The throwdown over the terms "liberal" and "progressive" in the left blogosphere has been mildly interesting to me, because I've always been dubious about the switch. I mean, I'm happy to call people whatever they want, and the corpus of moderate-and-beyond left-wingers seems to have decided that they'd rather be known as "progressives" than "liberals", so that's what I try to call them. When I remember, at least.
But I'm not sure that it's actually a good idea. For one thing, the historical progressives had pretty wide streaks of racism and eugenetics running through their movement; many of the "good government" reforms they sought had a lot to do with draining the power of the city political machines which were objected to not merely because they were corrupt, but because they catered to the unwashed masses that the progressives found distasteful.
Incidentally, those good goverment reforms (combined with the legal culture changes in the 1970s), are the reason that it takes about seventy years to get anything done at any level of government. My father likes to point out that had George Bush come into office saying "Shoring up the levees in New Orleans is my #1 priority" and proceeded to act on that, by the time Katrina hit the Army Corps of Engineers would probably have just about finished the Environmental Impact Analysis on the preliminary bids.
If there had been no lawsuits, that is.
There are always lawsuits.
So I'm not sure why you would want to inherit their mantle. For another, progressives seem to want the switch because they think that "liberal" has somehow been poisoned by right-wing propaganda. I'm not sure that's true, and even if it is, it wasn't the name they objected to. Slapping a new label on old ideas is unlikely to work.
But I digress. I meant to tell you that Noah Millman has written something very good on the subject:
Here are, in my view, the two key temperamental distinctions:
- Progressives orient themselves temporally, towards the future. Liberals do not fundamentally orient themselves temporally because their principles are timeless.
- Liberals love to argue about ends and means and whether one can justify the other; an argument between Kant on the one hand and Mill on the other is a quintessential liberal argument. Progressives are inclined to believe that arguments about means are really arguments about ends in disguise.
That last is why I have to spend so much time explaining that when I come out against card check, or the Griswold-Roe-Lawrence emanations and penumbras, it is not because I have some secret anti-union/woman/gay agenda, but because I think they're extremely deleterious to a liberal order. I have many friends who seem unable to comprehend, or at least believe, the idea that anyone might genuinely care enough about process to sanction a good process that produces bad outcomes.
Posted by Jane Galt at July 30, 2007 8:16 AM
janegalt.net
Bemused
Can someone please tell me exactly what Roy Edroso objects to in my post on "progressive" v. "liberal"? Aside from the fact that it's "glibertarian", I mean?
Update A reader opines that he thinks I'm trying to slander progressives by associating them with the original Progressives' less salutory tendencies. Which is exactly the opposite of what I meant. What I was trying to say is, given that contemporary whatever-you-they-want-to-call-themselves are not racists, eugenicists, etc., I'm not sure it's a great idea to take the name of a bunch of people who were.
Posted by Jane Galt at July 30, 2007 5:10 PM
janegalt.net |
