What's needed to build a progressive majority in the U.S.?

I'm not really kidding.

On the other hand, Wal-Mart has done more to spark a rural progressive movement than any other entity in the past two decades.

Part of the Judis/Teixiera idea goes like this. With cities still on an upswing and education and service industries growing as ever, there's an enlarging urban "professional" class with sort of new-model job traits: centrally, their jobs are less connected with the profit motive than in the past. They're (supposedly) more likely to be in jobs like health care, the arts, or academia -- or failing that, some line of work that they have a personal interest and some form of education background in. As such, they see their professional goals as tangible goods -- people's health, students' learning, personal fulfillment of various sorts -- and see corporate profit as a force against that. (Wipe away the details and this comes down to a really simple but sort of hard to confirm idea: young professionals now think of themselves as competing with the corporate structure for their own personal fulfillment.) This, supposedly, will swing them to the left. Also they're urban, and thus much more comfortable with government action -- in an urban setting you're exposed to the efforts of government on a near-daily basis, and you're also exposed to the problems that government services are meant to target: this, also, will theoretically swing them to the left in terms of supporting public services.

Haha, some friends of mine have been long dreaming of such a thing, except it would be called Cascadia. Take the Rockies, and everything from northern California all the way up.

wealth redistribution, drastic - like limiting inheritance or something

part of the problem with some of the coalition-based grassroots progressive movements is that, well, lets look at Walmart. lets say the company wants to move into a small town. Some of the people opposing it are going to be simply "not-in-my-backyard" types, who are great people to have in the limited context of the town, but when trying to formulate national policy, say, on Walmart, most of those people won;t give a shit.

Not necessarily the case in good ol' Pacific Northwestica!

Have fun with Idaho.

I never promised a purely idealistic country here. Sometimes, compromises have to be made.

(I kid you not. If the right to bear arms returned as a progressive/left issue, it would really transform the electoral dynamic.)

CASCADIA / SHASTA REPUBLIC: Washington, Oregon, Idaho, northern California, demilitarized zone bordering Nevada

ALASKA: give it to the Canadians; they'd take better care of it anyway

REPUBLICA DEL NORTE: southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, waste contamination zone bordering Nevada; Hollywood versus Mormons FITE

NEVADA: a.k.a. New New Amsterdam; gambling, drugs, prostitution all legal, limit four guns per visitor

FREEMAN'S REPUBLIC: Montana, Wyoming, North and South Dakotas, Kansas, Nebraska; grain, guns, no speed limits, live free and miles away from anyone else or die

TEXAS / COMMONWEALTH OF OKLAHOMA: you know there's no way to get through this without giving Texas its independance, to which many of us will say good riddance; they can have Oklahoma but obviously they won't want to screw with the state's boundary outline by actually annexing it

WAUKEEGAN (GREAT LAKE NATION): Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, northern Missouri; most desperate bids to develop near-obsolete production economies

ATLANTICA: New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Washington, D.C., West Virginia; most desperate legal loopholing to accomodate new-economy service industries -- a nationful of pharmaceutical marketers, consultants and stockbrokers, plus West Virginia to keep things interesting

PEOPLE'S MARITIME REPUBLIC: formerly known as "New England"

DIXIE CONFEDERACY: sorry about that war, it's all yours now; have fun with your laggard economy, embarrassing educational system, and never-ending race politics (NB don't make us invade you again)

FLORICUBA: in the wake of Castro's death, Floridian speculators pour money into Cuba in the hopes of creating a dual ocean resort nation to rival the tourist draw of Nevada; they are backed by other post-U.S. nations in an effort to counter the ambitions of the increasingly militarized Cuervo Republic, and Floricuba soon flourishes into a grand beautiful nation where formerly-Cuban dissidents rage against politicians' constant pandering to the entrenched authoritarian Gray Panther Party

HAWAII: have fun out there!

Remember Amerika? Remember the great nation of Heartland? ;-)

Though I'm not sure I completely buy your reversal, as the sort of rural liberally-inclined community you're describing seems to be statistically insignificant. I could be completely wrong about that. But it strikes me as a good description of Gilded Age through New Deal progressive base that hasn't really existed for a while.

Which, you know, there really is the Cuervo Republic now! It's officially really a nation, as I understand it: surely the world's first-ever corporate state!

I don't think far-left progressives look any more stupid than far-right conservatives. The same thing is happening in both cases: a few very simplified but striking ideas -- free markets are great! vs. corporations oppress us! -- become a draw for a lot of people who respond to them but don't necessarily have well-formed or necessarily even sane views of the world leading them to that. The problem, I think, is that by their very natures the messages of dumb-conservatives are going to sounds more evil or selfish and the messages of dumb-progressives are going to sound more stupid and ridiculous: the former has a pre-formatted appeal that says "hey government leave us alone, we don't care about these complainers and don't think you should be spending our money on anything," while the latter has an appeal that has to be invented, saying "hey government there is X problem I find important and you'd better do something about it." (E.g., respectively, the folks at the Free Republic making arguments that the collection of federal income tax is unconstitutional and has no sound legal basis, and any given person who decides that the shrinking habitat of the egg-toothed wasabi-monster is the key issue facing Americans today: they're both dumb statements, but which sounds smart-dumb and which sounds "dumb"-dumb?)

Re the Judis/Teixeira book: it, and its argument about suburban voters realigning themselves as Democrats is true as far as it goes (and New Jersey is the prime example of that thesis, so it's something I've seen with my own eyes). Still, I wonder how much of the argument comes from the fact that Judis and Teixeira, and the folks they hang with, fit in that demographic. And, therefore, they generalize that into being a general trend.

Dave Q's on the mark, too. All successful politics, left or right, progressive or conservative, concerns self-interest. Shit, Karl Marx, FDR and LBJ understood that, as much as Nixon or the folks behind the scenes of the Dubya WH. Why this simple fact can't penetrate the heads of those of the contemporary left is beyond me. It's like rebelling against the law of gravity, it's so basic.

However, I have the education and access to information that a lot of people from my background don't have.