Peter Dreier

The 25 Best Progressive Victories of 2013

Progressives are rarely satisfied. It is part of our political DNA. There's so much injustice in the world, it's sometimes hard to feel that we're making progress. But as Chinese philosopher Laozi reminded us, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

As I document in my book, The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame (Nation Books, 2012), the radical ideas of one generation are often the common sense of the next generation. One hundred years ago, ideas like Social Security, the minimum wage and women's suffrage were considered radical. Fifty years ago, most African-Americans in the South couldn't vote, few women were welcome in politics and many professions, and all but a handful of gays and lesbians were locked in the closet. In other words, if we take a long view, we can see that things do often change for the better, sometimes in big leaps, but usually in incremental stages.

Many progressives equate the word "compromise" with "sell-out," but the strategic question is whether compromises are dead ends or stepping stones to further progress. In their book Organizing for Social Change, Kim Bobo, Steve Max and Jackie Kendall contend that activism is successful if it (1) wins real improvements in people's lives, (2) gives people a sense of their own power and (3) changes the structure of power so that people begin the next phase of movement-building with greater leverage.

Last year I offered my 25 best progressive victories. To make this an annual event, let's look back at 2013 and examine 25 significant accomplishments -- elections, ballot measures, court rulings, legislation, new waves of mobilization, and changes in public opinion -- that meet one or more of those three criteria.

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