What is Progressivism? Pt. 2

Read the original post by Anders Ibsen and comments at the Young People For Blog.

| August 30, 2008

In my last post, I identified the core assumptions of Conservative doctrine in order to provide the right contrast to help us create our own ideology.

Conservatism is built on a foundation of atomism (individualism run amok) and crony capitalism. While conservatives profess a belief in personal responsibility and minimalist government, what they really strive for is selective government - I want mine, someone else pays for it.

With the basics of the other side covered, let's attempt a rough idea of what we're all about. Returning to the two basic questions (what is human nature, what is the role of government), Progressivism seems to boil down to two things:

1. People are cooperative, and capable of personal growth.

2. We're all in this together.

Read more below.

That communitarian sense of compassion is the beating heart of everything we stand for. Like Liberalism, we Progressives believe that government is obliged to provide for the common well-being, as well as respecting the private rights of individuals. As Barack Obama explained so well last night, Progressives and Liberals adhere to two overlapping kinds of responsibility: personal responsibility - my obligation to pull my weight and respect the rights of others - and mutual responsibility - my duty to contribute to the greater good and help those around me.

Progressivism is not a synonym for Liberalism, however. Though we are both communitarians, Progressives have rejected the more simplistic Utilitarianism of Liberalism for a more nuanced, mature Capability Approach.

A Liberal believes in attaining the greatest good for the greatest number. Government levels the playing field to accomplish this goal, while doing its best to also protect individual rights. Inequality is primarily seen as a matter of resource deprivation - throw more money at the problem, institute more charities and welfare programs and the problem will go away.

The Progressive sees society and the individual as a work in progress. Inequality isn't just a disparity of resources, but the deprivation of choice and potential. An uninsured family is denied the ability to live healthily and lives in constant fear of crisis, and as a result lacks the capacity to enjoy other basic human needs (like recreation or political involvement, for example). Progressivism refines Liberalism in this way, by recognizing that the enjoyment of individual rights depends on freeing the individual from the tyranny of social powerlesness - a freedom that requires social equity and cooperation.

It's this crucial development - seeing choice as a matter of power, rather than an isolated decision - that separates Progressivism from Conservatism and Liberalism.

Taken one step further, the Capability Approach becomes class conscious: in a plutocratic society where most economic and political power is concentrated in the hands of a small elite, one class has effectively monopolized choice, and expropriated decision-making power from the majority. The majority cannot exercise full choice without more power.

This final implication touches on democracy itself. Democratic government becomes a collaborative struggle against the deprivation of social power - a battlefield of principles, as opposed to a marketplace of ideas. So long as undemocratic systems of political and economic power remain in place, we can never be truly free.

Through empowering the many, we enrich the soul of the individual. Through freedom and equity, we offer the world a life that is fully human.

What is Progressivism? Pt. 1

Read the original post by Anders Ibsen and further comments on the Young People For Blog.

August 28, 2008

In their earlier posts, Patrick St. John and Jason Richberg began a conversation that I think is long overdue: what the heck is Progressivism?

Our first step in analyzing or creating any political ideology is identifying its core assumptions. These come down to two key questions:

1. What is human nature?

2. What is the role of government?

From these answers come all the different principles, value statements and policy positions that compose the movement's ideology. But before we delve into Progressivism, let's contrast what are about to articulate with what we already know about our rivals on the Right.

Scientists increasingly believe that there are cognitive differences between liberal and conservative brains that transcend environmental factors (race, class, gender, etc.). Conservatives are more likely to cling stubbornly to one course of action, even in the face of changing circumstances; liberals are much more likely to adapt their beliefs or actions when new information or circumstances come into play.

It has been empirically proven that conservatives are happier than liberals in the face of social inequality. The same situation (let's say, unequal pay for female workers) produces different emotional reactions: liberals become outraged at a system they hold to be discriminatory; conservatives become apathetic to the victim's suffering, defend the system as fair, and frequently display hostility towards the victim herself.

In short, the conservative individual is hard-wired on a biological level to be especially fearful and resistant to changing circumstances, and to rationalize away the suffering of others.

Fear and greed.

