Where have all the progressives gone?

This blog began a few years ago as a way to for me to have a forum to write about issues I was tackling through various master’s degrees. I’m changing formats a bit because I met a lot of great people through my blogging experience, and I’ve fallen off the radar in the last year because I couldn’t keep up sticking to my formal reading schedule. So, this is going to be the new format, with more off-the-cuff, shorter material.

The other reason I’m dusting off this blog is that my wife and I recently moved to a new area and I haven’t really established a community. If I’m honest, I also feel like a bit of an outcast as a progressive in a mostly conservative-dominated area of the country, and I sort of need to write in order to maintain my sanity. It’s akin to someone on Alcatraz tossing notes in a bottle into the bay. Well, that may be just a bit overstated.

Nevertheless, what’s been on my mind lately (like much of the country) is the national debt. Unlike most of the people I interact with, it’s not actually the debt that bothers me – it’s the tenure and trajectory of the discourse that’s most troubling. I find myself driving to work, my blood pressure rising, feeling more than a little bit marginalized by what I hear.

A good case study for the way I’m feeling is this: A friend of mine sent me a link the other day to a web game that allowed you to try and move money around to reconstruct the budget. The first thing it asked you to do is to pick a ‘theme,’ which represented the most important issues to your platform. The only progressive issue on the table was ‘sustainability.’ The other choices were things like “debt reduction,” “lower taxes,” “defense,” etc…The exercise gave no room for the things that I find the most fundamental issues in this country: education, healthcare, social justice, etc…

And there it was, staring me in the face again: the fact that the discourse has been so hijacked by a fear-based brand conservativism, that we can’t even imagine a world where progressive issues matter. Not to get too technical, but our national discourse is completely dominated by a commitment to a thing called neoliberalism. In the U.S. it began as a reaction against the justice-orientation of the 60s and has become so deeply ingrained in our culture that even modern progressives consider it to be the playing field.

No one in the media, in my church, across the lunchtable seems to be interested in or even aware of the fact that the only discourse available is neoliberal, conservativism. And this propaganda machine is quickly taking over the media (e.g. Rupert Murdoch) and education (e.g. NCLB and now ‘Race to the top’) - while, at the same time, claiming their own marginalization by progressive voices. It’s become so pervasive that we now see Obama, who in any other day would have been considered a moderate Republican, as a progressive Democrat.

It's why, for example, the conservatives (the minority) have been so easily able to bully the Congress into passing a completely unethical debt reduction bill, which places the cost of the Bush war and corporate bailouts in the backs of the poor and marginalized. Its all due to being able to leverage neoliberal discourse as some type of moral high ground.

That’s it. I’ve run way past the 500 word limit I set for myself. Here is the punchline: we are handing our country over to greed. Neoliberalism has hijacked all public discourse (e.g. religious and civil) to the point where those seeking peace-focused, justice-focused issues aren’t considered normative, but outliers. In the center are fear- and greed- based policy makers (I include those on both sides of the aisle) who have convinced the poor that poverty is their fault, and that God is Republican. So, where is the community out there that rises up and stops being bullied like a kid on the schoolyard, as progressives have been since the mid-70s?