Welcome to the progressives forum. Any progressives may post here. You don't have to belong to the Democratic Party. Enjoy and discuss the important issues of the day.

Thanks for the greeting!

Thanks for the welcome.

I have always voted and canvassed for the Democratic party - 40 years now - but I would never say that I "am" a Democrat, particularly now that "being" a Democrat means never talking about anything other than voting Democratic - no matter who the corporations put up with a D after their name - and now that any opinion slightly to the Left of Eisenhower gets viciously attacked.

I am not a progressive, because that word doesn't mean anything. On that issue, I agree with this post by alcibiades_mystery -

Why I'm Not a Progressive

I am not a liberal, because modern liberalism bears no resemblance to the traditional Democratic Left FDR liberalism I grew up with, and on issues of economics and power (which is what politics historically was concerned with) most modern liberals are far to the Right of Abraham Lincoln, let alone FDR.

There is much alienation from the party, and a revolt ios in the making. The same alienation and revolt is bubbling up in union locals all across the country. People are fed up with the pseudo-democracy we have, controlled in a top-down fashion by an out-of-touch leadership and their sycophants, that models itself after bureaucratic corporate free-market principles and is in bed with the right wing and the owners.

The growing revolt against the hierarchy in liberal organizations, the Democratic party, and the unions will not go away by merely sneering and ridiculing people.

I think the nagging and chronic debate with the centrists, corporatists, party loyalists, and DLC folks has outlived its usefulness. Inside or outside the party, Nader, ABB, better than the Republicans, lesser of two evils - the whole thing has run its course and has no relevancy anymore as we watch a new emerging political reality unfold.

There is a shift going on and the old divisions between us look more and more ridiculous and petty as time goes on. Those divisions are at worst counter-productive, and at best boring and worn out. I think some are resisting this shift because they are fearful of it, while a very few are actually opposed to the shift - they are not politically in support of the Left at all, or anything close to Left - and have been able to hide among the fearful and steer the mob. For years it was almost impossible to tell who was who. Every day that goes by now, it becomes more and more clear. This is an inevitable process and it can no longer be stopped.

The choice is this: one can continue to fight it; one can accept it; one can openly declare oneself to be opposed to it. But it can no longer be stifled or arrested.

If we continue to try to enforce the old and failed model for the party on people, we are inviting a successful third party, or some Republicans will steal our thunder and start a successful populist movement, or a crippled and compliant and complicit "opposition" - as we have now with the Democrats in office - to the extreme right wing will result in growing tyranny.

There is no longer a "business as usual" way out of the dilemma, and the more we try to force business as usual on people the more that will backfire.

"We can succeed only by concert. It is not 'Can any of us imagine better?' but 'Can we all do better?' Object whatsoever is possible, still the question recurs, "Can we do better?" The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."

Abraham Lincoln
Second Annual Message to Congress
December 1st, 1862


"Our cause, then, must be intrusted to, and conducted by, its own undoubted friends - those whose hands are free, whose hearts are in the work - who do care for the result. Two years ago the Republicans of the nation mustered over thirteen hundred thousand strong. We did this under the single impulse of resistance to a common danger, with every external circumstance against us. Of strange, discordant, and even hostile elements, we gathered from the four winds, and formed and fought the battle through, under the constant hot fire of a disciplined, proud, and pampered enemy. Did we brave all them to falter now? - now, when that same enemy is wavering, dissevered, and belligerent? The result is not doubtful. We shall not fail - if we stand firm, we shall not fail. Wise counsels may accelerate, or mistakes delay it, but, sooner or later, the victory is sure to come."

Abraham Lincoln
"House Divided" Speech
Springfield, Illinois
June 16, 1858  

--Last edited by Mike on 2007-10-18 01:48:33 --

Get as many people to make these phone calls.

Call GOP contributor and war contractor General Electric Corporation at 203 373 2211 and ask for the public relations department. Tell the person in public relations that you want the GE CEO to get Bush to end the war in Iraq and then Bush resign with Cheney and until that happens you will not buy any GE products and that you will tell your friends about this.

