By the Perspective Staff

With the stress of blocking and housing day out of the way, students are starting to choose roommates for next year. For many, living options are unfortunately constrained by considerations of gender. The college’s current limits on gender-neutral housing reinforce the gender binary and rely on the patriarchal and heteronormative assumptions that one should be closest friends with individuals of the same gender and attracted to individuals of the opposite gender. They also discriminate against trans* and gender-nonconforming students. Moreover, these limits deny students the right to decide their living situations as responsible adults. Thus, we urge Harvard College to enact an open (also called “gender-neutral” or “gender-inclusive”) housing policy that allows sophomores, juniors, and seniors to choose roommates of any gender and enables first-years to indicate on their housing forms the gender(s) with which they prefer to live.

Currently seven of the upperclass houses require students to live with roommates of the same gender. A limited number of students may apply for mixed-gender suites, but the College requires that bedroom occupants be of the same gender, with locks installed on every bedroom door. Since installing locks on walk-through bedrooms would violate Massachusetts state fire code regulations, the college’s policy prevents many suites from becoming open living spaces. A pilot program provides for open housing in five of the upperclass houses as well as the Dudley Co-Op; these houses do not require locks on bedroom doors. This pilot program has thus far been successful, but students are at the mercy of the housing lottery to determine whether they can participate.

To be clear about our terminology, we will use the World Health Organization definitions for sex and gender. While “sex” refers to the “biological and physiological characteristics that define men and women,” while “gender” refers to the “socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women” and has more to do with the individual’s self-identification.

Harvard is falling behind our peer institutions on this issue. UPenn has offered gender-neutral housing to all students in all years for all room types since 2005, stipulating only that students under age 18 seeking co-gendered housing receive parental consent. At Columbia, co-gendered living is known as open housing and is available in all upperclass residential houses. Yale has a gender-neutral housing policy for juniors and seniors, and The Yale College Council has been working for over a year to extend this policy to sophomores.

But why is open housing necessary on our campus?

For students who identify as LGBTQ+ or outside the gender binary, mandatory same-gender living situations can be extremely uncomfortable. Unnecessary stress and anxiety can come from being forced to live in close quarters with individuals with whom one is not comfortable on the basis of gender. On a campus that is becoming increasingly aware of preferred gender pronouns and institutionally recognizing gender and sexual minorities, it is important to recognize the needs of students who identify as trans* or gender non-conforming. The current policy accommodates the needs of trans* students and students with “gender-based needs,” but this term is ambiguous. What qualifies as a gender-based need? For students who begin transitioning after their first year, what living options currently exist?

Opponents of open housing claim that couples will be the first to opt into this program, and that college-aged couples cannot be allowed to live together because they will likely break up and then be forced to remain in the same living situation. This argument relies on the heteronormative assumption that all couples are straight; it’s currently possible for queer couples to cohabitate in same-sex rooming situations, and no one has complained about the possibility. Furthermore, students ought to decide for themselves whether they wish to live with their sexual or romantic partners; it is condescending and paternalistic for the college to make these decisions for us.

Moreover, the College’s worries about specifically heterosexual cohabitation, merited or not, should not prevent other students from pursuing a living situation in which they feel comfortable and accepted. The simple truth is that men and women can be close but platonic friends interested in living together. The assumption that a locked door is needed between all individuals of different sexes implies an inherent tension or antagonism that is not real. In fact, female Yale students living in the open housing system reported “feeling less vulnerable having men in their suite” and that open housing could make men allies of women rather than threats.

Students are emerging adults capable of making our own decisions concerning what living situations will be most conducive to a healthy and enjoyable undergraduate experience. Our rooms are not only places of academic study but also of relaxation and socialization. It is only fair for students to expect to be able to design their living arrangements in a way that promotes all of these ends. Besides, many students – both couples and good friends – currently unofficially live in each other’s rooms, so enacting an open housing policy would simply legitimize what is already a common practice.

