Commonweal Institute Blog

Cross Posted On MyDD

Hello everyone--this is my first post here. I would like to open up a discussion on the history of ideological self-identification within the American left and center-left. Specifically, I would like to take a quick look at the history of the ideological moniker "progressive," in order to develop a better grasp of what we mean by the term, how it differs from liberalism, and how it connects our current political actions to a tradition of American leftism.

I'll start the discussion with how I understand the history of the term in an American political context:

• 19th Century Roots. The term "progressive" first came into use in an American political context in the late 19th century. It was the ideological term many American leftists self-identified with, from women suffrage activists, to Teddy Roosevelt supporters, to backers of Robert LaFollette. At this time, "progressivism," was clearly distinct from "liberalism" in American political discourse. At the time, "liberalism" was a distinctly middle-class and American bourgeois view of a laissez-faire economic policies and (very) gradual movement toward universal suffrage. Progressivism was associated with the more forthright and hard-nosed suffrage and governmental accountability movements of the time, including the popular election of Senators, first wave feminism, and the implementation of ballot initiatives. Economically, it was vehemently anti-trust and pro-corporate regulation. In many ways, it is what we would now define as the differences between "neo-liberalism" and "progressivism."
  
  

• The Flip. Until FDR, "progressive" was actually the most common term used to describe the mainstream of American leftism. In what can be considered an early example of triangulation, FDR instead chose to call himself a "liberal," thereby poaching some of Hoover's turf while also distancing himself from the left-wing label "progressive." FDR thus changed the meaning of both terms in American political discourse, as the "progressive" label was rendered fringe left-wing, and the "liberal" label was tied to the economic policies of the New Deal instead of the laissez-faire and corporatist policies. From what I understand, Hoover was so outraged over FDR calling himself a liberal during the 1932 campaign, that Hoover challenged FDR to a debate entirely over who was the true "liberal" in the race. It is also important to note that when former Vice President Henry Wallace broke from the Democratic Party in 1948, he took up the banner of the "progressive" party. After that debacle, people did not call themselves "progressive" for some time.
  
  

• The 1990's revival. After nearly fifty years in the post-Wallace wilderness, the term "progressive" saw a revival in our political discourse in the 1990's primarily from two sources. First, "third way" triangulation types such as the DLC took to the term as a means to avoid being labeled as "liberal." Second, left-wing creative class types, at first primarily in the Bay Area, took to the term in order to disassociate themselves with the exiting "liberal" political infrastructure on both ideological and identity-based grounds. It must have been unpalatable for the wildly successful, and generally cutting edge, entrepreneurs of the Bay Area to self-associate with an ideological term that appeared to be old-fashioned and failing.
  
  

• The New Big-Tent Term. Entering 2007, "progressive" appears to be the new and emerging "big-tent" term for the American center-left. The term is used just as comfortably by New Dem types as it is by the Democratic Party's left-wing. Whether or not this has drained it of any significant meaning is open to debate. Whether or not it still has any significant difference from the term "liberal" is also open to debate. It certainly appears to have morphed into something of an empty vessel term that an increasingly large segment, if not the majority, of the left and center-left political activist community feels comfortable self-identifying with. That is a good thing, because it allows us a sense of unity we lacked when many would call themselves moderate and many would call themselves liberal. However, it is difficult to tell what degree of resonance the term has outside of the universe of political activists. Pollsters like to use the same question for decades, and thus are not ready to start including the term "progressive" in ideological self-identification questions anytime soon.

Personally, I far prefer the term "progressive" to the term "liberal." Logically, "progressive" is more of a direct opposite of "conservative" (or "regressive") than is "liberal." I also don't identify with the ideological position the term "liberal" posits (basically, neo-liberalism) when used in an academic sense, and coming from academic background that means a lot to me. I also like the way it is able to unite Democratic activists, and how it ties in with many of the great American political actors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

What detail can you add to this etymology? What mistakes did I make? I would like to get a better handle on how the term "progressive" is currently used, and has been used over time, within the context of American political discourse. Even if we cannot think of any other reason why this is important, if we are going to have a "progressive movement," it is probably a good idea to grasp what we mean by the term "progressive."

People still buy real estate that will be underwater in a few decades. Think about that.

The reason we don't take global warming seriously in America is because ExxonMobil has been spending millions and millions of dollars funding a PR campaign designed to shift our attention away from the problem. This has been very good for business for them, but it has caused each and every one of us to behave in ways that are counter to our OWN - and society's - interests.

One day this will change. One day the consequences of global warming will become too serious to ignore. One day ExxonMobil will stop paying the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Center for Defense of Free Enterprise and Citizens for a Sound Economy and the American Enterprise Institute and the Frontiers of Freedom Institute and the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institution and the National Center for Policy Analysis and the hundreds of other right-wing "think tanks" they pay to tell us global warming is a hoax (read the report), and then the fog will start to lift and we will start to see the world as it is -- the "reality-based" world we live in rather than the one we see on TV.