Conservatism as an ideology follows suit. Returning to the two questions, the Right's cardinal assumptions become apparent:

1. People are selfish individualists.

2. Every man for himself.

The economist John Kenneth Galbraith couldn't have said it better: "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."

The earliest liberal thinkers, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, saw people as isolated individualists, ready to screw their neighbors over at the first opportunity. To the godfathers of classical liberalism, all government was meant to do was keep the peace and protect private property from the savagery of our neighbors. This idea of the night-watchman state lasted well throughout American history into the Gilded Age, until the Great Depression proved it utterly wrong. Government must do something.

The legacy of the New Deal - and the idea that proactive government is a necessity for a just society - permanently altered all American ideologies. But it impacted Conservatism in the most ironic of ways: the universal acceptance of the welfare state forced Conservatism to become even more self-centered.

The painful truth for our right-of-center counterparts is that everyone wants government. Even conservatives. Very few people actually want to give away roads, public schools, Social Security or medical first-responders.

Conservatives really don't oppose government at all. They want the benefits of safety and order (not to mention the government intervention required to enforce their moral codes), just like everyone else. What they truly oppose is the concept of society itself.

The social compact of mutual obligation, responsibility and respect between equals is utterly lost to a conservative. Instead, the Right rebels against the principles of the liberal state while clinging desperately to it: conservatives want all the benefits of the system, but feel morally outraged at the idea that they are somehow responsible for it.

Conservatives consciously espouse a belief in limited government; but what they unconsciously believe is that government is a moral arbiter that should reward the worthy. Look no further than Too Big To Fail, the idea that it is paramount for government to bail out multi-billion dollar corporations when they sink. American Conservatism has tangled up social hierarchy and personal morality into a circle argument in which one becomes evidence of the other.

Conservative governance is neither conservative nor governance, but a system of redistribution and apologism - a redistribution of wealth and power to the wealthy and powerful, and an antisocial ideology of self-congratulation and scorn. Our power as the majority may be vast, but it is nothing, so long as the creed of righteous selfishness goes unchallenged.

The New Face of the Campus Left

article | posted January 26, 2006 (February 13, 2006 issue) on The Nation by Sam Graham-Felsen

When a group called Campus Progress launched its effort to promote progressive values on college campuses in the fall of 2004, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz wondered: "Isn't that a bit like pumping sand into the Mojave Desert?"

The assumption that America's campuses are impenetrable bastions of liberalism--where left-leaning faculty predominate, progressive student activism flourishes and conservatism is fiercely marginalized--still rules the day. But in reality, since the 1970s the conservative movement has become the dominant political force on many American campuses. This sea change is not simply a reflection of some students' increasingly right-wing views. Each year, conservative groups pour more than $35 million into hundreds of college campuses. They pay for right-wing speakers, underwrite scores of student papers, provide free leadership training and cushy internships, and equip thousands of new activists with talking points, discipline and missionary zeal.

Today's campus right is unified, on-message and passionate--in other words, part of a genuine movement. By contrast, the campus left is disparate, undisciplined and segmented along ideological and issue-based lines. Student progressives have struggled for decades with not only a lack of cohesion but a dearth of resources. "We didn't have our act together," says Joshua Holland, a fair-trade and antiwar activist who graduated from the University of Southern California this past spring. "We tried to keep things nonhierarchical and loosely structured, but at the end of the day, there was a lot of running around in circles, and we weren't getting anything done."

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It's a familiar lament among the two dozen student progressives I talked with for this article. But help has arrived. After three decades of unanswered advances by the right, the progressive movement is no longer leaving students to fend for themselves. Campus Progress--a project of the Center for American Progress (CAP), one of the country's premier think tanks--is the largest of a handful of organizations that have emerged in the past year to counter the right's campus operations. These groups are offering resources, ideas and training designed to patch up many of the holes that have long deflated the student left. But in attempting to forge a widespread student progressive movement, they face many of the same quandaries that loom large for American progressivism as a whole: What values should define the movement? What tactics should be embraced? And perhaps most difficult of all, to what extent does striving for results mean sacrificing strong principles?

