I’m a liberal, not a progressive
Remember this from elementary school geometry?
A square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square?
Keep this in mind. I’m going to circle back to this.
I made the following tweet defending Joe Biden:
To which someone replied:
In which I had to clarify:
And lo and behold, this post.
Progressives and liberals share a lot of things in common. We’re supportive of the idea of the welfare state, a mixed economy, individual rights, and human rights. We’re on the quest for a more fair, equal, and just society with a government that acts accordingly. We share a distrust of unencumbered capitalism and support of social democracy, albeit to varying degrees.
The differences come in how to achieve said goals.
I would say as a liberal — well, as someone that holds modern and classical liberal views — that there’s a limit as to how much we accept paternalism as public policy. Liberals, for the most part, also don’t completely embrace tribalism. Just as we’re not inclined to believe the free market is a panacea for all human needs, we’re also not believers in government being the end all, be all for all society’s socioeconomic problems.
Progressives are more idealistic and emotional; liberals are more pragmatic and logical. Progressives may resent this — throwing around pejoratives such as “neoliberal” and “incrementalism”, however, modern liberals (and to a degree, classical liberals) have been consistently spent long stretches on defense after short bursts of offense and understand the necessity of the stars aligning in each of the three branches of government to make a breakthrough that actually holds up over time.
This makes me think of a quote from late New York Senator Pat Moynihan of New York — that the central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself; the central conservative truth is that culture, not politics, determines the success of a society. (For the record, the actual quote is in reverse.) Liberals, both modern and classical, believe in the former part — even if there’s disagreement on the activism of government. Progressives, on the other hand, actually believe in both.
It’s a key difference that has been illuminated over the past few years, especially with the rise of the incumbent as the first populist president ever elected in the United States, over 120 years after William Jennings Bryan’s failure. Progressives embraced populist us-versus-them rhetoric and advocated for a level of paternalism that a good chunk of us in the Democratic Party are still not completely willing to embrace.
Identifying these differences is not exactly a criticism. For the most part — and this goes back to the square and rectangle analogy that I opened with — we fight for the same causes. However, tribalism, paternalism, and to some degree, purism, are still characteristics that are an antithesis to who we are and what we believe in as liberals.
However, what has been frustrating over the years is the media-driven narrative that “progressive” and “liberal” can be used interchangeably. I get why; the word “liberal” was so badly poisoned by conservative rhetoric in the 1980s, it was a passé term by the 1990s, replaced by “progressive”. I’ll admit; in my younger days, I would use those terms synonymously. However, after the 2016 election, I started to embrace the term a little bit more; by last year, I’ve been describing myself as such because I realized that I shouldn’t be bothered by the manufactured stigma of a label. It’s not a pejorative.
But a difference — and let me reiterate, this is not meant to be negative — exists between us. So much so that it is a disservice to liberals and progressives to lump us together. Very liberal should not mean progressive. Yet, trying to get journalists, activists, and even voters to completely recognize the distinction in the way it should be is quite difficult, but not impossible.
So, in closing, I guess I could be sum things up as follows: a progressive can be a liberal, but a liberal is not as likely to be a progressive.
