Progressives Have A Chance To Dominate American Politics For the Next 40 Years

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http://www.alternet.org/politics/140551/progressives_have_a_chance_to_dominate_american_politics_for_the_next_40_years

Progressives Have a Chance to Dominate American Politics for the Next 40 Years
By Sara Robinson, AlterNet. Posted June 10, 2009.

The tides of history and demographics, and the way the world works are on our side.

The following is a transcript of Campaign for America's future fellow Sara Robinson's speech to the America's Future Now! conference panel, "Kick Them When They Are Down? How the Right Plans to Come Back and What Can Be Done About It." It has been edited for clarity.

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So, I want to say flat out that I think that the progressive movement has real potential to be a lot longer and a lot stronger than most people think. And I'll flat out say -- if we play our cards right, we progressives have the potential to dominate American politics for the next 40 years. We have a huge opening here.

There are a couple of reasons for this. The first one is the millennial generation, the kids born between 1980 and 2000. They are anywhere between 10 and their mid-20s right now, and they put in their first historic appearance in the 2008 election. They were the ones who really got Obama fever and put him over the top. They are far and away the most multiracial generation in American history -- about a third of them identify as mixed race.

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This unique generation caught Obama fever at the critical age, when people's lifetime political attitudes are shaped. They are progressives now, and if we don't let them down, most of them will be for life. And both their sheer numbers and their solid organizing skills make them a very solid bedrock on which we can easily build a progressive structure that could stand until 2050.

Along these same lines, let's not discount the power of collective memory. In the post-war era, conservatism had a hard time making a comeback as long as most of the country's voter base had its memories of 1929 and World War II. Religious and free-market fundamentalism had a hard time getting any traction in the post-war decades because our grandparents knew first hand where that road led, and they weren't having any of it.

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The other reason the coming years belong to progressives is that there are deep structural shifts afoot that no conservative media dissembling, no amount of bank bailout money and no amount of willful denial can continue to paper over.

The corporatist order has failed us utterly and completely. Most of us here know this -- we've done the math. We know that an economy built on dwindling oil supplies, vast global inequities, and exploiting the resources of a finite earth is simply not sustainable. The current is recession is happening in no small part because we are finally bumping up against these facts. K Street and Wall Street both think they can rearrange the deck chairs and get things back to normal -- defined as five years ago. But here on the progressive side of Main Street, we know that normal as we've known it in the post-war era is over. And rearranging deck chairs isn't going to help when the whole boat is sinking.

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