Real Americans

Oh, and another thing! Progressives must defend and champion urban Americans in the so-called “Red States.”

We should distinguish sparsely populated rural conservatives from densely populated diverse urban progressives. The millions upon millions of city dwelling progressives across America are real Americans, and progressives do not live only on the coasts.

Every time demographic dimensions of political discourse are contemplated or figured through the broad-strokes of “Red and Blue States” or the “Heartland” versus the “Coasts” progressives must simply ignore that framing (we shouldn’t even respond to those terms) and we must always counter with a framing that insists on benighted poor sparsely populated rural conservative expanses dotted throughout with densely populated progressive cultural centers, thriving progressive centers of learning and industry, and diverse productive progressive cities and capitals.

Progressives need to get it through their skulls that, actually, come what may, we are Americans.

I realize that this is actually a common but by no means universal ritual of progressive maturation, still... When many of us left home for college or the cities and emerged into progressive consciousness, first confronted religious diversity, first grasped the reality and extent of social injustice, came out as gay, rebelled against the strictures of our upbringing, whatever form this development took, it is too easy to imagine that in becoming progressive we took a measure of distance from "America" as it is embodied in the impoverished lives we left behind.

But this is the path the majority of Americans have taken in some form or other over a century of tumult and trial. We did not leave America behind when we grew up and became progressives. Much of America grew up with us, much of America came with us, this is what much of America is now, this is the way most of us do things around here now.

Social conservativism is a sad, scared echo of America’s past reverberating into its present, but progressives are truly Americans in America as it actually exists in the present. Progressives need to stop acting like renters in America and realize we already own the place.