I've mentioned before that my mind boggles at the way the terms progressive, liberal, left have constantly shifted in meaning over the last thirty years. not that there's a shift, but rather that the types of people that call themselves "left" these days would not dare call themselves "left" in the past -- since left meant Marxist/heavy user of Marx (no, there's no 12 step program :) e.g., at Harvard, when WBM gave his talked, he denied being a "man of the left" and said only rightwing bloggers thought he was a "man of the left". (Chris motor mouth Matthews was using the same phrase the other night and he clearly meant someone inspired by Marxist ideas). so, it has a meaning where left=radical. but interestingly, to me, more and more people who mock and make fun of Marxists/heavy users of Marx/radicals will call themselves leftists (e.g., the kossaks).
and then there was the infamous incident where Clinton called herself a progressive. apparently, she used it in order to not say "liberal". anyway, Doug pointed to an NLR article by Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers, so i was reading another article by Rogers about divisions among progressives. I am mostly interested in it b/c it confirms that there was once a different meaning for progressive - and most certainly Clinton wouldn't have been considered one. not that i want meanings to stay static, it's just interesting to have my suspicions confirmed.
Also, interested to consider what Cohen had to say 15 years ago:
How Divided Progressives Might Unite, Joel Rogers, http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=1795
"Among us progressives, most discussion of domestic politics is taken up with descriptions of social problems—falling wages and rising inequality, retreats from racial justice, destruction of inner-city neighborhoods, environmental degradation, violence against women, the agonizing problems of urban youth. The inventory reminds us that current policies fail to ‘promote the general welfare’ or to ensure ‘liberty and justice for all’, and why we are saddened and often outraged by how we now govern ourselves as a people. But it does little to advance our understanding of how progressives might organize themselves to improve this state of affairs. It leaves unanswered the question: What is to be done? [*]
In asking that question here I assume that we can in fact do better—thatneither circumstance nor nature prohibit improvement. At some abstract level, this is self-evident. America remains blessed with abundance, free of external military threat, and populated by a spirited and resourceful people no more stupid or corrupt than any other. Our problems are political and admit political solution. They arise from the way this society is now organized, the way power within it is now exercised, the fact that power is not now exercised in sufficiently democratic ways—all things that can be changed. Less abstractly, I do not believe current political circumstance bars such change. While business evisceration of popular democratic forces and domination of popular culture are as advanced as at any time since the 1920s, those forces are still alive and that domination is still contested. We have room for manoeuvre. Indeed, as I’ll argue in a moment, we have something like an open invitation to advance.
I also assume an audience of progressives, not liberals. Without putting too fine a point on it, the difference is that progressives actually believe in democracy. They think that people of ordinary means and intelligence, if properly organized and equipped, can govern themselves, and that if they do the results will be better than if they do not. Liberals lack such confidence in ordinary people—like Neibuhr in his ‘Marxist’ phase, they believe in the essential stupidity of man—and so put less emphasis on popular democratic organization. To achieve social improvement, they typically favor the ‘kinder, gentler’ administration of people, usually through the state.
Given this liberal strategy, often, improvement never comes. Without organized popular support, liberals cannot do the heavy lifting against entrenched and resourceful corporate actors required to enact desired policies. And without the monitoring, enforcement, and trust-inducing capacities of socially-rooted organizations, they commonly cannot administer those policies effectively. When it comes to fighting opposition, liberals often don’t have the troops; when it comes to solving problems inside schoolrooms or communities, their government programs are all thumbs and no fingers. As problems of both kinds become more evident—as they are today, in everything from health care reform to education and public safety—so too do the limits of liberalism.