For centuries, Harvard has been at the vanguard of higher education. Yet the university’s lackadaisical approach towards achieving total open housing is pathetic when compared to the advancements made by its peer institutions. A lack of open housing could potentially drive prospective applicants away from pursuing a Harvard education.

So what would implementation of open housing look like? For freshmen, it would likely mean the simple adjustment of adding the option of open housing in the form of a check box, next to one for same-sex housing. For upperclassmen, it would mean the extension of open housing to all of the houses and locations in which Harvard undergrads currently live. No one would be forced to participate in this system, but the option would be widely available to anyone who opted. This would help to promote a community in which all self-identifications are welcomed and equal and would create both the immediate environment and the larger culture in which each individual feels at home.

This statement is endorsed by the following Harvard student groups:

BAGELS

Harvard College Democrats

Harvard College International Women’s Rights Collective

Harvard College GLOW

Harvard College Progressive Jewish Alliance

Harvard Student Labor Action Movement

Harvard Sustained Dialogue

Harvard Queer Students and Allies

Manifesta Magazine

Trans Task Force

By Rachel Sandalow-Ash

Hailing from Vancouver, Canada, Jeremy Wood (Metis) works as a progressive organizer in Boston. Additionally, he is working to organize social media for Idle No More – Boston, a local group acting as part of an international protest movement striving to promote indigenous sovereignty and environmental justice.

Can you give readers a bit of background? How did Idle No More start?

Well it started about 500 years ago…

You mean at the start of colonization?

Well, yes. It’s important to dispel a misconception that’s been too common in the media that this came out of nowhere. Settlers like to believe that colonialism, sad as it was, has ended, and that Indians are, at best, part of the great tapestry of America. We’ve resisted from the start. This is the continuation of a long history.

But more immediately, First Nations people in Canada have watched an increasing number of legislative attempts be made and passed that would further infringe upon the sovereignty of indigenous people.

A couple of months ago, the Conservative government put forward Bill C35 that would remove federal protection and oversight of waterways and in doing so absolve the legal duty of developers to consult with First Nations. In the past, damming of rivers has literally drowned entire indigenous communities. Others are forced to watch poison pour out of the kitchen sink. Now the main worries are contamination from pipelines – including the Keystone pipeline – and oil tanker routes.

On December 4^th a group of Chiefs, representatives of the Assembly of First Nations, went to the House of Commons to protest this bill, and they were barred from entry. In response, Chief Theresa Spence of the Attawapiskat First Nation began a hunger strike demanding a meeting with Prime Minister Stephen Harper. At the same time, four indigenous women in Saskatchewan began holding a series of teach-in’s they called, on their facebook page, “Idle no More.” And everything else has exploded from there. There have been flash mobs and road blockades, a common and conceptualized form of direct action used to block access from a society that believes it has domination over indigenous communities. It’s important to remember that while some of these actions are new thanks to Idle No More, many of them are decades old. They’re an expression of indigenous people forcing recognition of their existence and their borders. And the federal parties now at least say they’re taking indigenous interests seriously.

Of course, the name of the movement is somewhat misleading. Indigenous communities were not idle before ‘Idle No More’. Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island [North America] have always stood up in their traditional territories, working to block the advances of colonialism and rapacious resource capitalism. I want to make special mention of the community of Unistoten back where I come from, in British Columbia, who have been camped out resisting the theft of their land for several years, despite threats from the Canadian police, legal system, and military. Idle no More didn’t come out of nowhere.

What are the short- and long-term goals of Idle No More?

In the short term we want bill C35 and the whole gamut of recent legislative attacks on sovereignty to be taken off the table. In the longer term, we want treaty rights – that is, rights guaranteed by treaties between the Canadian government and the First Nations – to be protected by the federal government, which claims to uphold the rule of law. Real rule of law would require the federal adoption of treaty constitutionalism, which is the recognition that Canadian sovereignty and jurisdiction only exist as a result of treaty making and that Canadian law is constitutionally dependent on treaty terms and obligations.

It’s important to remember as well that many indigenous communities never entered into treaty making processes, either because the settler state never came to the table with them or because they rejected the legitimacy of the endeavor. Many of the peoples back where I come from fall into this category. As such, Canadian law recognizes these peoples as possessing un-ceded title and rights that must be respected by the federal government.