Ever since the heyday of left-wing campus activism in the late 1960s and early '70s, progressive students have struggled with looking frivolous, reactionary or cliched to their peers. At the University of North Carolina senior Jessica Polk says students have long been "sick of what the left is doing--they want to walk to class without being handed a flier about a rally or vigil."

Meanwhile, student conservatives have managed to balance organizational and ideological discipline with ragtag rebelliousness, positioning themselves as perpetual underdogs on oppressively liberal campuses. Armed with their version of a screw-the-man mentality, the student right's activism is often shocking: affirmative action bake sales where white students are charged more for cookies than blacks, for instance, or immigrant hunts where students dressed in Border Patrol uniforms chase targeted "illegals" with water guns. As tasteless and offensive as such stunts might be, they make waves on campuses and garner national attention for the movement.

"This is the South Park generation," says Matt Singer, a junior at the University of Montana and creator of the popular left-wing blog Left in the West. "The conservative activism is fun, and it rings with the students in the same way that the left did in the '60s and early '70s."

"The right actually ends up looking cooler than the left," agrees Mani Mostofi, who recently earned his master's degree at the University of Texas. "I don't know how this is possible, but it's true!"

For progressive student activists, attention-getting victories have also been scarce. There have been isolated triumphs in the past year: successful student-led living-wage campaigns for employees at Georgetown University and Washington University of St. Louis, and the multi-campus Taco Bell boycott, which helped secure a significant raise for the fast-food chain's tomato pickers.

The most widespread disappointment has been the failure to generate a sustainable movement opposing the war in Iraq. While student mobilization in the run-up to the war was massive in scope and energy, the typical problems plaguing the campus left--ideological splits and lack of organization--have caused the movement to fade considerably. "It was really a lost cause," says Yale University junior Jared Malsin, "because there was a great deal of infighting among different factions in the movement." Some student progressives wanted to focus on the fight to keep military recruiters off campus; others were divided over whether to call for immediate withdrawal of US troops. Plus, says Malsin, "there was waning interest in fighting it because it seemed like there was so little we could actually do as students."

Frustrations abound, but the emergence of national progressive organizations on campus has given many student activists renewed hope. In its first year Campus Progress has provided progressive students with tools they've never had before: money and a sense of unity. While its $1.25 million projected budget falls well below the more than $10 million of the right-wing Young America's Foundation, Campus Progress has made an immediate impact. Wayne Huang, editor of Cornell's student progressive publication, Turn Left, has seen his paper "go through a shocking transformation in little under a year," thanks to funding from Campus Progress. On twenty-seven other campuses, formerly cash-strapped student left publications are finally competing with conservative papers, publishing regularly and printing on high-quality paper. At its virtual meeting place, CampusProgress.org, students from across the country are sharing ideas and getting advice on how to communicate their values from the likes of Senator Barack Obama. Features like "Know Your Right-Wing Speakers" and "Crib Sheet" provide concise talking points for fighting the right.

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For the first time Campus Progress has given progressive students a sense that they, like the campus right, are part of a tangible movement. When 600 progressive students convened in Washington, DC, last summer for the first annual Campus Progress National Student Conference, many felt a profound sense of relief. "For so long there's been a disconnect of dialogue between progressives," says University of Kentucky junior Yuriy Bronshteyn. "There's been nothing central to look to." The mere existence of an organizational infrastructure seems miraculous to Bronshteyn, who says, "This is almost like a star that we can all see in the sky every night--it can give us the feeling that we're all fighting the same fight."

As Campus Progress works to build a national community for student progressives, Young People For (YP4) focuses on developing individual leaders. A project of People for the American Way, YP4 mirrors the right's Leadership Institute, which has trained more than 40,000 young conservatives, including movement heavyweights Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist, since its inception in 1979. Providing a leadership pipeline for the left, YP4 has trained 126 students on forty campuses in its first year.

Jenny Parker, a YP4 fellow at Baylor University, wanted to organize a living-wage campaign on her campus--but had no idea how. After YP4 training in January 2005 in media outreach, coalition building and event planning, Parker says, "now we have the most organized campaign I could ever imagine." Especially helpful, she says, was YP4's guidance on framing the message. "Our audience at Baylor is very conservative and was turned off at the announcement of a living-wage campaign," Parker says. "We realized we had to spin our message a bit in order to gain support. We changed our campaign to the 1 John 3 Campaign"--a reference to a biblical passage urging aid for the poor. "Now our campaign is centered on the idea that this is our Christian obligation."

