

Stein’s social media accounts were flooded with new likes, follows and engagements, and Google searches for her name skyrocketed. Still, many Americans don’t even know who she is. According to a May Quinnipiac poll, 87 percent of voters didn’t know enough about her to express an opinion.

Gary Johnson, the Libertarian choice, has gotten some attention and is polling at relatively high numbers as a result of the two major candidates’ low favorability ratings. Surveys including Stein (there aren’t many) show that she polls at two to four percent with registered voters. But overall, the Green Party’s candidate has struggled to get her name out there.

Who is Jill Stein?

Born in Chicago to parents of Russian Jewish descent, Stein graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1979, and went on to practice internal medicine for 25 years until her retirement in 2005, after which she became an environmental activist.

Her concern for environmental justice lead her to fight for campaign finance reform. Her website cites “sabotage of campaign finance reform by the Democratic Party” as ” pivotal event in Jill’s political development” that led her to the Green Party. Although a progressive on the political spectrum, Stein often takes aim at the Democratic Party and is planning to protest outside the DNC in Philadelphia. Her Twitter feed strikes more harshly at Hillary Clinton — and now, implicitly, Bernie Sanders — than Donald Trump.

In 2002 and again in 2010, Stein ran for governor of Massachusetts; her vote total in the 2010 election was 32,816, or 1.4 percent. She has also been elected twice to town meetings in Lexington, Massachusetts. She was also the Green Party’s presidential nominee in 2012 running against Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, appearing on 36 state ballots. Despite her low visibility, she actually holds the record for most votes received by a woman in a U.S. general presidential election, with 469,627 or 0.36 percent.

During the 2012 cycle, she was arrested along with her vice presidential candidate Cheri Honkala after trying to enter the Hofstra University debate between President Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney.

Stein’s “Power to the People” agenda promises to “end unemployment and poverty; avert climate catastrophe; build a sustainable, just economy; and recognize the dignity and human rights of everyone in our society and our world.” Her “New Green Deal,” outlines a transition to 100 percent clean renewable energy by 2030.

Like the Vermont senator, she supports a universal, single-payer health care insurance program, tuition-free public education from pre-school to university, a $15 federal minimum wage, and a ban on fracking. She has called for an ban on assault weapons, increased mental health funding, and an end to the “racist” War on Drugs including legalizing marijuana.

Stein is more of an isolationist than even Sanders: She proposes to “cut military spending by at least 50 percent and close the 700-plus foreign military bases that are turning our republic into a bankrupt empire,” close Guantanamo Bay, and pardon whistleblower Edward Snowden — while offering him a cabinet post.

Born Jewish, the now self-described agnostic has condemned Israeli occupation as “apartheid.” She supports the boycott of Israeli goods and an end to U.S. aid to Israel.

But will Stein be able to wrest Sanders’ insurgent progressive mantle away from the Clinton campaign — newly energized by the democratic socialist’s endorsement? Can Clinton convince young people that their priorities will be addressed in a Democratic administration? Many young voters don’t know who Ralph Nader is, or how he helped to deliver America into the hands of George W. Bush. It will be up to them to learn, and then decide.

Elizabeth Warren’s Still In Hot Water With Fellow Progressives Over Her Clinton Endorsement

Elizabeth Warren’s Still In Hot Water With Fellow Progressives Over Her Clinton Endorsement

Well before the July 4 weekend, there were plenty of political fireworks on social media and in the mainstream press around Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, progressive darling.

To the dismay of many of her supporters, Elizabeth Warren had endorsed Hillary Clinton and campaigned aggressively with her on the stump in Ohio, the two of them dressed in blue and lashing out at Donald Trump. Warren was by far the more electrifying speaker, telling an enthusiastic crowd in the Cincinnati Museum Center that Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, would “crush you into the dirt to get whatever he wants.”

Some pundits believe Warren would be an ideal running mate for Clinton in her second bid to occupy the White House. They note she has a strong record of attacking the big banks and a crowd-pleasing oratorical style that could draw a big portion of the 23 million votes Bernie Sanders received in the Democratic primaries out to support Clinton in the general election.

But Sanders’ more committed supporters regard Warren as damaged goods, a sell-out to a hawkish candidate with serious Wall Street connections. They also note that the folksy Massachusetts lawmaker had sharply criticized former Secretary of State Clinton in her 2003 book, The Two Income Trap, and later on Bill Moyers’ show for first opposing and then voting for legislation as a New York senator that would have made it more difficult for debt ridden Americans to file for bankruptcy. (Warren has since defended her position.)

