I think the squabble over the word “progressive” in our party is cemented over one thing:
To some people, it’s just a word.
To other people, it’s the movement they’ve been a part of, starting in the netroots, for over a decade now.
For those who weren’t an active part of the movement, they don’t understand the big hullabaloo, and they may even get defensive over it because it’s just a nice and shiny way to describe “liberal” (however they define it) to them. To them, anyone should have that!
What they don’t understand, though, is that the new progressive/netroots movement had to wage war against the DLC/Third Way branch of the party — the branch of the party that was friendliest to Wall St., and were as likely to attack bedrock liberal principals as Republicans were.
They, like Republicans, destroyed the word liberal for a long time.
When progressives started organizing, and identifying with the progressive label, we were first ignored, then laughed at — and then we started beating the DLC/Third Way wing in the wars that were waged against us.
While their leaders largely survived, and their donors will never go away, their rank and file members were obliterated from Congress during the past couple Republican wave elections.
Progressives largely won and retained their seats — because we’ve proven that when we fight for our ideals, and fight for the middle class and vulnerable communities, we win.
Well, now that we’ve become a larger contingent and largely won the hearts and minds of the rank and file member of the Democratic Party — people who weren’t a part of the progressive movement, but like our ideas and supported our candidates — the DLC/Third Way contingent has decided they should just appropriate our word.
Steal it. Subvert it for their own purpose.
After all, it’s nice and warm and fuzzy, and has the glow of the many wonderful candidates we’ve elected using it.
And who would know any better? Very few people understand the modern (or even historical) context of the word. The progressive movement was diffuse and became less active once we started winning (with many becoming more active in the Democratic Party as a whole — having crashed the gate and been welcomed inside). And it was never all that large, compared to the full size of the Democratic Party as a whole.
I guess it was easy for the powers that be to appropriate and steal it, but I think it’s an underhanded attack, a form of newspeak that is dumbing down the differences in the party. Corporations and their allies within the party of course want a Democratic Party where both neoliberals like Hillary and proud progressives like Bernie are both “progressive,” because that makes it all the easier for them to gain back ground in the party again.
But it will tremendously damage the party, with the corporate wing’s crappy policies killing the word progressive just as they dilute what that word means.
It will leave a party without a perceptible-to-the-public wing that the people of our country can see is fighting for them. It’ll mean Chuck Schumer is just as progressive as Elizabeth Warren.
All they’ll see is a corporate Democratic Party and a corporate Republican Party as their choices…. and they’ll vote Republican or stay home.
Corporations would love for many of the Democratic Party’s members to stay home. They want a country where Republicans or corporate democrats win. They don’t want an energized, effective grassroots base. They want a cowed base, who’ll accept whoever the establishment decides is due to run.
The fight over the word progressive probably seems like a small squabble to most — and I don’t think it’s helped anyone in the context of this campaign — but it’s far, far, far from a squabble.
This is the battle that’s being waged at the very heart of the Democratic Party. Too many are wrapped up in this single election, when we need to be looking at the long game. Defending Hillary as “progressive” may help her in the election, but tremendously hurts the party going forward — whether you prefer Hillary or not.
I want Bernie to win, but I’m far more concerned about where and how the establishment is moving in this election to beat him — and how the establishment’s trying to use this debate over the word to undermine not just the Bernie campaign, but use the Bernie campaign as an opportunity to try to deliver a huge blow to the left-wing opposition within the party.
I could accept and be enthusiastic about a Hillary nomination, as an effective moderate who will give progressives a seat at the table. I can’t accept the establishment using this election to undermine the progressive wing of the party for years to come, and our capacity to win elections or push through policy for the people and not just corporate America.
starting with Wilson’s reforms to FDR’s New Deal to Truman’s Fair Deal to JFK’s New Frontier to LBJ’s Great Society.
In recent times under Carter, Clinton and Obama it was still the most viable liberal alternative to the increasingly right-wing Republican party that has drifted ever more extreme since Nixon.