Call GOP contributor Rite Aid at 1-800-325-3737 and tell the person to get the CEO to get the GOP to enact HR 676 Single payer health care and repeal Medicare Part D and place the drug benefit in Medicare Part B covering 80% of drugs with no extra premiums, no extra deductibles, no means tests, no coverage gaps, and remove the means test for Medicare Part B and until that happens, you won't buy ANYTHING from Rite Aid.

Call GOP contributor Wendy's restaurants at 614 764-3553 and Tell the person in public relations that you want their CEO to get the GOP to help enact a $10/HR MIN. WAGE into law and until this happens you will not go to a Wendy's Restaurant.




After you call these companies please send email to info@dmocrats.org with the subject CALLED.

Hey Mike?

You aren't a liberal or a progressive?

Are you a Democrat?

Where do you stand, without a 5 paragraph essay?

Then are you a Republican? Libertarian?

Why are you here??  :/

Hi Vivid_Blue,

I don't think it is useful to talk about what people "are," rather we should look at what they say and do. I don't agree very often with many people today who call themselves "liberal" or "Democrats" - in particular and most notably the speaker of the House and the leading Democratic party candidate for the presidency. I don't know what the word "progressive" means, and for many it means an enlightened and spiritually progressed individual. That I reject, since the politics of individual self-actualization and self-expression will always and inevitably be contradictory to the politics of solidarity and community.

I also reject the politics that matches up "like-minded" individuals based on shared "positions" on social and cultural "issues" - all of which are apolitical and were created and defined by the extreme right wing.

However, I do agree with these sentiments:

I am glad to see that a system of labor prevails in New England under which laborers CAN strike when they want to, where they are not obliged to work under all circumstances, and are not tied down and obliged to labor whether you pay them or not.

...

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor can exist without capital, but capital could never have existed without labor. Labor is the superior - greatly the superior - of capital, and deserves the higher consideration.

...

The provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood.

...

It is the eternal struggle between these two principles — right and wrong — throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity, and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, "You toil and work and earn bread, and I'll eat it." No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.

- Abraham Lincoln

The age of machinery, of railroads; of steam and electricity; the telegraph and the radio; mass production, mass distribution—all of these combined to bring forward a new civilization and with it a new problem for those who sought to remain free.

For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital—all undreamed of by the fathers—the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.

There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small business men and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer. Even honest and progressive-minded men of wealth, aware of their obligation to their generation, could never know just where they fitted into this dynastic scheme of things.

It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.

The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor—these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the small business man, the investments set aside for old age—other people's money—these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in.

Those who tilled the soil no longer reaped the rewards which were their right. The small measure of their gains was decreed by men in distant cities.

Throughout the Nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.

An old English judge once said: "Necessitous men are not free men." Liberty requires opportunity to make a living—a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.

For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor—other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt


I would like to say what I understand the word "Liberal" to mean and explain in the process why I consider myself to be a "Liberal," and what it means in the presidential election of 1960.

I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, in human liberty as the source of national action, in the human heart as the source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas. It is, I believe, the faith in our fellow citizens as individuals and as people that lies at the heart of the liberal faith. For liberalism is not so much a party creed or set of fixed platform promises as it is an attitude of mind and heart, a faith in man's ability through the experiences of his reason and judgment to increase for himself and his fellow men the amount of justice and freedom and brotherhood which all human life deserves.

John F. Kennedy  

--Last edited by Mike on 2007-10-19 20:38:25 --

Well Mike;

Just curious as this is...

The Liberal Democratic Party of the United States message board.

You announced what you are NOT, so it only stands to reason
to wonder why you are here, if you are none of the above.

Couldn't there be something wrong with the labels, rather than with the person? If I say that I "am" a "liberal democrat" - and I have run into thousands of people who say that and yet are as right wing as Eisenhower Republicans were - that means I pass, yet when I give a detailed post about my strong support for the ideals and principles of the great American leaders on the Left from the past, I am suspect?