“I Iiked Elizabeth Warren until the time she started being so opportunistic,” said Ted Zatlyn, a Sanders supporter and former managing editor for the Los Angeles Free Press, a now-defunct granddaddy of alt weeklies in California. He described Elizabeth Warren as a politician “in the negative sense.”

“What’s so odd is that she has been decrying the money system and yet she’s now supporting the candidate who’s hip deep in campaign funds from Wall Street,” he said. “So I’m disgusted with Elizabeth, to tell you the truth.”

At the same time, Zatlyn believes that Warren is the “obvious choice” for the Democratic ticket. “I hate to make predictions, but she’s the only one who can get Bernie’s followers. When she spoke as a warm up for Hillary [in Ohio], she gave a speech that brought the house down.”

Yale-educated attorney Laura Wilson, a partner in a Lyndonville, Vermont law firm, was once an ardent fan of Elizabeth Warren. No longer. She too says Warren “sold out” and wrecked her credibility as a progressive by endorsing Clinton before the Democratic convention in Philadelphia and by “hanging Bernie out to dry.”

Her main gripe is that Warren, long regarded as an ally of the democratic socialist from Vermont, stayed neutral during the primaries. She didn’t endorse Sanders “when her endorsement could have made a difference in Massachusetts, Illinois, Connecticut, California. It could have turned things around in New York” and other states, Wilson said.

Wilson, who doesn’t believe Warren will wind up as Clinton’s running mate, says that the former First Lady could face difficulties getting entrenched Sanders supporters to vote for her in the general election.

“Roughly 25 percent of them in the last polls I read said they will not vote for Hillary Clinton,” Wilson said. “When you put that together with the independents, she’ll have a problem for the general election. Bernie wins more independents than Hillary.”

A June 14 Bloomberg poll of likely general election voters found that 55 percent of Sanders supporters plan to vote for Clinton, 22 percent plan to vote for Donald Trump, and 18 percent plan to vote for Gary Johnson. A three-day CNN poll completed on June 19 found that 74 percent of Sanders supporters would vote for Clinton over Trump in November, given a choice between the two.

For their part, many Clinton supporters consider the die-hard Sanders partisans to be naïve and purer-than-thou in their attacks on the presumptive Democratic nominee and their more recent ones against Elizabeth Warren.

“For the past year, folks have been telling me that Liz Warren is the greatest human being to ever walk the face of the earth (I don’t disagree),” wrote music historian Pat Thomas, author of the 2012 book, Listen, Whitey: The Sound of Black Power, in a Facebook post on July 5. “Yet these same folks are now telling me she’s a horrible bitch.”

“Did it ever occur to you Facebook-trained political scientists that Liz can do more for you ‘working with Hillary’ than battling her?”

Most of Thomas’ Facebook friends seemed to agree. “What people don’t understand is that the Clintons (yes both), are malleable, follow the polls intensely, and can be pushed in the right direction, even though they have a very shaky moral compass of their own,” opined one. “Having fiery Warren on the inside can only help.”

Another commenter noted: “I can’t wait for the cries of SELLOUT!! once Bernie finally and unambiguously endorses Hillary.”

(That could happen sooner than later now that Sanders and Clinton are conferring about hosting a joint event in New Hampshire next week.)

As for Elizabeth Warren becoming a vice presidential candidate, Thomas told The National Memo Wednesday that it would be “foolish” for her to become Hillary’s running mate because “a vice president has no real clout. She can do more good working with Hillary” in the Senate. He adds: “But I think it’s naïve for people to think that she can remain fiercely independent and battle everyone with her saber sword and remain in Washington, D.C. Everyone has their price. There are so many compromises they have to make.”

Asked who purists on the left might accept as Clinton’s running mate, Ted Zatlyn (who intends to vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein for president), said he could think of only one national figure with enough integrity to fill that bill.

“But he’s dead,” he said of the late Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, a leading progressive Democrat who was killed in a plane crash in 2002.

