> 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.
>
Here's my two cents on that history. The first split happened in 1948, over the Cold War and the Popular Front legacy. The leftists who wanted to continue the popular front formed the Progressive Citizens of America. (The reason the leftists chose the word "progressive" is that it had been popular front jargon in the 30's; when the Soviets shifted to a broad antifascist front in 1935, they had called for all "progressive forces" to unite.) In direct response, the cold war liberals formed Americans for Democratic Action. When Wallace ran against Truman, with the support of the Communists, the name Progressive Party was chosen. The next year Arthur Schlesinger published The Vital Center, the manifesto of cold war liberalism and attack on "progressivism." So from then on, the mainstream liberals were liberals and those who were dissatisfied with cold war liberalism often continued to use the term progressive.
The next step was the attack on liberalism in the 70's-'80's, and especially the 1988 election, when the right successfully demonized the word "liberal" - the "L word" - as the embodiment of chardonnay-swilling America-hating radicals. Terrified mainstream Democrats dropped the word liberal almost totally.
The final step was what happened in the Bush years, when the liberal base, awakening like a lion from slumber on the internet, vented their fury at Democratic politicians for constantly caving in to Bush. And they did things like support Howard Dean and Co., supposedly as an attack on the establishment Dems. This provoked an interesting and, I think, understudied reaction from Washington Democratic elites who set out to both harness and co-opt this new "energy" at the base. One of the results was a much-discussed multimillion-dollar project to create a "progressive infrastructure" to match the "conservative infrastructure" of the Republicans. So they set up the Center for American Progress, Media Matters, and various other outfits. This new "movement" (existing almost entirely among DC professionals and bloggers) self-consciously adopted the term "progressive," which by this point had lost to the mists of time its former specifically radicalisant connotation. (Maybe in part because in the 90's the DLC had anomalously named their think tank the Progressive Policy Institute, thus blurring the meaning.)
So now you can see that this new Democratic infrastructure is *specifically* and *actively* marketing the word "progressive" as a label to be proud of. Check out these "awareness campaign" videos produced by the CAP. It's the saddest thing:
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2007/11/progressive_videos.html
> The Center for American Progress, in conjunction with the Glaser
> Progress Foundation, recently launched a multiyear effort to increase
> public understanding of what it means to be a progressive given our
> nation's history and the challenges we face today.
Or this handy history of "The Progressive Tradition in American Politics":
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/04/progressive_traditions2.html
SA