You are either for forward movement, progress, or you aren't. The issues are not exclusive of one another.



Just speaking for myself, here.

You put civil liberties and civil rights in the same category, which is not accurate.

And I'm not sure that I know exactly where the line is between them. But I suppose that there are some that draw the distinction.

in the Constitution.

To most people, civil rights encompass the basic right to be free from discrimination and unequal treatment based on certain protected characteristics (race, gender, disability, etc.) as reflected in the 5th, 14th and 15th amendments and legislation enacted pursuant to and in furtherance of those constitutional provisions. Civil liberties is a term that I think is typically used to refer to other basic rights/freedoms guaranteed by Constitution, as interpreted by the courts. These would include the right to privacy (and the associated freedom of reproductive choice), the right to a fair trial and not to be subject to unreasonable search and seizure, freedom of speech.

Of course two areas overlap with each other -- freedom of religion can be viewed as both a civil liberties issue and a civil rights issue. Freedom to marry also overlaps both -- it is both a right based on equal protection and non-discriminatory principles as well as a liberty related to the right of privacy. That's why I lumped them together.

Historically speaking, people concerned with civil liberties were and are concerned with keeping government as small as possible. They prefer as little authority over them as possible, which in itself is not a problem. But in historical context, small government means less regulation/interference - but interference is necessary in order to authentically maintain civil rights. Too many people are not going to recognize equality to others out of the kindness of their hearts or an egalitarian spirit. For some people, laws are required to protect civil rights - libertarianism is a threat to those laws. So talk about civil liberties as if they are on the level as civil rights is really not honest.

It goes way back to slavery and even the Civil War, the fight for civil liberties was over states' rights to determine the legality of owning people for free labor. In modern terms, a similar fight is over paying employees as little as possible or preserving the right to create as many loopholes to favor employers instead of employees. These loopholes enable business owners to get as much as possible out of their workers for as little as possible in cost or power. Just imagine if we didn't have a minimum wage? We already have lost so many of our unions as it is. The mess we have today is, in part, because of this effort to have the government favor employers over employees.

Now, in an academic sense, I understand what you are saying about civil liberties overlapping with civil rights. But in terms of the real world? No. Libertarianism is not progressive, it aims to go backwards (regress) rather than forward (progress).

You are both correct and incorrect, it's all about context.

Social justice and economic justice are the same.

I don't think, for example, it is consistent to push for policies like Corporate Trade Agreements that push down all workers (below the 90 percent) while claiming to be for women's rights or racial justice.

You suppress a worker, it doesn't really matter if the worker is male, female, white, AA, Lationo, gay or straight.

But you can see why certain segments of the population might prioritize it at a level higher than it might be prioritized by others. That doesn't make the people who prioritize other issues over that one bad people. It just reflects that when people single out others for not being progressive because they don't emphasize the same issues that they do, they are assuming that progressivism is a monolith in which there is either a set hierarchy of specific concerns or in which all concerns must be weighed equally or one no longer is a progressive. It's not. Never has been. Never will be.

And that's on me for not being clear about it.

I completely get that as between Clinton and Sanders there are differences in priorities amongst their supporters as well there can and should be anytime two Democrats square off for the nomination.

The point I was not so clearly trying to make is that when it comes to the GE, those who prioritize various progressive values have more in common with each other than with the other side. If my African-American co-worker gets his head bashed in during a racially profiled traffic stop because he's being "uppity" or my cousin gets fired because she's gay or my best friend's daughter gets pregnant and wants to get an abortion -- I can see why for those voters the decision what to do in the GE is easy -- vote for the Democratic nominee. As someone who empathizes with them and views their concerns as part of the spectrum of progressive values, I agree, even if I disagreed with one candidate's position on the war in Iraq or disagreed with the other candidate for not supporting gun control legislation I felt was important.

The point is that voters who hold dear the various values that typically help define a progressive are more alike than different, and more like both of the Democratic contenders than Trump, even if they have strong areas of disagreement on the choices one of the Democratic contenders has made.

The line between liberal (which became a dirty word) & conservative blurred in the 80's & 90's. The differences between left and right used to be much clearer in the 70's but then the democratic party got co-opted by the republicans, thanks to Reagan. Then Bill Clinton came along and finished what Reagan brought to mainstream politics. Now what we have are two conservative parties that disagree on social issues.

Simply stating that a conservative party is liberal or progressive because they support civil rights socially (but not economically) does not make a party actually progressive in the true sense of the word.

This is where the disagreement lies, one part of the modern day democratic party wants to get back to the roots of the party, pre Reagan era. This is the Warren and Bernie wing, the other part wants to continue what Bill Clinton laid down, which isn't actually all that progressive, economically.

Getting back to your point and what appears to be an effort to come together in the spirit of unity, which I applaud, I don't see how it can be done. These two sides are not opposite on the same coin, they are fundamentally different in their goals.

But apparently that is not the case.

As I said, there are a lot of progressive values.