Think about what will happen to real estate prices in coastal areas when we do start taking global warming seriously. How much will people pay for real estate that is going to be under water in a few decades?

It's a real shame that Gov. Schwarzenegger of California, who has been acting pretty moderate during the past year and is clearly proud of the state's strong stand on global warming, has decided to shelve the prospect of investing in an ultrafast "bullet train" connection between the northern and southern urban centers of the state (San Francisco, San Jose, & Sacramento to Los Angeles & San Diego). Air travel is a significant contributor to global warming, and north-south travel in California is a major means of travel in this long, skinny state..

There has been ongoing interest in the bullet train for years among a small cadre of far-sighted people. It's time for responsible business folks to step up to the plate. Creative alternatives should be explored, such as investment in the bullet train as constituting a "carbon offset", or creation of a nonprofit "bullet train trust" (analogous to a land trust). Dealing with global warming is going to require thinking outside our life-as-usual boxes.

I’ve been thinking about the power of narrative—a story that weaves together where we have been, where we want to go, and why we want to get there—and how one progressive narrative can be used to tie together progressive values, recent new research findings, opinion pieces from other sources, and an unrelated book about protecting the commons.

The progressive narrative of a society in which all can have opportunity and thrive serves as a vehicle for bringing together our values, our past, and our dreams for the future. Conscious use of this same narrative in multiple contexts will reinforce it in the public mind, increasing its power and making it more likely to become our reality.

"Conservatives and their ideas are good, liberals and their ideas are bad."

You hear the message repeated a thousand different ways, over and over, every day. It is a strategy, an organized marketing campaign to create demand for conservatives, their policies and their candidates. Over time and unanswered, it sinks into the brain.

The fact is, marketing creates demand. So after decades of this, people start to demand conservative policies and candidates and their politicians just ride that wave. In some areas conservative candidates can just point and shout, "liberal, liberal" and win elections. We see the results all around us - trillions of OUR dollars flow to the top. Our resources are "privatized" into the hands of corporations. We work longer hours for lower pay, losing our health insurance and pensions and rights... Our environment is polluted and our resources extracted.

Repeat: this is a strategic marketing campaign to get people to accept being ruled by wealthy corporatists. Marketing creates demand. Repetition drives a point home.

Today's example just came in the morning e-mail. (How much of an "advance" do you think this guy received to write this?) Read this and you'll see that it follows the same tired script: liberals and their ideas are bad, and conservatives and their ideas are good. Marketing creates demand, and this is marketing, promoting conservative values and ideas and candidates.

The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11

"Why do they hate us?" Some conservatives, following President Bush, believe that Muslim anti-Americanism stems from irrational hatred of our freedom and democracy. Others lay the blame on our foreign policy. Now comes bestselling conservative author Dinesh D'Souza to argue that both views, while they contain elements of truth, miss the larger reason. In The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, D'Souza makes the startling claim that the 9/11 attacks and other terrorist acts around the world can be directly traced to the ideas and attitudes perpetrated by America's cultural left.

Terry Gross is a fabulous interviewer because she is so good at doing her homework before interviewing someone. Yet, listening to her interview with Frank Luntz on NPR's Fresh Air made me wish that I could have been asking the questions, because he got off way too easy.

Luntz had come on Fresh Air to talk about his new book, Words that Work. Here's how Terry introduced his work.

Although he works on one side of the aisle, he says that what he does is essentially nonpartisan, seeking clarity and simplicity in language.

During Luntz' discussion with Terry he talked about how he only uses words to "clarify", not to confuse. I wished I was there to help because Terry didn't have much of an answer for that statement. I would have liked to have him explain how it clarified things with his advice to the Republicans on how to talk about global warming.

A comment sent in by Lew Creary:

In his "Progressive Etymology" posting, Chris Bowers sketches a history of the political usage of the term "progressive" that in effect recognizes four consecutive phases -- a classical phase that ran from the late 19th century until FDR's first campaign for president, a second phase initiated by FDR's use of the term "liberal" to describe his New Deal ideology and ending with widespread abandonment of the progressive banner after Henry Wallace's fourth-place finish in the 1948 presidential election, a third phase consisting of a 1990s revival of the term "progressive" by two quite different political groups (DLC types and Bay-Area entrepreneurs), and a fourth phase, now in progress (2007), in which the term helps to create a "big tent" in which diverse elements of the American center-left can comfortably gather.

Here, I want to call attention to a fifth significant strand in the usage-history of the term "progressive" that overlaps in time each of the four strands that figure in Bowers's account, but which goes unmentioned in that account. This fifth strand is the term's role as the name of a standard-bearing political magazine, The Progressive, which has gone by this name since 1929, and whose direct lineage goes all the way back to U.S. Senator Robert La Follette Sr. of Wisconsin, and his founding of La Follette's Weekly on January 9, 1909.

