I thought 'progressive' was just the re-branding of 'liberal' since 'liberal' became a bad word.
No, there are people who have been 'progressives-not-liberals' for decades now.
The way it seems to me is Cala is kind-of right, but the rebranding was not in response to "liberal" being made a bad word by Goldwater and his scions, but in response to "liberal" drifting to the right to mean "moderate" in the 70's. "Progressive" has been in use since I've been politically aware but it always had a feeling of people saying "we're the real liberals".
The way they taught us political ideology terms in 7th-grade social studies was to say "liberals like change, conservatives dislike change, radicals and reactionaries similarly but moreso." "Progressive" seems to fit in well with that framework as "someone who likes progress".
I think you've described the difference pretty well. Add in that "liberal" became very problematic in the 60s when there was a need for a clear demarcation from those in government who supported the war. The terms progressive is used to set the speaker apart from what the speaker thinks a liberal is.
Reminding myself of Noah Sweat's whiskey speech, I understand your concern that progressives either despair too much or are about unattainable goals, yet at the same time your policy disagreements with liberals....
I guess. What I'm interested in someone who's going to tell me "Of course there's a sharp distinction, and this is what it is" -- I can't place the conversations I've had that led me to that conclusion, but I think there's a population of progressives with that belief.
No, there are people who have been 'progressives-not-liberals' for decades now.
This might be true, but I think the word "progressive" is being used differently today than it was decades ago. Also, it appears to me that the choice of whether to use "progressive" or "liberal" as an identifier reflects a generation gap, that self-identified progressives are more likely to be post-Clinton Democrats, and, as a result, they are ideologically more conservative than liberals. They are, quite possibly, less conservative than liberals in some more amorphous sense as a function of the disparity in ages.
I think the meaning of these terms has shifted so much. I think 1/3 are right about the most-common current uses -- progressive just means a convicted liberal, and in general use could mean someone slightly to the left of a moderate liberal, or someone who is left-liberal but doesn't want to use the tainted 'l' word.
More traditionally I think progressives are people who believe strongly in using government power to make progress in society, whereas liberals are somewhat skeptical of powerful government and hence more strident about the protection of individual rights and freedoms. But as I said I don't think the application of those traditional notions to modern discourse is very helpful or meaningful.
In modern usage, progressives are just liberals who have read Lakoff (or reviews thereof). Neither word means very much, aside from "not Republicans."
a convicted liberal,
Convinced? or with strong convictions?
Eh, if this is what people are coming up with, I'll go back to my old position -- liberal, progressive, potato, potahto. We're all on the same side, the only thing the different label tells me is which way you're more likely to go wrong if you do.
5- IME here you are likely talking to someone who uses "progressive" to mean hard-left, and thinks 'liberal' means democratic-mainstream moderate left. I've encountered plenty of "progressives" who use the terms that way, although again I think these are slippery words.
The progressives who think there is a sharp distinction are focused on a particular view of how liberals have sold out or given up on issues of principle. Again, war would be a good example.
I wonder if part of this consists of what one decides to do about it. In 1992, I was livid when Bill Clinton went home to Arkansas during the election to make a point about executing a retarded death row inmate (one aspect of my law practice is death penalty post-conviction), and thought it reprehensible. I voted twice for him anyway. I know self-described progressives who would sneer at that. Though I probably call myself a progressive.
I used that example rather than the whole Green / Nader thing because my experience in local politics with Greenies has made me convinced that there's a whole other kind of refusal to play going on with the Greenies.
9- I think the traditional breakdown in the second paragraph of 7 is a meaningful one, and it would probably be fruitful if it could be preserved. But that's hopeless, I think, so you are right that these are effectively interchangable terms. And yes, by 'convicted" I meant with strong convictions. Although all I really meant was not-at-all-moderate.
In american political philosophy, "liberal" has a very specific meaning. A liberal believes that the government should be neutral with regard to conceptions of the good life. Some people think homosexuality is wrong, others think it is not, but it is not the governments job to decide.
A progressive, on the other hand, actually does have a conception of the good life which she thinks the government should promote. The government should protect gay rights, not because sexuality is none of the governments business, but because being gay is in fact entirely compatible with being a good person, even an exceptional person.
Shorter answer: liberals read Rawls, progressives read Marx.