Photo: Elizabeth Warren, candidate for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, addresses the second session of the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, U.S. September 5, 2012.    REUTERS/Jason Reed/File Photo

Progressive Patriotism — Not An Oxymoron

Progressive Patriotism — Not An Oxymoron

Published with permission from Alternet

July 4 is an occasion for Americans to express their patriotism. But the ways we do so are as diverse as our nation.

To some, patriotism means “my country—right or wrong.” To others, it means loyalty to a set of principles, and thus requires dissent and criticism when those in power violate those standards. One version of patriotism suggests “Love it or leave it.” The other version means “Love it and fix it.”

Former President George W. Bush questioned the patriotism of anyone who challenged his war on terrorism. In his 2001 State of the Union address, for example, Bush claimed, “You’re either with us, or with the terrorists.” He introduced the Patriot Act to codify this view, giving the government new powers to suppress dissent. (The anti-war movement countered with bumper stickers illustrated with an American flag that proclaimed “Peace is Patriotic.”)

In contrast, President Barack Obama has said: “I have no doubt that, in the face of impossible odds, people who love their country can change it.” He observed that, “Loving your country shouldn’t just mean watching fireworks on the Fourth of July. Loving your country must mean accepting your responsibility to do your part to change it. If you do, your life will be richer, our country will be stronger.” He was echoing the words of Rev. Martin Luther King, who declared, in a speech during the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, “the great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right.”

After his followers began chanting “Build that Wall” at a rally last month in Tampa, Donald Trump interrupted his speech and gave a bear hug to an American flag on the stage behind him—apparently as a way to demonstrate his patriotism. (Note: You can see a priceless image of the cringeworthy embrace here.)

Displaying the flag—on one’s house, business, or car, even on coffee mugs, clothing, and tattoos— is a traditional way for people to voice their love of country. Jodi Goglio, chief operating officer at Eder Flag Manufacturing Co. in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, reports that the firm is having a banner year. Sales are up 15% from a year ago, in part because this is a national election year and political events need flags.

Ironically, about 6% of all American flags sold in the U.S. are made in China. Surely Trump, who wants to “make America great again” and “bring jobs home” would support legislation requiring that all American flags be manufactured in this country. But that would conflict with Trump’s own business practices. The entire Donald J. Trump Collection of clothing—including men’s dress shirts, suits, ties and accessories—is made in factories overseas, mostly in China, Bangladesh, and Central America, to take advantage of cheap labor.  What kind of patriotism is that?

Trump follows in the tradition of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, America’s largest corporation, who promoted the motto “Buy American.” But today the retail giant, now owned by his heirs, imports most of its merchandise from Asia, much of it made under inhumane sweatshop conditions

Progressives understand that people can disagree with their government and still love their country and its ideals. The flag, as a symbol of the nation, is not owned by the administration in power, but by the people. We battle over what it means, but all Americans—across the political spectrum—have an equal right to claim the flag as their own.

Indeed, throughout U.S. history, many American radicals and progressive reformers have proudly asserted their patriotism. To them, America stood for basic democratic values—economic and social equality, mass participation in politics, free speech and civil liberties, elimination of the second-class citizenship of women and racial minorities, a welcome mat for the world’s oppressed people. The reality of corporate power, right-wing xenophobia, and social injustice only fueled progressives’ allegiance to these principles and the struggle to achieve them.

Most Americans are unaware that much of our patriotic culture—including many of the leading symbols and songs—was created by people with decidedly progressive sympathies.

For example, the Pledge of Allegiance was authored and promoted by Rev. Francis Bellamy, a leading Christian socialist. Bellamy penned the Pledge of Allegiance in 1892 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ discovery of America by promoting use of the flag in public schools.

It was the Gilded Age, an era of major political and social conflict. Reformers were outraged by the widening gap between rich and poor, and the behavior of corporate robber barons who were exploiting workers, gouging consumers, and corrupting politics with their money. Workers were organizing unions. Farmers joined forces in the Populist movement to leash the power of banks, railroads, and utility companies. Progressive reformers fought for child labor laws, against slum housing, and in favor of women’s suffrage. Radicals were gaining new converts.

In foreign affairs, Americans were battling over the nation’s role in the world. America was beginning to act like an imperial power, justifying its expansion with a combination of white supremacy, manifest destiny, and spreading democracy. At the time, nativist groups in the North and Midwest as well as the South were pushing for restrictions on immigrants—Catholics, Jews, and Asians—deemed to be polluting Protestant America. In the South, the outcome of the Civil War still inflamed regional passions. Many Southerners, including Civil War veterans, swore allegiance to the Confederate flag.

