Georgia Progressive Exchange

The premise is that each of us has learned, through experience, strategies and tactics that make us more effective in serving the people who are part of our missions. By exchanging what we've learned in conversations with other progressives, each of us will discover and adapt new ways to advance progressive values across the full spectrum of our actions.

Progressives in Georgia are facing extraordinary attacks on our values and on people who lack the economic and political power to protect their full rights—people whom it's our mission to serve. These attacks come especially at the state but also at the national level. The strength to overcome these attacks will come from a "whole is greater than the sum of its parts" strategy by many progressive organizations and individuals as we pursue the values that we hold in common.

"Conservatives know that politics is not just about policy and interest groups and issue-by-issue debate. They have learned that politics is about family and morality, about myth and metaphor and emotional identification. They have, over twenty-five years, managed to forge conceptual links in the voters’ minds between morality and public policy. They have done this by carefully working out their values, comprehending their myths, and designing a language to fit those values and myths so that they can evoke them with powerful slogans, repeated over and over again, that reinforce those family-morality-policy links, until the connections have come to seem natural to many Americans, including many in the media. As long as liberals ignore the moral, mythic, and emotional dimension of politics, as long as they stick to policy and interest groups and issue-by-issue debate, they will have no hope of understanding the nature of the political transformation that has overtaken this country and they will have no hopeof changing it."
— George Lakoff, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 19.

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Georgia Progressive Exchange

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