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.
You’re putting way too much thought into this, Boo – certainly more than Milbank did, or ever does. This is just the same “Democrats need to move to the center” piece he, and scores of his Village colleagues, have written a bazillion times before. And since conventional Village wisdom, by definition, requires neither evidence nor justification, he can fill up the rest of his column with whatever random collection of word salad he likes. It literally does not matter. VSP will still nod sagely – oh, wait, it’s an odd-numbered day – chuckle wryly at his insights.
There is absolutely nothing people like Milbank could write that is inaccurate, idiotic, or offensive enough to threaten their jobs. Richard Cohen, among many others, has taught us that.
Sigh. Just sigh. I gather from your article that Dana Milbank (1) is still wrting and (2) still has a job.
As for political labeling the nature of big tent parties means that there will be lots of labels. The attempt to constrain the ideologies of the American political parties that occurred over the past 50 years in conservatisms reaction to their perceived threat of communism has turned out to be a fiasco that has vitiated good public policy. On too many issues we are in a strait-jacket of ideas ruthlessly policed by conservatives and the media that love them. Bernie Sanders’s campaign is going to have to blow apart that strait-jacket of bipolar labels in order to gain greater size. It will be interesting to what whether and how they can succeed at doing it.
I don’t want a left-wing version of the Tea Party, either. I want a left-wing version of the Democratic Party.
Doubt there was any “post-war liberal consensus …” Lots of jockeying for power after the death of FDR and the successful conclusion of the wars.
Excluding gay rights because that emerged much later than those other issues, from 1945 through the early 1970s, those issues crossed party lines as had all progressive policy positions from early in the twentieth century.
Using “countercultural” in this context is Newt-speak. Opposing and/or questioning US military adventurism is not countercultural. It’s the duty of all citizens. Unless we are going to label Abraham Lincoln as “countercultural” for doing that from the floor of the US House.
I want the power the Tea Party has. But liberals will always be coalition-based (big tent), and that means arriving at a consensus is challenging. Means we need consensus builders to lead our Party. That’s why PBO is so successful at making Liberal ideas acceptable. Until we can turn out voters in mid-terms the way the Tea Party does, then we’re not in any danger of becoming like them in any way, shape or form.
Cynical, or seen with unveiled eyes?
As I fully support things like the soda ban and think we should break up banks even when times are good (maybe especially then) and straight up seize the fortune of anyone worth over 50 million, I wouldn’t call myself liberal in an economic sense.