Welcome to BigTentProgressives.org Blog!

BigTentProgressives.Org is working to unify all progressives.

Our Mission: To unify the diverse Progressive voices by identifying and promoting our shared values.

Progressives believe Government's Moral Mission is

to Protect and Empower the People.

Our Vision: The shared values of Empathy and Responsibility will be a foundation to support our Working Together for a stronger America and a better world. We will explore these values together as we see how the complexity of issues align by these values.

Our Members: Come from a wide range of backgrounds. Each are Progressives or Independents for various reasons.
The major groups of Progressives Include:

• Socioeconomic Progressives
• Identity-Politics Progressives
• Environmental Progressives
• Civil Liberties Progressives
• Spiritual Progressives
• Atheistic Progressives
• Anti-Authoritarian Progressives
• Idealists, Pragmatists and Militants
• Realistic or Scientific Progressives

Progressives tend to be divided by issues, modes of thought and attitude.¹ The focus on these differences blinds us to the fact that we share common values; values that we can organize and understand.
Metaphors we live by: the "Nation-As-A-Family" metaphor. This is not meant to be literal but as a way to conceptualize the way things work. For instance, it is used when people talk about the budget as if it were a family budget, while no family would have a 1/2 trillion dollars in gold sitting around... but the USA does. The metaphor helps explain and sometimes gets in the way. At any rate it is useful.

There is a major difference between

Progressives and Conservatives!

Progressive and Conservative Metaphors: Progressives naturally apply values consistent with a Nurturing Parent in the Nation-As-A-Family metaphor. Conservatives fall to a Strict Father view. Once again, this is not literal but when you are deciding how to recover from an economic crisis Progressives would want to support the nation as it gets back on its feet, while Conservatives would prefer to punish America for getting into trouble in the first place... even if it was their policies that caused the problem. 

There are fewer value differences between the various groups of Progressives than there are between Progressives and Conservatives.

America is essentially Progressive: Imagine, when the world was ruled by kings, the founding fathers rejected that hierarchy and created a government by the people and for the people. There are far more actual progressive independents in America, in some cases they have been told that they are conservatives and they believed it. We will bring those people back to the Center of Politics.

Political Alignment Graph and the Myth of the Center: When you look at the domains of Social Freedom and Economic Freedom the 2 American Parties fall into certain regions. When these are plotted on a graph it becomes clearer where the 2 Parties fall. The myth of the center is that by ignoring the real spectrum the center is shifted towards the right. If there is a Center the Democrats are solidly in it.

 

 The center of the possible political spectrum on Social and Economic Freedom belongs to the Democratic Party.

What we're not trying to do:

• Alienate people - If we have offended please let us know.
• Make you change your family or parenting style (the metaphor of Nation-As-A-Family) is not to be taken literally. However, the more nurturing parent behaviors you exhibit the more creative, open and humane your children will be.
• If you do have a Strict Father parenting style but believe that the Moral Mission of government should be to Protect and Empower the people we don't want to drive you to become a conservative. We believe that the Nurturing Parent metaphor is more successful (Under GWB's Strict Father Presidency we got several massive and permanent failures that may take decades to recover from... this is after Clinton delivered peace and prosperity with a Nurturant Parent Presidency.
• To explain away failures due to things like competence or luck when it is clearly the values that are the problem. Conservative values fail America in part because their values are less effective at dealing with a complex world.

This is BigTentProgressives and you can be a part of it:

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Thanks so much for reading about this.

Yours,

Ed Kaine, CoFounder BigTentProgressives.org