On the other hand, while we can talk about wider change at the federal level, the most important goal for many communities is the protection of their water and land on a local level. Our territories feed us, spiritually and as settlers too often forget, physically. They must continue too. Our environmentalism isn’t some white people chief Seattle fantasy. We are fighting for the lives of our children.

How has Idle No More, as a protest movement, interacted with existing political structures and institutions?

It’s really too soon to say. Idle No More has inspired large outpourings of solidarity, but it has also illuminated a lot of the vitriolic racism that still permeates Canadian and American settler societies; it’s brought out the cowboys. It has shaken up dominant party politics. The official “left-wing” party in Canada – the New Democrats – have sided with the [conservative] government against Idle No More, which has shown that the left, just as much as the right, continues to prioritize the colonial project.

Idle No More has also shaken up politics within indigenous communities, as grassroots and traditional leaders have taken the helm rather than the elected tribal council leaders, many of whom have toed a more cautious line. It’s always been tough to say whether the tribal councils have truly represented the people. Both Canada and the U.S. – the latter through the Indian Reorganization Act – have established systems mandating that every indigenous group follow virtually the same political structure; in doing so they have erased hundreds of political traditions. These mandates have made it so that if indigenous people want to participate in governments, they must do so in accordance with a colonialist system. And this system allows the federal government to play a huge role in selecting the people who get elected to tribal council positions, and determining where money ends up in election campaigns. For instance, on the Pine Ridge Lakota reservation in South Dakota, the elected chief gained his support from a few communities that had been bolstered by American dollars against the wishes of most people.

What we’ve seen in Idle No More are thousands of indigenous people rising up and demanding that their chiefs, especially the national representation of the Assembly of First Nations, get up and start speaking out. We don’t just want our chiefs negotiating mining rights in Ottawa; we also want them fighting mining projects and the political cowardice that is allowing the ecocide of our territories. Some elected leaders, Chief Spence and others, have been fantastic, while some have been otherwise.

How have you become involved with Idle No More?

I’m originally from Vancouver, and I began to see amazing work being done by my friends and communities from home, and my aunt has been organizing solidarity actions in Montreal. But organizing an indigenous movement in Boston is generally hard because even though there are about 5,000 indigenous people in this city from all walks of life, indigenous presence is pretty invisible here. So I started a Facebook page for Idle No More – Boston, and within hours it had hundreds of likes, and people have just come out of the woodwork. We’ve had a round dance in Faneuil Hall, a flash mob at Copley, and a protest at the state house in coordination with people around the US and Canada.

How would you describe the role of ‘solidarity’ in a movement such as this one?

The international solidarity in Idle No Mode is newly manifest, not newly created – people have always had common struggles. But this solidarity is certainly exciting.

Solidarity coming from non-indigenous people is complicated, since there is always the danger of oppressed people’s struggles being co-opted. There’s a whole history, going back to the Boston Tea Party, of people using indigenous people to achieve their own goals; many elements of the contemporary environmental movement fall into this pattern. I might agree with some of the aims of that movement, but red face is still red face.

That being said, if settlers come with humility and listen to the voices of indigenous communities, and acknowledge that this is not everyone’s fight, equally, that could be really, really valuable. And not all actions of solidarity consist of explicit activism. A while ago, I heard a speech by a Wampanoag guy, who said “Kai, that means Hello. If you’re going to live here [the Boston area], you should learn the language.” I would encourage people to find relationships, where they can, with indigenous communities in this area. Don’t tokenize, but learn history, learn what laws are out there, and who is helping to reshape them. Especially in Boston, a place where indigenous presence is too often only felt in Thanksgiving pageants. An effort to learn about contemporary, local indigenous struggles, lives, and communities is a radical act. Where you take that knowledge is up to you.

