God bless The Nation, always willing to slip the surly bonds of consensus politics and touch the face of Karl Marx, or at least EF Schumacher. Their article on ten progressive ideas had me sleepily nodding for the first page -- universal health care, free preschool, nuclear nonproliferation, etc -- bored by the perfectly sound but wholly standard boilerplate dotting the piece. And then came page 2: a thirty-hour workweek (hasn't that failed all across Europe?), top marginal tax rates of 70 percent, worker-owned means of production, centrally planned communities, and a revived regionalism that amounts to partial secession for various subsections of the country. Awesome.
This country's progressive movement has become all too mainstream and respectable in recent years, and even if my policy preferences lie no more than a couple tics to the left of Clinton's better instincts, I'm always happy to see the spectrum get stretched out. So props to The Nation for publishing the piece, the quasi-socialist elements of American life have been stifled in recent years and that's tamped down the intellectual vibrancy straight across the board.