The largest Baptist university in the world has not yet passed a living wage for its workers, but Parker and her fellow activists are making headway with 1 John 3. They convinced the Student Congress to pass a resolution calling for a living wage, and have motivated 600 students to send postcards to the university president supporting the campaign.

Since the national groups have emerged, Joshua Holland, who was a YP4 fellow at USC, says campus progressives "actually get things done, which is a huge relief, because we're so used to not getting things done."

Progressives organized the most widely publicized student protest of 2005, the Princeton Frist-a-Buster. What began as a small event staged by eight students in front of the Frist Campus Center--each student took turns reading out of the campus phone book to protest Senate majority leader Bill Frist's threat to abolish the filibuster for judicial nominees--quickly grew into a nationwide phenomenon. Hundreds of students and professors, a Nobel laureate and two US senators took turns reading everything from Shakespeare to 3,500 digits of pi at Princeton, while students at thirty-five other campuses staged copycat events.

"We had a situation where the rhetoric was moderate, it was billed as nonpartisan and the people running it weren't the crazy activists but committed students who knew what they were talking about," says Princeton's Asheesh Kapur Siddique, a core organizer of the 384-hour talk marathon. "We spent hours learning the history, learning the rules, so we could talk authoritatively about it. When our peers asked us what we were doing, it was far more convincing to them."

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To David Halperin, director of Campus Progress, the Frist-a-Buster was the perfect model for the kind of movement his group wants to foster--clean, polished, on-message, but also humorous and inventive. The protest wasn't initiated by the national organization, he is quick to note, but by Siddique and his co-organizers. Campus Progress embraced the idea, provided resources and publicity and served, in Halperin's words, as a "megaphone" for the activists. That's how he wants his group to work. Unlike the largely top-town model of right-wing student advocacy groups, Halperin wants Campus Progress to be pushed "by the students' agendas."

But in choosing which student activities to support, which publications to finance and which speakers to bring on tour, Campus Progress can't help pushing an ideology. Some worry that the organization, run in part by former Clinton Administration officials, is more interested in promoting a centrist agenda than a strong, progressive alternative to the campus right. Several students who attended last summer's National Student Conference--where the keynote speaker was none other than Bill Clinton--felt that truly progressive perspectives were lacking. One panel, "Stronger and Smarter National Security," featured three panelists who, despite their criticism of George W. Bush's handling of the war, advocated expanding the military presence in Iraq. The subject of withdrawing troops was not even broached.

On the day of the conference, an article titled "What Is Progressive" was prominently displayed on the Campus Progress website, reading like a Port Huron statement for the new movement. "Progressivism," wrote Cornell University senior and Campus Progress intern Andrew Garib, "is far more flexible than any one ideology. Traditionally, conservatives see the world, especially human nature, as predictable and static. Liberals are often burdened with endless optimism--a belief that all problems can be solved through implementing utopian visions." The new student politics emerging from the conference should be defined not by revolutionary idealism, Garib wrote, but by pragmatism: "See the world for what it is, accept it as ever-changing and dynamic, and choose the best course of action in line with decidedly American values."

To Ishaan Tharoor, who edits the Campus Progress-funded Yale Hippolytic, Garib's manifesto was rife with centrist ambiguity. Tharoor fears the new progressive student movement will be dominated by "a cadre of résumé-pushing College Dems" who value expediency over principle. To Tharoor that's hardly the most "pragmatic" way to contest the right-wing movement's deeply held and sharply defined views. "Their extremism can only be taken to task by our own 'politics of conviction,'" Tharoor wrote on the Campus Progress blog. "As long as we cling to the...shadows of a Clintonian past and timidly skirt the issues that truly divide our country, that politics shall never emerge."

Halperin insists that Campus Progress is eager to bring students across the left's spectrum into the fold. If the ideological diversity of the students at the conference was limited, he chalks that up to the fact that Campus Progress recruited a large portion of the attendees from the DC-based progressive organizations where many work as interns. The 2006 conference, he vows, will reflect a broader outreach.

