Let's take back the "liberal" label. Salon's Michael Lind tells us why we need to take it back:
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?
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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.
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Objection No. 3. Progressivism as the radical left. What made all of this even more confusing was the fact that the term "progressive," which center-right Democrats like Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute sought to capture, had been identified with Marxists and other groups on the extreme left during the previous half-century. If you were a progressive in the '30s and '40s, like many supporters of Henry Wallace's Progressive Party, you were likely to find redeeming qualities in the Soviet Union's social experiment and to think that FDR was a pawn of the capitalists. If you were a progressive in the '60s and '70s, you were likely to think that Truman and Johnson were warmongering "corporate liberals" under the control of the "military-industrial complex" and that the Democrats and Republicans were indistinguishable. For the moderate and conservative Democrats of the DLC to call themselves the new progressives was the equivalent of moderate, secular Republicans calling themselves the new fundamentalists.
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Objection No. 4. The early 20th century progressives. Now that "progressive" is widely used as a euphemism for "liberal," there is a natural tendency to link the progressives of the early 2000s with the Progressives of the early 1900s, like Woodrow Wilson and John Dewey. The problem is that while the modern center-left is the child of mid-century Roosevelt-Truman-Kennedy-Johnson liberalism, it is only the grandchild -- or perhaps grand-nephew or grand-niece, twice removed -- of the Progressives of the 1900s.
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Objection No. 5. It's too German. The term "progressive" entered English from 19th century German politics. The first progressive party in the world was the Deutsche Fortschrittspartei, founded in Prussia in 1861 ("Fortschritt" means "progress"). The American Progressives like Woodrow Wilson who translated the term into English believed that Bismarck's Imperial Germany was superior in many ways to the United States and Britain. They sought to graft German-style bureaucracy onto what they considered to be an antiquated political system crippled by 18th century Enlightenment notions of local government and civil rights. In other words, they saw statist, technocratic German progressivism as an advance beyond Anglo-American liberalism.
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Objection No. 6. "Progressive" implies progress. Like "conservative," "progressive" is a term associated with a particular view of history. The conservative wants to stand still or go back; the progressive wants to move forward. Progressivism implies a view of history as perpetual progress; conservatism, a view of history as decline from a better world in the past. Needless to say, nobody who actually thinks this way could function. In the real world, self-described progressives aren't mindlessly in favor of everything new, just as self-described conservatives aren't indiscriminately in favor of everything that's old.
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But don't listen to me. Listen to John F. Kennedy, accepting the endorsement of his presidential candidacy by New York's Liberal Party on Sept. 14, 1960:
What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label "Liberal?" If by "Liberal" they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer's dollar, then the record of this party and its members demonstrate that we are not that kind of "Liberal." But if by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people -- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties -- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal."
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