Sam on a more hopeful progressivism:

Optimism is deeply ingrained in American culture. Progressives are in a tough spot in this regard, because they tend to bring America the bad news. And America typically kills them for it. We need a lot more skill in motivating people to correct what's wrong without simultaneously casting a pall over their vision of the future. Progressives need not surrender optimism to the conservatives. As Thomas Jefferson said, "My theory has always been that if we are to dream, the flatteries of hope are as cheap, and pleasanter than the gloom of despair." It was the Democrats, after all, who in the runaway election year of 1936 labeled Republicans as "disciples of despair" floundering in a "fountain of fear." Roosevelt himself got considerable mileage from his insupportable assertion that we had nothing to fear but fear itself. And one of the driving characteristics of the sixties was its vibrant, if unrealistic, vision of the future, including the dream of an Age of Aquarius. Today, the Democrats have an excess of whiners, nagging nannies, and contumelious scolds. Did the politics of joy really die with Hubert Humphrey?