THAT WAS FAST — THE ERA OF BIG PROGRESSIVISM IS OVER: In July of 2007 during a CNN/YouTube-sponsored Democrat presidential debate, Hillary Clinton was asked, “how would you define the word ‘liberal’? And would you use this word to describe yourself?” She responded, “I prefer the word ‘progressive,’ which has a real American meaning, going back to the progressive era at the beginning of the 20th century.”
Flash-forward eight years, and Dana Milbank of the Washington Post now claims, “Liberal is no longer a dirty word:”
Since the 1988 presidential campaign, when George H.W. Bush and Lee Atwater turned “Massachusetts liberal” into an epithet, the label has been tainted — so much so that many liberals abandoned it for “progressive.”
But new polling shows a significant increase in the number of Americans who describe themselves as liberal and the number of Americans taking liberal positions on issues. Gallup has found the percentage of Americans calling themselves social liberals has equaled the percentage of social conservatives for the first time since pollsters began asking the question in 1999 (when 39 percent identified as conservative and 21 percent as liberal). Democrats are more likely to call themselves liberal and Republicans are less likely to embrace the “conservative” description, opting instead for moderate.
As Jazz Shaw writes in response at Hot Air:
To see what a mixed bag this is in terms of definitions you need to wind the calendar back quite a ways. The emergence of a widely accepted definition of classical liberalism is found back in the 19th century and it was highlighted in the works of authors such as John Locke and Adam Smith and Thomas Hobbes. There was certainly a flavor of hey, do your own thing, baby to the movement, but it was grounded in the idea that your thing should be taking place in a well defined and suitably defended country. Beyond that, the classical liberal actually wanted government to stay out of your way as long as you weren’t hurting anyone else. (Sound familiar?) Hobbes wrote at length about the idea that one of the key functions of government was to protect us from each other. His fellow classical liberal authors believed strongly in the free market and the idea that the individual should be free to work for the highest paying employer and that competition was good. Most of these ideas are foreign concepts to modern liberals and would quickly send them to the fainting couch.
Of course “Progressivism” prior to World War II did have “a real American meaning” as Hillary said, though it’s probably one she’d much prefer forgotten: it stood for big government statism, racialism, and eugenics. As Fred Siegel of the Manhattan Institute wrote in The Revolt Against the Masses, his history of 20th century leftism, it became such a reviled word during World War I as a result of the Wilson administration’s crackdown on free speech (and to a lesser extent due to his rampant racism), self-described progressives resorted in the early 1920s to stealing the L-word away from classical liberals and appropriating for themselves. It seems a similar reaction to “Progressivism” as a result of the two terms of the Obama administration is forcing Milbank and other “Progressives” to revert back yet again to calling themselves liberals.
Rinse and repeat, apparently endlessly.