By Brianna Suslovic

“12th & Delaware” is a story of choice: choice between abortion and pregnancy, between a pregnancy care center and an abortion clinic, between what one priest calls “darkness and light.” This HBO documentary by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, which premiered in 2010, chronicles the interactions that occur on the corner of 12th and Delaware Streets in Fort Pierce, Florida. On one side of the intersection is A Woman’s World, an abortion clinic. On the other side of the intersection is the Pregnancy Care Center, which describes itself as a “Christ-centered ministry dedicated to serving those who are in a crisis pregnancy, as well as educating the community on the sanctity of life, marriage, and family.” The documentary effectively localizes the nationwide debate on abortion, brings personal stories and opinions to the table, and gets inside the minds and morals of both sides in this tiny Florida town.

The film begins in the street, with a tiny grandmother holding a sign proclaiming in all capitals: “THOU SHALT NOT KILL.” She tries to engage with the women entering the abortion clinic, calling them mothers and telling them that God made them pregnant for a reason. This scene is haunting – even as this protester adamantly tries to get the women to turn around, she does it in a nurturing way. She asks the women entering the clinic if they’d like to hold small doll-like fetus figures, telling them that these figures are the same size as the fetuses growing inside them.

In 1991, A Woman’s World opened and began providing abortions in addition to other women’s healthcare services. Eight years later, when property across the street became available, a group of pro-life Christians jumped on it, turning it into a Pregnancy Care Center. The care center does not offer abortions, but it does offer counseling and ultrasounds for pregnant women. Unfortunately, most of the counseling that these women receive is biased against abortion, warning its clients about the dangers – mental and physical –  of abortion. Many of these dangers have been disproven with more recent and thorough research.

12th and Delaware takes the fly-on-the-wall perspective inside the Pregnancy Care Center and A Woman’s World, filming interactions between clients and employees at both places. The primary counselor at the Pregnancy Care Center is Anne, a staunchly Catholic woman who sits with a 19-year-old in one of the film’s early scenes, trying to convince the girl that she’ll regret getting a second abortion. Anne also gives a 15-year-old pregnant girl a ten-week fetus figurine to hold, referring to the plastic figurine with male pronouns, humanizing an inanimate (and perhaps inaccurate) representation of the cells growing in her uterus. Anne is also shown making calls to check-in with clients who have come in earlier, checking their progress and trying to get them to delay or reconsider having an abortion. Meanwhile, across the street is Candace, one of the primary operators of A Woman’s World. Candace speaks with a 46-year-old woman who has been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, just come out of a divorce, is in a new relationship, and is doubtful of her ability to raise a child as she ages. Candace asks the client if this is something that she is choosing, reassuring her that this is her choice. Candace comforts another woman who can only speak in broken English as she explains that her partner doesn’t use protection consistently. Candace encourages this woman to stand up for herself in the bedroom, and she also reassures this woman that she is not a killer for seeking abortion treatment.

I stumbled upon this film while browsing the Harvard-funded HBOGO site a few weeks ago, and I was immediately captivated by the highly personal nature of a debate that’s so often nationalized and generalized. This debate is more relevant now than ever before, especially after the discourse sparked by recent elections. Remember Todd Akin, the Missouri Republican candidate for Senate who claimed that, according to his doctor friends, in cases of “legitimate rape,” the female body naturally would prevent pregnancy? (Two questions: What qualifies as “legitimate” rape? And what doctors is he talking to, and why are they telling him such lies?) Although Roe v. Wade has provided legal protection for abortion on a national scale, laws restricting abortion rights are particularly prevalent, and anti-choice activists will only continue fighting. According to the Guttmacher Institute, states continue to introduce provisions that require counseling, waiting periods, heartbeat-listening, ultrasounds, parental consent, and in-person doctor prescriptions. The Institute reports that between 2005 and 2011, the number of state-level anti-abortion provisions enacted per year nearly tripled, from 34 to 92.

