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campaign 2024 |
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progressive politics as pragmatic transcending gary e. davis |
September 3, 2024 |
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“Harris is beating Trump by transcending him,” E. J. Dionne wrote mid-August. Needless to say, the laughs at “Bozo” (Nancy Pelosi, PBS News Hour) are well-deserved. “Kamala Harris’s DNC was a master class in coalition building,” Dionne wrote the next day. “Harris captures ‘the soul of America’ so excellently,” I commented in response, “in theme and practical entailment,” which had in mind a pragmatism of progressive policy (theme) and politics (practical entailment). One W.Post pundit I like (usually), Philip Bump, believes that “moving on from Donald Trump…will be hard,” but he details that in terms of a retrospective which gives no attention to how Harris is moving on quite successfully. I commented, in part, that “’Turning the page’ is not about immersing oneself again in a genealogy of what we're not going back to. The new way forward is an orientation to taking advantage of emergent opportunity that good government can facilitate.” Besides, Bump’s narrative doesn’t argue credibly that moving on will be difficult, but only that moving on has a viscous history, as if a solution is not evident. —a history which will be happily transcended with the help of Tim Walz, because evincing futures is the business of teaching. Joe and Jill Biden are educational leaders. Harris and Walz will be too. A W.Post article on the announcement of Walz as running mate, early August, caused a very assertive response from me: Let's make a couple of things clear: An educator is likely to be “progressive” because more education enlightens a person to the simple humanism of openness to varieties of life and flexible thinking.The next day, at a NYTimes article on Walz’s sudden rise to prominence, I commented: Walz’s governance wonderfully exemplifies Biden’s aspiration to advance a “care economy,” and Harris has expressed her determin-So, what’s wrong with pragmatic optimism? next—> a note on progressive pragmatism in concept |
Be fair. © 2024, gary e. davis |