There is a good review at the NYRB by Tom Nagel of a book by a self described "progressive not liberal"
By this standard, interestingly, I am progressive but not liberal.
Also note that in Europe, liberal means something completely different, as our European commentors will better explain.
whole other kind of refusal to play going on with the Greenies
Yes, one where "play" = "acknowledge reality". On a more serious linguistic note, my internal dictionary has progressive as a larger category than liberal. For example, the Clintons are progressives but could hardly be considered liberals. But my usage is probably idiosyncratic.
my experience in local politics with Greenies has made me convinced that there's a whole other kind of refusal to play going on with the Greenies.
My interactions with Greenies have convinced me they'd rather lay around basking in their purity than actually get results.
13 pwned by 7
14: I think most people would say that the Clintons are liberal and not progressive, simply because liberal connotes "not as hard left," although Hilary's communitarian leanings are more progressive than liberal.
Impulsive, short answer to your question: in the beginning progressives were people who wanted to change, by degrees, the status quo; when the New Deal succeeded, such people were replaced by liberals (establishmentarians who wanted to preserve its successes); as the New Deal impulse has waned, a lot of people have been trying to gin up something like the old progressive coalition for change-by-degrees.
Short history of the middle part of this period here.
I'd like to blog a long, thoughtful answer but I must perform civic duties today. Maybe I'll get to it tonight.
In american political philosophy, "liberal" has a very specific meaning. A liberal believes that the government should be neutral with regard to conceptions of the good life. Some people think homosexuality is wrong, others think it is not, but it is not the governments job to decide.
A progressive, on the other hand, actually does have a conception of the good life which she thinks the government should promote. The government should protect gay rights, not because sexuality is none of the governments business, but because being gay is in fact entirely compatible with being a good person, even an exceptional person.
Okay, this is useful -- it's a strong philosophical distinction that (IMO) doesn't often lead to a lot of policy differences, which would explain both why there are progressives who think of themselves as very different from liberals, and I still have trouble telling the difference except socially. (7 should have been useful, given that it says the same thing, but I didn't understand it properly.)
13 Gets it right, I think. "Progressive": Jacobin, Bolshevik; "Liberal": Girondin, Menshevik. Both can be revolutionary or reformist, depending on context, but "progressives" damn well know what the promised land had better look like, while "liberals" merely know what they'd personally prefer.
Both strands would be described as flavours of scoialist or social democrat outside the USA, where, with the partial exception of Britain, "Liberal" retains its 19th century connotations.
Speaking in the role of grandfather, in 1968 "progressive" in my experience meant people who gave critical support to Democrats, but were really much further left. As opposed to ultra-leftists and schismatic third-party leftists.
"Liberal" was always contrastive to "socialist", and used to mean "free-marketer and civil libertarian". Because of the bad odor of socialism in the US, Roosevelt snuch a bit of socialism into his "Four Freedoms", which included non-traditionally-liberal freedoms such as "Freedom from Want".
Gov. Floyd B Olson of Minnesota, America's most successful leftist, explicitly said he was a socialist rather than a liberal.
"Liberal" after 1984 or so increasingly came to mean "social liberal" only, as the Democrats began their war on their labor / minority base and jettisoned their social-justice planks. "Progressives" are people who want to turn that around.
13 and 18 seem to cover it. I'd just add that the way this currently shakes out in practice is that liberals are more committed to a free market and less hostile to business than progressives are.
This is fascinating. My introduction to the modern usage of the term "progressive" was through various political blogs, and that usage appears to be a bastardized and just wrong usage. Really helpful.
(7 should have been useful, given that it says the same thing, but I didn't understand it properly.)
Probably because it wasn't stated nearly as clearly.
From the link in 18:
(End Ruachway)
The mystic cult that competes with the Bene Gesserit for dominance in Omen Canticles of Dune.
Ditto 24. I've used either term interchangably to refer to myself, and didn't really realize there was a distinction. Hmm.
I'm not sure where this fits in to the above, but I also see liberals as being more interested in institution's and proceduralism than progressives.
I think Glenn's observation is a good one. On the whole, I'd say that liberals *tend* more towards a politics of negative liberty; progressives *tend* more towards a poitics of postive liberty. Liberals tend towards institutional politics, progressives towards mass or movement politics. But this is a divergence rather than a chasm or simple split, a flavoring. Liberals aren't libertarians; progressives aren't quite radicals.
