**Capture the Democratic Party. This is a lesson to be learned from the religious right. They worked up from the grass roots, crowding the local GOP meetings, staying late and voting their members into party offices. Advice to progressives: "Go thou and do likewise." **Purge the Democratic Party of the "blue dogs." DINOs (Democrats in Name Only) must be challenged and at least occasionally defeated in primary elections. The mere threat of successful opposition might bring a few DINOs back into line. **Reinvigorate the labor movement. The GOP correctly figured that to achieve Karl Rove's "permanent Republican majority," they must first immobilize the labor unions. Thus Reagan's 1981 breaking of the PATCO (air controllers) strike. Conversely, FDR's New Deal would have been impossible without the support of the unions. The road back for the unions begins with the proposed Employee Free Choice Act, designed to increase union membership without fear of management retaliation. **Sustain and expand alternative media . The print and broadcast news media, once owned and controlled by hundreds of independent local businesses, is now primarily owned by six mega-corporations. It is past time to dust off and reactivate anti-trust legislation. In the meantime, progressives must refine and expand their use of the internet. **Enact election and campaign finance reform. End the privatization of elections, and outlaw any and all unverifiable voting technologies. Overturn Buckley v. Valeo, which affirmed that "cash is speech." Treat corporate campaign contributions for what they are: bribes. **Reinstate the Rule of Law. The crimes of the Bush/Cheney administration must be publicized and prosecuted, and the integrity of the Constitution restored.And finally, Carpe Diem! Seize this moment. The iron is hot. The opponent is groggy. Candidate Obama was speaking to the progressives when he said, "this is our moment... We are the ones we have been waiting for." As Shakespeare's Brutus observed:
"There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. "On such a full sea are we now afloat; and we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures."On a Personal Note. My plea in this essay for undiminished and continuing progressive activism might appear hollow, as it is published simultaneously with a Crisis Papers announcement that this, our website, will henceforth be downsized and will suspend weekly publication. If so, then this appearance is deceptive. My activism will continue unabated, but I will act as a professional scholar, rather than a self-appointed amateur "journalist." Following the (alleged) "presidential election" in 2000, I frequently wrote political opinion articles for my personal website, The Online Gadfly, which I also submitted for publication elsewhere on the internet. Two years into the Bush/Cheney regime, I joined forces with Dr. Bernard Weiner (both a journalist and a scholar) to establish The Crisis Papers. Since the appearance of the first edition of The Crisis Papers, two days before the 2002 mid-term election, Bernard Weiner and I have each published more than two hundred original essays, most of which also appeared elsewhere. Scarcely a week went by without at least one original essay at The Crisis Papers. After six years of near-weekly attention to timely and topical issues, I will now devote less time to hacking at the branches of political and economic regressivism, and will spend more time attacking the ideological roots. I will resume concentrated work on my books in progress, Conscience of a Progressive and To Ourselves and Our Posterity. And I will write papers for scholarly conferences and publications. As I do this, I fully expect that much of this effort will result in articles in The Crisis Papers and other progressive websites. But henceforth, free of the onerous demands of weekly deadlines, I will write and publish when good-and-ready. Hopefully, this will result in less quantity and more quality of output. To those who have read my internet pieces, and to those among you who have returned responses thereto, be assured that as long as I live, breath, and write, you will continue to find me on the internet, at The Crisis Papers, The Online Gadfly, and elsewhere. "Eternal vigilance," wrote Jefferson, "is the price of liberty." And eternal vigilance by an alert and informed public is essential if we are to prevent right-wing regressivism from once again contaminating the body politic. "The work begins anew, the hope rises again, and the dream lives on." (Senator Edward Kennedy, August 25, 2008) Copyright 2009 by Ernest Partridge