Beware the Progressive-Wishful Complex!
It's Election Day 2018, and I'm seeing it again: social media posts by ultra progressive friends celebrating Democratic victories as evidence of the imminent Revolution and decrying Republican victories as the result of voter suppression or voting machine shenanigans. Underlying these responses is the idea that the vast majority of Americans are really progressive at heart, and the only thing that's stopping their Voice from being heard is a corrupt Establishment whose overthrow would result in all the people celebrating their newfound freedom.… [more]
On this day of the 
In the 1970's, conservative Christians formed an organization called The Moral Majority, the point of the "majority" part of the name being their conviction that they and those like them formed a majority of Americans, whose wishes were being disregarded by the liberal (minority) establishment. The name was also a play on the "Silent Majority," coined by Richard Nixon to refer to those Americans (again, allegedly in the majority but overlooked by the liberal mainstream media) who were opposed to the countercultural protests of the 60's.… 
A lot of people see the political struggle between the Left and the Right as a game of capture-the-flag. We battle the other team to set our candidate on that hilltop, and once we do, we win the game. Thinking along these lines, many Bernie Sanders supporters were certain that if they could just get him elected president, everything would change.… 
I know that many of you donate a lot of money to progressive causes and candidates, but I recently got an idea for another avenue for societal progress you might pursue. The idea is a general one about a kind of action you can take that combines business, philanthropy, and political activism, but in this post, I'll describe it in terms of a specific type of business.… 
We need a new progressive third party. It would be a kind of Bizarro progressive third party, in that it would almost always do the opposite from what current progressive parties like the Green Party are doing today.… 
There's a lot of talk in progressive circles about "The Revolution." This was especially prevalent during the Bernie Sanders campaign. Some progressives had the idea that all that stood between us and Paradise was something so artificial that we could break through it with a single presidential victory. Unfortunately, the actual elephant in the room is far more substantial: the inconvenient truth that there are