Being from the land of LaFollette, I associate progressivism with utilitarian Good Government/structural reform and less so with economic or political ideology (that's not to say progressives can't be dogmatic; they're just dogmatic about different things, like campaign finance). Russ Feingold comes from this tradition, as does pre-1995 Ralph Nader and groups like Common Cause.
I'd just like to add that the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party was a populist group that was basically successful and did much more good than harm. So screw Hofstader, who has poisoned the minds of two or three generations of smart people.
The FLP was a pretty dodgy entity, though, because the left wing was left-Socialist and the right wing was implicated with Hitler (via isolationism). The first Minnesota Senator to die in a mysterious plane crash was Sen. Lundeen arouns 1941, accused of being a Nazi collaborator.
Minnesota was so throughly non-Anglo-Saxon in the thirties that standard average American individualist free-marketism was actually the least likely ideology of all there.
28: Yob's apostrophe! Destroy!
Substantively, I'm still confused. Take something like MoveOn: liberals, or progressives?
Moveon is so hands-on activist and non-ideological that you can't be sure, but I'd say progressive, in part because liberals are often anti-populist and elitist.
Ditto 24. I knew the historical sense of it, but the modern sense is fascinating.
I generally don't think there's any real content to the label "progressive," though perhaps things are different in NYC, where the afterglow of real radicalism can still be felt.
In most of the country, if you call yourself progressive I think it means, "I generally favor one or more of the entrees that are on the menu at the liberal cafeteria -- diversity, economic equality, social insurance, less belligerent foreign policy, etc. -- but there is something about "liberalism" that makes me uncomfortable." Usually, the "something" is not easy to articulate; it's an association with some policy or person or movement that's been tarred with failure. Probably, it includes difficulty admitting that some favored liberal solutions require growing government, or at least relying on it for services, and that they won't be perfect. Sometimes it means a desire to distance yourself from the politics established liberal groups, which have been around long enough to ossify, and/or to squabble endlessly about the fine points of their differences.
Mostly, though, I think of aversion to the word "liberal" as the outstanding triumph of the Republican political project since 1968 or thereabouts. It really used to be a good word, and "conservative" a term of opprobrium. Hard to believe for those of us who are younger (I used to be a historian, so I know these things). But they've convinced enough Americans that the "L-word" is a symbol for failure that politicians have essentially stopped trying to defend or redefine it. (When was the last time you heard a pol say he's proud to be a liberal? Maybe in NYC, but outside of there?)
Emerson's got it about right from my perspective, but let's bring this crudely down to cases and exemplars. Joe Lieberman is a liberal. Any progressive in public life is keeping her head down, but how abt Amy Goodman?
Is Amy Goodman Pacifica? Progressive, I'd say.
"Left-liberal" might be equivalent to "progressive". "Corporate liberal" might be equivalent to "liberal". "Social liberal / fiscal moderate or conservative" is often equal to "liberal" (worst sense).
In the worst case, someone counts as liberal if they're hedonistic and flamboyant, involved in the counterculture, pro-sex absolutists, drug anti-prohibitionists, and bitterly hostile to all conventional, ordinary people. Rove loves this definition, but plenty of people take it on for themselves.
7,13,28,29 I am really hardcore about the word liberal;I use a full classic definition that would include Burke and many conservatives. Liberals are about the means not the ends;about process not outcomes. Kant(?) and Rawls are classic liberals;and ToJ is the classic statement of liberalism. It may be actually immoral to worry about outcomes.
38 is too strong because obviously maximizing freedom is an outcome. But "maximizing justice" gives me pause.
I don't think you get far if you try to have a single definition for "liberal". Roosevelt really changed the meaning of the word, but only for Americans.
John--which Hofstadter do you want to screw?
And why?
Richard, the one who wrote one-sided books about American populism. And it was an imperative, I don't want to do it myself.
Over the last few years I've realized that a very high proportion of American liberals, even including left-liberals, are adamantly opposed to anything that seems populist, and I think that Hofstadter's (sp.??) books are the main reason. The question has to be reopened.
re: 43
I agree with your diagnosis re: Hofstadter, but not your prescription. We should be trying to recork that particular genie, not trying to wrest control of it from the republicans.
