which was really a political diatribe, I nevertheless tried to answer the question of where “liberals” got their name. In it, I argued for a continuty between Horace Greeley’s Liberal Republicans in 1876 and the progressive movement. Thinking more about it, though, I realize that some people might think I was making too broad a leap, and that the two movements weren’t directly related. I still stand by my position that that the progressives were the direct heirs of the Lib. Reps., but does anyone here think differently? I’d like to hear your reasoning.
I’m an outsider looking in, and from my limited understanding of the American political system it seems to me that “liberal” is simply Americanese for “left-wing”, with “conservative”, of course, meaning “right-wing”. OTOH, the U.S. is rather unique in that the major difference between right and left is the attitude towards “big government”, so it may be a false analogy.
Captain, I think your discussion rocks. I can’t actually answer your question about the direct link (or lack thereof between Lib Republicans and progressives b/c I don’t know enough about US political history. But I thought I’d mention that there are British parallels to the phases you describe. The shift from classical liberalism (freedom as laissez-faire) to the more proactive sense of liberalism (government helps promote freedom) was promoted by T.H. Green and other “advanced Liberals” the 1860s. At that time the Liberal Party in Britain was very anti-government if somewhat provincial in outlook. But by the 1900s the Liberal Party began calling themselves “New Liberals”; they became the party of progressive taxation, social safety net policies, etc. (I don’t think anti-monopoly legislation was as big a thing, though). Eventually though, these kind of policies became the province of the Labor party and the Liberal party died away.
What’s confusing about the term “liberal” in the US now is that it means both of these things at once. Free-traders are “neo-liberals” (from the classical phase), while lefties like Ralph Nader are “liberals” in the sense that goes back to your progressive turn-of-the-century examples. So Alessan, most conservatives are neo-liberals (as are many “centrist” Democrats). But left-liberals are never neo-liberals. Go figure…
When used to describe politicians, though, it is almost always interpreted to mean the “left-wing pinko commie” variety.
Back in 1989, I had a political science class with a professor whose own political views were decidedly left-of-center. She told me about a poll she (or her colleagues) had conducted on behalf of Gallup or one of those other agencies, regarding the Bush/Dukakis presidential election. One of the questions she asked was, “Did George Bush’s branding of Michael Dukakis as a ‘liberal’ influence your opinion of Dukakis?”
93% said “Yes.”
Of those 93%, the overwhelming majority said it had a negative impact on their opinion of Dukakis. Even though Dukakis was part of the Democratic Party, which is the slightly-more-left-of-center of the two major American political parties.
I don’t know how representative her sample was of the nation as a whole, but it didn’t seem unreasonable to assume that a heck of a lot of American voters felt the same was as the ones she polled.
The way to differentiate is that those of us who would now call ourselves libertarians would best be referred to as classical liberals. The Enlightenment ideas that influenced the Declaration of Independence and Constitution would certainly be rather liberal at the end of the 18th century (as the reactionaries were into the divine right of kings).
I agree with Captain Amazing. I’m not a history or political scholar, but I was always taught that a liberal is a person that sees the constitution as an ever changing, evolving document, and a conservative is one who believes in the strict interpretation of it.
