Keep in mind when “liberal” was a grimy phrase? Within the Eighties, Ronald Reagan, who usually prefaced it with a damning “tax and spend,” was maybe the simplest of the bashers. However essentially the most overt assault was within the early ’90s, after Newt Gingrich’s political group GOPAC issued a memo, “Language: A Key Mechanism of Management,” urging fellow Republicans to make use of the phrase as a slur.
It labored. Even Democrats started to keep away from the dreaded label. In a 2007 presidential main debate, Hillary Clinton as an alternative referred to as herself a “fashionable progressive.” She averted the time period “liberal” once more in 2016.
Now the phrase is again. The proportion of People who instructed the Gallup polls they had been “liberal” has risen from 17% in 1992 to 25% in 2021 (nonetheless decrease than the proportion who mentioned they had been “conservative” or “moderates”).
However the best way “liberal” is used now’s extra complicated than ever. By no means-Trump conservatives tout their bona fides as liberals within the basic Nineteenth-century sense of the phrase, partly to tell apart themselves from hard-right Trumpists. Others use “liberal” and “progressive” interchangeably, though what progressivism means in observe at present is commonly something however liberal—and even progressive, for that matter.
For these of us who’ve by no means given up on the time period – why let the Republicans outline us? — liberal values, a lot of them merchandise of the Enlightenment, embrace particular person liberty, freedom of speech, scientific inquiry, separation of church and state, due course of, racial equality, girls’s rights, human rights, and democracy.
Not like “classical liberals” (ie, often conservatives), liberals do not see authorities as the issue, however moderately as a way to assist the folks it serves. Liberals fiercely defend Social Safety, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, the Voting Rights Act, and the Nationwide Labor Relations Act. They consider that the federal government has an obligation to manage commerce for the good thing about its residents. They are typically suspicious of massive enterprise and their tendency to thwart the pursuits of employees and customers.
As not too long ago because the 2000s, the distinction between liberals and progressives was usually a matter of diploma—Obamacare versus Medicare for All, or elevating the highest marginal tax price versus imposing a wealth tax. However whereas liberalism’s most urgent menace comes from the Trumpian proper, the divide between basic rules and the left’s function has widened.
In an more and more distinguished model of the progressive imaginative and prescient, capitalism will not be one thing to be regulated or balanced, however is itself the issue. White supremacy doesn’t describe an extremist fringe of racists and anti-Semites, however is as an alternative the inherent character of the nation.
Some features of contemporary progressivism look much less like precise progress and extra like a step in reverse.
Whereas liberals maintain to a imaginative and prescient of racial integration, progressives have more and more supported types of racial distinction and segregation, demanding equity in consequence moderately than equality of alternative. Whereas most liberals wish to promote gender equality, many progressives appear fixated on reframing gender stereotypes as “gender id” and denying gender variations wherever they grant rights or protections explicitly to girls. And the place liberals are inclined to try for a universalist splendid the place numerous folks come collectively throughout widespread pursuits, progressives appear more and more wedded to an identitarian method that emphasizes tribalism over attaining widespread floor.
Extra reactionary is the repressive nature of progressive beliefs round civil liberties. It’s progressives – not liberals – who declare that “speech is violence” and that phrases trigger hurt. These values are the driving drive behind progressive efforts to close down public discourse, disrupt speeches, tear down posters, censor college students, and deplatform these with whom they disagree.
Divisions sharpened after the October 7 Hamas assault, with many progressives not solely expressing help for the Palestinian trigger, however in some instances even defending the assaults as a response to colonialism and opposing retaliation as a type of genocide. (One might argue that it’s equally intolerant for universities to droop or reduce funding to pupil teams that help Palestinian rights, as a number of have achieved, though these actions usually got here on the outcry of the teams that directors noticed as threatening Jews.)
All of this stands in stark distinction to the liberal view that extra speech is healthier speech, permitting for the free change of concepts. As David Frum, not typically thought of a liberal himself, not too long ago wrote in The Atlantic: “How is a society ever to determine its most necessary questions if it follows the rule ‘The extra necessary a query, the extra strictly its dialogue is forbidden’?”
Whereas progressives will not be a big group (between 6% and eight% of the voting inhabitants, in line with latest surveys), they’re in all probability the loudest on the left and the most definitely to close out their potential liberal allies. As Jonathan Haidt has famous, in addition they dominate the political dialog on social media.
In his latest ebook, “The Wrestle for a First rate Politics: On ‘Liberal’ as an Adjective,” political thinker Michael Walzer writes that liberals “try to be open-minded, beneficiant, and tolerant.” He additionally lamentably notes: “Illiberalism is extra widespread than it needs to be amongst those that are at the very least formally members of democratic and socialist events.”
This brings us to essentially the most troubling attribute of contemporary progressivism. Whereas liberals are inclined to delight themselves on acceptance, many progressives have utilized completely different purity exams to others on the left and, in line with a latest research of the schism between progressives and liberals, are extra probably than liberals to use public criticism to divergent views. This intolerance manifests as a acknowledged desire to keep away from others with completely different values, an perspective fully at odds with liberal values.
What an odd paradox it’s that on the very second the phrase “liberal” is having a renaissance, liberalism itself feels on the best way. Many liberals really feel lonelier than ever.