Elections are ultimately a decision to empower a vision of society, which in turn is rooted in a frame story that provides a cultural narrative, grounded in the bedrock of shared values. We are electing a social metaphor that animates and orients the policy choices that comprise our politics. These core principles are usually drowned out in the cacophony of the American political system, which is typically an exercise in mass marketing, undertaken in the spirit of a sports championship or a military campaign. The lack of consensus on a frame story and even on basic social values, coupled with the emphasis on winning by any means, contributes to the current toxic political environment.
In the post-modern era, when each political sub-culture has its own narrowcasted information sources, we no longer even have consensus on facts. When half the viewers of Fox News believe that the President is a foreign born Muslim and catastrophic climate change is a hoax, or large numbers of the left-wing Pacifica radio audience believe that “9/11 was an inside job,” we have a real problem.
This new column is titled “Progressive Majority Coalition”, which is both an aspiration and a methodology for creating a new kind of politics. The low levels of public participation in civic life in the U.S. demonstrate the need to create a more engaging and substantive political culture. We are dedicated to an analysis of local, state, national, and international political developments with an eye to building an enduring progressive majority coalition that can help chart an evolutionary path forward for American society and the world community. We are particularly interested in the construction of political realities through the media, and seek to develop intellectual resistance to the dominant memes of conventional political discourse.
The core values of the progressive world view are based in the vision of an ethical society which is in harmony with the natural systems of the planet and is motivated by empathy to work toward a widely shared prosperity. The ethical axioms of the progressive movement can be counted out on one hand: #1) We’re all in this together. #2) We are both self-responsible and socially accountable. #3) The role of government is to promote the common good through enlightened public policy. #4) The human race has prospered through cooperation. Competition as the dominant theme will lead to cultural decline.
#5) We live on a fragile planet, with limited resources. We will evolve or die.
This vision of a cooperative and empathic society has expression in the policy platform now being developed by the emergent progressive majority coalition of labor, environmentalists and locally owned businesses who are beginning to patch up their long-standing divisions and put together a united platform. This is the ‘blue/green/local’ alliance.
This platform of “Smart Growth with Shared Prosperity” is a new political synthesis that represents a formidable challenge to the old guard business and development interests represented by the traditional power axis of the Chamber of Commerce, the Sonoma County Alliance, Sonoma County Taxpayer’s Association, the Farm Bureau, and the North Coast Builder’s Exchange. The nexus of this new force in Sonoma County politics is represented by organizations committed to social justice, economic empowerment, environmental quality, affordable housing, urban renewal, and open space preservation.
Some of the key groups in this emerging coalition are SCCA (Sonoma County Conservation Action),the North Bay Labor Council, The Building Trades Council, Greenbelt Alliance, Housing Advocacy Group, Accountable Development Coalition (ADC), the Living Wage Coalition, Sonoma County Transportation and Land-Use Coalition, Concerned Citizens for Santa Rosa and the Leadership Institute for Ecology and the Economy.
The regional paper, the Press Democrat, serves as the house organ for the views and interests of the Chamber/Alliance faction. They have been in power for so long that they regard their perspective as normative, and these new political configurations as aberrational.
Unfortunately, for them, they misunderstand the progressive coalition, and seek to compress it into one of the ideological boxes in their limited intellectual toolkit. That’s why they persist in framing the progressive/conservative political match-ups as “slow growth vs. business-friendly”. Neither term is accurate.
This new progressive coalition represents the future of the county. We will replicate our regional successes as a template for the rest of the country. This is what our elections are about in these times. Economic justice, environmental sustainability, and Smart Growth planning are the foundations for the new civilization that will evolve as we enter the 21st century.
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