I'm on my second day at the Roosevelt Institution, the student-run think-tank with chapters in universities all across the country, 6,000 members nationwide, and national offices is Washington, DC.
My father would call Roosevelt "a bunch of lib[eral]s." Roosevelt calls itself "progressive," and its members "progressives." The difference between a liberal and a progressive is similar to the difference between the word "good" and the word "beneficial," or between the word "use" and the word "utilize." A liberal and a progressive are fundamentally the same thing: someone concerned with economic fairness, environmental protection, social awareness, and tolerance, manifested in and instituted by a strong, centralized federal government.
I think Josh Lyman said it the most succinctly: "We believe that government is a place where people can come together, and where no one gets left behind."
But due to our culture of televised derision, care of the merry-go-round of talking heads on CNN and MSNBC and Fox News, the word "liberal" has taken on the same kind of connotation as "oriental" or "shyster." In other words, "I know you're talking to me, but don't call me that."
Those fire-spitting conservatives, the Sean Hannitys and the Ann Coulters and, way back, the Rush Limbaughs, turned "liberal" into a four-letter word, not just to conservatives, but also to liberals themselves. Since the early '90s (and probably earlier), liberals have been painted as irrational, teary-eyed ninnies. Upon hearing the word "liberal," one imagines a bumper-stickered Volvo driven by a young woman. The woman is weeping hysterically because she just saw some roadkill, and so she can't properly pull her car into a space in the Whole Foods parking lot.
The Volvo is American politics. The Whole Foods parking lot is rational thought.
And, of course, liberals have painted conservatives as uneducated, gun-toting extremists with a fundamental disregard for their fellow-man.
The problem is that it’s not all that bad to be an uneducated, gun-toting extremist. Most John Wayne characters were uneducated, gun-toting extremists. So was Carl Weathers in Predator. I wouldn't appreciate being called uneducated or an extremist, but I wouldn't really cringe, either.
But nobody wants to be a ninny. Even ninnies don't want to be ninnies. That, one can only assume, is how they've become ninnies to begin with. So while Ted Nugent takes the "gun-toting extremist" epithet with a grain of salt, if not a prideful grin and a middle finger, liberals were slapped across the face with these derisive stereotypes, and began to run from themselves.
"I'm not a weeping Volvo," cries the environmentally sound, socially aware, demand-side federalist. "I'm not a liberal. Those bougie left-wing yuppies, they're the liberals. I'm legit. I'm MEAN for social awareness. I'm CRAZY for the environment. Those wishy-washy ninnies, they're not me. They're the liberals."
It could be that those bougie left-wing yuppies don't actually exist. It could be that liberals are liberals, and this movement away from "liberalism" is nothing but a knee-jerk "I'M NOT STUPID YOU'RE STUPID SHUT UP" reaction at just how efficiently and brilliantly mean the conservatives were in the 90s.
But whether its Yankees vs. Mets or Wizards vs. Bullets, its safe to say that there isn't a liberal in this country who wants to be called a liberal. "I'm not a liberal," they'll say, "I'm a progressive."
The word "progressive" refers to a largely reactionary phenomenon in American politics. Progressivism came about as a reaction to the darker side of American industry. It's true that the darker side of industry brought with it lasting problems (e.g. the need for legislated rights for workers, environmental policy, and corporate regulation), problems we must still address to this day. Progressives of that first generation could have called themselves liberals, but they didn't. Liberalism wasn't the right word to describe the movement. Liberal thought exists on the opposite side of the political spectrum as conservative thought. Liberals had the same goals (efficient self-governance) as conservatives, with differing opinions on how to achieve them.
Progressives, on the other hand, were demanding legislation to address new problems in new ways. Environmental protection and anti-trust laws were fresh ideas to deal with developing issues. So progressives aligned themselves with Democrats like FDR. In the hands of Roosevelt, progressive legislation addressed new problems and solved them, for better or worse.
I say "for better or worse" because those solutions themselves created new problems. The Social Security program, its cousins, and their collective bureaucracy were inherited by the post-Depression generations, and political affiliations divided according to opinions on those issues. Liberals supported government-funded programs and thought them necessary to the well-being of the country; conservatives stressed personal responsibility and a smaller government instead. Progressivism as a coherent movement became anachronistic, because a new status quo had been created. Conservatives went from keeping things how they were to keeping things how they used to be. And liberals found themselves playing defense.
The root of the word Liberalism is the Latin liberum, "free". This etymology is misleading, however, because liberalism doesn't hold as its core value human freedom, but rather free thought. Liberal politics, in fact, sometimes severely limit freedom in the most basic sense (most often of companies and the rich), and don't always guarantee the freedom of the poor or the oppressed, in that they can become dependant on government hand-outs and, in some perverted way, can become slaves to government legislation. That may not be the defining characteristic of liberal legislation, but its association with legislation is difficult to deny.
Liberalism is freedom of political thought. Conservatism has less risk (in that it preserves the status quo) but less potential for dramatically improving the lives of Americans. It is a political philosophy of security and rationality above all things. Liberalism, on the other hand, promotes shaping government policy to help and protect all people, even if it limits the freedom of some Americans.
That's where the question of reason comes in. Why should I be responsible for all these other people? Why should I give them my money? We live under the same flag, I found a way to earn this money, so why can't they? John Locke defined those impulses as the basis of political reason. To paraphrase Locke: "We're all looking out for number one, the things we like and the things we own--in a word, our freedom--and the necessity of government comes from a desire to protect ourselves."
J.J. Rousseau had a different formulation of things. Rousseau says that we have an impulse to protect and help our fellow-man. Further, according to Rousseau, that impulse is not an irrational instinct, but an expression of our most basic reason, or our rational faculty. The desire to help others, even at our own cost, is the rational quality of ethics. And the expression of that quality, typified in modern liberal political thought, is not irrational, at least in its purest form.
And in that way, the stereotype of the liberal ninny was always unfair, both for conservatives to spin out and for liberals to accept. But hopefully its more than self-reference that's changed on the Left--it's self-understanding. By calling themselves progressives instead of liberals, they're associating themselves more with Roosevelt than with Clinton. And by calling themselves progressive, they're concerning themselves more with creating good rules than with playing the game well.
The question, then, is whether there really are new problems enough to justify a legitimate progressive movement. If those problems don't exist, then it's just a name-change. If the change from liberal to progressive is, to quote Geoff Garin, a matter of framing, not a matter of ideas, then "progressive" just means "don't call me a liberal."
Its been said that what the Democrats have been lacking for the past eight years is a coherent vision for America, full of ideas and hope. As calls for ideas came from the top of the Democratic Party, liberals on the streets of America began to call themselves progressive. Democrats need ideas, and progressives should have them: I'm here at Roosevelt to find out if they do. I hope they do.
www.rooseveltinstitution.org
--Will Hollingsworth
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