The Promises and Limits of Progressive Cities

[marmar]

from Dissent magazine:


Introduction: The Promises and Limits of Progressive Cities
Michael Kazin ▪ Winter 2015


For liberal Democrats and their allies, this is the winter of their discontent—and foreboding. The most right-wing Congress elected since the 1920s has embarked on a mission to weaken or repeal federal programs that benefit neither its corporate funders nor its Tea Party base. A majority of justices on the Roberts court may ease that task by striking down the Affordable Care Act and several other laws they regard, clairvoyantly, as betrayals of the sacred wishes of James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and the other periwigged designers of the Constitution.

Barack Obama, whom Republicans attacked quite savagely and quite effectively as both tyrannical and inept, will protest some of what conservatives at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue say and do. He will probably back up his words with a handful of vetos and executive orders. The president will also retain the affection of millions of Americans, if not their confidence in his leadership. Indeed, his administration, after it’s gone, will probably not appear as futile as it does in the wake of the midterm debacle. But, for now, most of the media as well as elites in both parties have turned the page.

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However, to dwell solely on the grim events in Washington is to neglect a more complicated and, potentially, a more hopeful reality. Just as Michael Harrington noted in the mid-1970s, the United States is “moving vigorously left, right and center, all at once.” Last fall, voters in the solidly Republican states of Alaska, South Dakota, Arkansas, and Nebraska enacted boosts in the minimum wage. Marriage equality is now the law in thirty-two states and the District of Columbia. The same country where a denier of climate change now chairs the Senate environment committee is also a country where the movement to stop environmental disaster can mobilize a march of 400,000 people and where student groups at hundreds of campuses have called on their colleges to divest from companies that produce fossil fuels. The same country where the Tea Party is the powerful and well-financed bulwark of the party that runs Congress is also a country where, despite the weakness of unions, increasing numbers of fast-food and Wal-Mart workers are demanding a living wage and where a growing number of people on both the right and left advocate humane alternatives to mass imprisonment.

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In Los Angeles, as Manuel Pastor explains, activists for immigrant rights have spearheaded coalitions dedicated to building unions as well as to help undocumented men and women gain legal status. In Seattle, as James Gregory describes, older networks created by labor insurgents and environmentalists undergirded the recent electoral victories of a string of progressive Democrats and one charismatic, unabashed socialist. Joshua Freeman argues that whatever good Mayor Bill de Blasio manages to accomplish in New York will depend both on the persistence and unity of his local base and on his administration’s ability to galvanize national support for what he is struggling to achieve. Sarah Jaffe offers a personal story, both anguished and hopeful, about tenants in one Brooklyn neighborhood who demanded a rent freeze from landlords who failed to heat their freezing apartments. Jennifer Klein examines the rise in New Haven of an alliance between organizers in the Latino community and their counterparts among health workers and Yale graduate students. This alliance helped elect progressives to run the city and is waging an innovative campaign to create more jobs that pay decent wages. Finally, in the impoverished city of Reading, Pennsylvania, Abby Scher discovers a black mayor and his band of talented advisors who are making a sophisticated effort to refashion a local economy that would be both just and green. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/introduction-the-promises-and-limits-of-progressive-cities