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SEPTEMBER 23: MINNESOTA PROGRESSIVES: Movements and Values vs. Political Power?
Minnesota's long tradition for spawning progressive politics and movements, often regardless of party, has been so severely eroded over five decades of undermining our sense of community that the systems all of us have relied on as preserving the commons and common good – preparing and nurturing successive generations of leaders, citizens, workers and responsible purveyors of goods and services – the fundamental functions of food production, nutritional intake, education, health care, electoral processes, environmental stewardship, aesthetic enrichment and a reliance on science as critical compass for cultural and physical sustainability – may be coming to an end - certainly to a crawl.
The very words, ”commons” and ”common good,” have been challenged as subversive, in service of ”socialist” indoctrination as our public education system and other institutions ignore the state's history and the US's founding principles to market and promote consumerism as economic stability and isolating individualism – not just individual responsibility – as politic, all of it based on the notion that Number One is paramount and the devil take the hindmost when it comes to collective needs and community.
What are the core values that drive the current resurrection of the commons, of progressive thought and deed, of public policy that serves the maximum good while inspiring political engagement and community-based problem-solving? What are the tensions between movements for change and the power needed to make them happen? Are those tensions fatal to reviving the values that drive policy for the common good?
TTT's ANDY DRISCOLL and LYNNELL MICKELSEN query some thinkers and doers around those values and the commons in which we all reside, as well as put such efforts in historical as well as present political context. Heady stuff for a Wednesday morning.
GUESTS:
• JULIE RISTAU - Co-Director, On the Commons
• DAN McGRATHhttp://tr.im/z4vp - Executive Director, Take Action Minnesota
• PROF. TOM O'CONNELL, Political Science, Metropolitan State University and progressive movements historian
• TOM VELLENGA - President, Heartland Democracy - Progressive Values Public Engagement Group
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