Michael Lind: Is it OK to be liberal again, instead of progressive?
If the conservative era is over, can liberals come out of their defensive crouch and call themselves liberals again, instead of progressives?
In the last two decades, Democratic politicians, including Barack Obama, have abandoned the term "liberal" for "progressive." The theory was that Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush -- and Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Pat Buchanan -- had succeeded in equating "liberal" in the public mind with weakness on defense, softness on crime, and "redistribution" of Joe the Plumber's hard-earned money to the collective bogey evoked by a former Texas rock band's clever name: Teenage Immigrant Welfare Mothers on Dope.
I've always been uncomfortable with this rather soulless and manipulative exercise in rebranding, for a number of reasons.
Objection No. 1. Futility. It's not the name of the center-left that the right objects to, but the policies and values. Suppose the defeated Republican minority decided that it needed to rebrand itself by replacing "conservatism" with "traditionalism." Would anybody on the left or center be fooled, if traditionalism was defined by exactly the same synthesis of free-market radicalism, anti-Darwinism and support for a neoconservative foreign policy?
The center-left is going to be trashed by the right, whether the right adopts one term or another. If conservatives continue to call the new progressives "liberals," then the right wins, by implying, correctly, that progressives are liberals who are ashamed to admit what they really are. If, on the other hand, "liberal" becomes as extinct as "Whig" and conservatives agree to use the term "progressive," then what has the center-left gained? Nothing. The same conservatives who formerly denounced liberals as tax-and-spend appeasers would now denounce progressives as tax-and-spend appeasers. What then? Would wimpy progressives then abandon progressivism and hope to avoid the wrath of Limbaugh by disguising themselves with a new alias -- reformists, or pragmatists? Your enemies will caricature you, no matter what you call yourself.
Objection No. 2. Progressivism as neoliberalism. Some have sought to distinguish progressivism from liberalism in content. This was the project of the disproportionately Southern "neoliberals" like Bill Clinton and Al Gore and Dave McCurdy and the Democratic Leadership Council and Progressive Policy Institute in the 1980s and 1990s. Instead of using the obvious term, "moderate" or "centrist," they sought to co-opt the term "progressive," even though they weren't very. In their analysis, liberalism was too identified in the public mind with organized labor and big-city machine bosses like the first Mayor Daley. They struggled and largely succeeded in creating a new Democratic Party based among upscale suburban whites and financed by the Industry Formerly Known as Wall Street rather than private-sector labor unions....
Read entire article at Salon
In the last two decades, Democratic politicians, including Barack Obama, have abandoned the term "liberal" for "progressive." The theory was that Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush -- and Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Pat Buchanan -- had succeeded in equating "liberal" in the public mind with weakness on defense, softness on crime, and "redistribution" of Joe the Plumber's hard-earned money to the collective bogey evoked by a former Texas rock band's clever name: Teenage Immigrant Welfare Mothers on Dope.
I've always been uncomfortable with this rather soulless and manipulative exercise in rebranding, for a number of reasons.
Objection No. 1. Futility. It's not the name of the center-left that the right objects to, but the policies and values. Suppose the defeated Republican minority decided that it needed to rebrand itself by replacing "conservatism" with "traditionalism." Would anybody on the left or center be fooled, if traditionalism was defined by exactly the same synthesis of free-market radicalism, anti-Darwinism and support for a neoconservative foreign policy?
The center-left is going to be trashed by the right, whether the right adopts one term or another. If conservatives continue to call the new progressives "liberals," then the right wins, by implying, correctly, that progressives are liberals who are ashamed to admit what they really are. If, on the other hand, "liberal" becomes as extinct as "Whig" and conservatives agree to use the term "progressive," then what has the center-left gained? Nothing. The same conservatives who formerly denounced liberals as tax-and-spend appeasers would now denounce progressives as tax-and-spend appeasers. What then? Would wimpy progressives then abandon progressivism and hope to avoid the wrath of Limbaugh by disguising themselves with a new alias -- reformists, or pragmatists? Your enemies will caricature you, no matter what you call yourself.
Objection No. 2. Progressivism as neoliberalism. Some have sought to distinguish progressivism from liberalism in content. This was the project of the disproportionately Southern "neoliberals" like Bill Clinton and Al Gore and Dave McCurdy and the Democratic Leadership Council and Progressive Policy Institute in the 1980s and 1990s. Instead of using the obvious term, "moderate" or "centrist," they sought to co-opt the term "progressive," even though they weren't very. In their analysis, liberalism was too identified in the public mind with organized labor and big-city machine bosses like the first Mayor Daley. They struggled and largely succeeded in creating a new Democratic Party based among upscale suburban whites and financed by the Industry Formerly Known as Wall Street rather than private-sector labor unions....