How the term ‘progressive’
became an empty marketing tool for corporate Democrats.
What’s a progressive, anyway?
The term has a long and unruly
history, which I’ll be getting to. But the common-sense meaning of
“progressive” is someone who is pretty darn liberal. In fact, you might even
say that it signifies politics that are distinctly to the left of liberal.
That, at least, has been the contemporary connotation of the word for as long
as I’ve been following politics. Increasingly these days, the term is being
dumbed down into utter meaninglessness.
Take, for instance, Thad
Williamson’s curious and confusing In
These Times piece, which praised Hillary Clinton’s selection of Sen. Tim
Kaine as her running mate. In his article, Williamson minimizes the importance
of ideology as a criterion for judging political candidates. Ideological
considerations, he says, amount to little more than litmus tests that are
“useless in making more complex judgments” about candidate quality. Yet at the
same time, he refers to Kaine as “progressive” (a term he doesn’t define) and plays
up Kaine’s record as supposedly “the most progressive governor in Virginia’s
history.”
Arguing that: a) ideology
doesn’t matter much, but b) Tim Kaine’s “progressive” record is one of the
reasons he’s such a swell candidate makes no sense.
Williamson is not alone;
plenty of other liberals are twisting
themselves into pretzels to declare Tim Kaine a
progressive as well. But if we look at Kaine’s politics on a right/left
spectrum, it’s clear that he is one of the more conservative members of the
Democratic Party. His roll call votes for the 113th Congress (the most recent
figures available) rank him as the
41st most liberal senator (out of 57 who caucus with the Democrats). And
then there are his positions on a wide range of core progressive issues: Kaine
has close
ties to the financial industry and has supported policies such as
anti-labor right-to-work
laws, “free
trade” measures like NAFTA and fast-tracking the TPP, destructive
environmental practices such as fracking,
and abortion restrictions like the Hyde
Amendment and parental
notification laws. (Since being pegged as Clinton’s VP, he has reversed
course on right-to-work
and the TPP.)
That’s a picture that should raise alarm bells for those of us who actually are
progressives.
So why are so many liberal
writers so anxious to persuade us that, deep in his heart of hearts, Tim Kaine
is, too, a progressive? Probably there’s a desire to exaggerate Kaine’s
progressivism because Hillary’s own progressive bona fides are questionable.
But mostly it seems that today, the progressive label has become little more
than a marketing tool, a signifier deployed to distract us from that the actual
content of the signified. How did we arrive at this sad state of affairs?
A little history is order.
Like “liberal” and “conservative,” “progressive” has long been a contested
term. The capital-P Progressive movement, which emerged in the 1890s and
flowered in the early 20th century, embraced science, modernity and the use of
government to solve social problems. The Progressives supported a wide range of
political causes, including antitrust laws, women’s suffrage, food and safety
regulations, educational reform, the federal income tax and measures aimed at
rooting out political corruption. But in addition to its left-wing social
justice orientation, Progressivism also had a darker side. Some leading
Progressives—such as Theodore Roosevelt, who unsuccessfully ran for president
on the Progressive Party ticket in 1912—supported ugly political projects like
eugenics and imperialism.
Under different incarnations
of the Progressive Party, the agrarian populist Robert La Follette and Henry
Wallace also ran as third-party presidential candidates, in 1924 and 1948,
respectively. By the time of Wallace’s candidacy, however, the Progressive
Movement as such had died out, having been superseded by the New Deal
liberalism of the 1930s and 1940s. But the association of Wallace and his
supporters with the term progressive may have led to a shift in the word’s
connotation. Wallace’s Progressive Party was at the leftmost flank of the
American political spectrum. The party emerged as an alternative to the
anti-communist Cold War liberalism that had taken hold in the aftermath of
World War II. Unions, the government and other institutions were busy purging
and blacklisting reds and fellow travelers; Wallace’s Progressives welcomed
them. The party’s platform
supported labor rights, attacked Jim Crow and accused Republicans as well as
Democrats of being “the champions of Big Business.”
