Progressives Have a Bold Agenda. Biden Should Act on Their Priorities in His First 100 Days.

Progressives Have a Bold Agenda. Biden Should Act on Their Priorities in His First 100 Days.

Progressives Have a Bold Agenda. Biden Should Act on Their Priorities in His First 100 Days.

This moment demands boldness.

Facebook
Twitter
Email
Flipboard
Pocket

EDITOR’S NOTE: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

With the Electoral College confirming him as the next president, Joe Biden now faces his true test. Will he act swiftly and boldly to meet the calamitous crises he inherits? Or will his penchant for working across the aisle, combined with sobering down-ballot election results, lead him to fail what he describes as a “Roosevelt moment?”

Biden embraced a remarkably progressive agenda during the campaign, but many of his early appointments—lacking vision or new ideas—and his skittishness about his executive powers augur poorly. It will likely fall to progressive leaders and movements to force Biden to step up to that Roosevelt moment. Unlike the early days of the Obama administration, they are rising to the occasion.

Thanks to growing electoral strength and successful protests, progressives enter 2021 with a growing consensus around a bold reform agenda. And they are urging Biden not to wait for legislation—a tough prospect given a likely GOP-controlled Senate—but to act in his first days in office through executive orders and other similar actions.

Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

We cannot back down

We now confront a second Trump presidency.

There’s not a moment to lose. We must harness our fears, our grief, and yes, our anger, to resist the dangerous policies Donald Trump will unleash on our country. We rededicate ourselves to our role as journalists and writers of principle and conscience.

Today, we also steel ourselves for the fight ahead. It will demand a fearless spirit, an informed mind, wise analysis, and humane resistance. We face the enactment of Project 2025, a far-right supreme court, political authoritarianism, increasing inequality and record homelessness, a looming climate crisis, and conflicts abroad. The Nation will expose and propose, nurture investigative reporting, and stand together as a community to keep hope and possibility alive. The Nation’s work will continue—as it has in good and not-so-good times—to develop alternative ideas and visions, to deepen our mission of truth-telling and deep reporting, and to further solidarity in a nation divided.

Armed with a remarkable 160 years of bold, independent journalism, our mandate today remains the same as when abolitionists first founded The Nation—to uphold the principles of democracy and freedom, serve as a beacon through the darkest days of resistance, and to envision and struggle for a brighter future.

The day is dark, the forces arrayed are tenacious, but as the late Nation editorial board member Toni Morrison wrote “No! This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

I urge you to stand with The Nation and donate today.

Onwards,

Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation

Ad Policy
x