Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Yglesias on Progressivism

Matthew Yglesias sounds a pessimistic note about the near-term prospects for the progressive movement. I think he's spot-on, except for one mistake peripheral to his argument:
The time for that sort of [progressive] campaign, sadly, was 2000, when Al Gore could have leveraged long years of peace and prosperity delivered by Democrats into an argument that now was the time for ambitious plans to tackle long-festering problems. But he squandered the opportunity, and subsequently George W. Bush squandered the nation's fiscal capabilities along with the public's faith in the ability of the government to be competently managed... [emphasis added]


As Bob Somerby has been pointing out for years, Gore didn't squander the opportunity, the American people squandered it, by letting the commercial media spin Bush right into the White House.

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