More important, why would we want to see this woman publicly shamed? This woman, who has set an example for millions of women nationwide by coming clean about the embarrassments of her past — having been molested, having had a child when she was just 15 who died as an infant, having struggled with her weight for decades — this woman deserves our prying and our contempt? Here is a woman who was honest with us, who offered up her weakest moments, her most tumultuous and shameful and nightmarish memories, in good faith. Here is a woman who exposed her history of sexual abuse years before it was considered remotely appropriate or acceptable to do so, in order to make it clear that we weren’t meant to suffer alone – from domestic abuse, from incest, from eating disorders, from money troubles, from low self-esteem. Oprah put a whole new face on so many different issues, you can hardly begin to list them all. She demonstrated, by example, how, with enough hard work and determination and brutal honesty, you can pull yourself up out of a bewildering past and live a whole new life.

Oprah made vulnerability look strong.

So when Kitty Kelley whines about Oprah’s immense power, when she complains that — boo hoo! — she wasn’t invited onto Larry King and no one will speak to her about the book because they’re so afraid of Oprah, don’t begrudge Oprah that power. Celebrate it. Celebrate the fact that an ambitious, tenacious black woman now has many, many influential individuals either fearing her outright or rallying to her side. This woman, who has admitted to countless mistakes, fears, moments of paralyzing self-doubt, dark nights of the soul, has offered millions of women the opportunity to reclaim their lives, just by being honest about their experiences.

Even if you discount everything else — the book club, the cable channel, the magazine, any of the other projects and programs and charities that make up her empire – and just focus on what Oprah has done for victims of domestic abuse, sexual abuse and incest in this country, if you just consider how these things were shrouded in secrecy not so long ago, if you imagine the hundreds of thousands of women who were once afraid to speak out or get help who finally did, thanks to Oprah’s setting such a vocal example, you can’t for a second relish an Oprah takedown.

Women in this country who have a real sense of how courageous and admirable Oprah is — and there are millions of us — hardly care whether Oprah is straight, gay, arrogant, self-involved, an alien from a distant planet, a new drug-resistant strain of flesh-eating bacteria, whatever. We’re happy to let Oprah be whatever she wants to be. Isn’t that what she herself has tried to instruct other women to do, day after day, week after week? Hasn’t she shown us, over and over, how to be true to ourselves, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health?

We don’t care about takedowns or gossip, we don’t care about this or that foible, we don’t care about the vain remark Oprah made 15 years ago. We don’t even care that so many ignorant bystanders leap at the chance to call us brainwashed or claim that praising Oprah is the newest religion for overly emotional women. We know that we respect and admire Oprah for good reasons, reasons we could begin rattling off and not stop for several hours. We know that Oprah isn’t perfect, because she admits her flaws constantly. She airs her worries and doubts every single day.

Let Deborah Solomon, in an interview with Kitty Kelley in the New York Times Magazine, claim that Oprah “has made victimhood a status symbol, so that everyone in America is suddenly claiming to be a victim of bad parenting or a bad affair.” There will always be those who are embarrassed by or suspicious of any talk of emotional issues, weaknesses, abusive relationships, the sorts of things that women were ashamed to speak about just a few decades ago.

But today, there are millions of us in this country who know how much Oprah has helped women who once felt frightened, isolated, voiceless, powerless. We know how Oprah has changed the way these women see themselves and their possibilities. We see, in this woman, in her work, an earnest interest in making other women’s lives better.

Don’t insult our intelligence by insinuating that Oprah is some kind of cult leader or just another insincere, self-serving power player. These statements fly in the face of the facts, of the concrete acts of charity and kindness that Oprah has engaged in over the decades. More than anything else that she’s accomplished, though, Oprah has inspired us by demonstrating the healing power of honesty. For that, she deserves our respect and our admiration. Her bravery in the face of shame, her unrelenting commitment to exposing her own vulnerabilities, make her a hero in the truest sense of the word.

So much nonsense has been written about the influence of the German-American political theorist Leo Strauss on the American right that one hesitates even to raise the subject. But the origins of the “progressivism-is-fascism” meme are to be found in the work of scholars influenced by Strauss, including Harry Jaffa, Pestritto, Thomas G. West and Charles Kesler. They are associated with a few conservative liberal arts colleges: Hillsdale College, Claremont McKenna College and the University of Dallas.

In their version of Straussianism, the American Founders established universal human rights as the only legitimate foundation for government. The enemies of natural rights liberalism are historicists and relativists who argue that there are no absolute values and that good and evil vary in different times and places. In the 19th century, Abraham Lincoln defended the idea of universal values against historicist, relativist Southern slaveowners who dismissed the Declaration of Independence because it claimed “all men are created equal.” In the 20th century, neoconservative hero Winston Churchill defended universal values against Nazi amoralism.

