America's Future Now

Feel free to read Dana Milbank if that sort of thing appeals to you, but don't imagine for a minute that you're learning anything. That would be like studying the French Revolution by reading Marie Antoinette's cake recipes. The Milbank school of journalism - which at this point is American journalism -doesn't just fail to inform. Somehow it's able to subtract from a reader's overall body of information, as if by magic, leaving her or him even less informed than they were before. more »

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Life can only be understood backward, said Kierkegaard, but it has to be lived forward. more »

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I was getting ready to attend next week's America's Future Now conference, whose theme is that progressives must lead, and thinking about the relationship problems progressives are having with Barack Obama and the Congressional leadership. All the relationship books say that you need to be clear about what you need, so that you can communicate those needs to your partner in a healthy way. (At least that's what I imagine they say; I don't really know.)

The relationship between progressives and the Democratic leadership involves love, anger, and a lot of co-dependence. Some progressives seem to defend the President no matter what he does. Others have written him off as the hopelessly cynical tool (or manipulator) of a corrupt political system. Then there are those in the middle, the ones who get disillusioned and then fall in love all over again whenever he gives a great speech like he did yesterday. Political life must be a series of fifty first dates for them. more »

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It's an interesting time to be a progressive in the United States. In many ways, the election of President Barack Obama represented a logical, if improbable, end to the era of phony Reaganomics and demonization politics. But the Obama presidency has been a serious test for the progressive movement. more »

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