Bellamy (cousin of best-selling radical writer Edward Bellamy) believed that unbridled capitalism, materialism, and individualism betrayed America’s promise. He hoped the Pledge of Allegiance would promote a different moral vision to counter the rampant greed he thought was undermining the nation. Bellamy initially intended to use the phrase “liberty, fraternity and equality,” but concluded that the radical rhetoric of the French Revolution wouldn’t sit well with many Americans. So he coined the phrase, “one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all,” intending it to express a more egalitarian vision of America, a secular patriotism to help unite a divided nation.

Or consider the lines inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Emma Lazarus was a poet of considerable reputation in her day, who was a strong supporter of Henry George and his “socialistic” single-tax program, and a friend of William Morris, a leading British socialist. Her welcome to the “wretched refuse” of the earth, written in 1883, was an effort to project an inclusive and egalitarian definition of the American Dream.

And there was Katharine Lee Bates, a professor of English at Wellesley College. Bates was an accomplished and published poet, whose book America the Beautiful and Other Poems includes a sequence of poems expressing outrage at U.S. imperialism in the Philippines. A member of progressive-reform circles in the Boston area, concerned about labor rights, urban slums and women’s suffrage, an ardent feminist, for decades she lived with and loved her Wellesley colleague Katharine Coman, an economist and social activist.

“America the Beautiful,” written in 1893, not only speaks to the beauty of the American continent but also reflects her view that U.S. imperialism undermines the nation’s core values of freedom and liberty. The poem’s final words—”and crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea”—are an appeal for social justice rather than the pursuit of wealth.

In the Depression years and during World War II, the fusion of populist, egalitarian and anti-racist values with patriotic expression reached full flower.

Langston Hughes’ poem, “Let America Be America Again,” written in 1936, contrasted the nation’s promise with its mistreatment of his fellow African-Americans, the poor, Native Americans, workers, farmers and immigrants:

O, let my land be a land where Liberty

Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath

But opportunity is real, and life is free

Equality is in the air we breathe.

In 1939, composer Earl Robinson teamed with lyricist John La Touche to write “Ballad for Americans,” which was performed on the CBS radio network by Paul Robeson, accompanied by chorus and orchestra. This 11-minute cantata provided a musical review of American history, depicted as a struggle between the “nobody who’s everybody” and an elite that fails to understand the real, democratic essence of America.

Robeson, at the time one of the best-known performers on the world stage, became, through this work, a voice of America. Broadcasts and recordings of “Ballad for Americans” (by Bing Crosby as well as Robeson) were immensely popular. In the summer of 1940, it was performed at the national conventions of both the Republican and Communist parties. The work soon became a staple in school choral performances, but it was literally ripped out of many public school songbooks after Robinson and Robeson were identified with the radical left and blacklisted during the McCarthy period. Since then, however, “Ballad for Americans” has been periodically revived, notably during the bicentennial celebration in 1976, when a number of pop and country singers performed it in concerts and on TV.

Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” and “A Lincoln Portrait,” both written in 1942, are now patriotic musical standards, regularly performed at major civic events. Few Americans know that Copland was a member of a radical composers’ group.

Many Americans consider Woody Guthrie’s song “This Land Is Your Land,” penned in 1940, to be our unofficial national anthem. Guthrie, a radical, was inspired to write the song as an answer to Irving Berlin’s popular “God Bless America,” which he thought failed to recognize that it was the “people” to whom America belonged.

The words to “This Land Is Your Land” reflect Guthrie’s assumption that patriotism and support for the underdog were interconnected. In this song, Guthrie celebrated America’s natural beauty and bounty, but criticized the country for its failure to share its riches. This is reflected in the song’s last and least-known verse, which Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen included when they performed the song in January 2009 at a pre-inaugural concert in front of the Lincoln Memorial, with President-elect Obama in the audience:

One bright sunny morning;

In the shadow of the steeple;

By the relief office;

I saw my people.

 As they stood hungry;

I stood there wondering;

If this land was made for you and me.

During the 1960s, American progressives continued to seek ways to fuse their love of country with their opposition to the government’s policies. The March on Washington in 1963 gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, where Martin Luther King Jr. famously quoted the words to “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” repeating the phrase “Let freedom ring” 11 times.