"My biggest concern from the beginning about CAP getting involved in the campus biz is that we would look like the McDonald's or Microsoft of progressive organizing--that it would be sort of corporate-style, clean, gleaming and neat, and not the kind of messy, grassroots, crunchy or angry version of what campus organizing is supposed to look like," Halperin says. "We've tried very hard, without compromising what we stand for, to make sure that we are serious about progressive values, and that we believe in inclusion."

Campus Progress has funded several student papers with strong left-wing content, like the University of Texas Issue, which recently featured an interview with a member of the radical Landless Workers Movement in Brazil. Thus far, Campus Progress has not engaged in any editorial oversight. "Anytime CAP is associated with something far left, it's going to hurt us," Halperin says, "but if we're censoring students, it's also going to be a problem." He acknowledges that "we'd have a problem if students were writing editorials in support of the Iraqi insurgency or calling for the elimination of the state of Israel."

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How, I asked, would Campus Progress respond if students requested radical intellectual Noam Chomsky as a speaker? After all, right-wing groups like Young America's Foundation almost exclusively fund speakers from the radical end of the right's spectrum. "Well, I don't think Chomsky would do business with us," Halperin replied. "But let's say we planned to bring Al Gore to campuses, and students said, 'How about bringing Ralph Nader to debate him?' If that's what they wanted, we'd do it."

Campus Progress began this past fall to offer student activism grants, some of which will promote causes that extend beyond the mainstream aims of the Frist-a-Buster--like the $1,000 given to students organizing a living-wage campaign at Vanderbilt University. According to director Iara Peng, YP4 also wants to emphasize bottom-up initiatives. "There was no way we could design this program from the top down and tell students what to do," says Peng. "We made a deliberate choice to break out of the right-wing model and allow students to define us."

On each campus, YP4 chooses three fellows (often with differing ideologies) who collectively agree on an activism project. YP4-sponsored activities have included living-wage and anti-Wal-Mart activism. Notably missing from the list of YP4 efforts--not to mention those sponsored by Campus Progress--is antiwar activism, arguably the core cause of the day among progressives. According to Peng, students from only one campus, Southern Methodist University, have expressed any interest in Iraq-related organizing. But even there, it didn't happen; the Southern Methodist students "decided instead to do coalition-building with progressive organizations."

"That was the only interest we received on forty campuses," Peng said. "That is not to say fellows are not organizing on Iraq--just not through the program."

In part, that's no doubt because of the group's philosophy. "We look for issues that will not polarize people but work toward common ground," Peng says. "We're not here to totally fight the right on campuses; in some ways we're here to work together toward our collective visions. If a Republican wants to work with us and work toward a better world, great."

Not all of the major efforts to organize campus progressives are coming from the outside. The Roosevelt Institution, founded by Stanford University students in the wake of the 2004 presidential election, is billed as the nation's first progressive student think tank. Providing much of Roosevelt's steam is executive director Quinn Wilhelmi, an ambitious and ultra-enthusiastic junior who quotes Spider-Man and Henry David Thoreau in the same breath. His message--that progressive students can and should be fighting in the war of ideas--is resonating with thousands of students across the country; the Roosevelt Institution already boasts chapters at 120 campuses.

In early October students from across the country met in Washington to present policy recommendations at the House office building's Cannon caucus room. Debuting their policy journal, the Roosevelt Review, students held forth on relatively mainstream topics ranging from AIDS prevention to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge crisis. At the launch of Yale's Roosevelt chapter this fall, students donned formal attire, nibbled on fancy hors d'oeuvres and watched a prerecorded video appearance from Hillary Clinton.

"This was not our parents' campus activism," Yale senior Sarah Laskow wrote of the event on CampusProgress.org. "So much the better, say the Roosevelt kids. We'd rather shine our shoes than dred our hair. We'd rather speak alongside our political leaders than shout out rhetoric from campus quads. We'd rather write policy papers than compose protest songs. The political elders have used us for our bodies and our energies. Now we want to offer them our minds. Our politics of revolution pushes not for actions but for ideas."

