Building A Progressive Future

Since this is our first official blog posting on our new website, I thought I’d write a bit about our organization and our goals. You can learn much more about us by poking around the site, so I’ll keep this brief and to the point.  
As our name implies, Progressive Future’s long term goal is to make fundamental progress on core progressive priorities. We want to win big on the issues we all care about: getting out of this war and preventing the next; providing quality and affordable healthcare to all Americans; creating a fair and stable economy; solving global warming and other environmental problems; and giving every child a quality education so the next generation is prepared for the challenges ahead.

And, we want to win in a way that fundamentally changes the power dynamic in this country. At heart, we’re not just progressives, but populists too. We think corporations and wealthy campaign contributors have too much power—concentrating that wealth and power while spreading costs amongst the rest of us.

Our primary strategy is to build the progressive movement. In order to take back our country, we need to get organized—like the right has been doing through the churches. And we think there are two basic elements to put into place.

First, we need to activate our base.  

There are plenty of Americans who are fed up with the Bush Administration and ready for a new direction. We need to turn these folks from frustrated citizens to effective activists. So, we’ll be knocking on doors, standing on street corners, and generally doing whatever it takes to recruit an army of activists—and get our fellow progressives off their couches and beyond the blogs.

Next, we need to unite our movement around a set of values that are broader than our various policy preferences but specific enough to differentiate ourselves from the right. 

The right has basically held its fragile coalition together since William F. Buckley, Jr. united economic libertarians and social conservatives against communism in the 1950s. They’ve done so by articulating a set of values that’s easily understood, no matter where you stand. When a right-wing politician talks about supporting “family values,” “limited government,” and being “strong on defense” and “tough on crime” everyone knows what (s)he means.

Unfortunately, we all know that our progressive allies have tended to talk more about particular issues or policies than about the broader values that underlie our passion for these causes.

Our activists—from professional lobbyists to the most motivated volunteers—want to talk about workers’ rights, choice, or the environment. That’s great, but without connecting these critical issues to a broader framework we can sometimes seem like just a group of special interests fighting for our piece of the pie. More important, we have no way to connect with each other and make tough decisions about who’s passions to prioritize as we move forward to throw out the old pie and bake a new one altogether.

I think we can better appeal to the public at large and bridge some of our internal divides by focusing on the values that connect us as progressives—and separate us from those on the other side.

I’ve taken a shot at defining a few of these values on this site—and you can click on the Values & Priorities section to see what you think. I want to keep these posts short and sweet, so I’ll expound a bit on what I’m going for in the next post.

Thanks for reading. I don’t know how you found us—perhaps you met one of our organizers on the street, signed a petition online, or you’re just surfing the web. Either way, I’m glad you’re here and I hope you’ll check out the rest of our site. We’re a new organization and we just launched this website, so we’d really appreciate your feedback. You can click here to send us a note about how we can improve the site.