We were idling away the evening on the balcony, drinking wine and talking about everything from the Keith Richards book to Medicare cuts. Our neighbors – she a world class blues singer; he an accomplished painter, musician and entertaining raconteur – were just paying a warm, old-American style social call.

But when I happened to mention that many today consider our generation, the Sixties generation, a failure, I set the singer’s eyes ablaze and we took off on a lively historical survey of the last few decades.

Progressives United is a very new formulation for former Senator Russ Feingold. With all the tumult in his backyard over Scott Walker and the unions, it was natural that would be an early focus. But I think it’s interesting that he went here for his first campaign outside that.

I, along with much of FDL, am often painted by both the media and the Obama administration as on the outer-left-wing of political thought—a group of progressive extremists well outside the mainstream.

The reality is both far more boring and sad. Recent polling has caused me to go issue by issue to examine public support for the reforms I care most about. I found almost all of them have extremely broad popular support with the American people. In the traditional sense of the word, my brand of radical progressivism is boringly centrist.

In 1976, environmentalists in the “Western Bloc” strategically worked to put anti-nuclear power ballot initiatives on the ballot in several states. They succeeded in getting anti-nuclear power measures on the ballot in Arizona, California, Colorado, Missouri, Montana, Oregon and Washington. The measures failed in all the states by wide margins except in Missouri, where it passed overwhelmingly.

The first statewide initiative from Edwin and Joyce Koupal’s People’s Lobby to appear on the ballot, the Clean Environment Act, lost by a wide margin. The Koupal’s blamed much of its failure on the huge amount of money the oil and chemical industries were able to spend on the “No” campaign.

Politics in a democracy is about changing minds, and to change minds you need to get your message to the people you hope to persuade. Reformist groups throughout history have often run into opposition from the established mainstream media, which tends to be supportive of the current status quo structure. Being able to speak directly to supporters and the population as a whole has been critical to independent political movements. This is something the leadership of the Nonpartisan League strongly understood and why one of their first acts was to create their own paper.

The era of liberalism as a philosophy of government is over. The Democratic Party endorses this message.

This is play two of two, in which we see that Corporatist Democrats employ a very different strategy to justify schemes that rip off the public, using their own emotional buzzwords and talking points.

I’m partial to the desert mountains of West Texas, but on my frequent visits out here I’m always surprised – and touched – by the strong spirit of friendship and community that marks the place. “Friendship holds political communities together,” said Aristotle, and he was on to something. American political culture has deteriorated as the [...]

Edwin and Joyce Koupal and their People’s lobby technically “failed” three times in their efforts at California-wide direct democracy before passing their first successful ballot initiative, the Political Reform Initiative of 1974. Yet from each loss, the Koupals learned important lessons they applied to later efforts. One of the lessons they learned was the importance of keeping it simple.