# Should we discard the political label "progressive"? I say no **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [December 7, 2008, 12:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-discard-the-political-label-progressive-i-say-no/476069 "2008-12-07T00:17:51Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2008, 12:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-discard-the-political-label-progressive-i-say-no/476069/1 "2008-12-07T00:17:51Z")
In [this recent article,](http://www.newamerica.net/publications/articles/2008/it_ok_be_liberal_again_instead_progressive_8448) political commentator Michael Lind argues that “progressives” should drop that label and start calling themselves “liberals” again – revive that once-honorable name, instead of trying to distance themselves from the RW’s demonization of it by rebranding. Reasons given: 1. It’s futile – the RW is going to bash the center-left based on its policies, whatever name it uses. 2. [Neoliberals](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberal) have tried to appropriate the name “progressive” for themselves, which makes it rather confusing. 3. Radical leftists – socialists and Communists of various stripes – have done the same. 4. There is also risk of confusion with the [early 20th-Century Progressives,](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_movement) whose politics were substantially different from all of the above. 5. The word “progressive” is “too German,” deriving as it does from Germany’s bureaucratically-oriented 19th-Century _Deustche Fortschrittspartei_ (the word _Fortschritt_ means "progress), whereas liberalism proper is rooted in values and civil liberties, not state action. 6. The most interesting objection: The world “progressive” implies “progress,” which is not necessarily a liberal value. > [@](#): > > Unlike progressivism and conservatism, liberalism is not a name that implies a view that things are either getting better or getting worse. Liberalism is a theory of a social order based on individual civil liberties, private property, popular sovereignty and democratic republican government. Liberals believe that liberal society is the best kind, but they are not committed to believing in universal progress toward liberalism, much less universal progress in general. Many liberals have been skeptical about the idea of unlimited progress and have believed that a liberal society is difficult to establish and easily changed into a nonliberal society. > > Because liberalism refers to a particular kind of social order, and does not depend on any implied relationship of the present to the past or future, liberals can be either progressive or conservative, depending on whether they seek to move toward a more liberal system or to maintain a liberal system that already exists. For that matter, liberals can be revolutionary, if creating or establishing a liberal society requires a violent revolution. Liberals can even be counterrevolutionary, if they are defending a liberal society from revolutionary radicals, including anti-liberal revolutionaries of the radical right like Timothy McVeigh or Muslim jihadists. 1. “Liberal” is, or could be once again, a badge of pride. It describes an American political tradition with an honorable history and great achievements to its credit. > [@](#): > > Those, then, are six arguments in favor of using liberalism to describe the center-left. I’ve reserved the seventh for last. The word “liberal” is a badge of pride. What is more embarrassing in 2008, to be associated with self-described liberals like Roosevelt and Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr. and Barbara Jordan, or with conservatives like Reagan and George W. Bush and Tom DeLay? I much prefer the public philosophy of the mid-century liberals, for all their blunders and shortcomings, to that of the three movements in American history that have called themselves progressive: the moderate-to-conservative progressives of the Democratic Leadership Council in the 1980s and 1990s; the deluded pro-Soviet progressives of the mid-20th century; and the Anglo-Protestant elite progressives of the 1900s, who admired Bismarck’s Germany and wanted to keep out immigrants and sterilize the native poor. All very good reasons, to be sure; very persuasive and cogently argued; but I object for the following two reasons: 1. The word “liberal,” as **Liberal** will shortly be showing up to remind us, also is prone to ideological confusion. In the 19th Century it meant more or less what we call “libertarianism” today, which, at least in its modern incarnation, is also very, very different from what Lind considers “liberal” as described above. 2. In my judgment, in contemporary American political discourse, the word “progressive” actually **means** something, and not what Lind seems to think it does. Specifically, it means something **well to the left of “liberal” and well to the right of “socialist.”** It is the political position of America’s erstwhile NDP-inspired [New Party,](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Party_(United_States)) or the [Working Families Party,](http://www.workingfamiliesparty.org/) or the [Vermont Progressive Party](http://www.progressiveparty.org/) – any of which is easily distinguishable from even such a moderate socialist organization as the [Democratic Socialists of America.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Socialists_of_America) Their politics is that of the social democrats of Europe. They don’t envision wholesale expropriation of wealth or socialization of all means of production, but they do regard greater socioeconomic equality as an important end-in-itself, and they do regard movement in that direction as a form of “progress,” and they do believe in the idea of “universal progress in general.” The American Greens – at least, the main body of them, the [Green Party of the United States](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Party_of_the_United_States) – are a branch of American progressives. (There is also a smaller and distinctly far-leftist, Marxist-influenced party, the [Greens/Green Party USA.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greens/Green_Party_USA)) And progressivism so defined is an **important** political tendency, far more important in American politics today than socialism as such – and, I think may become much more important in coming decades. The word “progressive” is worth preserving in American political discourse because it denotes that political tendency as no other term in current usage adequately does. ---
