What does it mean to be a "progressive"?

Submitted by gjohnsit on Fri, 09/06/2019 - 4:13pm

ThinkProgress got shut down today.

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ThinkProgress, the influential news site that rose to prominence in the shadow of the Bush administration and helped define progressivism during the Obama years, is shutting down.

In case you weren't aware, ThinkProgress is owned by the Center for American Progress Action Fund (CAP Action).
CAP Action is headed by Neera Tanden, and one of its major initiatives is "The Moscow Project".
Neera is a neoliberal centrist who served as an advisor to Hillary Clinton, and Russiagate is an establishment project.
Remember when Hillary Clinton called herself a progressive in 2016?

"I'm a progressive who gets results and I will be a progressive president who gets results," she said.

How about when Barack Obama called himself a progressive in 2008?

“Look, let me talk about the broader issue, this whole notion that I am shifting to the center,” he told a crowd gathered at a town hall-style meeting in this Atlanta suburb. “The people who say this apparently haven’t been listening to me.”

“I am someone who is no doubt progressive,” he said, adding that he believed in universal health care and that government had a strong role to play in overseeing financial institutions and cracking down on abuses in bankruptcies and the like.

And now Joe Biden is a progressive.

"I'm told I get criticized by the 'New Left,' " Biden told the audience. "I have the most progressive record of anybody running for the ... anybody who would run."

If these three, plus Neera, are a good example of "progressive", then progressive means neoliberal, corporatist, center-right warhawk.
I don't want to be called a progressive.
Bernie Sanders doesn't call himself a progressive, but he did call Obama a progressive. He calls himself a democratic socialist.

Let's not forget The Progressive Policy Institute. They've got progressive right in their name.

The Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank that grew out of the party’s pro-business wing in the 1980s and ’90s, received $50,000 from Exxon Mobil in 2018 via its parent organization, the Third Way Foundation, according to the oil giant’s 2018 Worldwide Giving Report.
...Itai Vardi reported at DeSmog this summer that Phil Goldberg, director of PPI’s Center for Civil Justice, has come out swinging against climate lawsuits being brought by cities and states against fossil fuel companies. The law firm at which Goldberg is a partner — Shook, Hardy & Bacon — defended the tobacco industry for decades and was the inspiration for the fictional firm Smoot, Hawking in the 2005 film “Thank You For Smoking.”

Given all of these examples you would think that "progressive" would be an apt label for the establishment.
Yet the establishment is trying to block progressive insurgent candidates.

the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee — controlled by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer — is reportedly taking the policy of its House counterpart "one step further" by undermining progressive candidates attempting to flip Republican-held seats.

Schumer also famously predicted that “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

So maybe progressive means whatever you want it to mean. Which makes it meaningless.

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Submitted by gjohnsit on Fri, 09/06/2019 - 5:14pm

Repubs going after Social Security

Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa is under fire after telling a town hall audience last weekend that members of Congress should negotiate changes to Social Security "behind closed doors" in order to dodge scrutiny from the media and advocacy groups.

Ernst, who is running for reelection in 2020, complained to the crowd gathered in Estherville, Iowa that "the minute you say we need to address Social Security, the media is hammering you, the opposing party is hammering you—there goes granny over a cliff."

"The GOP wants to cut our earned Social Security benefits—and they want to do it behind closed doors so that they don't have to pay the political price."
—Nancy Altman, Social Security Works

Lawmakers should therefore meet in secret to avoid "being scrutinized by this group or the other," said the Iowa Republican.

Ernst did not recommend specific changes to Social Security during her town hall appearance, but the senator has in the past suggested privatization of the widely popular program as "one solution."

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Submitted by ovals49 on Fri, 09/06/2019 - 5:19pm

Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - - that's all."
(Through the Looking Glass, Chapter 6)

When Progressives-In-Name-Only get lots of air time under the banner of “PROGRESSIVE”, they not only get to redefine the common understanding of the word, they also besmirch the word by their hypocritical actions, thereby denying actual progressives the ability to use the original meaning of the word to describe themselves as “progressive.”

It’s a win-win for the abusers of the language.

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Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all."
- John Maynard Keynes

Submitted by Le Frog on Fri, 09/06/2019 - 5:31pm

Actual LOL at the memory of that nonsense being used as a campaign talking point, thank you! The sheer arrogance of announcing that she (allegedly) got things done and expecting that to persuade and motivate voters to support her boggles the mind.