Although this film serves as a cinéma vérité (observational cinema) look at the abortion debate in one small town, it also sends a powerful message. Since the film lacks a true “agenda” or opinionated commentary, its content speaks for itself. Viewers can easily see the absurdity of the situation when anti-abortion advocates at the Pregnancy Care Center joke that “the new strategy is lock ‘em in until they decide to keep the baby”; when an abortion provider conceals his head with a sheet to protect his identity from the potentially violent protesters who continually harass him; and when a priest proclaims in his sermon that abortion is akin to “ritualized blood sacrifice,” while the reproductive rights movement is like a “diabolical religion.”

This priest and his followers declare that their pro-life movement is fighting the “powers of darkness,” otherwise known as the pro-choice movement. However, it is clear that A Woman’s World and similar organizations such as Planned Parenthood in fact work to enlighten women by conveying important information about reproductive and sexual health. These organizations show women hope after rape and sexual assault, enable them to end socially and financially limiting pregnancies, and allow them to stay healthy through routine reproductive health care. The film never takes a side, and yet, it says so much about the anti-intellectualism and darkness that is often present in pro-life argument and practice. For example, one of the staunch anti-abortion protesters is a middle-aged man whose tactics involve shouting belligerently at women entering the clinic, women who are already emotionally vulnerable. How could this ever be an effective way to get these women to see his viewpoint on the issue?

12th & Delaware is a film that doesn’t answer all the questions – it allows for dialogue and productive discourse on the issues that the directors are able to capture. I found myself captivated by the film for this exact reason; no one was telling me what to think or why to think it, and yet, I was still able to arrive at my own conclusions about the anti-abortion movement in the United States. This film was personal and powerful. Through its lack of commentary, it speaks in clear tones amidst the cacophony of opinions on abortion in America.

By Kelly Maeshiro

Terry Eagleton’s recent book, Why Marx Was Right, is in some ways a culmination of his insights on the subject as a veteran Marxist literary critic. The book reads in like fashion, akin to a digression over coffee, though with a mind versatile as Eagleton’s, such digression is of course appreciated. The title is all but misleading: the book is less a systematic defense of Marx than a deconstruction of the assorted myths built up around Marxism. “What if all the most familiar objections to Marx’s works,” Eagleton asks, “are mistaken?” (ix). The book’s ten chapters deal in turn with ten common objections to Marx, or to whatever image of Marx his detractors have fashioned.

Some of Eagleton’s arguments are aimed at those of us who were taught, when we heard the name ‘Marx,’ to see in our minds such figures as Stalin and Mao. Perhaps this is why Eagleton has said that trying to put in a good word for Marx is rather like trying to put in a good word for Jack the Ripper. Even if at some conceptual level we can see beyond the caricature of Marx, we are apt to associate Marxism with over-theoretical thinking (i.e. “well, it sounds good in practice, but will it work in theory?”). We are inclined to believe that however good it sounds in theory, the result of Marxism whenever put into practice has been tyranny on a massive scale. We read in this of course the implicit, ‘Capitalism, on the other hand…’ but this line of reasoning won’t work for Eagleton. He writes, “Modern capitalist nations are the fruit of a history of slavery, genocide, violence and exploitation every bit as abhorrent as Mao’s China or Stalin’s Soviet Union” (12).

Today, even the cultured view Marx as a totalitarian statist who desired the uniform labor of mankind at the expense of individual freedom. However, Eagleton explains that this characterization could not be further from the truth; Marx was a democratic anti-statist who desired the individualized leisure of mankind. No less, he “was a critic of [the] rigid dogma, military terror, political suppression and arbitrary state power” (21) that Eagleton suggests is part and parcel of modern capitalism. Even aside from “genocide, famine, imperialism and the slave trade…[capitalism] has also proved incapable of breeding affluence without creating huge swathes of deprivation alongside it” (15).

To combat the charge that Marx was a utopian revolutionary whose head was stuck in the clouds and whose social system would try to make every human being the same, it would do us well to bear in mind some facts. Marx’s ideal was individuality, and Marx even explicitly rejected the idea of income equality. As for idealism, it was Hegel, like the neoliberal Francis Fukuyama (known for his 1992 work The End of History), who claimed that history culminated between his two ears, and Marx rightly ridiculed him for it. But Marx, who was not a utopian, was no cynic either. “[T]he true dreamers,” Eagleton writes, “are those who deny that anything more than piecemeal change can ever come about,” and Marx himself supported parliamentary measures under certain conditions. Like the Hebrew prophets, Marx was a student of the tragic vision – he rose above the worst by staring it in the face rather than avoiding it.

