Eight reasons to stop Trump

Is it really going to be hard to convince people leaning to our side to vote? Here are eight Ā lines of argument. 1. Tump’s threat to democracy. 2. Trump’s threat to abortion and other basic rights including to contraception. 3. Trump’s embrace of deep tax cuts for the rich. 4. Trump’s promise to repeal the ACA. 5. Trump’s threat to social security if he keeps deepening deficits through tax cuts. 6. Trump’s threat to student debt relief and Republican efforts to block of the student debt relief Biden promised. 7. Trump demanded that Republicans blocked their own immigration reform bill because Trump demanded it. 8. Trump’s threat to our climate and the earth as a whole. I know how deeply entrenched the Trump movement is and how insane the Republicans are. But it’s still Ā hard for me to believe that these 8 lines of argument aren’t enough to give Democratsā€¦ Continue reading

Pennsylvania Voters Believe Wealthy Individuals and Profitable Corporations Are Not Paying Their Fair Share

Income and wealth are highly concentrated at the top in Pennsylvania, a situation that has worsened greatly in recent decades.Ā Pennsylvania voters rightly believe that corporations and wealthy individuals arenā€™t paying their fair share to fund the government services and infrastructure we all depend on. In November and December of 2022, Data for Progress conducted a survey of registered voters nationally to gauge voter support towards state action to ensure that profitable corporations and the wealthy are paying their fair share of taxes. The national survey was then used to estimate opinion at the state level for Pennsylvania, using a machine learning model trained on nationally representative survey responses linked to a commercial voter file. There is no question that Pennsylvaniaā€™s voters are supportive of statewide policies that require those at the top to pay their fair share. Voters are looking to Pennsylvania’s elected leaders to hold corporations accountable and createā€¦ Continue reading

We Need to Let Local Communities Set Their Own Minimum Wage

The state of Pennsylvania does not allow local governmentsā€”whether counties or municipalitiesā€”to set a higher minimum wage than that set by the state. It should do so. The reason it should is obvious: Pennsylvania is a large, diverse state in which local economies differ from one county and city to another. Some of our counties have a much higher cost of living than others, which means that the single statewide minimum is less valuable to working people in some counties than others. Some of our counties have much higher average wages than others, which means that they can support a higher minimum wage without any job loss. (And itā€™s pretty clear that, under current economic conditions, it would take a much higher minimum wage to cause job loss than anything being discussed in the General Assembly.) Some of our counties have lower unemployment or more employers looking to hire peopleā€¦ Continue reading

Chanukah and Hellenism

Originally written during Chanukah 2014. Happy Chanukah, Hanukah, Hannukkah, Chanukka, Hanuka, Channukah, Hanukah, Chanukkah, Hannukah, Chanuka or Hanaka Iā€™ve always loved this holiday–fighting for political and religious freedom chimed with so much I believed in. And then I learned that the Maccabees were not just fighting against the Seleucids but the Hellenistic Jews whose syncretic practices conflicted with what they took to be a more pure form of Jewish practice. That complicated things since I’m a Hellenistic Jew, myself, for whom syncretism (which is a fancy way of saying mash-ups) are deeply attractive. My work in political philosophy draws on and attempts to weave together ideas from Jewish (especially as they have influenced modern liberalism) and Greek sources. So Iā€™m loathe to identify with a moment in Jewish history which attacked those Jews whose ideas prefigure my own. I’m not quite done figuring out how to reinterpret the holiday soā€¦ Continue reading

Thinking about the West Side Story Debate

The recent New York Times piece on the reaction of Latinx people in the arts to West Side Story has drawn some sadly uncharitable responses from people whose political instincts are typically progressive. So, even though my initial and concluding thoughts about the whole issue is to say that the arts are, thankfully unlike politics in that the best work does not come from agreement and compromise but a willingness to put forward distinctive, unique, challenging and often upsetting work, I do want to say a few words about why I think we should not be divided about the wrong things when it comes to West Side Story and other works of art that raise issues of gender, race, and class. Itā€™s important to note to being with that there was no unanimity of opinion in the article let alone an effort by the voice of the New York Timesā€¦ Continue reading

Don’t Fearā€“Run for office in 2022

My biggest fear about the 2022 election is not that conditions will be that political and economic conditions will be difficult for Democrats–for reasons I have explained a few times I don’t think that will be the case–but that good candidates are not getting ready to run in state legislative races and political contributors are not getting ready to fund them beause that wrongly fear that it will be a bad year, (And it doesn’t help that we don’t know what the district lines will be now and won’t for about another two weeks.) Political scientists have shown that this dynamic explains part of the problem with mid-term elections for the party that holds the presidency. In other words, the failure of parties in those elections is a self-fulflilling prophecy. Don’t let that happen. If you are thinking of running for the General Assembly in 2022, do it. If youā€¦ Continue reading

Overturning Roe v Wade would be a game changer in state legislative races

Originally posted on Facebook In all the punditry’s hand-wringing about the Democratic chances in the 2022 election, I rarely see any reference to the impact of the overturning of Roe v. Wade. After today, I think that outcome is likely. And I also think the impact on our elections–especially state legislative elections–will be profound.Ā  All of us who do advocacy on state legislative elections know how hard it is to get people–and lately newspapers, too–to pay attention to them. We know how they don’t connect the party identification of incumbent legislators to control over the legislature and control over the legislature to policy decisions. And so Republicans incumbents in SEPA and elsewhere in the state, and their equivalents elsewhere, skate by as voters turned off by the increasingly Trumpified Republicans Party push the button for familiar names of incumbents.Ā  If Roe is gone, voting for any Republican legislator in PA,ā€¦ Continue reading