Restate, Glenn. My diagnosis is that Hofstader misled people about populism, with disastrous results of various sorts. You seem to agree with Hofstadter.
My prescription was not that anyone should actually try to screw Hofstadter,
I always thought the difference between liberals and progressives was that liberals wanted you to stop beating your slaves, while progressives wanted to end slavery.
Here in San Francisco, actually, nobody's an admitted liberal. Probably because by American standards we pretty much all are. But "progressive" means anyone who's not funded by real estate interests. It's really a sloppy way to describe the left half (40%? 60%?) of San Francisco. As such, it describes everybody from non-building-trades labor to (non-trotskyite, non-maoist) socialists. The common thread is, in general, economic justice (rent control, living wage, transit), but there are exceptions: The Bicycle People (of which I am one) are one of the most powerful lobbies in the city, and although there's not a direct economic connection, they're generally considered progressive.
A note on Greens: in a city where there is no significant Republican presence, the Green/Dem dynamic is mch different, and healthier, than in, say, Pennsylvania. In San Francisco, there are plenty of principled, effective Greens. There's also much less of the "the Democrats are the lesser of two evils" crap (largely because the Democrats are actually the greater of two evils (and some rather large number of goods) here).
I was agreeing with your historical diagnosis about Hofstadter scaring over modern america elite opinion. Sorry, should have distinguished better.
I agree that liberals tend to value negative liberty - non-coercion or prevention from taking actions I would otherwise take. In the English and French traditions this was never thought to be an unlimited sphere of freedom because it would result in infringement on the freedoms of others. Since the 18th century the argument has been about what should be included in the list of liberties afforded individuals and what should be afforded the state and how much coercion was necessary. Only the most severe authoritarians, Dominionists, ultramontane Catholics, fascists, and the like are categorically anti-liberal.
Progressivism, as far as I know, is a particularly American phenomenon. In the 19th and early 20th century the term was used to describe social reformers who campaigned for anti-trust laws, social justice and worker’s rights. Progressivism is not radical socialism or anarchism and it includes reformers motivated by religious conviction for temperance and suffrage. I suppose they were interested in positive liberty- the freedom to achieve some end or goal- but given the broad nature of the movement it is hard to conclude this was their central focus. Often their goal was simple humanitarian improvement in material conditions like sanitation.
I find it very hard to think of Noam Chomsky as a progressive in the strict sense, but all political labels are slippery.
Is this where I should send the "hott emerson-on-hofstadter action" queries?
37 and 38 look so odd next to each other. 38, using the philosophical definition of liberal, says that liberals are purely interested in procedure, don't have sexual agendas and are trying to block people with sexual agendas. Emerson in 37, using Rove's definition of liberal, includes "pro-sex absolutists."
I would like to state right now that I am a pro sex absolutist, and I don't even know what that means.
44:"Joseph Schumpeter states "As a supreme, if unintended compliment, the enemies of the system of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label" implying that modern liberals have "stolen" the word and given it a definition opposite of its original meaning." ...Wiki on Classical Liberalism.
Hayek and Friedman call themselves classical liberals.
I don't mind the old definitions. Liberals can abandon the word and move on to Socialist, Anarchist, Marxist, and actually distinguish themselves from the Clintons and Liebermans
28 and 30 are another amusing pair. Glenn, using the philosophical definition, associates proceduralism with liberalism, while 30 associates it with progressivism. I think 30 is responding to the same popular American usage as 49, where progressives are interested in concrete, rather pedestrian improvements in society, like better sanitation or clean election laws.
Well, to me it means saying that "If behavior X is sexual, then it's good, regardless if it's problematic in some way, and anyone who disagrees is a Puritan". It's not a well-developed theory, but I see that kind of gut reaction fairly often.
People seem to draw the line very vigorously at child abuse, which is still bad, but don't want anything else to be stigmatized.
The #38 definition of liberal is not one I'd agree with.
53
I don't understand why folks like Hayek & Friendman can just stick with the name libertarian. It's got liberty in it, and it fits better with popular usage.
@55
Well, I suppose I can't be a pro-sex absolutist then. I even have rather Twisty-esque qualms about S&M.