How does this make President Obama, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Harry Reid into fascists? Patience, dear reader, patience.

In the early 1900s, Woodrow Wilson and many members of the progressive movement, influenced by the German scholarship of the time, dismissed Enlightenment notions of natural rights, arguing that government was the product of historical evolution, not Lockean social contracts. Many progressives also disliked the checks and balances of America’s 18th century Constitution and argued that a benign, technocratic administrative elite should be empowered to carry out economic planning and social engineering, including eugenics (a horrible fad that attracted many Fabian socialists, communists, feminists and conventional conservatives as well as fascists, before Nazi Germany discredited the idea).

The Straussian conservatives are correct when they point out that many progressive intellectuals like Wilson rejected the 18th century ideas of natural rights and checks and balances as outmoded. The problem arises when these scholars, and their popularizers like Beck and Goldberg, treat all American liberalism and leftism from World War I until the 21st century as the continuation of early 20th century progressivism, the better to denounce today’s liberalism as “historicist” and “relativist” and lump it with the Confederate and Nazi ideology. This ignores the profound differences between the Progressive movement and subsequent movements on the American center-left.

New Deal liberalism broke with progressivism in many if not most respects. Progressives wanted technocratic economic planning. By the 1940s, New Dealers dropped planning for Keynesianism. Most progressives were nativists who supported immigration restriction on ethnic or cultural grounds. New Deal liberals celebrated the melting pot and liberalized American immigration laws in the 1960s.

Wilson resegegrated Washington. Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Franklin Roosevelt created Social Security and Johnson created Medicare. Wilson opposed national health insurance.

It is even harder to find any traces of Wilsonian progressive DNA in the New Left of the 1960s and ’70s or the neoliberalism of the 1970s and ’80s. Wilsonian progressives idolized the impartial expert administrator. The New Left denounced bureaucracy and academic hierarchy. Wilsonian progressives wanted a state-directed economy. Neoliberals like Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers celebrated deregulation and free markets.

For Straussian scholars and popularizers like Beck and Goldberg to denounce modern progressives because long-forgotten WASP political scientists in the early 1900s favored eugenics or economic planning is absurd. It is as though today’s liberals denounced today’s conservatives on the grounds that in the late 19th century the McKinley Republicans favored excessively high tariffs.

The claim that modern American liberalism rejects the founding tradition of universal natural rights is particularly preposterous. What, if not the idea of universal, inalienable human rights, has been the basis of center-left campaigns for feminism, gay rights, reproductive choice, civil liberties and international human rights?

None of these movements has appealed to historical traditions or moral or cultural relativism. The historicists and relativists are to be found on the right, where, for example, same-sex marriage is denounced because it goes against “six thousand years” of tradition (historicism) or because it represents the imposition of the values of a liberal subculture on conservative subcultures with different values (cultural relativism).

But if conservatives were interested in consistency or historical accuracy, Jonah Goldberg would have titled his book “Liberal Historicism and Relativism” instead of “Liberal Fascism” and his net worth would be much lower.

The Straussian-inspired denunciation of progressives as amoral historicists and relativists who have more in common with Jefferson Davis and Adolf Hitler than with Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill is simply the latest in a series of smear campaigns against the center-left launched by American conservatives with the help of the highbrow right. From generation to generation, the details of American conservative historical mythmaking change, but the underlying pattern remains the same.

Once upon a time, we are supposed to believe, there was a golden age in which everyone shared orthodox conservative beliefs. Then a wicked intellectual introduced heretical ideas, and the world went to hell in a handbasket.

For the conservative thinker Richard Weaver in “Ideas Have Consequences” (1948), the decline of Western civilization began with the triumph of William of Occam and the nominalist school of Catholic theology in the 14th century. For Irving Babbitt, who influenced T.S. Eliot and Russell Kirk, world history’s greatest villain was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who spawned romanticism, which is responsible for all of the ills of the modern world.

Today’s Straussian conservatives attribute the Fall to the influence of German Hegelianism on early 20th century American progressive intellectuals. The narrative of the expulsion from Eden is always the same, no matter when it is supposed to have occurred or what thinker is assigned the role of the snake.

All of these conservative interpretations of history share one thing in common: They ignore any material factors — industrial revolutions, population growth, urbanization, geopolitics — and treat American and world history as a Manichaean struggle of abstract philosophies.

