Bruce A. Dixon is scratching his venerable head over this, and I share his puzzlement. He and his comrades at Black Agenda Report looked at the websites of 31 Congressional primary-winning candidates endorsed by one of three post-Bernie progressive advocacy groups: Our Revolution, Justice Democrats, and Brand New Congress. They found that 21 of those 31 websites' issues pages say literally nothing—or at least nothing markedly progressive—about international policy or issues of war & peace.
Since I have found Dixon to be a reliable source of information and progressive commentary, at first I figured I'd just take his word for it. In his article, he includes the URLs of those issues and platform pages, but does not include hyperlinks to them, and I was feeling to lazy to copy and paste them. Then curiosity overcame laziness, and I checked a few of the 21. Sure 'nuff, these sites are conspicuously and eerily silent on those topics.
Why Such a Big Hole in the Platform?
Dixon speculates as to the reasons for this silence, as well as the Sanders-esque omissions of these topics on the sites of OR and JD in particular (numbers in parentheses mine):
Since I have found Dixon to be a reliable source of information and progressive commentary, at first I figured I'd just take his word for it. In his article, he includes the URLs of those issues and platform pages, but does not include hyperlinks to them, and I was feeling to lazy to copy and paste them. Then curiosity overcame laziness, and I checked a few of the 21. Sure 'nuff, these sites are conspicuously and eerily silent on those topics.
Why Such a Big Hole in the Platform?
Dixon speculates as to the reasons for this silence, as well as the Sanders-esque omissions of these topics on the sites of OR and JD in particular (numbers in parentheses mine):
There are only two possibilities. Either (1) two thirds of our progressive Democrats running for Congress this year really are true believers in the US right to make up its own facts, to declare offshore law free zones like Guantanamo, to invade other countries at will, killing millions and wreaking incalculable havoc upon their infrastructure, societies and ecologies like in Southeast Asia, Iraq and Afghanistan, and just don’t want to say it out loud, or (2) our progressive Democrats don’t believe it but imagine they need to remain silent and pretend to be true believers in the US empire to get elected. Either way, two thirds of the new blue wave of progressive Dem congressional candidates believe they can get away with silence on foreign affairs.
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