This is not to say, of course, that Marx had no ideals in mind; but Eagleton points out that those “who scoff at socialist ideals should remember that the free market can never be perfectly realized either. Yet this does not stop free-markets in their tracks. The fact that there is no flawless democracy does not lead most of us to settle for tyranny instead…It is only socialism which for some reason is out of reach” (87-88).

To the charge that socialism ignores human nature, one could do worse than to recall that the same charge was leveled against capitalism when it was the new idea in town. It took “an intensive process of re-education” to proselytize people with the capitalist credo, “greed is good.” Nevertheless, we are told, capitalism is more natural than socialism. Because, of course, the “Tuareg people of the central Sahara are really capitalist entrepreneurs at heart. They would secretly like nothing better than to start up an investment bank,” (97) writes Eagleton.

In summarizing Marx’s views, Eagleton states, “Marx…had no time for the concept of a perfect society, was wary of the notion of equality, and…it was diversity, not uniformity, that he hoped to see.” Marx emphasized the agency of individuals, and was often more anti-statist than conservative “libertarians” were/are. Eagleton explains that Marx, “saw socialism as a deepening of democracy, not as the enemy of it. His model of the good life was based on the idea of artistic self-expression…His ideal was leisure, not labour…” (238-239).

In defending Marx from his vulgar critics, an analogy can be drawn to Christianity, namely that no reasonable person today would judge Christianity by looking at its fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. And indeed, as the only people making these kinds of crude judgments today are Richard Dawkins and Co.; no reasonable people are doing this. Why then, do we continue to judge Marx by the actions of Stalin and Mao?

Reading Eagleton is always a pleasure, if only because his mind offers a fruitful picking. Owing to the breadth of his interests, the presentation of his thoughts is at times exasperatingly haphazard. Nevertheless, he continues to offer for us a version of a Marx – agree or disagree with it – which should at least challenge us. These are the sorts of insights one could only expect from a veteran theorist.

By Keyanna Wigglesworth

Graphic, VixArtwork (online)

Around 11 p.m. on Tuesday, November 6, President Barack Obama won reelection against GOP opponent Mitt Romney. For about four hours, I had sat on the carpeted steps of the IOP with my eyes glued to the gigantic television screen awaiting CNN’s projected winner of each state. Shortly after a series of northeastern states, such as New York and New Jersey, and the battleground state of Ohio were called for President Obama, the words “OBAMA WINS REELECTION” appeared on the screen. At first, I could not believe what I saw. I checked the time on my cell phone because I thought that, surely, the winner could not have been predicted this early. As soon as I overcame my state of shock, I joined everybody else in the overwhelming feelings of joy and relief. Tears began to roll down my cheeks and cheers from fellow Obama supporters could be heard all the way down JFK Street.

Unfortunately, I did not retain the euphoria of election night. When I woke up the following morning, I began to consider the grave implications of Obama’s win. If it took just two years of an Obama administration to light the conservative wildfire that was the Tea Party takeover of Congress, then I could only imagine the backlash that eight years of this administration might bring.

Modern American political history shows that a conservative backlash after prominent periods of liberalism is a common trend. During the1960s, President Johnson’s lack of transparency regarding the Vietnam War caused many Americans to yearn for not just a change of president, but also a change of political party. With Richard Nixon as their candidate, the Republicans won the White House with a campaign centered on purging America of radicalism, neglecting ever-intensifying racial tensions, and maintaining a nationwide sense of tradition. America endured eight years of Nixon and two years of his second vice president and successor, Gerald Ford, as a result of conservative backlash against the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