Phil Ochs, then part of a new generation of politically conscious singer-songwriters who emerged during the 1960s, wrote an anthem in the Guthrie vein, “The Power and the Glory,” that coupled love of country with a strong plea for justice and equality. The words to the chorus echo the sentiments of the anti-Vietnam War movement:

Here is a land full of power and glory;

 Beauty that words cannot recall;

 Oh her power shall rest on the strength of her freedom;

Her glory shall rest on us all.

One of its stanzas updated Guthrie’s combination of outrage and patriotism:

Yet she’s only as rich as the poorest of her poor;

 Only as free as the padlocked prison door;

 Only as strong as our love for this land;

 Only as tall as we stand.

This song later became part of the repertoire of the U.S. Army band.

And in 1968, in a famous anti-war speech, Norman Thomas, the aging leader of the Socialist Party, proclaimed, “I come to cleanse the American flag, not burn it.”

In recent decades, Bruce Springsteen has most closely followed in the Guthrie tradition. From “Born in the USA,” to his songs about Tom Joad (the militant protagonist in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath), to his anthem about the 9/11 tragedy (“Empty Sky”), to his album Wrecking Ball (including its opening song, “We Take Care of Our Own”), Springsteen has championed the downtrodden while challenging America to live up to its ideals.

Steve (“Little Stevie”) Van Zandt is best known as the guitarist with Springsteen’s E Street Band and for his role as Silvio Dante, Tony Soprano’s sidekick on the TV show, “The Sopranos.” But his most enduring legacy should be his love song about America, “I Am a Patriot,” including these lyrics:

I am a patriot, and I love my country;

Because my country is all I know.

 Wanna be with my family;

People who understand me;

 I got no place else to go.

And I ain’t no communist,

And I ain’t no socialist,

And I ain’t no capitalist,

And I ain’t no imperialist,

 And I ain’t no Democrat,

Sure ain’t no Republican either,

I only know one party,

And that is freedom.

Since the American Revolution, each generation of progressives has expressed an American patriotism rooted in democratic values that challenged jingoism and “my country—right or wrong” thinking. They rejected blind nationalism, militaristic drum beating, and sheep-like conformism.

Throughout the United States’ history, they have viewed their movements—abolition of slavery, farmers’ populism, women’s suffrage, workers’ rights, civil rights, environmentalism, gay rights, and others—as profoundly patriotic. They believed that America’s core claims—fairness, equality, freedom, justice—were their own.

America now confronts a new version of the Gilded Age, brought upon by Wall Street greed and corporate malfeasance. In the midst of a recession, the gap between rich and poor is still widening. Although the economy has improved in recent years, Americans are feeling more economically insecure than at any time since the Depression. They are upset by the unbridled selfishness and political influence-peddling demonstrated by banks, oil companies, drug companies, insurance companies, and other large corporations. They are angry at the growing power of American-based global firms who show no loyalty to their country, outsource jobs to low-wage countries, avoid paying taxes, and pollute the environment.

We are, once again, battling over immigration and who belongs in America. Some right-wing groups and talk-show pundits, calling themselves patriots, have even challenged the citizenship of our president.

These trends have triggered a growing grassroots movement—reflected by Occupy Wall Street, the Fight for 15, the Dreamers, Black Lives Matter, and others—involving a diverse coalition of community groups, immigrant rights organizations, unions, consumer advocates, and human rights activists—demanding stronger regulations to protect consumers, workers, and the environment from abusive corporations, living wages, fairer trade, an end to police abuse and mass incarceration, and higher taxes on the very rich to pay for better schools, safer roads, and student loans.

This movement, which embodies the idea of “liberty and justice for all,” reflects America’s tradition of progressive patriotism. It recognizes that conservatives have never had a monopoly on Old Glory.

Happy July 4th.

 

Peter Dreier teaches politics at Occidental College. His latest book is The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame (Nation Books). Dick Flacks, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California-Santa Barbara, is the author of Making History: The American Left and the American Mind. His weekly radio show, Culture of Protest, streams at6 pm (PT) at www.kcsb.org.

Photo: A giant American flag hangs from the West tower of the George Washington Bridge in between New York and New Jersey ahead of the U.S.-Germany 2014 World Cup Group G soccer match June 26, 2014.  REUTER/Mike Segar