Author: Sara Robinson
-
Real Men Don\’t Type
Twenty years ago this spring, the small software company I was working for hired in a new vice president of advertising to be, among other things, my boss. The guy, who\’d come from running his own agency, was a CEO crony. He had all kinds of old-hippie cred (he\’d belonged to one of the most…
-
Why Change Happens: Ten Theories
One of the grandest — and most frustrating — things about carrying on the great democratic conversation via blog is finding out how many of your fellow citizens (including many who are nominally on your side) turn out to be looking at the world from a completely different set of assumptions than you are. In…
-
Reclaiming Mother\’s Day
Progressives have always loved holidays, which may be why we\’ve created so many of them. There are Saturdays, of course, brought to us with no small help from the early 20th century unions. And May Day. And Labor Day. And Mother\’s Day, which started out as the first and perhaps greatest progressive holiday of all.…
-
Outright Barbarism vs. The Civil Society
I live in a nice place. I mean that literally. It took some getting used to. After 20 years in Silicon Valley, where people put a premium on being direct and to the point, have no time to waste on small talk or personal sharing, and will call a stupid idea stupid to your face,…
-
Jeremiah Wright: What (Else) Is Going On
Jeremiah Wright is everywhere this week — and the media doesn\’t quite know what to make of it. Mostly, they\’re stuck so hard in the election horse-race narrative that they only question they can think to ask is: Does having Wright out there hurt Obama, or help him? Lost in the tortured pondering over this…
-
How to Kill An Army: A Scenario
John McCain, who from the early 1980s worked hard to establish himself the one of the Senate\’s shining champions of Vietnam veterans\’ issues, completed his betrayal of the Iraq-era troops today. Brandon Friedman of vetvoice.com has the details: Yesterday VoteVets.org delivered a petition with 30,000 signatures to the office of Senator John McCain. Through that…
-
Born-Again Americans and That Old-Time (Civil) Religion
Can we progressives — who won\’t be caught dead these days calling ourselves liberals — can we stop serving as a punching bag for the right? And speak with depth and conviction about the things that really matter to us? Once and for all, can we break through the false and humiliating charade that they…
-
Speaking To The Future: Obama\’s Speech on Race
A while back, while I was deep in the midst of my maundering three-week wander
-
Learning From the Cultural Conservatives, Part III: Taking It To The Street
Part I Part II The conservative worldview has succeeded so wildly — and is still holding such tenacious sway over the ways Americans approach their current stack of problems — because the conservatives started out 30 years ago with a focused plan that put promoting their model of reality at the center of every other…
-
Learning from the Cultural Conservatives, Part II: Talking Up The Worldview
This is Part II of a series on the strategies used by the conservatives to promote their worldview, and the lessons progressives can learn from them to promote our own. Part I is here. As we saw in the previous post, the entire conservative movement was organized around the single goal of changing the country\’s…