It is not easy being progressive in the United States today. Conservatives attack us as anathema to American values, and we portray them as a threat to progressive ones. President Barack Obama, the first avowedly progressive president since Franklin D. Roosevelt, is denounced by critics on the right as a “socialist” and decried by ones on the left as a “sellout.” Progressive Americans find ourselves caught between a political rock and a hard place: either we swallow our pride and use the opportunity of Obama's presidency to try to restore at least some semblance of progressivism to our country's policies, or we stick to our principles and risk losing the chance to govern it completely. What are we to do? Should U.S. progressives stand up for a country that continuously disappoints and even disavows us, or should we turn our back on one that still attracts our hope?

Obviously, no single answer to these questions exists, and the many underlying assumptions are open to debate. But rather than pitting one analysis of today's progressive American dilemmas against another, this volume takes a different approach: it suggests that we reconsider the state and fate of American progressivism altogether by placing it within the framework of human rights.

This is not an academic exercise. It has taken me all of my twenty-five years as a U.S. social justice activist, for example, to recast my own politics in terms of human rights, a shift that required me – as I hope this book will inspire you – to reexamine my sense of self, my connection to the various social justice movements of which I am a part, their relationship to one another and to the United States government, and the link between all of these things and what it means, in very practical terms, to be a progressive and an American in the world today.