Could I ask a small favor? Could we either retire the adjective “progressive” whenever it is used in a political context or, if not, could we apply it more universally? Confused? Stay tuned.
To be sure, the word has a lengthy history In American politics. That history stretches back to the early days of the twentieth century when the original progressive movement came into being. While anything but universal, this movement was a bipartisan affair with each major party sprouting a progressive wing. Think Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, and Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat.
In 1912 ex-President Roosevelt called into being a Progressive party in his failed third party effort to reclaim the White House. The winner, of course, was Woodrow Wilson, then a mildly progressive Democrat, who would soon transform himself into a very progressive president.
Wisconsin Senator Robert LaFollette revived the Progressive party label before running and losing in 1924. Better than two decades later another midwesterner, Henry Wallace of Iowa, led yet another failed Progressive party effort to defeat a liberal Democrat by the name of Harry Truman in 1948.
To date, three strikes and out has been story of our Progressive parties. In fact, following the Wallace campaign, small “p” progressives were pretty much nowhere to be found. New Dealers had been liberals, not progressives. The same goes for Harry Truman’s Fair Dealers. For that matter, “liberal” remained the standard issue descriptor for Democrats at least until the days of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
By the 1970s liberalism appeared to have exhausted itself. The New Deal of FDR was well in the rear view mirror. Truman’s Fair Deal had been cut short by the Korean War. Kennedy’s New Frontier was eliminated by assassination, while the Great Society was overtaken by the war in Vietnam.
With the midwest again in ascendance and liberalism in increasing disrepute and disarray, a pro-Vietnam War liberal Democrat (Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota) barely lost in 1968, and an anti-war liberal Democrat (George McGovern of South Dakota) was crushed in 1972.
The last Democrat elected when Democrats were routinely called liberals was Jimmy Carter. As president, Carter proved to be less than sufficiently liberal, not to mention less than sufficiently competent. After holding off a challenge from the liberal lion of the senate, Ted Kennedy, Carter proceeded to lose his bid for re-election to a one-time liberal Democrat who had transformed himself into a conservative Republican.
In the aftermath of that political earthquake, liberals and liberalism were on their way to political extinction within the Democratic party. Not immediately, to be sure. Remember the techno-liberal Michael Dukakis?
The Massachusetts governor was followed by the governor of Arkansas, New Democrat Bill Clinton, who managed to sell himself as a moderate. No longer a liberal, he had not yet evolved into a full-blown progressive.
After Clinton came Al Gore and John Kerry. Each was caught somewhere in the middle of the ongoing evolution from liberal to progressive, and neither had the appeal of “Slick Willie.” Then came Barack Obama. Since his arrival on the national political scene, it’s been progressive Democrats pursuing progressive agendas 24/7. By and large, this rhetorical shift has worked wonders for the party at all levels of electoral politics.
Learning from history, Democrats have not stopped to rename themselves the Progressive party. But then why should they bother? By choice and default, theirs is the party of self-described progressives.
This ballot box success shouldn’t be surprising. Turning out the vote has always been a Democratic talent. And, almost by definition, progress must be a good thing. After all, who could possibly be opposed to progress? Only stodgy, stick-in-the-mud conservatives, that’s who.
Clearly, there has been no need to create yet another progressive party when today’s Democratic party can sell itself to the voters as the one and only party of progress and progressives.
And the Republicans? Long gone are those liberal Republicans who called themselves, guess what, liberal Republicans. Remember Senators Jacob Javits of New York and Charles Percy of Illinois? One of the last of that nearly extinct breed might well have been another Minnesotan, Senator Dave Durenberger, who tried to horn in on the current Democratic monopoly of the term with a book titled When Republicans were Progressive, which was written shortly before his recent passing.
Today’s GOP is populated by conservatives and libertarians, each of many varieties. There are also main street Republicans, country club Republicans, and MAGA Republicans–or those an ex-liberal-turned-progressive by the name of Hillary Clinton deems to be in serious need of some serious deprogramming. There are, however, no liberal—and no progressive—Republicans.
And yet there should be. Actually, pretty much anyone could be referred to as a progressive or, better yet, no one should be called a progressive. (Here comes the “stay tuned” part.) The key question for anyone who wishes to be called “progressive” ought to be this: What is it that I want my community, state, country and world to be progressing toward?
Instead of hiding behind the term “progressive,” we should think and speak much more directly—and even much more dogmatically—about issues and goals, especially goals. Really now, virtually everyone sentient and walking about is a dogmatist of one sort or another when it comes to goals, especially political goals.
That lengthy list should even include the late Senator Diane Feinstein, who haughtily dismissed Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett for permitting “the dogma” to “live loudly within” her.
Justice Barrett is hardly alone. Even those who think no one should be dogmatic, or those who claims to disdain all dogmas, or someone like Senator Feinstein who presumes that only her opponents are dogmatic, is operating on the basis of some sort of a dogma or dogmas.
English author G. K. Chesterton offered a slight refinement on this. For him, there were two kinds of dogmatists: those such as himself, who freely admitted that that was precisely what they were—and those who failed—or refused—to admit as much.
More than that, Chesterton thought that no one had any business appropriating the term “progressive” in the second place without possessing a “definite creed” in the first place. In fact, the more definite the creed, the more clear-eyed the commitment to progress.
The creed, of course, could be a secular creed or a religious creed or some combination of the two. But Chesterton’s larger point stands: only those think and operate on the basis of definite ideas, creeds, and/or dogmas deserve the title of progressive.
Which is all the more reason to either abandon the term or universalize it. The question that each of us has to ask ourselves is this: What do I want to progress towards and why?
Politicians and would-be politicians have a particular charge here. In addition to asking themselves that question, they need to spell out their dogmas and goals. More than that, they need to state their end game. Getting away with disguising oneself as nothing more than a “progressive” should never carry the day.
Really now, just what is the end game of modern American progressives? Karl Marx had an end game in mind. He was serious enough to contemplate it and honest enough to state it. Are modern progressives as honest and serious? If so, what is their end game?
Is it the end of the United States? Is it some sort of world government? Is it the nationalization of pretty much everything?
Among the original progressives, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson both sought to march the country toward an ever-expanding and ever more powerful central government run ever more effectively (they presumed) by disinterested experts (they also presumed). Yours Truly, on the other hand, would like to return to the original vision of the founders, meaning a government of limited and divided powers.
There, having stated a key piece of my vision of an American future, mark me down as dogmatist and a progressive. In other words, consider me to be a progressive who thinks that the original progressive vision is in serious need of progressive reform.
In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that a reincarnated Roosevelt, but probably not Woodrow Wilson, would likely agree with me. Roosevelt would be opposed to a politicized bureaucracy, let alone much of today’s progressive social agenda. Therefore, mark TR down as a progressive then and a progressive now, given what he sought to progress toward then and what he would likely be inclined to progress away from today.
In any case, all of us dogmatists, and, therefore, all of us progressives, can debate such matters as we lay out our various visions and specific, even ultimate goals. But before we do any of that, let’s first agree that we are all dogmatists and, therefore, we are all potentially well-positioned to be progressives of one sort or another. And then, while we’re at it, let’s strike such weasel words as “progress” and “progressive” from our political vocabularies and confine its use to pretty much anything and everything else.
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The featured image is a photograph of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt (circa 1904), and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.