On July 10, Baltimore Women United will be hosting a discussion with Maryland Democratic Party Chair, Kathleen Matthews.
Baltimore Women United is "a coalition of women from across the city, uniting to be a force of engagement, action, solutions, and hope", according to their website. They recruit women within and around Baltimore to become more engaged in politics in order to diversify our national leadership.
This discussion comes at a time where the Democratic Party is reevaluating their platform, which has become a hot topic of debate lately. On July 6, the New York Times published a controversial op-ed entitled "Back to the Center, Democrats", in which Mark Penn and Andrew Stein argue that the Democratic Party needs to further embrace centrism in order to regain votes.
"Candidates inspired by Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren and a host of well-funded groups have embraced sharply leftists ideas," they write. "But the results at the voting booth have been anything but positive: Democrats lost over 1,000 legislative seats across the country and control of both houses of Congress during the Obama years."
This article, unfortunately, glosses over the recent and prevalent critiques of neoliberalism, or the policy model of social studies and economics that transfers control of economic factors to the private sector from the public sector. Neoliberalism is argued to have reigned for at least the past 30 years, leading to loss of domestic job growth and an erosion of democracy, leading to the wide political discontent that led voters to gravitate to whoever promised to dismantle the current system.
"There was a lot of elite discussion across the spectrum about the danger of too much democracy and the need to have what was called more 'moderation' in democracy," public intellectual Noam Chomsky told The Nation, "for people to become more passive and apathetic and not to disturb things too much, and that’s what the neoliberal programs do. So put it all together and what do you have? A perfect storm."
Matthews will be discussing the role of women in progressive politics and what we can do to help progressive Democratic women seek and retain leadership positions in local, statewide, and national politics.
The discussion will be held at Bird in Hand (11 E 33rd St). If you're seeking change, now's the time to voice your grievances!
