on multiple occasions, and voting with the GOP to refuse to inform the Mexican government about the vigilante group the Minutemen laying in wait for Mexicans as they cross the border?
Voting against the Brady Bill, for immunity for gun corporations, for loaded guns in cockpits, Amtrack and national parks is "progressive"? Voting to prohibit federally funded research into gun violence is now "progressive"?
Voting for and continuing to defend hundreds of billions to Lockheed-Martin for the MIC is "progressive"?
If the above are progressive actions, there sure are a lot of Republican progressives about.
"Progressives" attacked and insulted Black Lives Matter, insisted they have no right to challenge Bernie, a politician seeking the presidency. They had no right to question "white liberals." Those "progressives" insisted that a movement to protest an epidemic of murder of African Americans was a Koch-funded conspiracy. A "progressive" on 538 proudly announced "policy over pussy." Other "progressives" insist women who vote for a highly qualified candidate are "voting with their vaginas" because apparently the natural state of voting is to defer always to male candidates, and refusing to do is somehow aberrant. "Progressives" insist a female candidate who has the audacity to challenge a man is devoid of "womanhood" or insufficiently "feminine". One "progressive" even insisted to me that progressives were nearly all white, that the activism done by African Americans and other non-whites didn't qualify as progressive.
I know full well that the label progressive means more to many that any policy or issue. As far as I'm concerned, they can have it. The positions I've seen defended with the use of the term "progressive" are so objectionable and antithetical to any conception of equality or moving the country forward (the literal definition of the word) I am increasingly at a loss to see how it differs from the far right of the GOP. After all, the Tea Party loudly denounced Wall Street when they first emerged. The left has no corner on that particular cry.
So by all means, take your label. I care about principles of human equality and inclusion, ideas I have come to understand are antithetical to the class, race, and gender project suddenly proclaimed as "progressive." I will not stand with those who seek to return to a time when America experienced even greater poverty than in does now--while they pretend that poverty didn't exist because it didn't affect people like them. I will not fight to restore the white male bourgeoisie back to what they see as their rightful position atop the capitalist world order. I will not participate in the great and noble struggle of the 20 percent vs. the 1 percent. I stand with the subaltern--people of color, the poor, "old white women" who have the audacity to imagine their lives and their rights actually matter. I reject a "progressivism" that bullies, berates, and seeks to erase those people from the body politic.
= new reply since forum marked as read
