Some on the Left Turn Against the Label 'Progressive' - The New York Times - 0 views
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Christopher Lasch, the historian and social critic, posed a banger of a question in his 1991 book, “The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics.”
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“How does it happen,” Lasch asked, “that serious people continue to believe in progress, in the face of massive evidence that might have been expected to refute the idea of progress once and for all?”
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A review in The New York Times Book Review by William Julius Wilson, a professor at Harvard, was titled: “Where Has Progress Got Us?”
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Essentially, Lasch was attacking the notion, fashionable as Americans basked in their seeming victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, that history had a direction — and that one would be wise to stay on the “right side” of it.
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Francis Fukuyama expressed a version of this triumphalist idea in his famous 1992 book, “The End of History and the Last Man,” in which he celebrated the notion that History with a capital “H,” in the sense of a battle between competing ideas, was ending with communism left to smolder on Ronald Reagan’s famous ash heap.
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One of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most frequently quoted lines speaks to a similar thought, albeit in a different context: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Though he had read Lasch, Obama quoted that line often, just as he liked to say that so-and-so would be “on the wrong side of history” if they didn’t live up to his ideals — whether the issue was same-sex marriage, health policy or the Russian occupation of Crimea.
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The memo goes on to list two sets of words: “Optimistic Positive Governing Words” and “Contrasting Words,” which carried negative connotations. One of the latter group was the word “liberal,” sandwiched between “intolerant” and “lie.”
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So what’s the difference between a progressive and a liberal?To vastly oversimplify matters, liberal usually refers to someone on the center-left on a two-dimensional political spectrum, while progressive refers to someone further left.
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In the late 1980s and 1990s, Republicans successfully demonized the word “liberal,” to the point where many Democrats shied away from it in favor of labels like “conservative Democrat” or, more recently, “progressive.”
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“Is the story of the 20th century about the defeat of the Soviet Union, or was it about two world wars and a Holocaust?” asked Matthew Sitman, the co-host of the “Know Your Enemy” podcast, which recently hosted a discussion on Lasch and the fascination many conservatives have with his ideas. “It really depends on how you look at it.”
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None of this was an accident. In 1996, Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia circulated a now-famous memo called “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.”
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The authors urged their readers: “The words and phrases are powerful. Read them. Memorize as many as possible.”
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Republicans subsequently had a great deal of success in associating the term “liberal” with other words and phrases voters found uncongenial: wasteful spending, high rates of taxation and libertinism that repelled socially conservative voters.
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Many on the left began identifying themselves as “progressive” — which had the added benefit of harking back to movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that fought against corruption, opposed corporate monopolies, pushed for good-government reforms and food safety and labor laws and established women’s right to vote.
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Allies of Bill Clinton founded the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank associated with so-called Blue Dog Democrats from the South.
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Now, scrambling the terminology, groups like the Progressive Change Campaign Committee agitate on behalf of proudly left-wing candidates
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In 2014, Charles Murray, the polarizing conservative scholar, urged readers of The Wall Street Journal’s staunchly right-wing editorial section to “start using ‘liberal’ to designate the good guys on the left, reserving ‘progressive’ for those who are enthusiastic about an unrestrained regulatory state.”
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As Sanders and acolytes like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York have gained prominence over the last few election cycles, many on the left-wing end of the spectrum have begun proudly applying other labels to themselves, such as “democratic socialist.”
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To little avail so far, Kazin, the Georgetown historian, has been urging them to call themselves “social democrats” instead — as many mainstream parties do in Europe.“It’s not a good way to win elections in this country, to call yourself a socialist,” he said.