About Answering Back

In Answering Back we are trying to create what Ellen Sterner Sedeno, the gifted publicist now working with Wake Forest University, rightly called a “living book”: a book that will grow with you as you develop your arguments in defense of progressive causes, and one that is perennially responsive to the ever changing contours of American political debate.

The basic arguments for and against progressive change in the United States do not alter fundamentally over time, and have been laid out for you in the text that accompanies this blog site. But the particular political struggles into which those arguments have to be inserted change. The data sets necessary to their defense alter, and the specific issues that have to be addressed move about on the political chess board. For all those reasons, it seems essential that we equip you not simply with powerful defenses against conservative and reactionary politics but also with all the information that you need, all the up-to-date stories to which you need to refer, and all the twists and turns of political struggle with which you need to be familiar if your arguments are going to carry their full weight – hence this blog site.

Here you will find the latest storylines, data sets and literature references necessary to keep you fully up to speed with this incredibly rapidly changing and important set of political struggles. Such a blog site is necessary even when conservatives control the White House and the Congress, when the task of progressive intellectuals and activists is to slow the pace of conservative change by keeping alive a liberal alternative. It is even more vital when progressives set the political agenda, vital to roll back the vitriolic and hysterical counter-arguments hurled against them by conservatives out of power, and vital to reinforce the movement of progressive change at a time when political expediency always suggests that change should be slowed or abandoned.

So please use what follows as an extra resource to keep you up-to-date as you fight the good fight, and treat Answering Back as the book it has been designed to be – both a living book and a fighting book in the struggle for a better America. It is a privilege to share the life and the fight with you!

David Coates

PS: The thinking behind “Answering Back” was discussed at length with Judy Woodruff of the PBS NewsHour. That interview is available here.

PPS: Answering Back can be purchased via Amazon.com