‘Progressive’ Is New ‘Liberal’ or ‘Left’ and Is Also Definitely Awesome

by on November 19, 2008 4

The news is filled with speculation about whether Obama's mainstream Cabinet choices are going to alienate his leftwing base. The commentators aren't sure how to phrase this. Contessa Brewer on MSNBC used the words far left and liberal, as I recall. I was hiking with one of my leftwing cell-mates today and he said that the word liberal had been successfully destroyed in the 80s and 90s, but that "progressive" is very cool. Huh. And I notice that David Remnick implicitly seemed to include himself in that category in his Obama piece last week, the progressive category. Maybe the new orthodoxy? A ver, as my revolutionary buddies say in Spanish.

About Philip Weiss

Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.
Posted in Beyondoweiss, US Politics

{ 4 comments... read them below or add one }

  1. observer says:
    November 20, 2008 at 8:01 am

    Perhaps, just as traditional black leaders were slow to catch on to
    Obama's Joshua (versus Moses), his more left-wing supporters are now being slow to catch on to the method in his "madness"?

    If he doesn't get shot, just as he reached his first goal, POTUS, he may just reach his second goal by equally synthesizing implementation–his deft campaign continues?

  2. Grumpy Old Man says:
    November 20, 2008 at 8:23 am

    "Progressive" referred at one time to the technocratic, centralizing forces in the U.S.

    Later, the Stalinists adopted the term, even launching a puppet "Progressive" party to run Henry Wallace for President in 1948.

    It is a thoroughly disreputable term, and also incorporates the foolish notion that there is such a thing as "progress," except in the most ephemeral sense.

  3. Rowan Berkeley says:
    November 20, 2008 at 9:17 am

    I shall breathe a lot easier if Michael Chertoff is really going to be replaced. I saw him as staying for a couple of decades, J. Edgar Hoover-like.

  4. observer says:
    November 20, 2008 at 2:25 pm

    Grumpy Old Man is partially right. One thing's progress is another thing's regress. The seduction is in the Hegalian concept of dialectics, thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

    Generally the notion of progress assumes anything but a zer0-sum game. Reality and detailed history suggests a gray area, a continuing
    progression (Ha) of various relative haves and have-nots.

    I see the donning of liberal, neoconservative, and progressive masks
    as the actions of opportunists always looking for their own gain
    in the name of whatever seems to sell at the passing moment.

    Nobody is pure, least of all the usual Republicans.

    The guy at the soda fountain in the apron is a bit more pure–you all know him, Ron Paul.

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