Nancy Scola :: Search Results for "Progressivism"

February 3, 2006
My take on the abortion debate

I've just posted some thoughts over on MyDD on how progressives talk about abortion, inspired by Katha Pollitt and William Saletan's really interesting "Is abortion bad?" Slate debate from this week. I hope you'll check it out.

UPDATE: We've been front-paged. Nice!

, Progressivism

June 15, 2005
Developing a Statement of Values
I don't always agree with Kos but he does some damn fine work. I speak of his recent posts on developing a "coherent, unified, statement of values" for the Democratic party (part I here, part II here, part III here.) Doing what he suggests should be the primary focus of those of us who really want to build a sustainable progressive way of doing things. Kos says this:

They [voters] don't care so much about the issues, but how you arrive at decisions about the issues.

He's absolutely right. The way that the party works now assumes that we have to get people to agree with us on our collection issues in order to get their votes. Bad strategy on a lot of levels but particularly when so someone otherwise sympathetic to voting Democrat disagree on something we've made a big deal of. We're screwed, then. If there's no obvious value or principle backing up the position, what, exactly, are we giving them to justify their vote? Take for example, abortion. I'll use this as an opportunity to quote something somewhat-related that Garance Franke-Ruta said on this once:

I expect that male politicians and pundits are not always cognizant of the way that men who are vehemently pro-choice can come across as creepy and irresponsible to some women.

It's a great point. There are Democratic women, of whom I'm one, who find abortion distasteful. I'm sympathetic to what Hillary Clinton has been saying lately about how abortion is not a good, rah-rah, sort of thing that we ought to be cheerleading on every corner. But yet these same women will, like me, fight to the death to protect the right to make that choice. Why? There's a salient principle behind the issue. But I can't articulate what it is. Kos puts it under privacy and that's a good start. For the sake of winning elections, there's really nothing more important work that we could be doing than figuring out exactly what it is that we stand for and, more importantly, especially on tough issues like abortion, why we stand it is that we stand for it. Should be job one.

Related Howard Dean story after the jump.
, Progressivism

June 10, 2005
Crisis of Imagination on Family Values
Matthew Yglesias and Amy Sullivan and Garance Franke-Ruta have been having a somewhat heated discussion about popular culture and Democrats. In brief, Amy started it by citing a Dan Gerstein op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (paying customers only) that criticizes Democrats' dismissiveness of concerns about the media bath that kids find themselves in today and then Matt said that he sees no policy response to such concerns and thus finds attentiveness to these concerns to be just political pandering and then Garance cited such dismissiveness as one reason that Democrats have failed to connect to married parents.

I started thinking about all this at an event yesterday on low frequency FM radio when Jan Schakowsky described how she was more concerned about her children having freedom of speech than she is about them seeing Janet Jackson's nipple.

As am I.
, Progressivism

May 26, 2005
Growing the Young
This right here is the most important article of the year. What it does is that it explains how, as it turns out, there really is a right-wing conspiracy after all. You see, self-identified conservatives fund these leadership institutes. They nuture those young people who show signs of supporting their philosophy, spending the time to actually teach them the answers to the questions that they'll get asked. As a result, they all know each other. Simple, perhaps, but as a way of, you know, taking over the world, it's freakin' brilliant. And that's what we're up against.
, Progressivism

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