Progressive-ism

I think about this question a lot lately because my friend Christian Urrutia has been attacked on this point by a group orchestrated by an opponent in his race for Congress in NH’s First Congressional District (the eastern part of the state plus Manchester).

I chair Christian’s Urrutia’s campaign for Congress.

What does it mean to be a Progressive? Who decides? Does it come with a plaque for my wall or a little red card for my wallet? Are Progressives all the same?

The attacks began when candidate Heath Howard lost the endorsement of the progressive caucus to Christian. Heath was vice chair of the caucus when his colleagues chose to endorse another.

What does it take for your own caucus to reject you?

Heath has since been removed from his position as vice chair of the caucus for his toxic behavior.

It’s time to condemn his behavior.

Although it may appear to hurt Christian in the near term, hurling false challenges at him doesn’t raise votes for the candidate attacking him. What it does is turn people off to elections at a time when Trump would like us all to forget about the importance of free and fair elections.

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Christian is a human rights lawyer and a public defender in the National Guard. He’s a first time candidate who grew up in Hudson, NH. His platform, A Fair Shake for All, reflects his values.

Christian believes we must take on Trump and take care of our fellow Americans.

At some personal cost, he argued for the closure of Guantanamo and against the use of torture derived evidence in military tribunals. These positions did not make him popular at the Pentagon where he was serving at the time.

The insults tossed at Christian make me wonder if I would qualify as a Progressive and whether I even want to.

This isn’t the place for a discourse on Fightin’ Bob Lafollette, or the Farm Labor Movement, the sewer socialists of Milwaukee (and now NYC), or a remembrance of Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone. I propose to offer a simple working definition.

I believe a political Progressive is a person who believes in inclusion.

Inclusion is broader than economics. Inclusion does mean fighting the concentration of wealth that excludes all others. It means fighting against the very small group of billionaires controlling the means to build wealth or who inflate the cost of even the most basic services, such as healthcare and food.

Inclusion also means acceptance of different religious beliefs (and that some folks don’t believe in a god at all). Inclusion means believing that racial and ethnic diversity is a value, not a handicap and that we should accept diverse gender norms and identities, not insinuate government where it doesn’t belong.

Inclusion means we should be a leader on the world stage, not isolationists.

A commitment to inclusion is multi-generational. What we do now to the environment and the climate will damn our children and grandchildren. We must include their futures in our policies.

Senator Bernie Sanders epitomizes a Progressive. Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Congressman Ro Khanna and others may qualify as well.

In recent history, President Bill Clinton is the antithesis of a Progressive. His campaigns and presidency were transactional, not values based. He used poor people to triangulate against Republicans, dismantling safety nets before Republicans could. Borrowing the words of Viet Thanh Nguyen, Clinton epitomized “our American DNA, a double helix of beauty and brutality, a weave that binds our present to our past.”

Clinton also oppressed the oppressed for political advantage presiding over the execution of a death row prisoner during his first presidential campaign.

Unlike Clinton, I fought against the death penalty my entire professional life. I did it mostly as a lawyer.

Some would disqualify me as a Progressive because I am a lawyer. Only “working people,” they claim, can be considered Progressive.

Nonsense.

Even though I haven’t swung a hammer, worked in a factory or humped furniture up narrow stairways for hourly pay since I began law school those memories and the experiences of my friends and siblings are always with me.

As a lawyer, I also overturned how NH funds its public schools.

In the early 1990s, I sued NH’s largest employer for employment discrimination for firing an executive who refused an order to replace a woman employee with a man. My friend Eleanor MacLellan represented the woman. We each took about a million dollars from Cabletron for our clients after a trial and appeal. In 1990s NH, a million dollars was a lot of money. I assume Progressives applauded this anti-discrimination work.

I then represented Cabletron for about half a dozen years. People who didn’t know better would have absolutely kicked me out of the Progressive Club for this. One of my dear friends didn’t speak to me for a year.

But here’s the thing, Cabletron CEO Craig Benson listened to me. He followed my advice. I taught him about anti-discrimination laws and we reformed Cabletron’s employment practices. Benson didn’t know, but the fees I earned from Cabletron funded the pro bono work I did in the Claremont school funding cases. It was a trade I was willing to make.

Some of Christian’s experience as a lawyer is similar to mine. You can’t judge a lawyer’s career by one case or one client especially when, in Christian’s case, as a junior lawyer others in the firm decided on which cases he should work.

My career as a lawyer allowed me to earn a comfortable living. Again, Heath’s crowd objects to this. My wife and I went deeply into debt for law school . We were first gen college grads and became the first lawyers in our respective families.

Christian did the same thing. He graduated from law school amidst the 2008 financial crisis with $250,000 in student debt. Rather than demeaning him for it, I respect that Christian distinguished himself as a lawyer despite this challenging start.

Being an anti-Zionist is a big deal for Progressives. I agree we should call out Israel’s war crimes and genocide in Gaza and the West Bank.

I am Jewish. Heath’s fans may look askance at me for this. Worse yet, I attended religious school two or three days a week until I was 13. My teachers and rabbis were all devout Zionists.

However, as I became college aged and older I became less of a believer in the stories I was taught about Israel. In the 2024 presidential race, I was so fed up with Biden bear hugging Netanyahu that I started the Write-In Cease Fire movement. We got 1500 cease fire votes in NH.

Genocide and the horrible suffering in Gaza and other places, however, are not topics about which we should cosplay. Genocide is a serious allegation that deserves thoughtful consideration. For Heath and his crowd, I didn’t say “genocide” soon enough or say it often enough. Christian faces the same attacks.

This leads to two questions:

Is this primary election a competition to see which candidate for Congress can be the most extreme or the quickest to pass judgments that have real consequences?

Is recklessness the prime trait we seek in our candidates?

So where does this leave me? I guess that’s in part up to you.

My conclusion is that I am very comfortable with my personal and political decisions. I was Sen. Sanders’ NH lawyer. He endorsed me when I ran for governor. So did Ben and Jerry. They even named an ice cream for me.

I am a Progressive and so is Christian.

The coordinated cheap shots at Christian need to be called out for what they are but deciding who is progressive enough is a waste of time. The attacks are self-defeating, especially when aimed at Christian Urrutia, a first generation Latino, who has been endorsed by the NH House Progressive Caucus, the NH Youth Movement, 350NH, and the national Latino Victory Fund.

There are monied interests in this race for Congress that would compromise with the devil. They blatantly seek and are endorsed by a Democratic Majority for Israel. They don’t value inclusion. They oppose the change we so desperately need to improve healthcare and reform how we finance campaigns.

We would better off focusing on them than on who is sufficiently progressive.