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The Maryland Progressive
"The America over which FDR presided was home to mass organizations of the unemployed; farmers' groups that blocked foreclosures, sometimes at gunpoint; general strikes that shut down entire cities, and militant new unions that seized factories. Both communists and democratic socialists were enough of a presence in America to help shape these movements, generating so much street heat in so many congressional districts that Democrats were compelled to look leftward as they crafted their response to the Depression.
During Lyndon Johnson's presidency, the civil rights movement, among whose leaders were such avowed democratic socialists as Martin Luther King Jr. and James Farmer, provided a new generation of street heat that both compelled and abetted the president and Congress to enact fundamental reforms... In America, major liberal reforms require not just liberal governments, but autonomous, vibrant mass movements, usually led by activists who stand at or beyond liberalism's left fringe. No such movements were around during Carter and Clinton's presidencies... It might well be too little too late, but without left pressure from below, the Obama presidency will end up looking more like Carter's or Clinton's than Roosevelt's or Johnson's."
- Harold Meyerson, Wash. Post Jan. 8; Without a Movement, Progressives Can't Aid Obama's Agenda
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