But most political debates are not about the “first principles” beloved by the Lincoln-and-Churchill school of Straussianism. They are about practical subjects: how to provide healthcare, what kind of infrastructure we need. The Democratic healthcare plan can be criticized, but not because it is Hegelian state-worship that betrays the principles of the Declaration of Independence. There is nothing relativist or historicist about the hydropower dams of the New Dealers like Roosevelt and Johnson.

One can learn from reading Leo Strauss, a thinker far more subtle and interesting than his disciples. It is a pity that the epigones of Strauss lend their scholarly credentials to the oldest trick of right-wing populist demagogues: denouncing liberals as amoral, state-worshiping libertines.

However, that doesn’t mean the ideologies are synonymous. In fact, if the last decade of economic policy proves anything, it is that even as the word “progressive” is now ubiquitous, a perverted form of liberalism has almost completely snuffed out genuine progressivism.

Some background: Economic liberalism has typically focused on using the government’s treasury as a means to ends, whether those ends are better healthcare (Medicare/Medicaid), stronger job growth (tax credits) or more robust export businesses (corporate subsidies). The idea is that taxpayer dollars can help individuals afford bare necessities and entice institutions to support the common good.

Economic progressivism, by contrast, has historically trumpeted the government fiat as the best instrument of social change — think food safety, minimum wage and labor laws, and also post-Depression financial rules and enforcement agencies. Progressivism’s central theory is that government, as the nation’s supreme authority, can set parameters channeling capitalism’s profit motive into societal priorities — and preventing that profit motive from spinning out of control.

Looked at this way, liberalism and progressivism once operated in tandem. But regardless of which of the two economic ideologies you particularly favor (if either), three of the recent epoch’s most far-reaching initiatives make clear the former now dominates both parties.

It started in 2003 with Republicans’ Medicare drug benefit. Rather than go the progressive route — imposing price controls, permitting government to negotiate lower bulk prices or letting wholesalers buy drugs at cheaper foreign prices — the bill hinged on taxpayer money. Essentially, the government gave $1.2 trillion to the pharmaceutical industry in exchange for the industry providing medicines to seniors.

This became the bank bailout’s model. Instead of first responding to the Wall Street crisis with progressive, New Deal-style regulations, Presidents Bush and Obama opted for liberal bribe theory: Specifically, they bet that giving banks trillions in loans, subsidies and guarantees would convince financial institutions to halt their riskiest behavior and start lending to small businesses again.

Now, it’s healthcare.

The Democratic bill began as a hybrid. On the liberal side, it proposed growing Medicaid and trading subsidies to insurance companies for expanded coverage. On the progressive side, the original legislation included measures like premium regulation and a government-run insurer to compete with private firms. But save for a few fairly weak consumer protections, the final bill was stripped of most major progressive provisions. Ultimately, the celebrated “reform” is based primarily on a liberal wager that Medicaid plus subsidies will equal universal healthcare.

Which, for a short time, may be the case.

The trouble, though, is what the Washington Post reports: “The [subsidies'] buying power could erode over time in an era of rapid medical inflation.”

There, of course, is the rub.

Liberalism sans progressivism — i.e., public money sans regulation — turns the Treasury into an unlimited gift card for whichever private interests are being sponsored.

In this era of corporate-tethered lawmakers, such public-to-private transfers often face less congressional opposition than progressivism’s inherent confrontations. But the inevitable result is taxpayers being bilked, as subsidized industries freely raise prices and continue engaging in destructive behavior, knowing government and/or captive consumers will keep financing the binge.

So to answer the question — is there a difference between liberalism and progressivism? Yes — and without both, we end up paying a steep price.

© 2010 Creators.com

Of course, “progressive” also happens to be the way nearly every Democratic lawmaker, activist and politician describes him- or herself these days. There is, for example, the Congressional Progressive Caucus in the House and Senate; and the Center for American Progress, a think tank; and the Progressive Democrats of America, a liberal group. Which means all the scary rhetoric on the right — if it goes unanswered — could do exactly what it’s intended to do: make Democrats seem like the enemy.

The bad-mouthing of the word “progressive” hasn’t quite reached the fever pitch that the Reaganite bashing of liberals did. After the culture wars of the 1960s and the backlash of the 1970s, “liberalism” had developed such a bad rap that throwing the word around was like political Kryptonite for Democrats. By the end of the Reagan era, Republican adman Arthur Finklestein was helping his clients win elections simply by calling their opponents liberals. (Former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo was unseated in 1994 by then-state Sen. George Pataki, using the slogan: “Too liberal for too long.”) At the time, Bill Clinton and his ideological friends at the Democratic Leadership Council got a lot of attention for finding a way to move past the old definition, which got bogged down in cultural politics and Reaganite slurs about “welfare queens,” and claiming to represent a new type of Democrat.