Do you mean that you aren't the sort of liberal described in 38, or that you dont' think that is the right way to define liberal?
"Libertarian" was invented as a response to the hijacking of "liberal" Schumpeter whined about.
Excesses of liberal "creative destruction" caused the term "liberalism" to lose its attraction after 1929 or so, and Keynes, Roosevelt, et al, saved liberalism's ass, but people like Hayek and Schumpeter were not appreciative and continued to rant about how wonderful creative destruction was until they died.
55: liberalism means two different things by now, and while there are commonalities, #38 tends to make confusion inevitable.
creative destruction
Wasn't Charles Atlas into that too?
@61: Only when he was shrugging.
Scaredy-cats. I am a Marxist.
I want all of the Walton money. Every fucking penny. Just a question of how much blood is spilled in getting there.
I am trying to combine a Marxist critique with reasonably "liberal" processes. In other words, I would prefer the people vote to take all the Walton fortune. But the people don't seem to understand that the Walton fortune belongs to them.
The political entries in wiki tend to come from a modern American libertarian perspective. The classic liberalism as defined here is not Manchester liberalism of 1830. The early liberals, including Herbert Spencer, had radical notions about many things included landed property. Richard Cobden was an advocate for commerce as the basis of utopian brotherhood. Milton Friedman does not stand shoulder to shoulder with the early industrialists who fought against the Corn Laws; he belongs with the anti-New Deal libertarians. You can just read Spencer’s Social Statics (1851) in the first addition and than in his later addition to see how modern libertarianism came to be a defense of the prerogatives of the powerful, as if coercion by the state were somehow a different beast than coercion by industrial monopoly.
64:"as if coercion by the state were somehow a different beast than coercion by industrial monopoly. " or coercion by any non-gov't entity, if such a thing exists.
"Liberals" are always going to run into a problem of much of the Walton money they can take, and how they justify taking it. Hayek annd Friedman will be there to show they're just phonies, that they really don't care about freedom. They have a point.
I no longer know what the fuck I am, having lost any fleeting shreds of faith in "liberals" to do anything but sit and whinge, whilst loathing "conservatives" and the idiot Nader, upon whose raging egomania I place the moral blame for this administration's getting into the White House. Cynical crone that I am, I have become more inclined to want to bash heads and shriek 'stop all this internecine warfare and partisanship and get on with making the world a fucking better place where everyone gets enough to eat, reasonable shelter and a decent education and no-one gets to torture, oppress, or impose his, her or itself on anyone else and politicians don't get to change scientific reports in favour of shareholder economics.'
And then I realise that those delusions of the possibility of creating an anti-dystopia are all an acid flashback, that the Marching Morons have taken over, that there is no point to all that arguing over a 9/11 memorial because NYC will be underwater in 20 years, that this country is teetering on the edge of becoming a theocratic oligarchy if it hasn't flung itself over already and the only thing to fear are the stobor, as Homeland Security will tell us whilst ravaging our civil rights and tossing them into the nearest oubliette along with swarthy men who pray to Allah, but don't let anyone burn the flag because a piece of polyester stamped "made in China" is so much more important than the ideals it once stood for.
I'm going away now to upbraid Satan Claus for luring young children into depravity under the pretext of getting them to donate to Toys for Tots or making those cloves-stuck-into-an-apple pomanders so beloved of kindergarden teachers. After all, the Devil has "cloven" hooves, all one has to do is change one letter in "cloves" and that proves the existence of WMDs.
@66
You know, I was in a good mood today, and now you have to go reminding me about how everything sucks. Damn
67: You should have known not to read anything starting in "66", because that's just the Number of the Beast in the petite department. So there.
stop all this internecine warfare and partisanship and get on with making the world a fucking better place where everyone gets enough to eat, reasonable shelter and a decent education...
The common sense appeal of this agenda is one of the reasons why I like to identify with the nineteenth and early 20th century progressive movement. I like the idea of making things better in concrete, practical ways. Clean water and good government.
There are things the earlier progressives were involved with that don't make much sense anymore. An earlier commenter noted that prohibitionists could be counted among the progressives. But you learn from experience. One thing progressives have learned is that people aren’t made happier if you poke your nose into every aspect of their lives.