It seems that after 1948,
progressive signified a politics that is leftier than merely liberal. Historian
Beverly Gage has noted
that around this time, progressive suggested something “more radical … to be a
progressive was suddenly to be a ‘fellow traveler’.” The association of
“progressive” with politics that are firmly to the left lingered for
decades—that’s certainly how I remember the term being used in the 1990s. Think
The Progressive (“peace and social
justice since 1909”), a magazine with politics very similar to those of In
These Times. There’s also the Congressional Progressive
Caucus. Founded in 1991, the organization comprises only the most liberal
members of Congress: over 70 House members and just one senator (who happens to
be—you guessed it—Bernie Sanders).
But while the sense persists
that progressive suggests a hard left politics that falls somewhere between
liberalism and outright communism, the word has also been used to convey
something more moderate. As early as the 1970s, liberalism was in bad odor, and
some liberal politicians were adopting “progressive” as their preferred
euphemism. Writer Rob Hager notes
that Rick Perlstein’s book The Invisible Bridge recounts an early example of
this strategy: when he ran for president in 1976, Rep. Mo Udall called himself
a progressive, not a liberal. As reported in the Milwaukee Sentinel, Udall
openly admitted
that “progressive means the same thing as liberal,” but said he was dropping
the liberal label “because it evokes unfavorable connotations on social issues
and wasteful spending.”
Unlike Udall, the
business-friendly Democrats who rose to power in the 1980s and 1990s had few
ties to traditional liberalism. But they faced a similar problem: what should
they call themselves? Many were allergic to identifying themselves with any
political orientation at all. When he ran for president in 1988, Michael
Dukakis claimed,
“This election isn’t about ideology; it’s about competence” (and look where
that got him). Clearly, these Democrats were centrists, but apparently no
centrist ever likes to call himself one. How could they spice up their bland
blancmange of an ideology by associating it with something cool? Initially,
some of them accurately defined themselves neoliberals,
but that label was quickly abandoned. “New Democrats” and “The Third Way”
worked for a while. But slowly, “progressive” was becoming their preferred
descriptor. Their adoption of the term reeked of bad faith, but it served a
purpose: It’s a happy-talk kind of word that can help launder some really nasty
politics. An early example of the co-opting of the term occurred in 1989, when
the Democratic Leadership Council had the brass to name its think tank the Progressive
Policy Institute.
So far as I can determine,
Barack Obama was the first modern-day Democratic presidential nominee to identify
as a progressive. Interestingly, he did so when left-wing activists
criticized his rightward shift during the 2008 election campaign. Progressive
must poll really well, because after Obama came the great stampede. Political
figures such as Andrew
Cuomo and Rahm
Emanuel, not exactly the guys you’d invite to a meeting of your local
Democratic Socialists of America chapter, have sworn up and down that they are
progressives. Then there’s Hillary Clinton, who’s been running around
describing herself as “a progressive who gets things done.” Note the
condescension implicit in the phrase: so the rest of us are hapless
pie-in-the-sky types who don’t get things done?
Clearly, Clinton’s
self-characterization was meant, at least in part, as a diss aimed at Bernie
Sanders. During primary season, Sanders and Clinton debated the question of who
and what qualifies as progressive. When reporters asked Bernie whether Hillary
is a “true progressive,” he replied,
“I think, frankly, it is hard to be a real progressive and to take on the
establishment in a way that I think has to be taken on, when you come as
dependent as she has through her super PAC and in other ways on Wall Street and
drug-company money.”
At a Democratic debate a few
days later, Clinton was asked to respond. “I am a progressive who gets things
done. And the root of that word, progressive, is progress,” she
said. “A progressive is someone who makes progress.” Well, okay then.
Clinton’s tautological
definition suggests that progressive has become a meaningless term devoid of
ideological content; a signifier that signifies nothing in particular. In that
sense, perhaps it is an apt descriptor after all for triangulating politicians
like Tim Kaine and Hillary Clinton.
Kathleen Geier is a writer and
researcher who has written for The Baffler, The Nation and The Washington
Monthly.
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