Words matter because they mean something, but these meanings change, both naturally and artificially, which can mislead. This rant is about a few political terms, both their history and their current meaning. It’s going to be dry, pedantic, and yet desperately incomplete. The focus is on liberalism, especially on distinguishing it from progressivism and populism.
In the 19th century, liberalism referred to what we would now call classical liberalism; we added the “classical” after the fact to differentiate it from what came later, much as acoustic guitars only came into being as a back-formation after electric guitars made the distinction necessary.
Classical liberalism was an extension of the views of people like John Locke and Adam Smith, with a heavy emphasis on unfettered markets and civil liberties. By that point, it had lapsed into what we would recognize as conservatism, but was still tempered by some left-leaning, socially-conscious elements baked into its core. For example, Smith himself wrote in favor of a living wage on pragmatic, as opposed to compassionate, grounds.
At the tail end of the 19th century and into the start of the 20th, we went through the Progressive Era. Progressivism, true to its name, was based on seeking immediate improvements for everyone who mattered through broad social changes led by government activism. It had its heart in the right place, mostly, but its head was often in the clouds. While many of the changes that were ushered in under the banner of progressivism represented actual progress, there were also blunders.
The core failure of progressivism was that, in its fervor, it violated the maxim of the Hippocratic Oath to “first, do no harm”. It focused on the potential for improvement without sufficient concern about the harm that could be caused. A good example of this was the Temperance Movement that led to Prohibition. It also suffered from lingering racism, which is perhaps best demonstrated by its enthusiastic support for eugenics.
Under the influence of progressivism and socialism, yet still distinct from either, liberalism continued to evolve towards a viewpoint that recognized the legitimate role of government in addressing socioeconomic issues while retaining a commitment to a regulated market economy as the means to that end. It leaned to the left by caring about the people instead of treating their misery as unavoidable, and in supporting positive rights, not just negative freedoms. This was both the culmination of the liberal tradition and a break from what it had become.
This new liberalism was called, variously, social liberalism and social justice liberalism. Today, we call it modern liberalism or—in America—just plain liberalism. Elsewhere in the world, liberalism has largely retained its previous meaning, leading to some confusion. Insert the obvious joke here about countries separated by a common language.
FDR, whose New Deal epitomized American liberalism as we know it today, made an intentional choice in embracing liberalism while avoiding other left-wing views, such as progressivism and Marxism. Modern liberalism was, from its start, a moderate stance that rejected revolutionism and extremism. This was and remains a defining characteristic.
Keep in mind that, at this time, the Russian Revolution was still fresh, the USSR had been our ally in WWII, and the USSR’s Marxism-Leninism was naively imagined to be true to Marxist Socialism; a workers’ paradise. It wasn’t until 1947 that the American left collectively saw through the Soviet totalitarian disaster and rejected communism.
Or at least most of it did. American socialism split into Russophobe and Russophile camps. The former rebranded as pro-labor (union) liberals, which are effectively non-Marxist socialists, while the latter doubled down, continuing to call themselves socialists or even communists.
The -phobes accepted that Marxism-Leninism was bad, even by Marxist criteria, and distanced themselves from the Rodina. They understood that totalitarianism in Marxist trappings was still totalitarianism.
The -philes didn’t care; they loved Russia—and hated America—more than the Marxist principles they so loudly claimed to support. They chose Marxism-Leninism over Marxism, which made them Soviet-style communists, not socialists in a broader sense. This is why American socialists continue to favor Russia, even after it dropped its USSR branding and any pretense of Marxism, and why they are tankies who ironically call themselves anti-imperialist.
Of course, it was also around this time that, spurred by the global spread of communism, the right latched onto red-baiting through the Second Red Scare. This persecution led to McCarthyism and tarnished the socialist brand for decades, largely unfairly. Up until then, Soviet communism was still seen as a legitimate thing, at least by the left, and there was little stigma associated with socialism or even communism.
For that matter, until WWII, fascism and even Naziism were entirely legitimate as political positions in America, even overtly under those names. Clearly, the Overton window was wide open. Hitler and Mussolini ruined that brand, but bad ideas never go away, they just find fresh labels.