**Author:** ![foolsguinea](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foolsguinea/32/14751_2.png) [@foolsguinea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/foolsguinea)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2008, 5:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-discard-the-political-label-progressive-i-say-no/476069/2 "2008-12-07T05:17:52Z")
Eh, I’m a social democrat. (Or a pragmatic socialist egalitarian, which is too long & still unclear to people.) “Progressive” is too void of intrinsic specificity & clarity, as are “conservative” & “liberal”. ---
**Author:** ![dropzone](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dropzone/32/7515_2.png) [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2008, 6:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-discard-the-political-label-progressive-i-say-no/476069/3 "2008-12-07T06:04:54Z")
I’m a proud liberal. We accomplished too damn much to be letting the Right demonize our very name. ---
**Author:** ![dropzone](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dropzone/32/7515_2.png) [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2008, 6:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-discard-the-political-label-progressive-i-say-no/476069/4 "2008-12-07T06:14:09Z")
> [@foolsguinea](#): > > Eh, I’m a social democrat. (Or a pragmatic socialist egalitarian, which is too long & still unclear to people.) “Progressive” is too void of intrinsic specificity & clarity, as are “conservative” & “liberal”. “Social democrat” is too (wiping an ishy thing from my hand) European. We Americans have a long liberal tradition to draw upon without any need to associate ourselves with the European goulash of political types. ---
**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2008, 6:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-discard-the-political-label-progressive-i-say-no/476069/5 "2008-12-07T06:44:15Z")
“Liberal” is to politics as Coors Beer is to brewing. It implies _acceptance_ of change rather than advocacy for change, which is the progressive. I found the “centrist” three-legged Clintonista agenda uninspiring, too anxious to win the approval of “business”, too eager to soothe reactionary anxiety. “Heavens, no, your investments are safe, we don’t mean to really _change_ anything, a few throwrugs, some doilies…” They give themselves points for not actually getting in the way. Time was, I took this stuff kinda seriously. Liberals annoyed me. Now, not so much. Still, I’m about as likely to describe myself as a “liberal” as I am to describe myself as “fabulous!” ---
**Author:** ![foolsguinea](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foolsguinea/32/14751_2.png) [@foolsguinea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/foolsguinea)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2008, 6:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-discard-the-political-label-progressive-i-say-no/476069/6 "2008-12-07T06:48:23Z")
> [@dropzone](#): > > “Social democrat” is too (wiping an ishy thing from my hand) European. Yeah, well, how’s our “long liberal tradition” working now? I’m quite ready to draw on European ideas where they’ve been empirically proven to work. An absence of awareness of the success of social democracy in Europe means we politic in self-inflicted darkness. Thus the right seems as full of usefully “new” ideas as the left, though its ideas & schemes are unproven. ---
**Author:** ![mswas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e99b99/32.png) [@mswas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mswas)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2008, 7:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-discard-the-political-label-progressive-i-say-no/476069/7 "2008-12-07T07:14:04Z")
Change in and of itself is not a value of any merit whatsoever. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2008, 2:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-discard-the-political-label-progressive-i-say-no/476069/8 "2008-12-07T14:09:05Z")
> [@mswas](#): > > Change in and of itself is not a value of any merit whatsoever. But progress in and of itself has merit. E.g., the abolition of Jim Crow – not merely change, but progress; the sweeping away of something both unjust and anachronistic in such a way that it could not possibly be revived. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2008, 3:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-discard-the-political-label-progressive-i-say-no/476069/9 "2008-12-07T15:01:46Z")
Within three bullet points of the OP I was already looking up definitions. The average voter, in any country, has no idea what a “progressive” is versus a “liberal” versus a “neoliberal.” Most people - I know this will shock Internet discussion board veterans, but it’s true - do not know what a “libertarian” is. Precise labelling of political positions is a fool’s game in any case, and doesn’t serve a lot of purpose. elucidator’s claim of the distinction betwene liberal and progressive is purely subjective - any number of people will disagree - and would be lost on anyone you were trying to convince. Progressives - not a clear set of people but let’s not worry about that - may as well keep using that word if for no other reason than _it’s a positive-sounding, optimistic word._ It SOUNDS good. ---
