The Reformers

Many liberals today prefer to call themselves progressives. I really hate this. Perhaps the reasoning is that since liberalism has been defamed, we should use another, older word to describe what we are for. But doing so is like referring to a car as a tire, or naming your cat paw. It is using a piece of something to describe the whole.

Progressivism is an honored political tradition. It developed in the late nineteenth century in response to the corruption and incompetence of the patronage system, and the abuses of the big trusts. Their response was to use legal sanction and institutional reform to clean up government, politics, and business. The idea wasn't to get rid of the system, but to make it work better. Their tools were government action, open elections, and professionalism.

The progressives originally had a home in neither party. For years they were the key swing constituency in American politics, and hence both parties adopted elements of their platform. Finally the Democrats under Franklin Roosevelt won their loyalty, and they have been the leading element of the Democratic coalition ever since. For better or worse, they have been the brains of the whole operation.

Progressivism is a political philosophy dedicated to issues. Progressives approach political events with a rational eye. They believe in the use of sweet reason and hard thinking. Political leaders should be personally disinterested, and decisions should be made not based on any particular interest but for the public good. Progressives are essentially goody-goody reformers (I mean this in a nice way). They have a real faith in democracy and democratic discourse, and of the power of public action to improve people's lives.

Progressives have a truly awesome legacy. In this century they abolished child labor, created the minimum wage, established Social Security and Medicare, and led the War on Poverty. They were a key supporter of the labor movement (see the Populists) and civil rights (see the Pluralists). They have been fighting for years for national health insurance, their one unfulfilled ambition.

But this movement, as honorable, even glorious, as it is, definitely has its down sides. It is primarily an urban, middle class (even upper middle class) phenomenon. It tends to ignore rural issues and has some suspicion for small town and suburban life. Progressives believe in helping the poor and working class, but they tend to do so in a somewhat patronizing way. They are somewhat technocratic, with an emphasis on central leadership rather than decentralized participation. They want to control the national government and use it to govern in the people's interests. The people play a somewhat passive role in this formulation, except when it comes to voting in elections (which is pretty limited form of participation). So central has government action been in their thinking that they have tended to neglect the importance of over civil and political institutions (they did a real number on political parties). And because progressives believe so much in issues and rationality, their politics tends to be moralizing (even condescending) and passionless. As a consequence they have had some difficulty appealing to our emotions or even really persuading people. Asserting your moral rightness is not a great way to win people over.

Now I don't mean that all progressives are this way. What I do believe is that these are certain tendencies in progressive though and action. They smack of elitism, and it is this that the right has capitalized on. There is a certain intellectual rigidity: they pretty much got everything they wanted in by 1970 (except health care), and have been playing defense ever since. Their ideas as a consequence look pretty stale. As progressives have come increasingly to dominate the Democratic Party and liberalism itself, the right has exploited these stereotypes to their advantage.

However, I think that progressives are learning. There is a renewed emphasis on new policies, new messages, a more aggressive strategy, and more popular mobilization. This process must continue, and they must continue to reach out to their ideological partners, populism and pluralism.

But hey, guys! Don't stop calling yourselves liberals!