Just An Ordinary Liberal

Ramona, I hope folks will take the time to use your link and read what you had to say about LBRL's.  Or mebbe you could repost it here at Dagblog.

So Flavius, I never took Latin but I put it into Google translate, and this is what they came up with: Illegitimati does not still be friends is

Is there a message in there??

If we are such a "Center-Right" nation, how come the Repugs keep going further to the Right rather than move towards the middle? Wouldn't they find themselves more electable if they took a more Centrist position on things?  Wouldn't they have re-taken the Senate if they had moved to the Center rather than the extreme Right?

This notion of America being a Center-Right nation is mere marker-moving, to justify the Repugs pulling the country 'back' from the "Extreme Left" (actually the Center) to what they now redefine as the center, but which is actually the right. 

I'd prefer an interception AND a hail mary pass.

And modest, too.    I want to keep this going because I seriously would like to know why, with our own history of accomplishments, our support of the poor and middle class, our union activities which gave wage hikes, benefits, and workplace safety to every working-class schnook in this country--why liberals went underground for so many years and then emerged as sheep in completely different clothing, calling themselves "Progressives" and then having the nerve to denigrate "liberals", that bunch who were either naive or out-of-touch or a drag on progress.

I really would like to know.

Interesting.  Really.  But it doesn't answer my question.  How are progressives different from liberals?  I see that they list Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz, Jim Hightower and Molly Ivins as progressives, when they call themselves liberals.  So again--what's the difference?

"These days, political progressives are considered to the left of the Democratic Party"

So are Liberals.

"So what's a "progressive"? Use the Wiki and you might be surprised to learn what they've helped accomplish in the twentieth century: Progressivism in the United States."

The conflation you're offering here rests on the assumption that the Progressive Movement is a continuous entity, like the Democratic Party or the Republican Party (roughly), with a marked homogenous continuum.  Even the article you're citing differentiates the current progressive movement from earlier ones, and tends to refer to it as "liberal Progressivism."  You may prefer to find no meaning in that, but lumping the various American Progressivisms all together as you do is kind of the same thing as equating First Wave Feminism with Third or Fourth Wave. 

You get on shaky ground with this kind of thing. 

All very easy fer YOU to say, ya goddam socialist! ;O)

Well, these guys have declared themselves "the leading think tank of the progressive movement". Another brand shot to shit. Screw labels. I'm an American who just wants some decent policy for a change.

I think the critique of "the term 'liberal'" that you get to toward the end here hits on fair points, but your earlier analysis of the various contents of liberalism has a rather 19th Century British/Gladstonian kind of bent, most specifically via your inclusion of "individual/private property and free enterprise and free markets and free trade" as defining elements. 

I don't want to run a repeat of Ramona's use of material from a West Wing script, that's already been lambasted, though more than a bit unfairly.  I think O'Donnell and the crowd writing those scripts had as fair a grasp of what Liberalism rests on in this country as nameless Wicki contributors -- albeit without the trappings of academic discourse -- and the things mentioned in the speech Ramona quoted are very fairly claimed as Liberal achievements. 

But back to your discussion.  If I take some exception, it's because I don't see where historical Liberalism in this country specifically (which is, after all, what we're talking about here) can be defined without referencing Roosevelt and Johnson, whose liberalism is predominantly social, and who run pretty far afield of championing property rights.  You could question some of Roosevelt's care for Standard Oil and and US petroleum interests in the Middle East, but that's a way different ball of wax from Clinton's free market/free trade magical thinking. 

Prior to Roosevelt and the 20th Century, you mostly come down to Philosophical Liberalism and the rights of the individual, as embodied in the Bill of Rights.  And you do rightly include this as one of the contents of Liberalism, but the problem in your analysis is, I think, the way you elide the specifically political content of Liberalism that comes later and which, for most of us, more accurately defines what we think of in this country when we consider the term. And which, in fact, has been piggy-backed onto Progressive content. 

My two-penny synopsis of course leaves out Lincoln and the days when the Republican party stood in, so to speak, Roosevelt and Johnson's shoes.  But the wheel turns, that's just how it is.  And the fact that the great Tom Reed, Republican speaker of the House, did not allow Democrats to block the seating of the first black men elected to the House of Representatives actually proves your point:  labels are pretty meaningless.  But I'd still say they are useful and necessary -- up to a point. 

