WHAT IS A "PROGRESSIVE"?
By the way, "paleoliberal" is not, I think, the term with which people with views like those of Kerry and Edwards prefer to describe themselves-- nor "liberal" either. The new label is "progressive." And I don't like it.

The core, the word-within-the-word, of course, is "progress." Progress is a motion-word, moving somewhere, moving "forward." But that begs the question: progress towards what? The word suggests that those who are not "progressive" are "regressive," they want to move "backward." As if Republicans wanted to turn the clock back.

But of course, it is not the Republicans who want to turn the clock back, it is the Democrats. They want to turn it back, depending on who you ask, at least to the (pre-Bush) 1990s, or maybe to the 1960s, or the 1970s. This is not just a charge from one of their opponents (me)-- they admit it themselves. Dean openly regretted not only the Bush years but even much of what happened in the Clinton years; and the Reagan years, I suppose, go without saying.

It used to be, if you were happy with the trend of history and wanted to advance it, you were a liberal; if you disliked the trend and wanted to stop it or turn it around (like William Buckley, who aspired to put the National Review "athwart history, yelling 'Stop!'") you were a conservative. But then the conservatives took power and changed the trend, and history began "progressing," so to speak, in a Republican direction, or rather in a "conservative" direction-- although suddenly our terms are betraying us here, again. What do you call a conservative who does not want to "conserve" the system as it is, who, on the contrary, wants change? How long can we live with terminology that forces us to speak of the career of Reagan in the paradoxical language of the "Conservative Revolution?"

In view of all this, a few months ago I was plotting a bit of word-play of my own. Conservatives have splintered into neoconservative, theoconservative, free-market conservative-- these are recognized terms in the press. (Also paleoconservative, but let's put them to one side: I don't like them.) Each wants to "conserve" something, perhaps-- neocons, American power, theocons, the Christian faith, free-marketeers, property rights-- but each of these lines of thought also envisions far-reaching changes in, nay transformations of, society. If you put them all together-- if you're a neocon, a theocon, and a free-marketeer all at once!-- the ideology that results is not the least bit conservative; rather, quite revolutionary.

So I, too, wanted to appropriate the term "progress" for my cause: progress towards a society where religious freedom broke the bands of secularist rigidity and the passion of belief infused public life; progress towards a more thoroughly capitalist society where education, immigration, foreign trade were governed by markets and not bureaucrats; progress towards a strong America that upheld and advanced liberty bravely at home and abroad. What do you get when you cross a neocon, a theocon, and a free-marketeer? I hoped to redefine a word like "progressive" to signify the answer to that question.

So imagine my dismay when I discovered that the liberals had pre-empted me by rebranding themselves "progressives"! Now, I'll admit that 1) my neologistic strategy was probably never very realistic, and 2) the term "liberal" was always an anomalous one, since outside the US "liberal" means a free-marketeer or a libertarian (The Economist is a quintessentially "liberal" magazine in this sense.)

But can we really let the liberals (so called for now) get away with renaming themselves "progressives" when progress has been going in the other direction for the past twenty-five years, and when many members of their constituency, the environmentalists for example, are quite definitely "standing athwart history, yelling 'Stop!'"? Surely not.

Conservatives should boycott and sabotage the word "progressive." But what should we call them instead? For Kerry, the term "paleoliberal" is just about perfect; "populist" would fit Edwards; but in general... ? The best term, really, would be "Social Democrat." But they would never settle for that. Liberals had to work quite hard to turn "liberal" into a term of abuse in America. Anything with "social" in it would be poison right away.