As far as seizing the Walton fortune, I’m all for it, mostly because they aren’t doing much good with it, and we still have a semi-functional government that can do some good with it. So, like the liberals, I worry about how much to seize, not because I worry about the property rights of the Walton family, but because I’m worried that to big a flow of money will just wind up in the hands of corrupt populist political machines, which are an ever present hazard for progressive movements.
See, I wouldn't say Lieberman is a liberal, not at all. It's not just his blind worship of the Bush foreign poilcy. Far more it's his frequent shilling for government intervention in cultural markets, his invocation of religious and communal standards, etc.
In many ways, I would think of Lieberman as closer to populism in this respect. And I would see progressivism as kind of the mutant child of liberalism and American populism, just as many contemporary liberals are the bastard children of libertarianism and postwar institutionalism. Progressives are drawn to collective social projects (as long as they don't include People Not of Our Kind); liberals are drawn to working through civil institutions and the state (as long as the state's project doesn't include Things That Sound Too Socialist).
Lieberman isn't a populist because he runs errands for finance -- he was Arthur Anderson's boy, until they collapsed after Enron. He's a hawkish corporate centrist with liberal and demagogic elements.
This starting to look like Mort Sahl's blackboard.
I'd just like to disassociate myself from any imputation that John Emerson wants to screw any Hofstadters.
What I *meant* to ask was:
which Hofstadter are you ordering *us* to screw?
But you have given us a complete answer by now: it's Richard, the historian.
Nope. Not gonna do it.
(Though I do remember having a crush on his daughter, Sarah, many many years ago.)
Hey, if you run into Sarah again, go for it. Explain afterwards that it was a transgressive populist act.
So there's a definitional vs. label as lived issue here. I think Tim Burke is right that the progressive/liberal split as these labels were once used in the political realm broke along a negative/positive liberty axis. Although the relationship now between those people/institutions in the US that are usually grouped under the descriptor 'liberal' and a political philosophy based on a concept of negative liberty is farily tenuous.
Liberal did mean for some time the leftish side of the democratic party. Now, as a matter of branding, I think there's a move to 'progressive.' The axes that (analytically) seem useful are: a)orientation towards *change* (the true progressive/conservative split) and orientation towards structure of government (the liberal/illiberal split). There's also a broader notion of left vs. right in the US, but I would argue the Reps and Dems map onto liberalism/illiberalism and orientation towards change only very roughly.
a political philosophy based on a concept of negative liberty is farily tenuous.
Whaa...? You mean it's not much spoken about?
I think of "progressive" as somewhat of a floating word. Partly nowadays it is probably just an attempt to evade the liberal stigma, and partly a way of distinguishing oneself form lame liberals.
75 is good, and I vaguely remember graphs like that. It also reminds of the days we needed to distinguish Hubert Humphrey from Richard Russell.
Stirling Newberry divides the political spectrum into reactionaries, conservatives, and progressives.
I have been working on this, with Social Security as the example issue
The libertarian would kill it dead now, and give the money back to its rightful owners.
The "conservative" would do the same in slow phase out.
Friedman would exchange it for a negative income tax.
Hayek might keep it, or limit its scope.
Burke would investigate corruption, but a program 75 years old and popular? Y'all might be surprised what party Burke went into.
The difference between a populist and a demagogue, if we're not talking specific kinds or flavors of historical populism (e.g., American agrarian populism of a century ago) strikes me was pretty thin.
I like Bob's breakdown on social security. Burkean conservatism, if I can be forgiven seeming to promote someone to whom I have no relation, strikes me as very, very hard to place on the contemporary American grid. In many ways, the position I extrapolate from Edmund Burke onto contemporary American foreign policy would make Bush's foreign policy the absolute opposite of Burke's conservatism. I think Edmund Burke would be at nearly the opposite point of the grid from Bush. In general, Burke was big on what was, simply observing that trying to employ power to change things for the better was as likely to make things worse, and that whatever makes things change over time, it's pretty subtle.
Makes sense to me, but maybe that's just some kind of weird quasi-familial thing. At any rate, he maps into the contemporary American spectrum in some very weird ways, in my opinion.
I'm with, err, Burke on Burke. Edmund Burke's philosophical position has simply never been an important element of the American political scene. The conscious genuflection of certain conservatives in his direction can be regarded as the surest indication that they don't care a whit about what he actual says. Yes, Sullivan, I'm looking at you.
