On Tuesday July 4th we took the first step in the Booman Tribune Electoral Politics Project with a call for comments building what I’m calling: Our Progressive Platform.
The entries were all well thought out and, thankfully for those of us trying to keep track…concise! This comment by Kahli garnered broad support and is a must read. Every entry, however, is a part of this open source collective effort and worth reading.
I want to open the floor to a “final call” for entries right now. Please feel free to add your comment listing your “Top Five” Progressive Platform Planks either in the original diary, or below. (For instructions and a good sample follow the links above.) For those interested in making an observation about the first wave of entries…read more below…
One thing that strikes me about our platform planks is how we have defined progressive as sitting at the juncture of several different schools of political thought, or movements:
First, you can read a distinct advocacy for economic policies that reflect social democracy, even if we didn’t often name it as such. Essentially, the views we BMT progressives espouse are very much in synch with the “socialist/post-socialist” political parties around the world. (Whether we can gets U.S. politicians to embrace the term, or even want to, is another question.) That is something to think about.
Second, there’s a forthright embrace of Green Politics and what we might call the movement for equitable globalism: sustainable agriculture, micro loans, anti-militarist national defense, and a pro-cooperative internationalism with its sights set on combatting global warming. That challenge…that inconvenient truth…according to our planks, is clearly the “global task at hand.”
Third, dovetailing with both of the above, there is a marked emphasis on science, education and national investments in technology.
Fourth, for lack of a better term, our platforms reflect what I’d call a “netroots populism:” (ie. populism informed and empowered by technology) our planks demostrate a strong advocacy of egalitarianism, meritocracy, election reform, a broad new definition of privacy rights and personal civil liberties for the information age, and sunshine provisions for government.
What’s interesting to me is how this junction of movements and ways of thinking is particular to the “online progressive movement” and not a reflection of traditional Democratic Party politics or liberalism or even what many progressives meant, exactly, by “progressive” not so long ago. It’s finding all four streams in one place which is remarkable.
What’s stiking here is that it seems that it is the freshness of our advocacy of Green policies, our pro-science, cooperative Globalism and, our own particular brand of Netroots Populism that seems to free us to make a renewed and unabashed case for Social Democracy. In old school terms Green meets Red but within the particular playing field of the internet. The streams are intermixing and, as they do so, evolving.
My question is whether this hybrid approach, this “meeting of the rivers” is what folks will ultimately decide to call: progressive politics in the 21st Century. (It had a very different meaning in its first guise.)
Or, are we at the cusp of something new? Will the rivers join and become one…perhaps with a new name?
