Is Elizabeth Warren a progressive?

[dreamnightwind]

45. OP poses an excellent question

I support her based on what I've seen, which is mostly issues regarding economic justice.

However, I would like to see more discussion of how she thinks on other progressive issues. Better now than later.

Here's the elephant in the room. I don't like the Daily Beast, so take it for what it's worth, but it touches on something we should take a close look at, her Republican past.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/10/24/elizabeth-warren-i-created-occupy-wall-street.html

For all those quaking on the right at the sight of an ascendant Warren, rest easy. Warren’s no lefty. In fact, Warren was a registered Republican into her 40s. When it comes to ideology, Warren makes for a rotten heir to Kennedy.

“I was a Republican because I thought that those were the people who best supported markets. I think that is not true anymore,” Warren says. “I was a Republican at a time when I felt like there was a problem that the markets were under a lot more strain. It worried me whether or not the government played too activist a role.”

I actually trust her on the issue of government playing an active role in regulating markets, so that is no red flag to me.

I'd like to know more about her positions on other things. Federal marijuana policy, for one. Yes, I think that's an important issue, the current laws ruin countless lives and careers. and needlessly place a large segment of the population on the wrong side of the law. More broadly, reducing incarceration, this has become incarceration nation rather than the land of the free. Civil rights, her position on single-payer healthcare, global trade agreements, foreign policy (is she interested in defunding the military to spend the money here at home?), surveillance, drones, and perhaps most importantly, climate change. How does she stack up on these issues?

For the record, neither Obama nor Hillary stacks up well on most of those issues, and that is being kind about it. Warren's willingness and ability to take on powerful economic interests in defense of the powerless puts her far ahead of those politicians in my mind, that's an extremely important area that effects everyone. It isn't the whole story, though, and we should take a close look at the rest of the story.

The recent trend for our party is social liberalism with neo-liberal (market-based) economic policies. That clearly doesn't cut it, the liberal social policies are the bone the powerful are willing to toss us without conceding any of their vast hold on wealth and power. Warren may be the inverse of this, I honestly don't know.