martybegan
Diamond Member
- Apr 5, 2010
- 84,036
- 34,939
A liberal by any other name is still a liberalHey, it's your label. Show me that it actually exists in today's world. And how those people live so long.
You deny left leaning people consider themselves "progressive"?
I actually call them progressive statists. The more hip term these days is democratic socialist.
"Democratic Socialist" at least has a shred of definition, via Bernie Sanders. "Progressive" is a term from the turn of the 19th/20th century that has long faded into history.
What you just used above was "progressive" the adjective. Anything that includes progress is "progressive". At base it means "not static". But your original term was 'Progressive" the noun, to wit: "progressives can't let that happen". And that, sir, is a label.
A label which I might add I've been challenging anyone and everyone to define on this board outside of its 1890-1920 usage, which no one has ever addressed.
Now me, I don't use terms I can't define....
If you use the term progressive today, most people automatically know what you are talking about.
The SJW, big government types that infest the democratic party.
If you think government is the solution to pretty much everything, you are a progressive.
If you think 1st amendment free speech protections have limits beyond fighting words and "yelling fire in a theater" you are a progressive.
If you follow identity politics from a leftist bent, you are a progressive.
It's actually quite easy to define if you actually put some effort into it.
What they are no longer is "liberal" in the classical sense.
First off I'll readily agree that nothing on that list is "Liberal". But the question was "Progressive".
"Most people know what you're talking about" obviously falls on its face as definition. Most of what you've given as examples here are activist leftist stances. If that's what you actually mean --- and I don't know yet if it is but if so --- why not just say that instead of trying to recycle a hundred-year-old already-used different term? That just results in a single term meaning two disparate things.
The problem with this sort of vague terminology is it's weasel-wording. If you charge in without an established definition, you can retroactively plug in (or remove) any trait you want after the fact if it turns out to be convenient or inconvenient to have done so.
So given the only definitions we have, if we're not referring to the corpse of Jane Addams, by "Progressive" you must be describing "people who desire things to improve". That's all we have to go on, and it ain't exactly scary. It should include --- everybody.
Any liberal who wants to skirt around the 1st amendment is not a liberal.