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What’s progressive? | Columnists



At an election night party in November, I asked then-Rep. Diane Papan about the seemingly widening divide in San Mateo County politics between progressives and moderates—although she clearly aligns with the latter.

Papan quickly resisted the label. She is not a moderate, she said, but a pragmatist.

The implication is clear: a progressive agenda must be tempered by the need to get things done. Some progressives would argue that this pragmatism is an excuse to back away from genuinely seeking solutions to problems like the climate crisis, housing costs and related discrimination, or police misconduct.

Progressive is just one of the terms I use a lot when writing about politics. In this lull between campaigns, it seems like a good time to ask yourself what it means and how it should or shouldn’t be used. Moderate is another term that comes up here and I’m not at all sure it can be applied with any precision. Another is the word activist and I’m pretty confident about its application.

What difference does it make?

Well, as long-winded as this corner is, I’m limited to 800 words. For the sake of economy, like many journalists, I resort to a kind of shorthand—terms that, at least in the political world I visit, have a common understanding. The risk is that these words – yes, labels – are generalizations, with all the bias and inaccuracies that can accompany them.

Especially now, in the peninsular political environment, I admit that I have some confusion about how to use terms like progressive and moderate as labels in confidence of their usefulness—to me, to the people I write about, and to those of you who do I have the honor of reading this.

The Pew Research Center describes progressives as proponents that “US institutions need a complete overhaul because of racial prejudice.”

Pew also notes—and it’s totally true here—that progressives are among the most politically active Democrats.

Many peninsular progressives are young; Many of them – not all – come from communities of color that are slowly evolving into the combined peninsular majority.

You are liberal. Many of them are supporters of the democratic socialist principles advocated by US Senator Bernie Sanders. They’re big fans of US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who responded to the extremists’ label online and offered a list of positions she considers more mainstream than what the political establishment believes: Medicare for all, the Green New Deal, ICE is a “rogue agency” that should be dismantled. “I believe in cooperative economics and cooperative democracy, also known as democratic socialism,” she wrote.

Incidentally, I’ve heard more than one candidate say he or she wants to be “SMC’s AOC.” I don’t think this is an AOC district, but there you go.

The complication of describing progressives as a distinct political entity within our local political landscape is that most elected officials in the peninsula – certainly the most prominent – can only be characterized as progressive. Then-MP Kevin Mullin, who ran for Congress last year, has been named by several progressive groups as one of the leading progressives in the legislature. He is also certainly a leading member of the political establishment.

It is noteworthy that Papan’s election night commentary was delivered at the Plumbers’ Union Hall in Burlingame, a decades-long political arena in the county. Labor was perhaps the key factor in San Mateo County’s transition from staunchly Republican to fully Democratic. Labor remains the most influential advocacy group in the county and is clearly progressive. But progressives could easily view the labor leadership as pragmatic and mainstream establishment. Labor has consistently had a strong track record of supporting winning candidates, which is undeniably the ultimate sign of pragmatism.

And that might be the crux of the matter. The real conflict between progressives and pragmatists is that more pragmatists win office—at least for now. That tension plays out in other ways: in voting on policy issues in the Democratic Central Committee, or in battles over who goes as a delegate to Democratic conventions. On these battlefields, the sides are evenly divided.

A core of leading progressive officeholders is emerging — County Supervisors David Canepa and Noelia Corzo, San Mateo Mayor Amourence Lee, and South San Francisco Councilmember James Coleman are among the most notable.

But the real tension may simply be that a younger generation is impatiently waiting for an older establishment generation to step aside.

And that is as old as politics itself.

Mark Simon is a veteran journalist whose career spanned 15 years as an executive at SamTrans and Caltrain. He can be reached at markimon@smdailyjournal.com.

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