During the 1980s, a similar Republican usurpation occurred, starting with the election of 1980, when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter. Reagan proved to be a terrible and corrupt president in many ways. In domestic politics, he did not address the AIDS epidemic until the end of his second term in 1987, despite the fact that thousands of Americans had died of the disease since the first five cases were reported in 1981. Indeed, even though the Center for Disease Control had affirmed, “casual person-to-person contact…appears to pose no risk” of contagion, when asked if he would allow his children to attend the same school as children who have AIDS, Reagan said he would not. His policy of supply-side, trickle-down “Reaganomics” led to soaring interest rates, a national debt that skyrocketed to over $3 trillion, and ultimately to higher taxes in order to pay for these negative consequences. In foreign policy, Reagan maintained a close alliance with the apartheid government of South Africa, and his National Security Council illegally funded the Nicaraguan contra rebels by selling military supplies to Iran.

Despite these failures, through his impeccable oratory skills, Reagan created a benevolent image of himself that made Americans feel comfortable with him and trust him to take on problems such as the budget deficit. Not only was Reagan overwhelmingly re-elected to a second term, but the conservative backlash that first helped him win the Presidency continued with the election of George H.W. Bush in 1988 and later on the victory of his son, George W. Bush, in 2000 and 2004.

With Democrats in control of the White House and the Senate, a conservative backlash in response to President Obama’s second term could have monumental implications. The GOP favorites for 2016, such as Rick Santorum and Paul Ryan, are super-conservatives who would strive to undo many of the policies that Progressives have fought so hard to establish. So, how can liberals prevent another conservative backlash? In other words, how can we remove the Tea Party from existence?

We could start by taking some of their strategies. Members of the Tea Party capitalize on the religious convictions and fear of the American electorate. Tea Partiers use Christianity to legitimize hate speech about gays and lesbians. They equate gaining much-needed universal health care with losing basic freedom. There is no doubt that the immense success of the Tea Party results largely from its dishonesty and animosity. However, in their messaging, Progressives ought to combine the Tea Partiers’ level of aggression and passion with the Democratic ideals that will help move this country forward.

Democrats cannot continue to allow the religious right to label Christianity as an exclusively conservative entity. The hallmarks of liberalism, such as a fair tax code and universal health care, reflect principles of compassion and equality. These values coincide perfectly with one of the most important tenets of Christianity, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Therefore, Democrats should try harder to use this correlation to appeal to more religious Americans, who form a large portion of the electorate. Furthermore, liberals in elected office must be more vocal about the advantages of progressive legislation, and even more vocal about the genuinely fearful consequences that are sure to devastate the country if we continue to elect right-wing extremists. Lastly, Democrats must remember that the Republicans are not the only political party with a substantial number of committed individuals who will stop at nothing to see their political views transformed into law. Take, for instance, the Occupy movement.

Starting in September 2011, the Occupy protesters presented a strong affront to income inequality. They marched in and around New York City’s financial district shouting chants that denounced America’s oligarchs, known as the 1%, and empowered the low- and middle-income Americans who make up the 99%. The demonstrations soon spread around the country. Although the Occupy Movement lasted only a little over a year, those involved with this movement were and are a promising group of Progressives that successfully characterized the American struggle of our time: rising income inequality and the political and economic dis-empowerment of most Americans. As they endured arrests and pepper spraying by belligerent police officers, they exemplified a great deal of resolve, courage, and potential.

So, why did Occupiers not get elected as Democrats, whereas Tea Partiers were elected to office as Republicans? The Occupy Movement is, essentially, a movement to change America’s political system, so becoming a part of the American political system by running for elected office could be contradictory to the initial purpose of an Occupy protester. What’s more, establishment/moderate Democrats do not feel that they need to embrace the “radical left,” because they realize that America’s rapidly changing demographics are causing it to inevitably become a more liberal nation. In contrast, establishment Republicans accommodate Tea Partiers not because they necessarily agree with all of their ideas, but rather because they do not have any other option if they want to produce an electoral majority. Democrats would do well to learn from Republicans on this matter. Despite some differences, they ought to embrace the Occupiers’ passionate call for social justice and consider Occupiers partners in passing liberal legislation and preventing another conservative backlash.