Here’s how the Washington Post describes the job that they pay Dana Milbank good money to do.
If your boss wants you to write about politics as some kind of theatrical act, then you can hardly be blamed for producing the equivalent of season previews of Celebrity Chef.
And no one probably expects you to make any effort to understand what the words “liberal” and “progressive” actually mean, or have meant. There are a few clues, however, that even a casual observer of politics might pick up on. For example, there is this thing we call the Progressive Era. And then there is this related, but quite distinct, era we associate with Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal, and the years between the Depression and the crackup in Chicago in the summer of 1968.
It’s true that Republican strategists made a deliberate and conscious effort to turn the word “liberal” into an epithet in the latter part of the 1980’s. They had some success with that effort and some Democrats began running away from the label. Some opted to call themselves “progressives” instead of liberals.
When the anti-liberal Democratic Leadership Council decided to run a think tank, they called it the Progressive Policy Institute.
On the other hand, the most classically left-wing members of Congress are organized into a Progressive Caucus.
If all you know is that someone is calling themselves a progressive, you don’t know much. They could be Maxine Waters or they could be Evan Bayh.
I think it’s best, however, to treat progressives as people who are members of the Progressive Caucus or who support those kind of policies. It’s important to understand them less as liberals by another name than as left-wingers who are dissatisfied with the status quo within the Democratic Party.
I won’t try to provide the comprehensive, everyone-has-to-agree definition of progressivism, but it isn’t the same thing as the post-war liberal consensus in Washington DC. Progressives have pushed the envelope on civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and environmentalism. They have been countercultural by temperament and cynical about the U.S. security state even when Democratic presidents have been in charge.
If you try to push too much harder for a definition than this you’ll run into problems. For example, Michael Bloomberg and his soda bans are solidly progressive in the traditional sense. After all, progressives brought us Prohibition. The modern progressive movement is split on that kind of moralistic policy making. On the other hand, Michael Bloomberg is almost the classic anti-progressive when it comes to his economic and urban policies, and much of his foreign policy. Progressives don’t see Bloomberg as an ally any more than Wall Street sees Sen. Elizabeth Warren as an ally. But, then, there’s the whole gun issue.
It’s not easy to classify people into just a handful of political categories, which is basically my point. And it’s also why Milbank’s admonition that liberals not become the new Tea Party is so off key.
