10-14-13
Liberals, Stop Whining and Do Something
Roundup: Historians' Taketags: Republican Party, liberals, conservatives
Liberals need to stop complaining about the right....
[S]imply criticizing congressional intransigence never goes very far in Washington politics. Liberals who rail against the right are unlikely to accomplish much. The 40 or so conservative Republicans who have been controlling the House Caucus don't really care what liberals in Washington have to say. Even if some House Republican politicians are listening to their critics, most of the short-term electoral incentives are pushing them in a different direction than Democrats hope.
If liberals want to bring change and truly alter the political dynamics in Washington, they are going to need to build grass-roots pressure to shape national debate and genuine electoral pressure in the states and districts of Republicans who are not among the hard-core of the right-wing -- still a majority of the GOP....
comments powered by Disqus
News
- Josh Hawley Earns F in Early American History
- Does Germany's Holocaust Education Give Cover to Nativism?
- "Car Brain" Has Long Normalized Carnage on the Roads
- Hawley's Use of Fake Patrick Henry Quote a Revealing Error
- Health Researchers Show Segregation 100 Years Ago Harmed Black Health, and Effects Continue Today
- Nelson Lichtenstein on a Half Century of Labor History
- Can America Handle a 250th Anniversary?
- New Research Shows British Industrialization Drew Ironworking Methods from Colonized and Enslaved Jamaicans
- The American Revolution Remains a Hotly Contested Symbolic Field
- Untangling Fact and Fiction in the Story of a Nazi-Era Brothel