An emailer asks
What's your beef with the term progressive? I prefer liberal myself, too, but I feel like that ship has sailed, and it is only semantics, after all. I feel that, since you're already coming from a marginal place (as you say all the time), it doesn't make much sense to look for fights to pick that don't mean anything. I don't mean to scold but I alternatively love your work and hate your self-marginalizing thing.Well, to the broader point about my self-marginalization, you know, it's complicated, and I have little to say in my own defense. But for the subject at hand, there's two major things.
First, I tend to see the use of progressive as a capitulation. Conservatives notoriously made liberal into a bad word in the 90s. (I know this because I got a Doonesbury collection when I was 12 and read it religiously, despite knowing essentially nothing else about partisan politics at the time.) To run from the term because conservatives tried to stigmatize it is emblematic of all that was wrong with 90s-era liberal politics. I don't say that in some martyring sense, either. I'm not saying that we should have accepted the term liberal and confined ourselves to irrelevance, but rather that the refusal to fight essentially did the work for the conservatives, which again was a running theme of the Clintonite 90s. You triangulate and triangulate and before you know it you've given away the store. I have a theory of political change (which could be right or wrong) that says that people don't get inspired by political movements that don't appear inspired themselves, that people don't sign up for causes when the people espousing that cause seem embarrassed or unwilling to stand up for itself.
Second, I care because language matters. I actually disagree that the difference is entirely semantic, actually; I think that progressive has come to refer to slightly different things than liberal, in both disposition and policy stances, in a way that reflects that legacy of capitulation. And remember the etymology of progressive, with its confused relationship towards the early 20th century Progressive movement, which had some good and a lot of bad. Matt Yglesias put this beautifully in a post from several years ago (inspired by some geek commenter):
while the historically Progressives did stand for some good things, and are a part of the backstory of contemporary American liberalism, they also stood for some very bad things. Certainly, whatever sins liberalism may have committed in the 1970s as it fell into disrepute were distinctly minor compared to the problems with the Progressives.
"Liberal," by contrast, is an important term with a noble history and a contested legacy. I think the notion that something like contemporary American liberalism is, in fact, the correct instantiation of the historic liberal project for our times is a proposition that's worth fighting for.Words to live by.
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10 comments:
What all were these lots of bad things? Eugenics or something? I'm surprised to hear you say that there was a lot of bad and only some good.
Not disagreeing, just asking. I looked at the Wikipedia page and it seemed alright to me, for an American political entity. Education, support for labor, trust busting, conservation...but my knowledge of political history is pretty poor, so if the page is whitewashed, it wouldn't surprise me at all.
Eugenics, yeah. And a general attitude that the way to improve the country was to avoid/remove/marginalize the "wrong sort."
Right on. Avoid/ remove/ marginalize the wrong sort and hand over the keys without any questions to the "right sort." Progressivism, for me, has acquired a distinctly anti-democratic taste to it- and I don't like, no sir, I don't. Progressivism (or the ideal of it in my head) discounts the reality of competing interests within society. Rather, it tends to seek out some "golden mean" of governance that all can give a jolly cheer for. Not only is this unrealistic, this conception of governance has been hijacked by many who were, in fact, ruthlessly pursuing their own interests. See, e.g., many of the Founding Fathers.
IMHO, your search for more descriptive terms is "self-marginalizing" only by virtue of the stunted, malformed political discourse here in the USofA. Most people are out of their comfort zone as soon as you reject "liberal", "conservative", "liberatarian", or "Independent." The last, of course, being the most popular and, in reality, meaning "I couldn't be bothered to have an opinion."
The problem with 'progressive' is that it sanctifies the utopian element of liberalism, with its tacit belief in progress and the gradual perfectability of human institutions. The word is awful and should not be used. It is also annoyingly self-flattering. Hmmm, I wonder why our narcissistic generation loves it so... But doesn't 'liberalism' also carry a taint of the utopian? Yes, I guess, tho not necessarily. At any rate, I don't see an alternative for now. Perhaps leftist is best for now, since, at least in theory, it avoids this spurious notion that a liberal temperament leads to a 'liberal' politics, a conservative temperament to a 'conservative' politics, et cetera. For a time I liked the sheathed radicalism 'meliorist' until it became clear that a self-regarding mediocrity like Obama would probably like it, too. Leftist is better, but admittedly brings its own challenge, namely the strong historical linkage, perhaps inevitable, between democracy and a certain kind of statism. In the end what is needed is a simple, new, galvanizing term that allows that freedom works two ways: the freedom to (say what I want, write what I want, walk wherever the fuck I want) and the freedom from (worry over shelter, food, medical care, etc.) Well, those are my two not very pondered cents.
