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That Would Be Progress

Today Megan McArdle writes about the terms “liberal” and “progressive”:

The throwdown over the terms "liberal" and "progressive" in the left blogosphere has been mildly interesting to me, because I've always been dubious about the switch. I mean, I'm happy to call people whatever they want, and the corpus of moderate-and-beyond left-wingers seems to have decided that they'd rather be known as "progressives" than "liberals", so that's what I try to call them. When I remember, at least.

I wasn’t aware there was such a throwdown, but that’s probably because I haven’t been keeping the pulse of the leftosphere very well. I really ought to, but that’s a different issue. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the throwdown exists and Megan reads it correctly. I think it’s great. There is a difference between the two terms, and it would be helpful to see folks distinguish which more closely identifies them. I’m not talking about rebranding “liberal” as “progressive”, but rather splitting the Left into subgroups for the sake of clarity. And if said throwdown is serious enough, a label-splitting is exactly what will happen, since self-labeling is a market, not a democracy.

So how would such a split manifest itself? What is the difference between the two terms? I was taught long ago that the important difference between “progressives” and “liberals” is a matter of goals and methods.

Loosely, a Liberal is one who advocates freedom. The confusion in American politics comes from the confusion over whose freedom is more important (If I could just have some of your money, I would have more freedom to travel... if you didn't have guns, I would be free of the fear that you might shoot me... etc.), and what limits might be placed on it (thus concepts such as “too wealthy”, "too many guns", etc). The divide between libertarianism and modern American liberalism is that libertarians believe the boundaries to be absolute, while liberals see them as very moveable. For liberals, rights are malleable, and a degree of equality is to be sought not just in opportunity, but in outcome.

A Progressive is one who seeks to use government power to enact social change. As noted in the comments following McArdle’s post, this is specifically a interventionalist mentality. It advocates both greater democracy and greater centralization – which is exactly why it is so fervently feared by libertarians. Centralization is anti-liberty for reasons that are too obvious to go into here. More frequently, I am asked to explain how democracy is anti-liberty. It was explained well by Kip in this post a while back, if you don’t already get it.

Perhaps you don’t agree with my definitions. It wouldn’t be surprising, since traditional political labels are obsolete. But a terminology throwdown among bloggers on the Left might help us all to have a better understanding of the goals and methods being advocated – especially in a climate where so many are currently defined by what they oppose, and not by what they espouse.