To argue that those of us who have labored in the vineyards as proud DEMOCRATIC PARTY PROGRESSIVES all our lives are somehow ‘UNDERMING’ the progressive wing of the party by supporting a lifelong progressive Democrat, Hillary Clinton, over a lifelong self-described socialist who now wants be our Democratic standard bearer. even though he is not a member of our party ( yet he has been welcomed to caucus with the Democrats) by accusing Secretary Clinton — and by implication her supporters — of being somehow dishonest because she accepts corporate contributions just like he does — is deeply offensive.
This is not how you build a unified Democratic coalition to beat the Republicans in November.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
it’s a party. The progressive movement holds a more liberal and reform-minded ideology, and much of it is the thing that’s trying to change the corporate, deregulatory, anti-environment, DINO elements within the party.
Much of the progressive movement was also compromised of independents who find that they can’t identify with the brand of the party anymore, a contingent that is growing.
As someone who identifies with the progressive movement and the Democratic Party, I don’t like that, but I have to recognize it — and the longterm dangers it presents.
When the corporate wing of the party tries to appropriate progressive — and make it somehow an offense to suggest that Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren can’t both be movement progressives — then we risk losing more and more, and those people aren’t as likely to get out and vote.
I don’t want the party to lose more people. I don’t want more people to register Independent.
If you want a Big Tent party, that means creating space for the progressive movement — it doesn’t mean appropriating their label because it polls better, and then attacking them left and right for having the audacity to want to keep and build their own brand, one that overlaps heavily within their party.
People who identify as movement progressives did not try to steal Blue Dog when Blue Dogs were popular, subverting what it means. We created our own brand, that meant a different thing. The favor should be returned.
But “corporate wing of the party” isn’t really fair. There are definitely two wings, and one is more centrist, but it’s not “corporate.” Some members are, sure, but center-left does not equal corporate.
I still think we’d be better off defending and reviving the term liberal.
Good idea. I have long identified my self as a old fashioned liberal advocating for more resources for the poor, the elderly and the disabled. Progressives pushed for and won rules reform that increased accountability and transparency and actually slowed us down a little bit.
… more than “better off” it is, perhaps, appropriate and necessary.
Those who can be made to fear the word ‘socialist’ can be made to fear the word ‘liberal’ for many of the same (specious) reasons and those who can be made to fear the word ‘liberal’ can be made to fear the word ‘progressive.’ Those who can be made to fear the word ‘progressive’ won’t react differently to the next word that comes along.
And I’m not limiting this to those who might make knee-jerk opposition to what ‘socialist’, ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ mean, but also to those who want to promote exactly those things: having a backbone is incompatible with this sort of transitive language foraging; if you can’t really decide what you are out of fear, then I’m not going to decide it for you… I’m going to look somewhere else for, at the least, defined substance.
I think the whole thing is a rather shabby form of condescension: it’s clear ‘progressive’ is meant to circumvent the poor labelling ‘liberal’ has been turned into… in a rather arch manner of not wanting to confuse the rubes… but that just invites the notion that Liberals are invidious liars who shed labels for convenience and are there for without core convictions.
I don’t believe they are… I think they are simply not machiavellian enough to pull it off well (which is to their credit) but arrogant enough to think that their knowing better entitles them to the attempt (which is not to their credit.)
that doesn’t fit within the traditional definition of liberal in this country.
Liberal politics, to me anyway, speaks to policy and not process. Beacon Hill could have been liberal and still had “Big Dig” politics (as Charley coined the term) and good old boy tendencies that the progressive movement would want to root out.
I think you’ll see most people who are progressives aren’t just interested in ideology, they want to reform how Congress works to make it easier for bills to get through, or the redistricting process to end gerrymandering, or support public financing of campaigns, etc.
The priorities for changing the process is why the word progressive works so well, given its historical roots (when it was also as much about process as policy).
So…. I view the progressive movement not as complete synonyms to liberals, but rather people who are liberals who want to change the system to make it work better.
