Liberal or Progressive?

Liberals vs. Progressives: What’s the Difference?

I’m not the only one who’s noticed the sudden replacement of “progressive” for “liberal” starting around the time Newt Gingrich became the Speaker of the House in 1994. I agree that progressivism, as a political movement, has its roots in much older history. However, it doesn’t appear to have replaced that naughty “L word” until the early ‘90s. It’s no secret that the Reagan revolution was a stark attack on all things deemed liberal and that the torch of anti-liberalism was carried full-tilt by AM radio as soon as the Fairness Doctrine was nullified by the Reagan-appointed chair of the FCC in 1987. I certainly remember the early early ‘80s bumper stickers stating, “I don’t believe the liberal press”. A well orchestrated attack on the political language and evenhanded discourse was under way. It’s roots extended at least as far back as Spiro Agnew’s “pointy-headed intellectuals” remark. In fact, politics since the McCarthy era has been a war of attrition for the American right. The left has often seemed aloof and too easily sucker punched by a fight it refused to acknowledge it was even engaged in.

So, why suddenly has the word “liberal” become exclusively associated with the (now right-wing) panacea of laissez-faire capitalism? Why has it suddenly become forbidden to associate itself with the basic definition of the word itself, including all of its left-wing implications? Why is the left suddenly incapable of defining its own meaning for a label it once gave itself? What happens when “the P-word” suddenly becomes a target for witch hunts? Do we have another backup?

Obviously I have an opinion of my own on the subject. I consider it to be an example of what we could call “classical pansy liberalism”. “Anything to avoid or divert confrontation” could be the motto of this movement. To me, the historic progressive political movement of a century ago was a strategy of moving forward with a liberal agenda much more than one of anti-liberalism. At any rate, the word “liberal” has its own history as a proudly worn label for the left-wing movement for many decades before this sudden rebranding. I find it distasteful to run from a word because the conservative media has decided it has naughty connotations. In fact, the act of hiding from it shows a lack of conviction more than anything else.

Liberalism, in its classic form, is, among other things, the proposition that you get more out of people if you treat them well. Conservatism is the proposition that you get more out of people if you treat them badly.

Post war Liberalism was a giant experiment in “treat people well”. The Reagan/Thatcher counter-revolution was a giant experiment in “treat people worse”. The empirical result is this: the rich are richer and more powerful in a society that treats people like shit, but a society which treats people well has a stronger economy, all other things being equal, than one that treats them badly.

http://www.ianwelsh.net/the-logic-of-the-surveillance-state/