"Progressive"

 I think I may have written on this before, but it keeps needling me and no one reads this shit anyway...

Back in the Bush 43 years, those of us left-of-center were dismayed at how "liberal" had been turned into a slur by people like Rush Limbaugh and Karl Rove. So, in a triumph of branding over substance, liberals began calling themselves "progressives" as a way to accent that one form of liberalism is about the faith in human progress. Liberals/progressives believe that reason combined with good evidence can lead to better policy outcomes and harkens back to a similar reform movement in the period before and during World War I.

At some point, "progressive" became a term for the further left reaches of American politics. Some of this is simply because they, too, hate "liberals." 

To back up a bit, there are two flavors of "liberal". There's the one above, where people think that generally speaking, policies can be improved for the greater good. The other is a belief in liberty, which when termed "classical liberalism" refers to restricting the power of the state to increase liberty. Prior to about 1870, at least in the US, the state was considered the greater threat to human liberty. Since then, a new form of liberalism identifies plutocracy as the greater threat. Still, "neoliberalism" was the name of the movement to roll back some of the efforts made by the New Deal and Great Society to address economic inequality. 

It's a confusing term. 

What we have now, is a schism between "progressives" and "liberals" like Biden. Many of these "progressives" are quite young, which...whatever. Still, what's interesting to me in 2024 is that the two flavors of "liberal" are merging, and the self-styled leftist/progressive axis is not part of that merger.

To support the Democratic Party today means to support both the OLD progressive/liberal idea of reasoned, utilitarian policy making AND a defense of freedom of expression. I'm taking a workshop next week that addresses some of these issues in academia where it's becoming more and more of a minority of self-styled "progressives" who exercise a heckler's veto over anything that might discomfort them. 

With a dangerous autocratic demagogue having turned one of our two major parties into a cult of personality, I would hope that there would be common cause between the two forms of liberals, because I'm not sure we can count on the "progressives" of 2024.