Nobody Here Buy Us Progressives Liberals throw away labels that used to proudly wear, like Hillary announcing that she is not a liberal, but a progressive.
If progressives have given us progress, then we should ask for a refund. Change is not always good. The Twentieth Century should have shown all decent people that progress is as likely to be bad as to be good.
What have we learned from the Democrat debates? Well, one thing that we have learned is that Hillary Clinton is not a “liberal.” She is a “progressive.” Leftists play with labels and language all the time. When was the last time you heard a politician get up and say “I am a liberal, and proud of that label?” But isn’t Hillary very much a liberal? Does she not proclaim proudly those issues most associated with modern liberalism? Of course she does!
Then why the problem being called a “liberal”? Sixty percent of Americans, according to every bi-partisan Battleground Poll in the last five and a half years, call themselves “conservative” or “very conservative.” Only about thirty-seven percent call themselves “liberal” or “very liberal.” What about the “moderate” so beloved of punditry? Only one or two percent of Americans, given that as one of their choices, choose that. Only one or two percent of Americans, given choice of “undecided” as one of their choices in the Battleground Poll, choose “undecided.”
Besides just polls, Americans have evaluated the political ideology the way we have been brought up to think of it, and they have overwhelmingly rejected “liberal,” “very liberal,” “moderate,” and “undecided” for either “conservative” or “very conservative.”
Americans have also seen how the Great Society was not so “Great,” the New Deal was not such a good “Deal,” and how every entitlement and every bureaucracy has an inherent life of its own, independent of budget constraints or common sense. All of those were “gifts” of liberalism, which liberalism dared call itself by its old name.
That old name, “liberalism,” never fit. It is connected with the Latin word for liberty, which is the last thing, in any area of life, that modern liberals want. School choice? No! Lower taxes? No! Right to work? No! Right to pray in school? No! Right to smoke outside a café? No! Right to use your land the way you want? No! Liberalism resembles the Soviet Union in the Security Council, and the infamous Ambassador Nyet! (Meaning that anything the democracies could agree upon, the Soviet Union would oppose.)
So in this age in which history seems to have vanished, those politicians once known as “liberals” are now “progressives.” Great. Let us here their notion of progress. Do they believe that the spiraling trend of sexually transmitted diseases is progress? Do they believe that allowing misogynist Moslems to create thousands of communities within America is progress? How about when the first American Moslem girl is a victim of “honor killing,” because she was raped – would that qualify as progress?
Is the increasing burden of entitlements and national debt which we are leaving to our grandchildren progress? When three quarters of their income goes to support us in our old age, will that be progress? What about when they revolt against this generational slavery and we have to get off our eighty year old behinds and take orders at McDonald’s – will that be progress?
Bruce Walker has been a published author in print and in electronic media since 1990. He is a regular contributor to WebCommentary, Conservative Truth, American Daily, Enter Stage Right, Intellectual Conservative, NewsByUs and MenŐs News Daily. His first book, Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie by Outskirts Press was published in January 2006.
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