‘From producing the blueprints to achieve universal healthcare coverage and end the Iraq war, to developing a new middle-out economic-growth agenda and showing the economic benefits of clean energy, our ideas are helping address the country’s most pressing challenges.’ Thus the Center for American Progress marked its first 10 years of existence with a day-long conference featuring, among others, an international panel comprising former American secretary of state Madeleine Albright, former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard, and Canadian Liberal party leader Justin Trudeau, and a video of the Democratic party’s great and the good reflecting on its contribution. Hillary Clinton addressed the gala, the latest in a string of speeches across the country in which she is roadtesting possible campaign themes and in which she criticised the recent government shutdown, thus building the near-obligatory reputation as Washington outsider, critical of its misguided ways. The conference can be watched online via CAP’s main website.
The thinktank also runs the newsy thinkprogress.org, as well as hosting pieces on its main site. There, senior fellow Eric Alterman, in what he estimated to be his 500th blog on the site, looked back over the decade and took on the ‘false equivalence’ of American news outlets giving equal weight to conservative arguments, ‘no matter how outlandish, illogical, or simply untrue’ those arguments are: ‘The mainstream media irresponsibly treats uncredentialed climate [change] deniers … with the same degree of respect as climate scientists who are qualified.’ It is a trait also present in the treatment of the subject of climate change in the UK media – television included. As Alterman quotes, ‘If CNN did sports reporting, every game would be a tie.’ Also in his sights is the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank whose stated mission is to ‘formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom [and] traditional American values’, but which, he argues, produces reports which are ‘factually dishonest and analytically ridiculous’.
Back in Blighty, IPPR continues to make its own contribution to the forward march of progressive politics with the latest instalment in its examination of the ‘political battleground of values’, The New Electorate. Dividing the country (indeed, the whole world) into ‘settlers’ (anxious and socially conservative); ‘prospectors’ (aspirant but uninterested in causes); and ‘pioneers’ (liberal and interested in fairness), it finds that Britain is comprised of 30 per cent settler, 32 per cent prospector and 38 per cent pioneer, with settlers, having been in long-term decline, growing as a group in recent years. By contrast, the balance in the United States is 50 per cent pioneer and just 18 per cent settler. Social class, in this analysis, fails to capture the range of psychological dispositions that cut across socioeconomic divides; it also reveals that more of the population is ‘up for grabs’ for Labour than for the Conservatives, with more saying they would never vote Tory than say the same for Labour.
IPPR’s update records a shift to extremes of late, which may help explain a tendency noted by the political commentariat for the main parties to play to core vote values rather than reach out to swing voters who are, say, more open to immigration but highly concerned about welfare. The thinktank pays particular attention to the interaction of ‘blue Labour’ – which ‘identifies with the settler and reminds Labour that … the “narrative of loss” is profound’ – and New Labour. ‘Nostalgia … leaves the prospector cold,’ it warns. A significant chunk of the analysis concerns how parties might build election-winning coalitions of voters from across the groups, whose views often conflict directly. While Conservative sloganeering often retreats only into core settler territory (‘The British way’, ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’), New Labour’s ‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ is cited as a powerful message that both conservative-minded settlers and liberal-oriented pioneers could get behind; a modern-day equivalent might be ‘Firm on immigration and firm on discrimination’, the paper suggests. And with the further warning that prospectors shifted back to Labour ahead of the 2010 general election, but could switch again to the Conservative party should they feel they would be better served by it, retaining and growing this group for Labour could not be more important.
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