I don’t view the terms as mutually exclusive in anyway, though. I’m both liberal and a progressive.
Speaking of misappropriating the word progressive by pro corporate interests…
![flo](http://media.cleveland.com/business_impact/photo/c06flob-9d6c229cc45664e8.jpg)
…that their record of political donations does in fact favor liberal/progressive candidates.
—since Insurance, whether it was Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, FDIC or the governments near-wholesale creation of the private insurance industry, is at the very heart of the New Deal. The neatest, cleanest, crystallization of the New Deal progressivism is our present day system of insurance.
Is it perfect? Not in the slightest: but we’re only talking about abolishing private insurance in the case of its only clear failing — health care — and replacing private insurance with a single payer — that is to say, public insurance… we’re not talking about fixing something (like car insurance) that isn’t broken…
There isn’t a more liberal/progressive (nor more viable) idea out there than insurance and the involvement of corporations and ‘corporate interests’ isn’t going to change that.
Are you saying they misappropriated the term in 1937?
Man, I didn’t expect you to take my jab at Progressive Insurance so seriously. I have nothing against progressive insurance. I just don’t like that people think of insurance when they hear the word “progressive” instead Progressive movement itself. That’s not saying, that the folks over there are malicious. It’s just confusing for uninformed people.
…when you’re basically already there. You have no more right to ownership of the term progressive than the Tea Party does to call the likes of Orrin Hatch and Bob Ingalls not conservative. You don’t have to storm the barricades to have a progressive record and set of values. HRC has been nothing but for her entire adult life.
Establishment Republicans trying to call themselves Tea Parties would, of course, upset many in the Tea Party.
I am diametrically opposed to the Tea Party, as is the progressive movement, but the progressive movement is like the Tea Party in that it’s a reform movement comprised of both people in the party system and outside of it, who have an ideology different than the establishment of the party that most closely aligns with their view and that has been battling the establishment within their party for years.
The progressive movement is a smaller, quieter movement than the Tea Party, one more willing to work with our party’s establishment and center-left moderates within the party (and conservatives outside of it), but it is a contingent of people that deserve to be recognized. You are dismissing that movement and that narrows the party and allows the establishment to twist a term for their own gain, and in opposition to those who seek to change the status quo.
…from either candidate. After all, the primary has in the mind of some moved HRC to the left. Of course this is also the case of can’t win. Some can’t take yes for an answer. They claim she’s not progressive enough then when she emphasizes her progressive bona fides she’s accused of pandering and calculation. Personally I’m convinced the record suggests she did not have to move left since she was already there. Maybe not AS left as Sanders, but there can be more than one progressive. I stand by the analogy and have no use for purity from either left or right.
Are you the guy who defends the power of the MA Democratic Party to deny all other organizations the right to use the word “Democratic” in their name? LOL
…as said that I understand the logic and explained that such was the case. I actually don’t have a strong opinion on the merits which I believe I said previously. If there is a Progressive Party they could likewise claim the same protections against other groups using the name, but in neither case would the word democratic or progressive uncapitalized be forbidden to use as adjectives.
Sorry, but you are mistaken. There is no legal protection for any other political parties, certainly not a hypothetical Progressive Party, just as the very real United Independent Party is uncovered by the law you defend. Please stop making things up as it just clouds the discussion.
…but I believe it was you who pointed out that there is in fact a state law the two parties colluded to pass to protect themselves. I understand you believe such a law would be unconstitutional, but I stand by my argument on the logic.
Nice review of the history, actually, which explains why one might be passionate about whether Ms. Clinton were or were not a progressive.
On triangulation, I think of the Clinton Administration’s espousal of welfare reform and of DOMA. Also the loosening of financial regulation — and those are sort of 1990’s issues. The DLC has disappeared. Harold Ford doesn’t show up so much on TVs. Hillary Clinton has been pushing a rather different policy agenda for a while now — which is more progressive (or if you prefer, closer to being progressive) — than Bill Clinton’s Administration.