To quote from the magazine's web site, "In 1929, La Follette's Weekly changed its name to The Progressive, but the views of the magazine have remained remarkably consistent over the years. The Progressive, a monthly since 1948, has steadfastly stood against militarism, the concentration of power in corporate hands, and the disenfranchisement of the citizenry. It has continued to champion peace, social and economic justice, civil rights, civil liberties, human rights, a preserved environment, and a reinvigorated democracy. Its bedrock values remain nonviolence and freedom of speech." In 1979, the magazine successfully (and famously) defended its right under the first amendment to publish a controversial article on the hydrogen bomb [see this for the magazine issue containing (and focused on) the article, and this for a 1999/2003 retrospective analysis of the case and related issues by the author of the H-bomb article].

Bowers is happy with what he sees as the emerging "big tent" function of the term "progressive" because it contributes to a sense of unity among different types of Democrat activists. But this contribution to unity, based as it is on a potentially equivocal political label, has its limits. For example, it seems unlikely that an activist committed to reducing the concentration of power in corporate hands would be willing to compromise that goal away as the price of entering the "big tent" to collaborate with a "New Dem" type on some other, shared, goal. However, the price of such collaboration might be lower than that. Even if key value-differences exist within the big tent, principled, limited collaborations on shared goals may still be possible (and worth seeking out). And such limited collaborations may sometimes be the best we can hope for in the short run, given the values of the participating activists.

I want to get out a thought I have been working on.

For a long time America's politicians have needed to posture and pretend and play a game of saying things that every informed person understands are not true, but are mouthed in order to to "position" themselves aligned with their idea of the thinking of the broad uninformed masses.

The conservatives built up a power structure by building (and funding) advocacy organizations like Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute - buying a movement - and progressives and their funders had not done that. So the conservatives have had this persuasion machine in place and progressives have not. The conservatives were able to use their machine to build up the "conventional wisdom" along the lines of their own strategic narrative. And so for a long time the public was, probably correctly, perceived to have been largely persuaded by conservative rhetoric, and the politicians had to speak to that.

So maybe for a politician it was a correct perception that you have to move right and "triangulate" and spout right-wing crap to get elected. You get this enormous demand built up by the right's unanswered propaganda, and at the same time you get this enormous conservative-engineered institutional pressure built up to vote a certain way on legislation. What else were politicians supposed to do?

Meanwhile progressives were not working to persuade the public, so there has until recently been little popular demand or respect for progressive policies and candidates. Sure, we want leaders to do the right thing, but we haven't been building up the mechanisms or creating the public demand that makes leaders do the right thing -- or that protect them, "watch their backs" and give them cover to do the right thing.

I think the blogs are starting to make a tremendous difference in our politics. They are holding politicians and the media accountable, and I think we're all starting to see the effects. They can't seem to get away with ANYTHING anymore because of these darn bloggers, and a lot of them don't like that one bit. But progressive politicians are learning that now there finally is someone out there - the blogs - working to persuade the public, and watching their backs, and applying pressure, and rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior. A power structure for progressive is being built.

So I think that one of these effects from the blogs is that doing the RIGHT thing rather than ridiculous posturing and perception games is starting to become the way to win elections. Or maybe I should say that the posturing and perception game to win elections and doing the right thing are converging - into the same thing.

Paul Abrams picked up on Gary Trudeau’s clever verbiage in his Doonesbury cartoon:

Discussing the Bush Library's unprecedented budget, one Doonesbury character suggests that it will also be a "think tank", to which others respond that it will be a "belief tank", defined as a think-tank-without-the-doubt.

Goebbels' observation about the power of the "big lie" can, with modern technology, now trickle down even to small lies.
For 30 years the radical rightwing has funded its own institutions, such as Heritage Foundation, supposedly to "investigate" social and political issues and to publish the results of those "investigations". They rigorously screen the views of potential hires to ensure they are ideologically pure (to be an intern at the Heritage Foundation, students had to pass a litmus test to ensure not a whisper of free thinking remained), and their results, curiously, always seem to support the economic interests of their funders.

Between $300 and $400 MILLION per YEAR is spent on these radical rightwing institutions. Their corporate sponsors are accustomed to getting returns-on-investment ("ROI" in the biz), and cutting funding from operations that do not produce good ROI.

Belief tanks deliver for them. Starting with a pre-ordained conclusion, the "investigation" focuses on finding those facts that can be woven into a supporting fabric. Contrary facts are ignored; if they are too powerful to be ignored, the integrity of their sources are impugned.

Abrams advocates use of a sound marketing principle – repetition through multiple channels – to take advantage of this brilliant neologism:

Frank Luntz, the rightwing linguistic guru, taught them the words to use to demean facts so that they were, at best, on a par with belief, but his main lesson was: language counts. I am no longer going to refer to groups like the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Discovery Institute, Americans United for Life, as think tanks, but rather as "belief tanks".

Will you join me?

How about using the netroots, and the blogging community, to spread Gary Trudeau's brilliant insight? In my writings, I will refer to such institutions, and the people from them, like this: "John Smith, from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Belief Tank, said....". And, how about training those who appear in the MSM alongside people from the Belief Tanks to call out their institutions as "Belief Tanks", and to do so over-and-over-and-over-and-over again, so it becomes part of the background?