This is what I've been waiting for, for a long time.

Founded by Norm Geras and Nick Cohen, it is a new democratic progressive alliance - committed to intellectual freedom, human rights, and progressive principles. It is pro-freedom and pro-labor, pro-liberty and pro-human rights. It is the synthesis of being liberal and being libertarian.

It is the new American majority - it is Purple Politics. It is universal in a way that being just a Democrat or just a Republican can not be. It is a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Here is the formal announcement:

Today, 13Apr06, we — bloggers, academics, campaigners, writers, scientists, journalists, citizens — launch the Euston Manifesto. With this document we hope to publicly assert our progressive, democratic, egalitarian, internationalist principles in the face of recent attacks upon them from the Right and, to our dismay, the Left.

Many of us are of the Left, but we come from across the range of political positions. We are not founding a political party. There were differences amongst us over Western military intervention in Iraq. Our declaration is not definitive, final, or perfect; it is, we hope, the beginning of a renewed debate, grounded in a common set of progressive values.

Sign me up. And you should sign up, too.