Thomas wrote:Maybe I missed something, but I don't remember any Americans calling themselves "Progressive" before the presidential campaign of 2004.
You missed something. I vividly remember rather wonky debates in the early 00's on left-leaning intellectual sites like tnr about what the meaning of progressive is and how it relates to and differs from liberal, historically and in terms of current politics. (Since all my bookmarks from the time were stolen along with the laptop they were on, and the TNR archives are off-line, I have no links, but I'm sure you'll take my word for it.)
I'll bet you could easily find similar invocations in the run-up to the 2000 elections as well, during all the acrimony between Nader supporters and those pleading for a Gore vote.
Of course the term progressive disappeared from the political stage for a few decades. First Joe McCarthy's red-baiting had pushed the whole movement into the suspect category, and then the sixties, with all their postmaterialist, libertine fervour, made old school progressivism look stodgy, and led to a heyday of liberalism instead. But the return of progressive as an alternative identifier from liberal did not suddenly pop up again in the 2004 campaign, it has gradually built up over time.
The equation of progressive and liberal, and the argument that progressive is simply a refuge for those who are simply liberals but want to escape that term's negative connotations, is simply ill-informed. Of course there are those people - people for whom progressive as a label is a convenient way to duck the "liberal, liberal, liberal" attacks. But at the root of its resurgence as a term lies an expansive and varied enough debate that has come up on and off again in both the 90s and the 00s, and that very much focused on the differences. A debate that was spurred by the realisation that in the course of the 60s-through-90s, the American left has lost crucial qualities - and crucial electoral constituencies, and by the resulting theories about how to undo the damage.
I think the Clinton years in the 90s have played an important role in this that goes well beyond Rush Limbaugh's attacks of the time. The Clintons themselves represented a political mix where moderate liberalism in substantive policy was wedded to all the negative culture war connotations of "liberal" that involved replaying the battles of the 60s all over again, from "I didnt inhale" to "I'm not someone to stay at home and bake cookies". It left many on the left of the party wondering, what happened to the party whose appeal was primarily socio-economic, and succeeded in attracting middle-class voters and the poor across the country? How did we get in this particular rut? The culture wars were started and effectively exploited by the right, but how did we come to ourselves play the accorded role so persuasively, and swap our FDR-era identity for it?
There's a lot of talk, here, in Edgar's older thread and elsewhere, about progressive being just a fashionable alias for liberals - end. But to believe this you have to be ignorant of the long discussions about the meaning of both terms that have been had, on and off, in left-leaning journals the past fifteen years or so.