Anyway, for anyone interested, Judd Legum shared his thoughts about ThinkProgress folding (sorry, I'm on mobile with spotty Internet):
https://mobile.twitter.com/juddlegum/status/1170033721627594752

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Submitted by Wally on Fri, 09/06/2019 - 6:18pm
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Both fine investigative reporters with The Intercept now, they both got started at CAP . . .

PS: How come twitter embeds display differently now? Since yesterday, it seems. No media graphics/gifs etc.

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Submitted by HenryAWallace on Fri, 09/06/2019 - 6:56pm

Sixties. For others, it means incrementalism. For still others, it's a hoodwink.

https://caucus99percent.com/content/liberals-must-not-say-liberal-left-p...

I believe that Can't Stop the Macedonian Signal did an essay about this recently.

How weird is it that Obama denies going toward the center out of one side of his mouth and then says he would have been considered a moderate Republican in the 1980s? (Ya know who was considered a moderate Republican in the 1980s? Reagan.)

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Submitted by travelerxxx on Fri, 09/06/2019 - 7:42pm
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"Ahh, ya doesn't has to call me Johnson! You can call me Ray, or you can call me Jay, or you can call me Johnny or you can call me Sonny, or you can call me RayJay, or you can call me RJ... but ya doesn't hafta call me Johnson."

For years I've watched as the far right (especially), and now even the not-quite-as-far-right have conducted a withering attack on language. My observations of the first years of the Rush Limbaugh radio program were my first big hint as to what was happening. Limbaugh was on the cutting edge of this attack in those early years. Perhaps he still is, but the impact is lessened. Others, some pure fascists such as Mark Levin, have probably left Rush in the dust. Levin is particularly dangerous as nearly every sentence he utters contains at least one lie.

The first word I recall being attacked was the word "liberal." I watched as the word "liberal" was equated with child molesters, serial killers, etc. There was never any pushback. There still isn't that I notice.

I used to look back at the progressives of the late 1800's and early 1900's and consider that I could be grouped with them. The word was too malleable, though. Right-wing Democrats ruined the word as much as fascist Republicans did.

For me, I don't want a label on me that can be easily smeared. That means I need one that is already so smeared that it can't be smeared any further without the language-changers showing their hand.

Call me a socialist. I may not fit every definition of one, but I'll take it. Using it leaves my enemies with no ammunition. Good.

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Submitted by on the cusp on Fri, 09/06/2019 - 8:36pm

with very strong socialist tendencies.
My law school classmates called me straight commie. That was in the early 80's. This is nothing new for me.

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

Submitted by davidgmillsatty on Sun, 09/08/2019 - 1:04pm

@on the cusp I have just decided when people ask me I tell them I don't really know much about meaningless labels. I tell them that all I know is that I take the part in the preamble to the Constitution regarding promoting the general welfare very seriously. The founders meant what they said.

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Submitted by UntimelyRippd on Fri, 09/06/2019 - 8:56pm

http://www.fightingbobfest.info

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Submitted by ban nock on Fri, 09/06/2019 - 9:05pm

They love busting on Trump because it's a lot easier to blame symptoms than the disease. Think Progress? Good luck with that. I hate blatantly opinionated "news" sources. You start reading expecting to learn something new and realize you're being fed a bunch of opinionated pap, no thanks.

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Submitted by Battle of Blair... on Fri, 09/06/2019 - 10:11pm

It meant standing up for the working class, supporting unions, fighting banksters.
It didn't mean socialism or capitalism. Left or right. It recognized class warfare and took the side of the working class.

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Submitted by Azazello on Fri, 09/06/2019 - 11:31pm
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It's enough to give Wittgenstein a headache.
I identify as a progressive.
I know what I mean by that and everybody else does too.
Healthcare vs. Warfare, the Working Stiff vs. the Bosses.

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We wanted decent healthcare, a living wage and free college.
The Democrats gave us Biden and war instead.

Submitted by tle on Sat, 09/07/2019 - 9:13am

but I'd also be fine with "democratic Democrat". Too bad that that phrase is still an oxymoron.

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Submitted by Jonathan Larson on Mon, 09/09/2019 - 2:46pm

I started to call myself a progressive. I had just finished reading Robert La Follette's autobiography and was very impressed. He was the Progressive Party's presidential candidate in 1924. If he called himself a progressive, I would too.

I am near-furious that a corrupt, warmongering POS like Hillary Clinton has done her best to besmirch the term so now I call myself a La Follette Progressive. It doesn't help much here in the United States of Amnesia where almost no one knows what the real Progressive movement was like, but it helps me feel better.

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