“It’s not enough to be progressive — we must be aggressive!”

An important gain for Southern progressive struggles over the last few years has been a sharper focus on fighting the target, rather than fighting each other. The Powers That Be, both economic and political, have long succeeded in splitting us apart — black from anglo, rural from urban, poor from nearly poor. We still have more than our share of internal squabbles — it’s often like loading frogs in a wheelbarrow to get us progressives moving together — but more often than not, our recent battles on issues like environmental justice, union busting, runaway corporations, living wages, and hog factories have had us united and our eyes riveted on the corporate greedheads who are trying to run roughshod over all of us.

For the next 25 years, our challenge is to take the terrific progressive energy that is at work throughout the South in these various battles and connect it up into a majority movement. In large part, this involves more old-fashioned, grunt-level organizing — linking folks on one side of town who are fighting Browning Ferris Industries to those on the other side of town who are fighting McDonald’s — while also helping the people of Athens, Georgia, meet the people of Athens, Texas, Alabama, and Tennessee, who are fighting the same battles against the same forces of ignorance and arrogance.

But it also involves linking our disparate, diverse, and dispersed battles to the traditional values of our movement. Our fights are not merely for another dollar-an-hour over there or a toxic clean-up over here, but for the advancement of America’s founding (and very radical) values: Economic Fairness, Social Justice, and Equal Opportunity for All.

Actually seeking implementation of those core American values is what has distinguished the progressive movement throughout our country’s “democratic experiment” — from Shay’s Rebellion through Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, forward with the Populists and Wobblies, down the road with Mother Jones and Martin Luther King, Jr., and on to us today. When it comes to these values, it’s not enough to be progressive, we must be aggressive.

The good news is that economic fairness, social justice, and equal opportunity for all are values deeply ingrained in our culture and in most people. They not only help unify us progressives, but they also broaden our reach to those who don’t call themselves “progressive,” yet actually discover they are when we engage them on issues that embody these values.

The challenge of Southern progressives is to take our issues, ideas, and ideals directly to this broader public and make ours a majority movement based on the self-interest, aspirations, and shared values of workaday people.

This means recognizing that the true political spectrum is not right to left, but top to bottom — and that the vast majority of us are no longer in shouting distance of the powers at the top, no matter whether they call themselves liberal or conservative.

This majority wants the same thing that you and I want: We want our country back! Back from the spoilers and speculators, big shots and bastards who have stolen it. The people are ready for a grassroots rebellion to take America back and begin anew to implement our progressive values.