Dear Progressive Reader,
Last night our recent cover story by Melissa Ryan was featured on MSNBC’s The 11th Hour with Brian Williams. In his introduction, Williams said to Ryan, “I got off the air one night this week, read your entire twitter thread; read the article; and asked our folks to invite you on at your earliest convenience, so thank you for coming.” The article highlights the ways in which “State and local Republican parties have been taken over by white supremacists, conspiracy mongers, and insurrectionists,” and clearly indicates the depth of the danger to our democracy. As is clearly shown by many of the writers in this most recent issue of The Progressive, this danger, while brought into the public eye during the presidency of Donald Trump, did not end with his departure from the White House. As a 112-year-old defender of democratic practices and peoples’ participation in governance, The Progressive takes very seriously its responsibility in raising these concerns.
The verdict on Tuesday in the trial of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd eleven months ago has been hailed as one important step in a long and ongoing struggle. Matt Rothschild wrote this week, “As if we needed any reminders, the police killings of Daunte Wright and Adam Toledo in the days leading up to the verdict are staring us in the face today. How many more victims of police brutality do we have to mourn for change to happen?” As Sarah Lahm points out, even though U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has promised “an investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department . . . similar past efforts have not brought real change.” And Bill Blum, writing from Los Angeles, reminds us that, “Derek Chauvin’s conviction is not some kind of final accomplishment in the struggle for equal justice—it’s just one important step in a very long, and seemingly unending, process.”
Thursday was the fifty-first anniversary of the first Earth Day, and today the threat to the Earth’s climate is worse than ever. The Progressive has worked since that first year to share the message and the agenda of Earth Day. In April 1970 we devoted a special issue to a broad range of voices on the topic. In 2013 The Progressive produced an e-book gathering a collection of one hundred years of writing on the environment from our magazine, and in April 2020 we featured the voice of Tia Nelson, daughter of Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson. “When it comes to my father’s original vision of an inclusive, bipartisan environmental movement rooted in social justice, we still have work to do,” she wrote.
This week, Simone Lovera, director of the Global Forest Coalition warns that powerful interests are working to co-opt the very idea of Earth Day, and that “we must resist the corporate takeover of the UN’s food, biodiversity, and climate agenda.” And Ed Rampell offers a review of the new documentary on the young climate activist Greta Thunberg, whose passionate voice has helped spark a global youth movement for action on climate. We must “listen to the science,” Thunberg regularly reminds us.
And finally, former U.S. Vice President Walter Mondale died at the age of 93 on April 20. I briefly met Mondale in May 2015 when he spoke at Macalester College. Even though, he said in his speech, his intent was not to speak about current politics, he felt still had to raise grave concerns about the growing partisanship in Washington as the Republican-led Senate was blocking every Democratic initiative. Exactly one month later, Donald Trump would announce his candidacy for President.
Mondale grew up in the progressive political tradition of senators like Robert M. La Follette, and was elected Attorney General on the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party ticket. At the 1964 Democratic National Convention, Mondale tried unsuccessfully, as chair of the Credentials Committee, to forge a compromise that would seat the delegates of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. He was appointed to fill the Senate seat of Hubert Humphrey when Humphrey became Lyndon Johnson’s Vice President in 1964. Mondale was chosen as Vice President by Jimmy Carter in 1980, and in 1984 ran for President against Ronald Reagan, choosing as his running mate Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman ever nominated for that office by a major political party.
Mondale wrote a long article for The Progressive in 1967 where he described efforts by the Johnson Administration and previous Democratic administrations to address poverty and inequality. It was both a history and a critique. “As our present programs,” he wrote, “continue in their sometimes uncertain way, we must undertake to devise statistical and analytical methods to help us find out what we have done and what we ought to be doing.” Mondale concluded with the warning, “Unless we provide the government with new modern tools we are likely to waste more and more of our resources in crash programs without knowing what will result, a process both wasteful and dangerous.” Washington, take heed.
Keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.
Sincerely,
Norman Stockwell
Publisher
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