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Sunday, Jul 5, 2009
Come out of the closet, liberals. Stop using the fashionable euphemism "progressive" and relaunch the old, tarnished L-word.
By Michael Lind
Read more: George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, John F. Kennedy, Opinion, Michael Lind, Barack Obama
Nov. 21, 2008 | 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.
Fine by me. While the New Democrats were too conservative for my taste in some ways, a majority party has multiple factions or wings, and in the late 20th century the only way that the Democratic Party could grow was by appealing to centrists as well as liberals. If the DLC had been granted exclusive franchising rights for the term "progressive," then it would have meant simply the pro-corporate right wing of the Democratic Party, whose left wing was pro-labor and populist. We would then be speaking of conflict and also collaboration within the Democratic coalition between liberals on the left and progressives on the right.
Unfortunately, Democrats on the left insisted on calling themselves progressive too. Instead of meaning a moderate Democrat, progressive came to refer to any Democrat. So by the 1990s anti-labor, pro-NAFTA progressives were battling pro-labor, anti-NAFTA progressives. Fiscal conservatives who wanted to invade Iraq were progressives -- and so were democratic socialists. The left, center and right of the Democratic Party simultaneously gave up the name of the tradition of FDR, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson and Humphrey, all because Ronald Reagan and Rush Limbaugh denounced liberals.
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.
At least the far-left progressives were honest. They genuinely despised the mid-century American liberals, whom they viewed simply as another species of bourgeois imperialists. This is another one of the reasons I dislike the term "progressive." Why should I call myself by the name preferred by deluded radicals who despised the New Deal and the Great Society liberals I admire? Why share a label with anyone who romanticized Ho Chi Minh or Fidel Castro?
Next page: The word "liberal" is a badge of pride
Relax, liberals. You've already won
Obama and the dawn of the Fourth Republic
The Newer Deal: The path to a Democratic supermajority