It is popular awareness of these limits that provides the opportunity for progressives alluded to above. A generation of economic decline and failed government response have forcibly put social control of the economy and the democracy of which that is one instance—the very issues conventional liberalism is least capable of addressing, the signature concerns of progressive movements for two hundred years—back on the table of American politics. All around us is the wreckage of an unconstrained capitalism—falling living standards, families strained to breaking point, rising inequality. Right before us is the alternating feebleness and corruption of a government devoid of any organized base, in hock to monied interests, uninterested in rational debate, incapable of the heavy lifting needed to put the country right, unwilling even to speculate on what sort of lifting might be required. Reflected in public opinion surveys showing sky-high rates of alienation and disgust with government and deep distrust of business, in ‘out-of-nowhere’ mobilizations like that against nafta, in the growth of independent and third-party candidacies and formations—what is new (though this too is now getting old fast) is that these things are now widely recognized. There is mass discontent with politics as usual, a mass hunger for some alternative.
Progressives need not fear, and cannot hope, that conventional liberalism will deliver a democratic one. The reason why is that doing so would require challenging corporate power and mobilizing outside the state. Thirty years ago—given the us military position in the world, the strength of the us economy, the character of popular expectations about race and gender justice or the environment—it was perhaps possible for the bulk of the dwindling voting population to expect security in their liberty and prosperity, absent such challenge and mobilization. Of course the luxury of that expectation never extended to those on the receiving end of us military force, nor to those at home whom our politics had always tended to forget. Whatever the case then, a transformed political economy now leaves open no way of defending domestic living standards, reducing inequality, making jobs safe for families, escaping the legacy of four hundred years’ racism, saving our cities, or greening our economy, without putting serious constraints on capital and without recruiting citizens to their own administration. And this is just what liberals are loathe to do.
The preferred liberal response to current calamities, instead, is to back even further off democratic commitments. In the last twenty years, on matters of class and popular organization in particular, the leadership of the Democratic Party has moved steadily to the right. Most recently, on every major issue of popular contest with the business community—minimum wage, nafta, labor law reform, domestic investment, health care, environmental regulation, campaign finance reform—the Clinton administration has been from the start hopelessly compromised, when not proudly ensconced on the wrong side. Along with a little welfare bashing here, a little ‘toughness on crime’ there, acquiescence to business is nearly the sum of the current liberal program. Not democratic, it is also no more likely to revive liberal political fortunes than a simple-minded defence of the status quo. Liberalism is not just corrupt, but dying, sustained by a life-support system of electoral inertia and government patronage.
And, of course, the Right is mobilizing to pull the plug. Unlike liberals, the Right is quite willing to take its own side in an argument—to organize, to target, to wield state power in ways that build its ability to disrupt. Plundering during the catastrophe, it fuels its anti-statist populism with liberal failure, promising Christian perfectionism along the way. Mass shenanigans aside, its program is quintessentially elite and secular: to repeal the New Deal, dismantle the affirmative state, destroy all non-business-dominated secular organization, and thus complete the corporate domination of American public life.
Our present circumstance then is this. A dying liberalism, now a pale shadow of its New Deal self, no longer delivers the goods. An insurgent corporate Right aims squarely at democracy’s destruction. A mass discontent understands itself in terms at least amenable to progressive appeal. This is the unstated invitation to progressive action, our opportunity to do some good.
But that opportunity must be seized, which is where progressive problems start. If progressives recognize more clearly than liberals the need for popular democratic organization, the right kinds of organization do not arise spontaneously. They need to be built, and revised and built again in light of changed circumstances, through political projects of mass appeal that also unite progressive ranks. Today ‘changed circumstances’—from the erosion of neighborhoods to the decline of urban manufacturing to the rise of issue and identity concerns orthogonal to those class concerns that once unified progressive politics—have made identifying and acting on such projects more difficult than at any time in living Left memory. Taking measure of those disenabling changes, I want to ask, What are the right projects today? While of a different form, this question about organization is equivalent to the ‘What is to be done?’ question asked earlier.
My answer proceeds in two steps. Step one (‘Why We Are Weak’) inventories some of the sources of progressive fragmentation and incoherence—the reasons why it is difficult to identify and act on projects of the right kind. Step two (‘How to Get Strong’) suggests some specific projects that can work to overcome this disunity, and do some good for the country, in ways that build the longer-term strength of progressive forces."
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)