It often feels as if this country's old political leaders are just holding on by fingernails, waiting for a new generation of political leaders to rise up and carry on American democracy.
Whenever a promising fresh face shows up, I like to highlight them here. Last week I pointed to Arizona legislator, Eva Burch, who shared her experience of getting a needed abortion.
Today, given my fascination with combating Christian nationalism, take a gander at Texas State Senator James Talarico:
There's plenty of speculation that this 35 year old legislator and Presbyterian seminarian from the Austin area has a bright future.“Loving thy neighbor is exhausting, especially in a place like the Texas legislature,” Talarico told me in the campus chapel, as the morning sun streamed through stained glass windows.
... “Seminary,” Talarico told me later after class in his basement office at the Texas capitol, “helped me crystalize the project we’ve been working on.” Through a series of legislation, Talarico has been developing a policy program that he’s billed as The Friendship Agenda. Based on Texas’ 1930 motto of “Friendship,” his agenda promises to promote everything from “economic friendship” (think medical debt forgiveness, baby bonds and subsidized marriage counseling) to “political friendship” (ranked choice voting and digital literacy, among others) and “social friendship” (“Medicaid for Y’All,” as he calls it).
“We progressives do ourselves a disservice when we discard those central stories,” Talarico said. “In my reading of history, the most successful progressives — whether it’s in the labor movement, civil rights movement, women’s movement, farm workers’ movement — they embed themselves in those stories, and then use those stories to propel their movement forward.”
Can a Democrat with Talarico's background break the Republican statewide monopoly on power in Texas? To be determined. He's likely to give it a shot ...
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