dlowan wrote:edgarblythe wrote:While the Democrats were a party made of every stripe of politics,in those days, Roosevelt led us with a liberal slate of programs. It became popular to deride conservatives then as much as conservatives now deride liberals (many of whom hide from the liberal label under the mask of being "progressive."
Nonsense. (Re the "hiding" thing)
Only in the USA does anyone think liberals are left.
Well, if you refer only to the US, well, you may be correct, I do not know.
It's nonsense in the US context as well. The term "Progressive" has a long history in America, and refers back to a political strand that was always distinct from "liberal". The character of the Progressive movement itself shifted too, for sure, drastically even, from Teddy Roosevelt to LaFollette's leftist Farm/Labor coalition to the "pinko" Henry Wallace ticket of 1948. But it's always been distinct from "liberal", and most of the time, to the left of it. If you go back to the 40s or 50s, you find that "liberal" referred to the moderate, reformist strand on the Democratic Party's left, and "progressive" to the more fundamentally system-critical, radical strand.
Today's US liberals, IMO, continue the tradition of their predecessors, even if the conservatives ridiculously try to rhetorically brand them as some kind of far-leftists. Their dominating focus on 'moral' issues of high-falutin but post-material quality, whether its gay marriage or defending the division of church and state or abortion or gun regulation, worthwhile though each of those issues is on its own, continues a 'safe' kind of tweaking of issues that are not essential to the main, capitalist thrust of society's structures anyway.
Tellingly, they also pretty much mirror the issues that the conservatives have thrust into dominance since the early 80s; they are playing on the conservatives' field, have let them kidnap the agenda.
If I were American I'd call myself a "Progressive", with LaFollette's and Wallace's tradition in mind, to denote that I'd like a far more fundamental revision of socio-economic policy. Affirmative action and a withdrawal of Bush's tax cuts for the very richest are nice, but in the end just tinkering, when the elephant in the room remains the explosively increasing gap between the rich and poor, period, and the existence of lower classes (white poor as well as minorities) who are making do and getting by on their teeth from one generation to the next. Who lack basic protections, whether it's health insurance, rent controls or employee rights, that are standard in most West-European countries.