I don’t even know what this means. If you’re going to write a book review about the defining elements of liberalism, you need to do more than just list four defining elements and say that looking at things that way is very rewarding. More importantly in our present setting, it’s almost moronic to introduce the difference between liberals and progressives this way:
You might wonder if there’s any point in even trying to define liberalism. Efforts to do so seem bound to fail. From the start, its meaning has been elusive and in flux. Today, no right-thinking person is against “liberal democracy,” and we mostly take “liberal capitalism” for granted — yet conservative Americans use “liberal” as a term of abuse and many left-leaning Americans would rather be called “progressives.”
These two words are not interchangeable. In fact, for progressivism to have any meaning at all, it has to be distinct from liberalism. If there are some Democrats who don’t want to be called “liberal” that is their choice, but whether they actually are liberal or not is not up to them.
Progressivism has a long history in this country, and it’s a history that is distinct from FDR’s New Deal coalition which relied heavily on Jim Crow Democrats. Progressives track their heritage to people like Fighting Bob La Follette, Louis Brandeis and Teddy Roosevelt. Prior to the Reagan Revolution, the Republican Party embraced many progressive concepts and goals. But the country’s Establishment was thoroughly liberal.
It is indeed difficult to precisely define what liberal means, partly because the liberal Establishment of the mid-20th Century was as heavily reliant on progressives as it was on segregationists. But JFK and LBJ were liberals on foreign and domestic policy. Yes, they both had progressive agendas and they were much different from each other in many respects. But they led the liberal Establishment at the zenith of its power.
Progressives, meanwhile, were sorted out of the Republican Party entirely and found themselves clustered on the left-wing of the Democratic Party, or even further to the left outside of the two-party system. And then watched the Democratic Establishment slowly march in their direction on a whole host of social issues but much less so on economic ones. The liberal Establishment always wanted to balance corporate/labor disputes, while progressives openly take labor’s side. Progressives are adjuncts in a center-left coalition…more outside agitators than inside legislators. Liberals are used to power and its responsibilities. The progressive movement is suspicious of all power structures, albeit generally trusting in the government’s ability to stand up to the concentration of wealth and economic power if given the authority to do so.
Liberalism is forward-looking, but much more comfortable with traditional American cultural attitudes than progressives. It’s easy to be a good FDR liberal in Arkansas or Tennessee, but disqualifying to be a “San Francisco progressive.”
I call myself a progressive and a liberal, but I don’t fit perfectly into either definition. I abhor Michael Bloomberg’s progressive excesses on things like sugary drinks while warily supporting his progressive efforts on gun control (up to a point). I’m not much interested in being a gadfly on the Establishment because I want to take over the Establishment. I want progressives to keep most of their values but to lose their anti-Establishmentarian attitudes that turn people off and prevent them from trusting progressives with power. A progressive revolution in this country can only happen when we have the geographical reach to be a governing coalition. That requires us to expand our reach, and that requires pragmatism on both issues and on how we feel about power.
But, in any case, this country is still run on the architecture built by the great 20th Century liberals, who built on the work of the great 20th Century progressives. Since both groups have a common interest in defending their work, and since both groups share an optimistic outlook on the capacity of government to do good, they are currently flocking together to oppose the dying remnants of the Conservative Movement.