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Wilhelmi says that the Roosevelt Institution is not an attempt to replace grassroots activism but rather to complement it. "Nothing would have happened in the '60s without the sit-ins, but nothing would have happened without the Civil Rights Act either," he says. "I hope students will do both. I hope they'll do the sit-ins and then also work toward getting a city government to pass a law." He also maintains that Roosevelt will be a "big tent" for progressive ideas. Even though the organization is courting DLC darling Hillary Clinton, it has Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel and liberal philosopher Richard Rorty on its advisory board.

Some progressives are suspicious of the professionalism of the Roosevelt movement, fearing it is already marginalizing traditional left-wing activism on campuses. "Anything could happen, but at this point the pendulum seems like it's swinging toward the center-left--Roosevelt, Campus Progress--the fine, upstanding, clean-shaven young white men standing up for this new brand of progressivism," said one student organizer (speaking on condition of anonymity because "they're already too powerful"). "It's no heir to SDS."

I asked the former president of Students for a Democratic Society, Todd Gitlin, now a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, for his thoughts about the trends on the new student left. "I think there's a desire for results, a hard-bitten realism," says Gitlin. "The primary goal is not some sort of symbolic display, or some sort of posture or attitude, but results. If that's what it means, then I applaud the turn to practicality. Today the far right is in charge, and I don't think you can create the possibility of broad-based radicalism until you defeat the far right. Put the center in power and then you have the possibility--or the luxury--of radicalism."

But SDS co-founder and lifelong activist Tom Hayden is wary of organizations that emphasize efficacy over ideals. "Students are being channeled into the Democratic Party or other mainstream institutions that will never bring about social change without a challenge and pressure from idealistic and free-thinking campus activists," says Hayden. None of the issues Hayden believes are "the great moral challenges before this generation"--the Iraq War, fighting the oil companies, resisting the pressure of military recruiters, debating alternatives to corporate-led globalization--are being pushed by the groups organizing campus progressives. "The immediate need," says Hayden, "is to say no to those who would channel students into safe alternatives to these challenges."

The right has created a student movement not simply by providing infrastructure but by promoting hard-core conservative ideology on campuses. The fledgling effort to organize campus progressives has provided the much needed infrastructure. But if progressive students are encouraged to embrace pragmatic politics over bold and sweeping challenges to the status quo, could something else--something essential--be lost? After all, radical students have stood at the forefront of many critical battles in this country, propelling social change by refusing to think within the accepted boundaries of debate. What will it mean for the progressive movement in the long run if cries for a new society are replaced by calls for incremental improvement? Is the future of the progressive movement better off in the hands of young pragmatists or young visionaries?

How Progressives Can Win in the Long Run

By Iara Peng | September 27, 2006 | from WireTap magazine, a project of AlterNet.

Right-wing groups spend ten times more on youth leadership development than progressives do. If we want to win, we need to start investing in the next generation of leaders.

For nearly 30 years, ultraconservatives have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in young people and built an infrastructure that initiates young people into the radical right movement through campus activism, leadership training and career development. Their investments have paid off. The radical right wing now controls the executive and legislative branches of government, and it's only one seat away from complete dominance of the Supreme Court.
If progressives want to achieve the same sort of political success that the radical right has enjoyed for the past two decades, we're going to have to do more than focus on the next round of elections and pay lip service to engaging young people. We must make a serious, long-term investment in our next generation of progressive leaders. Young people provide a vital infusion of ideas, energy and passion to the progressive movement right now, and their commitment to continued activism and leadership is critical to building a progressive future.

The right wing's investment in young people

For decades, right-wing organizations including the Leadership Institute, Federalist Society, Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation have spearheaded a massive effort to bring young people into their movement. Last year alone, the Right invested $48 million in 11 youth-focused organizations aimed at increasing the number of ideologically friendly campus papers, fostering networks of students on campuses, shifting the way that students self-identify in terms of political ideology, providing skills and strategies training, and promoting right-wing values.

Students are cultivated by the right-wing campaign against college courses that conflict with their agenda. For example, they have accused more than 100 professors of making "anti-American" statements. They attend courses with titles like "How to Stop Liberals in Their Tracks." They have internships, fellowships and jobs waiting for them when they graduate. They learn how to run campaigns and how to run for office.

