Dear Progressive Reader,
The week began with the Senate chaplain Barry C. Black invoking the words he said were “reverberating down the corridors of centuries, ‘you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.’ ” That biblical quote is, of course, well known to readers of The Progressive because our founder, U.S. Senator Robert M. La Follette, put it on the cover of every issue of his magazine for the first twenty years of its existence. However, today in the United States Senate it seems as though truth is not what many are seeking.
Former United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld wrote in a May 1961 letter about “all those compromises which we fool ourselves into calling small.” (Less than four months later, he would be killed in a mysterious plane crash in what is today Zambia.) As biographer Roger Lipsey points out in a new book, Politics and Conscience, Hammarskjöld was referring to “the nearly invisible corruptions that undermine the politics of genuine service.” He is, Lipsey tells us, talking about “elected officials” who “apparently silence or contradict their actual views . . . in order to retain positions of power.” This practice was in full evidence during the Senate impeachment trial this week, as Republicans voted again and again not to bring witnesses or evidence to the proceedings—a scene cartoonist Mark Fiore illustrates this week in his ode to the “Grand Ol’ [Adaptable] Party.”
As the Senate impeachment trial winds on, the candidates (even the four Democrats who will be stuck in Washington on Monday) are all preparing for the contest in Iowa. This is also true of Donald Trump, who held a large rally in Des Moines on January 30, despite his assured win in that state’s Republican contest. This week on our website, Mike Ervin looks at Joe Biden, noting, “it’s too bad that everyone who has heard Biden speak even in passing isn’t well aware that he stutters. It’s too bad that he can’t freely speak like he naturally speaks, without the stupid stigma that stutterers face.” Rann Miller analyzes the role that former candidate Cory Booker played in getting us to look at “the root of inequality in schools.” In an excerpt from Eitan Hersh’s new book Politics is for Power, we hear about strategies to do the “hard work” of organizing for political change. And, Jake Whitney reviews the latest book by Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies, which points out that Donald Trump is “not an aberration. He is not a maverick bravely standing up to elitists. He is, in the end, just another tool of the billionaire class; the logical endpoint the Republican Party has been approaching for forty years.”
Finally, Mrill Ingram bids a sad farewell to writer Brandon Weber, who penned numerous articles for The Progressive before his untimely death earlier this month.
On Monday, I am off to Iowa where I will join Laura Flanders in hosting Pacifica Radio’s live national coverage from the Iowa Caucuses. You can listen on your local community radio station, or tune in to the live stream at pacificanetwork.org.
Keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time. And, for the new year, don’t forget to click here to order your 2020 Hidden History of the United States calendar from The Progressive!
Sincerely,
Norman Stockwell
Publisher
P.S. – Thank you so much to everyone who generously contributed to The Progressive in 2019. We truly could not keep doing this work without your support! 2020 promises to be a busy year with many new opportunities. We look forward to traveling that road together with you, our readers and supporters, as we move forward in this new year.
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