And this discussion, it seems to me, started out in a vein that was quite a bit more personally probing.  The question, to me, seemed to be shouldn't we be proud of the word Liberal?  I see no reason why we shouldn't be.   And I, for one, am. 

there's pretty universally an emphasis on "liberty" and "freedoms," especially individual rights and freedoms (free speech, sexual freedoms, etc.)... but also individual/private property and free enterprise and free markets and free trade... and usually a "role" for government, but a limited one... and an emphasis on "representative" democracy, "one man, one vote," that sort of thing.

Thank you for bringing that up.

That's "Classic liberalism"

which has a lot in common (though not everything) with what is now known in the U.S. as libertariansim.

As opposed to the more modern "social liberalism"

which Ramona iin this post appears to be arguing should be rehabilitated by wearing it proudly.

Much of the conversation here strikes me as absurd for a related reason.

That Ramona feels the need to argue for rehabiitation of a label with a definition that isn't actually that old as far as the English language is concerned (the alternate usage being much older,) I am moved to say: give it up, because it didn't work as a label in the language. Whatever the reason it was abandoned by many, it's not worth fighting for a word if it has a meaning that's not clear to everyone. As in: you can try to force ta language to change, but if it's a word that never caught on as a clear, concise and useful meaning with no misunderstanding about what it meant, why bother? What good is a label that has a confusing meaning? There is no "but that's not fair" in language. Either people find a word useful because it communicates a clear meaning to everyone, or they don't. Defending a certain definition of a label to its last breath, when it's not doing an accurate job of communciation, strikes me as folly.

Progressive has similar problems, as the poll cited in a comment above notes.

What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label "Liberal?" If by "Liberal" they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer's dollar, then … we are not that kind of "Liberal." But if by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people -- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties -- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal."

- John F. Kennedy, September 14, 1960

That old cliche about Hollywood liberal elites is about as hoary as the one about welfare mothers in cadillacs.  You're using "liberal" as a word with many meanings, when what it is to millions of Americans is a philosophy, a way of life, a calling, if you like.  There seems to be a complete misunderstanding about who and what liberals are, and I'm hearing more and more again today--as I have for years and years and years--that it's best to just can the word because it carries all sorts of negative baggage.  Well, I'm asking, who gets to decide that?

My world is blue collar and decidedly liberal.  The people in my world work in factories, clean other peoples' houses, stand in unemployment lines, volunteer in food banks, gather clothing and blankets for poor people, and worry about what's happening to the kids out there.  Other peoples' kids as well as their own.  They're a lot like everyone else who has a heart and a brain, and they don't feel like they're any better, but they're not any worse, and they're liberals.

They want fair wages, universal health care, an equitable tax policy, a clean environment, an acknowledgment of global warming, an end to wars--and they're liberals.

They drink, they gamble, they raise hell, they can be as stupid and boring as anyone else, and they're liberals.

They're out there in numbers, believe me.  I'm out there, and so is Flowerchild and so is Stilli.  I don't know why you can't see us.

Can't we all just call ourselves "Els"? 

I love 'em all. Liberals, Progressives, Socialists, Centrists, Populists, Greens, Social Democrats, Independents, the whole damned shooting match.

Except for the Blue Dogs.

THEM bastards need to be put down. ;-)

LOL! I can't thank you enough for that article, stilli, which contains a Lawrence O'Donnell quote where he labels himself a socialist.

And the bait-and-switch masters came out to play, too.

This is a cheap shot, fyi. To assume there are "bait-and-switch masters" means that you don't believe people here are sincere.

If you can prove something is bait-and-switch, have the courage to level the charges at the person or contact the administrators of the site. Otherwise, this kind of comment is passive-aggressive and leads to endless mud-slinging.

Be the change you want to see, Flowerchild. 

Good news for Genghis.  Blowing Smoke can become a series.  He should getting started on his Moderate Democrat persecution fantasies book before someone beats him to it.  How criticism of someone's position (that she apparently has no answer for) turns into Let's Tear Apart Ramona Day is beyond me.  And people call progressives immature and childish.  Sheesh.