The return on this investment has been enormous. A powerful network of young ultraconservatives fills state capitols, the halls of Congress, the executive branch and the courts. It is supported by community leaders, skilled organizers, academics and media personalities that help dominate the debate. The leaders in whom the right has invested in are familiar names. In 1970, a man named Karl Rove was head of the National College Republicans. In 1981, Grover Norquist took the reins. And in 1983, it was Ralph Reed.

Progressives need to do more

Young people have been at the forefront of every social and political movement in the history of the world. Through organizations like United Students Against Sweatshops and others, young people have defended the struggles of working people and challenged corporate power. And progressives have made great strides in supporting young progressive leadership development at a national scale over the last few years through the creation of new, progressive leadership development organizations with a nationwide and multi-issue focus, including Young People For, the League of Young Voters and the Center for Progressive Leadership.

At Young People For, we've created a diverse national network of young leaders on campuses around the country. We connect them with each other and provide them with skills and training from national progressive movement leaders. Over the course of their one-year fellowship, they work to implement individually designed Blueprints for Social Justice -- creating important change in the present while at the same time learning valuable lessons they can put to work in the future.

This year alone, fellows at Young People For have played a key role in shutting down Florida's juvenile boot camp system, expanding campus nondiscrimination policies, creating leadership institutes on college campuses for high school students and GLBT leaders, and engaging young people in the political processes by registering them to vote.

Collectively, we're doing great work, but we're not doing enough. Right-wing groups spend more than ten times as much on long-term political leadership development than we do, and financial trends over the past four years show that progressive leadership development organizations are actually, on average, experiencing a decline in revenue. Unlike their conservative counterparts, youth-focused progressive organizations are often funded with a "buying," not "building," mentality, meaning that donors want their contribution to have immediate payoffs, such as election-year voter registration, but are not focusing on investing in the strategic, long-term sustainability of those organizations.

We need more investments through growth capital followed by sustainable, multiyear revenue. Doing so would allow youth-focused progressive organizations to plan for increased growth and build for the future. Eventually, this sustained investment would also help them create reserve funds that would allow them to continue operating at the same scale if funding sources temporarily decline.

Progressives should make a commitment to youth leadership development throughout our nonprofit organizations -- not just youth-led organizations -- that is on the same scale as that of the right wing. It's time to scale up our efforts by demonstrating our commitment to young people through mentoring, professional development, networking and intentional training opportunities to help develop young leadership.

A way for progressives to catch up with the right's infrastructure

In order to address this disparity, we must build widespread knowledge about progressive leadership development needs and opportunities, increase awareness about the gaps between right-wing leadership programs and their progressive counterparts, and support progressive programs over the long term. We need to identify gaps in progressive leadership development programs and start to support programs that fill those gaps. And we need to be clear about the ways in which progressive programs are falling short and develop new initiatives.

Getting to scale is the process of expanding effective programs to achieve greater impact by:

Increasing the numbers of young people served by these programs
Broadening geographic coverage
Building multi-issue and multidimensional programs
Making sure various marginalized communities are reached
Simply put, getting to scale means that our programs will be able to extend services to more people in more places. If our youth-focused work grows to the scale of the work done by the right, we won't have just created more of the same or an increase in quantity. Instead, we'll have created a catalytic effect that leads to fundamental change.

By getting to scale, we can do a better job of reaching beyond urban areas to provide services for marginalized youth at community colleges and on nontraditional campuses. The marginal cost per youth may be expensive, but the gains of reaching more young people in community colleges outweigh the costs, especially when larger social benefits are factored in.

If progressives are to support young people over the long term, we need to make sure our youth-focused work consists of multiple programs that offer complementary types of leadership development to various groups of young people. We must build strong relationships between leadership development organizations to ensure that future leaders have access to various leadership development opportunities throughout their youth.

Together, these organizations will be able to connect young people with opportunities to grow and develop their skills over time, from high school experiential leadership programs to college-based activism and leadership trainings to career development and professional development to mid-level career development, training and networking -- providing the key infrastructure to get our movement to scale.

To learn more about Young People For, or to discuss this story, visit the YP4 blog.

Iara Peng is the director of Young People For.