“On the left, cold-war liberals and neoliberals were not what anyone wanted to be, and the right had done a job on ‘the liberal elite,’ the ‘tax-and-spend liberals,’ etc.,” says George Lakoff, a Berkeley linguistics professor who has consulted with Democratic leaders on how different words can affect political battles. “So many of us went to ‘progressive.’”

That seems to have worked. A few years ago, a Rasmussen poll found 39 percent of voters reacted negatively to calling a politician “liberal,” compared to only 18 percent for “progressive.” Just a couple of months ago, the Des Moines Register’s Iowa Poll found 42 percent of Iowans — including 15 percent of Iowa Republicans — considered themselves progressive.

There’s a solid history behind the term that appealed to many Democrats, as well. The Progressive Era brought America, among other innovations, direct election of senators; the right for women to vote; antitrust regulations and the first limits on corporate power; child labor laws; the eight-hour workday; and national parks. “Folks at [the Center for American Progress] clearly identify with the animating values and spirit of the original Progressive Era,” says John Halpin, co-director of CAP’s Progressive Studies Program. “This is not a dodge, it’s a proud association.”

But listen to Beck, or read the sources of his paranoia, and there’s a far more sinister history involved. Progressives, in Beck’s telling, were the prototypical European authoritarians, tied just as closely to fascists and Communists; the progressive notion that government could help change things for the better (instead of just staying out of the way of the free market) becomes the ideological glue that unites those two disparate movements. “Where did the progressives go, where did they come from?” Beck asked at CPAC. “All of a sudden, I’m not a liberal, I’m a progressive. It was the opposite a hundred years ago. I’m not a progressive, I’m a liberal. I mean they keep — they keep changing their names. Every time they wake America up to their policies, they have to change their names. What are they going to be next, the Royal Order of the Orange? It doesn’t matter. They’re running out of names.” Not long after that, he went on a long tangent praising Calvin Coolidge. At times, Beck really does seem to want to go back to a time before the Progressive Era. On Wednesday’s show, he scoffed at the notion of national parks and monuments, asking — dead seriously — why the country doesn’t just drill for oil in all of them to wipe out the national debt.

The net effect of most of his rhetoric, though, just adds up to a spooky conspiracy theory that’s hard to follow because it jumps around so much. “It mixes up these abstract ideas of the original Progressives with notions of European fascists and socialists and Communists — it lumps them all up and they all sound bad,” Halpin says. “They never actually repudiate any of the key advances of the Progressives that most people take for granted today.” In Beck’s version of history, the Founding Fathers come out as the heroes for fighting against the Progressives — never mind that they predated them by over a century. “They just have this, ‘We’re going to vaguely associate with fuzzy good things, and we’re going to bad-mouth things that sound like they’re evil,’” Halpin says.

But instead of sitting back and letting “progressive” become the next American political boogieman — like what happened to “liberal” — some Democrats want to fight back. “This is the big fight about the role of government and markets,” says Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future (who also says he’s proud to call himself a progressive, because of the original economic populism of the Progressive Era). “People need a clear narrative about how we drove off a cliff, and what we need to do to get off of it, and it has to relate to a set of ideas about how we got off the cliff.” That’s where laying out a progressive agenda — and explicitly identifying the conservative agenda as opposed to it — would help.

After all, it’s one thing to spin conspiracy theories and imply that your opponents are goose-stepping Nazi Communists hell-bent on seizing all private property. It’s another thing altogether to have a debate over whether to abolish the weekend, or go back to the pre-”Jungle” days of no meat inspection. Last time conservatives went after the term Democrats used to define themselves, the damage lasted a generation. Progressives may laugh at Glenn Beck now, but if his assertions keep going unchallenged, they might not be smiling for long.

While Obama’s [Gallup approval] rating has declined across the political spectrum, nearly nine out of 10 liberal Democrats — an average of 87 percent in December — approve of the job Obama is doing as president.

While Obama’s numbers have declined modestly among liberal Democrats since last April (from 95 percent to 87 percent), the declines have been more pronounced among conservative Democrats, moderate to liberal Republicans and “pure independents” (those who do not “lean” to either party) ….

Among liberal Democrats, the ABC/Post poll found a decline in strong approval from 78 percent in the first three months of the Obama presidency to 69 percent over the last three. A decline, to be sure, but at least two-thirds of liberal Democrats still say they strongly approve of the job Obama is doing as president.