Collapsing corporate consensus.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Editor's Note - Editorial

In this issue of The Progressive, we bring you a terrific interview with the incomparable Bernie Sanders. He joined us at Fighting Bob Fest here in Madison, Wisconsin, the huge annual rally named after Robert ("Fighting Bob") La Follette, who founded this magazine. Senator Sanders gave a barn-burner of a speech, and then sat down with John Nichols to talk about fighting for progressive values.

Another great speaker at Bob Fest this year was Scot Ross, a veteran activist and journalist who runs One Wisconsin Now and has done a great deal to press for a remedy to crushing student loan debt. He and his colleague Mike Browne write about this crucial issue in the magazine this month.

Ross and Sanders take aim not just at the clownish Tea Partiers and their ridiculous representatives like Senator Ted Cruz, but at the corporate consensus that has taken over much of the Democratic Party.

This consensus--that tax cuts and subsidies for the rich, shrinking support for the poor and middle class, receding access to educational opportunity, and yawning inequality are inevitable facts of life is currently in a state of collapse, as I observe in Comment.

There here are signs of hope all over America for a resurgent progressive politics.

We saw that here in Madison as speaker after speaker fired up the crowd at Fighting Bob Fest.

Check out rising star Chris Taylor, a state legislator from Wisconsin and a leading voice for the opposition to the rightwing takeover of our statehouse. In this issue, she gives us a witty and revealing first-person account of going undercover at the American Legislative Exchange Council to learn the details of its pro-corporate, anti-democratic agenda in the states.

We see more signs of hope in the generation of young Americans who led the Occupy movement and continue their activism to expose the...