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Dear Progressive Reader,

Our focus the first week of this month was understandably on the Senate runoffs in Georgia, and the events the following day in Washington, D.C. when a Trump-inspired mob of insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol. In fact, it was not until early this week during our virtual staff meeting that we remembered we had missed our own 112^th birthday! On January 9, 1909, Robert M. “Fighting Bob” La Follette and his partner, feminist and human rights activist Belle Case La Follette, launched the first issue ([link removed][UNIQID]) of La Follette’s Weekly, the magazine that would become in 1929 The Progressive. So, with deserved fanfare, let’s celebrate ([link removed][UNIQID]) it now!

This magazine ([link removed][UNIQID]) has survived for 112 years, thanks in large part to the generous support of our donors, subscribers, and readers. Thank you! We plan to keep publishing it, and we hope you plan to keep reading. As much as at any time in our history, a progressive voice in the media is needed now. Fighting Bob wrote ([link removed][UNIQID]) in his 1912 autobiography, “Shall government be for the benefit of private interests . . . . Or shall government be for the benefit of public interest? This is the simple issue involved in the present conflict in our nation.” The image in The New York Times from Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol building on January 6 of insurrectionists marching past the statue of La Follette, who appears to rise up in indignation from his chair, inspired labor cartoonist Mike Konopacki to craft the image above. Throughout his political career, Fighting Bob maintained
([link removed][UNIQID]) that “Democracy is a life, and involves continual struggle. It is only as those of every generation who love democracy resist with all their might the encroachments of its enemies that the ideals of representative government can ever be nearly approximated.”

This past Wednesday, Donald Trump became the first-ever federally elected official in the United States to be impeached twice during the same term. As Bill Blum wrote ([link removed][UNIQID]) at the beginning of the week, “[a] second impeachment would be a fitting conclusion to Trump’s defilement of the presidency. Better still, if we maintain our vigilance and continue to press for accountability, a second impeachment could also be a prelude to future federal and state criminal prosecutions of Trump and his principal enablers.” A trial in the Senate will likely move forward following next week’s Inauguration. As Blum points out, “Given the growing sense of shame and disaffection in the ranks of the GOP, Trump should expect a full Senate trial in his second impeachment, in sharp contrast to the perfunctory acquittal he received in his first impeachment.”

Now that the dust is settling from the January 6 Capitol incursion, investigators and analysts are looking into the support for, and sponsors of, those events. Christopher Cook writes this week that progressives should be concerned that in a rush to respond, we need to worry about ways that restrictions might be used to curb lawful, peaceful protest as well—much as we saw with the USA Patriot Act in the wake of September 11. “It’s worth remembering,” notes ([link removed][UNIQID]) Cook, “that this very same security state has a long history of stifling dissent and will certainly be used to tamp down mass protest from the left, as well.” Meanwhile, many longtime Trump loyalists are seeking to exit a sinking ship, as Mark Fioreillustrates ([link removed][UNIQID]) . However, as Sarah Lahm points out, in the case of Cabinet members like Betsy DeVos, it is probably too-little-too-late. As Lahm writes
([link removed][UNIQID]) , “She may be gone, but her legacy of intolerance and privatization, at the expense of millions of school children, will live on.” On the positive side, as Jacob Sutherland reports ([link removed][UNIQID]) , there is a trend among organizations and corporations of withdrawing support from individual legislators or even the whole Republican Party, in the wake of their enablement of Trump’s anti-democratic actions these past four years. Perhaps it will usher in a whole new trend of what La Follette called ([link removed][UNIQID]) for more than a century ago, “winning back for the people the complete power over government—national, state, and municipal—which has been lost to them by party machines [and] corporate and unincorporated monopolies.”

One more birthday that we celebrate today is that of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who was born January 15, 1929, and whose legacy is commemorated with a national holiday this year on January 18. The King holiday was not readily accepted by all states, as I wrote ([link removed][UNIQID]) in an article a few years ago. “Nine states initially refused to observe the holiday, and it was not until 2000 that all fifty states gave state employees a paid holiday.”

It was the depth of his understanding of injustice, combined with his qualities of leadership, that made King a target of the right, as documented in a brand new film, MLK/FBI, reviewed ([link removed][UNIQID]) this week by Ed Rampell. King was a radical ([link removed][UNIQID]) , and his goals and expectations for a better world are well described in a 2019 book by French cultural historian Sylvie Laurent. “King’s interracial Poor People’s Campaign offered an alternative to the facile dichotomy between social and economic justice,” she wrote ([link removed][UNIQID]) . His analysis “was race- and ethnic-conscious as well as class-conscious. It refused to choose between economic equality and specific anti-discrimination demands.”

Keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,
Norman Stockwell
Publisher

P.S. – Together with A Room of One’s Own bookstore, we are hosting a special live “virtual book event ([link removed][UNIQID]) ” this coming Thursday with local author Mary Lang Sollinger and her new book From Inspiration to Activism, A Personal Journey through Obama’s Presidential Campaign, which chronicles the building of a grassroots movement to elect the first African American to the White House. Please join us for this free event on Facebook Live ([link removed][UNIQID]) or Youtube ([link removed][UNIQID]) . If you would like a signed copy of the book as a thank-you for a donation to The Progressive, please click here ([link removed][UNIQID]) .

P.P.S. – If you don’t already subscribe to The Progressive in print or digital form, please consider doing so today ([link removed][UNIQID]) . Also, if you have a friend or relative that you feel should hear from the many voices for progressive change with our pages, please consider giving a gift subscription ([link removed][UNIQID]) .

P.P.P.S. –We need you now more than ever. Please take a moment to support hard-hitting, independent reporting on issues that matter to you. Your donation today will keep us on solid ground and will help us continue to grow in the coming years. You can use the wallet envelope in the current issue of the magazine, or click on the “Donate” button below to join your fellow progressives in sustaining The Progressive as a voice for peace, social justice, and the common good.
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