Marching Morons. That was Cyril Kornbluth, wasn't it? Apt, except CMK was an optimist. He assumed that the people behind the morons would be of good will.
I dont understand this interest in defining progressive and liberal. It's not like there's a Nobel prize for correctly describing political categories. It's not like 'progressive' is some natural category which, if we could only properly characterize it, would lead to a vaccine. I, of course, have the sole power and authority to define Mikeyism (of which I am the founder, prophet, and sole adherent) but everyone is going to use progressive and liberal to mean whatever they happen to want to mean.
These are constructs, and we can construct 'em as we want. Both 'progressive' and 'liberal' clearly mean that one supports truth, justice, competence, honesty, science, liberty, and the Murrican Way.
But the title question of the post is a great set-up. I wish I could think of a good punch line. Somehow "I don't know, but if you hum a few bars I'll fake it" doesn't quite do it.
The question is of contemporary interest, because a distinction is being made these days.
Well, yeah. I asked because I've said things along the lines of "Progressive, liberal, you know -- someone on the left," and been chided for ignoring the important distinction.
and were you more often chided by self-described liberals, or by self-described progressives?
Because that could give us grounds for a distinction.
My mother used to tell of excruciating Sunday afternoons when she was young. The older members of the family would sit around discussing which version of communism (or socialism!) was the one true creed. [this story may not be true: being the last survivor, I can invent family history]
I'm also reminded of trying, in vain, to understand the differences among the various denominations of Christianity. I still don't know who Trent was, or what he counseled, or if there's also a not-so-Nicean creed. Apparently presbyopia, while it is a way of viewing the world, isn't like Presbyterianism.
Such distinctions are too often used to define who's in and who's apostate, to identify heretics, and to assure ideological purity. That's a very, very bad game. Schism, we don't need. Such distinctions can only cause trouble.
Ideological consistency is unnecessary. People can quite comfortably affirm "yes, I'm a staunch believer in Republicans, the party of life, that's why I favor capital punishment." Or can say "yes, I believe in religious freedom, that's why I support compulsory prayer in public schools."
Engaging in the 'label, label, who's got the label?' discussion is bad rhetoric and bad politics. It gets a certain small subset of activists foaming at the mouth and fighting among themselves. Everyone else, the other 98%, yawn and go on to more interesting topics - like actual policy questions.
So I think the best answer to 'progressive or liberal? is to say "whatever - I believe in the constitution and in liberty and in promoting the general welfare." Or whatever policy beliefs seems most important at the moment.
Otherwise one gets into the sort of argument I heard made by my incumbent republican congressman to her challenger at a debate at a synagogue last week. She said 'you've agreed to attend an event sponsored by our local African American community. Al Sharpton will also be there, sharing the stage, and he's endorsed your candidacy. Al Sharpton is a known anti-Semite. How can you stand with him?'
Because she's apparently not too bright my candidate got all tangled up in who she was with and to what extent and all those other group boundary identification issues. She should have denied the premise, denied that assigning her to a group (progressive or liberal? Who do you stand with?) was a valid way to define her positions. She should have said "I oppose anti-Semitism. I support religious freedom, unlike my Republican opponent, who support government funding for Christian outreach programs. I oppose racism. I was invited by our african american community. To show my respect for them, and my respect for the principle that all americans of all races and ethnicities are a part of our political process, I agreed to go. I take it as an honor."
Which is what I think LB should do. Deny the premise. Those distinctions aren't important.
I think that the point of the progressive / liberal distinction is rather small, but meaningful. Not much like a sectarian debate -- progressives don't feud with liberals, they just prefer the "progressive" label for themselves.
I don't think there's an ideological difference, just a labelling difference.
I prefer "liberal," because:
1. the politician that comes to mind is FDR, whereas for progressives it's Dennis Kucinich
2. too stubborn to abdandon it because it's been "tainted"
3. related to 2, and picked up from "Reading Lolita in Tehran": what other word has such a distinguished list of people who hate them? (Well, Jews, I guess, but you know what I mean.)
4. it gives you more content about what you believe in--"progressive" makes me wonder: progress towards what?
It took me longer than I thought, but here is the longer response I promised/threatened.
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