I have always been inclined to agree with Disraeli that in the western world almost everyone is a 'progressive'. The question is simply about how we pursue change and at what pace.
"Liberal"sucks though; the world is more globalized than ever, we all read each other's political writings to some extent, and in political philosophy and in much of Europe, "liberal" means something in many ways the opposite of what it means in American parlance. Jettison "progressive" if you must but Jesus please find something other than "liberal."
Also, this: a litmus test for "liberals."
If you don't passionately support at The Very Least an immediate return to Eisenhower marginal tax rates, you're cut off.
I'm just so fucking tired of the blather. Thank god I'm not Freddie, tho, and read the baggy bloggers but sparingly. My heart rate is high and cancerous enough as it is, without wading through those daily, self-effacing mountains of equivocating centrist palaver!
I just have too many young 'uneducated' friends without jobs panicking and freaking out, and at the Denver homeless shelter I volunteer at -- yes, sanctimonious leftist me -- the fucking misery just keeps getting worse and worse and worse.
Why do I bang on about the awfulness of the utopian strain in liberalism? Because of that commenter in the last post who babbled on about this being such a great time to be alive considering all the relevant 'metrics' and such. God I hate that ignorant bullshit. I just finished a 600 page book disagreeing with it. Or: if you're privileged and have the funds and wish to doom yourself prematurely, you could spend a few days bushwhacking off trail in some mountain in the West and try to experience being naturally alive for a moment.
What you would find, whatever the outdoor idiot enthusiasts of Outside or whatever say, is that we are truly and irreparably and tragically fucked and alienated and lonely beyond measure!
It's almost funny how stupid we are and how we think we're such clever geniuses. Hey, guess what, O centrist bloggers Freddie loves to scorn? Anthropology and archeology and "evolutionary biology" tell a much different story than the fairy tale you're used to hearing.
If you can't appreciate the stark rank tragedy of being alive right now, and the incredible difficulty of doing anything truly good, well then you don't know shit, and that's the fucking truth y'all!
Oddly enough, in Canada the word 'Progressive' is coming to have the opposite relationship to 'Liberal' as it does in the US, largely because its been adopted in the past 4 or 5 years to describe the NDP and left wing of the Liberal party, whereas before the NDP would more often be called 'Socialist' or 'social democrats', so rather than a 'moderate' signaller in place of 'Liberal' it's a 'moderate' signaller in place of 'socialist' or an ideological marker in the Liberal Party. The old Canadian 'Progressive Party' merged with the Conservatives, which were known as the "Progressive Conservatives" for several decades.
Late to the party but I want to add my two cents.
I don't see a noble history of being a liberal. Witnessing Obama's presidency after campaigning for him I have lost faith that being a liberal represents the political desire to enact socialistic policies or limiting the military. Additionally the etymology of liberal has branched into a multitude and even contradictory terms.
I hate labels in the first place, but the term liberal has become convoluted. I would rather look for simple terms that add the specific color to the debate. Personally, when I hear or read the word liberal, the most prominant person I see in my mind representing liberal views in action is Henry Hazlitt, who ironically (or not) introduced the Austrian School of Economic thinking to the American discussion.
So this ambiguity of whether to use liberal or progressive to represent the views of the unequivocal left speaks more to the wilderness that has entangled the left. I don't see the left coming out of this without owning the specific terms because it is the very thing that holds the political views accountable. The term liberal has lost that sense of accountability.
It's interesting to see this debate, because in my neck of the woods, Progressive tends to be used as a term for someone more left of Liberal, and Radical is used for someone more left still. Among my friends, Liberal is a bad word that basically means centrist stooge--everyone I'm close to was dismissive of Obama from day one, because he was way too conservative--though I understand you're trying to rehabilitate the word. I'm not taking sides, just noting the different connotations in the different communities.
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