In America, those who supported the goals of fascism and claimed to espouse (classical) liberalism recognized that they had a brand crisis. They knew that they couldn’t endorse fascism openly anymore and had lost the war over the meaning of liberalism. Some wanted to sell their ideas as classical liberalism, but the ones who mattered were not content to distinguish themselves from their enemies with a mere adjective.
They also needed to cook up a plausible ideological basis for conveniently arriving at the same desired outcomes as fascism—a strictly hierarchical society absent any remorse for those who are dealt a losing hand—without the same stated premises.
The trick was back-formation: putting together a system that wrapped itself in the flag of individualism and made property rights supreme, espousing market fundamentalism as the cure for a caring nation. Thus they weaponized the notions of freedom and liberty into political tools against the welfare state by attacking the fundamental legitimacy of the government and pandering to selfishness by demonizing taxation.
So, in 1947 (clearly a busy year for political change) at a resort near Mont Pèlerin, right-wing economists crafted this new ideology by taking classical liberalism and methodically stripping it of all the sane elements that had allowed it to evolve into modern liberalism. This purer, more vicious form of laissez-faire capitalism still needed a name, so they did what any lover of property rights would do: they stole it from the befuddled left-anarchists of Europe, who were called libertarians.
Libertarianism joined with traditional conservatism and anti-communism to form the Republican Party’s Movement Conservatism, whose stated goal was to oppose the liberalism of the New Deal. In the 1970’s, after the Southern Strategy took advantage of the Civil Rights Movement to send the formerly-Democratic bigots of the South into the waiting arms of the Republicans, they covered their support for continuing racist segregation by embracing anti-abortion as a dog-whistle wedge issue and generally wrapping themselves in the Bible, rebranding as the Religious Right.
The Religious Right joined the Movement and got behind Nixon, who nearly spoiled the Republican brand by being such an obvious crook. Reagan rescued the brand by making conservatism seem more compassionate. At the same time, he viciously attacked liberalism, turning the term into a slur. In reaction, many liberals—tired of the abuse—abandoned the now-tainted term and retreated behind the label of progressivism.
This new-again term has since been hijacked by a group that attacks liberalism from the other flank; the populist left extremists who had long rejected the liberals for being center-left and therefore too moderate. The socialist populists embraced progressivism as a term, since almost nobody ever wants to admit to populism, and also dusted off socialism, which had gained some cachet since its decline, precisely because it had grown to have an air of the forbidden. There are both parallels and inconsistencies with the historical usages.
Like the progressives of old, these populists who now call themselves progressives are political extremists espousing bold, foolhardy changes. Like the socialists of old, these populists who now call themselves socialists are Marxists who maintain a laser-beam focus on economic equality and class warfare while overlooking social equality and the fight against bigotry, which they deride as mere identity politics. Like the nationalist populists on the right, these populists (who generally deny being populists or nationalists) are isolationists who put America first while rejecting our leadership role in the world and would redefine the nation in terms of the subset that they believe truly represents it; mostly, straight white men.
What makes them populists is the emphasis on purity and extremism in the name of the common folk and the concomitant opposition to objective truth, competence, and expertise. The boring, centrist experts who keep the country afloat with carefully-crafted policies that are arrived at through compromise are derided as “the establishment” and considered inherently corrupt. Only left-populist edgelords qualify as worthy of their support.
As a result of their anti-intellectual core, they are ignorant about these words and their past, so they don’t seem to understand that progressivism is forever tainted by its history of overkill, or that socialism could mean either social democracy (like Sweden) or democratic socialism (like Cuba). They don’t recognize how their alt-left populism mirrors that of the alt-right. In fact, they see nothing odd about attacking the DNC in the primaries in exactly the same way that the Tea Party attacked—and conquered—the RNC. This is their stated goal: to take over the party by throwing out the liberals.
Today, the people who call themselves progressives most loudly are these socialist populists, but plenty of liberals continue to hide behind the term out of habit and cowardice, inadvertently providing cover. The populism of the left, as exemplified by Bernie Sanders, has joined with the equal and opposite populism of the right, as exemplified by Donald Trump, to subvert democracy in America and establish a radical backsliding into the very things that classical progressivism opposed.
And that’s how we got here.