**Author:** ![Olentzero](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/90ced4/32.png) [@Olentzero](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Olentzero)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2008, 5:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-discard-the-political-label-progressive-i-say-no/476069/10 "2008-12-07T17:43:32Z")
> [@elucidator](#): > > “Liberal”… implies _acceptance_ of change rather than advocacy for change, which is the progressive. I like this, to be honest. At the risk of oversimplification, it allows us to somewhat accurately gauge political attitudes to change in the direction of increased social, economic, and political equality. Conservative: resist change. Liberal: accept change. Progressive: advocate for change. Of course this doesn’t take into account neoliberalism, which I would argue falls between conservative and liberal in that they take conservative policies and put a liberal mask on them (ie resist change while acting like you’re accepting change) or the fundamental divide in advocating change, which is whether or not you “rock the boat”. Arguably both would fall under the “progressive” label since you are advocating for change, just using different methods. Furthermore, the as-yet unspoken link between all three of them is that the question of the sociopolitical and socioeconomic system remains unaddressed - change only within the system, not of the system itself. Which is where the term ‘radical’ comes in - they advocate for both types of change. So yeah - keep the label ‘progressive’. As a radical I’d much rather work alongside people who want to advocate for change than simply just passively accepting it! ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2008, 6:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-discard-the-political-label-progressive-i-say-no/476069/11 "2008-12-07T18:55:00Z")
> [@foolsguinea](#): > > Eh, I’m a social democrat. (Or a pragmatic socialist egalitarian, which is too long & still unclear to people.) “Progressive” is too void of intrinsic specificity & clarity, as are “conservative” & “liberal”. But, “social democrat” is also a term prone to ideological confusion. Lenin, after all, was a [Social Democrat.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Social-Democratic_Labour_Party) So are the nearly-defunct [-- the more conservative, or, at least, more anti-Communist-hawkish and pro-Vietnam-War, faction, that emerged from the breakup of the [url=[Socialist Party of America - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Party_of_America)]Socialist Party of America](]Social Democrats USA[/url) in 1973. Neither is “progressive” in the sense I am here using and attempting to promote the term. ---
**Author:** ![shallora](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f9ae1b/32.png) [@shallora](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/shallora)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2008, 7:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-discard-the-political-label-progressive-i-say-no/476069/12 "2008-12-07T19:27:19Z")
> [@Olentzero](#): > > Conservative: resist change. > Liberal: accept change. > Progressive: advocate for change. I disagree completely. I mean, really, conservaties “resist” change? Just as silly here is my own oversimplification of over 300 million Americans: **My own oversimplified compartmentalization of the three** Conservatives: “Utopia is impossible.” Change what’s necessary only a case-by-case basis. Anything more than that is usually chasing an impossible utopia, and leaves usually a mess of unintended consequences in its wake. For this reason the greatest fault of conservatism is sometimes not acting when in retrospect perhaps they should have. Liberal: “Utopia is possible.” And let’s keep changing everything until we reach it. We haven’t reached it yet? Obviously we just haven’t changed enough things. back to the drawing board! For this reason Liberals are often rightly accused of chasing impossible ideals and creating a mess of unintended consequences in their wake. Progressive: “Utopia = a constant state of change.” For this reason anytime anything is changed, progressives claim a temporary victory (they don’t have to see the end results, just the change itself is sufficient). This is different than anarchy, however, because progressives take a logical and ordered approach to constant change, while anarchists aren’t interested in order whatsoever. The greatest fault of progressives is that they often try to come up for a reason for change after first advocating the change has to be made. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2008, 8:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-discard-the-political-label-progressive-i-say-no/476069/13 "2008-12-07T20:11:20Z")
> [@shallora](#): > > I disagree completely. I mean, really, conservaties “resist” change? Not exactly. The best definition/explication I’ve yet encountered of **contemporary American** conservatism comes from [_The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America,_](http://www.amazon.com/Right-Nation-Conservative-Power-America/dp/0143035398/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1224007314&sr=8-1) by conservative British journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge: > [@](#): > > The exceptionalism of the American Right is partly a matter of its beliefs. The first two definitions of “conservative” offered by the Concise Oxford Dictionary are “adverse to rapid change” and “moderate, avoiding extremes.” Neither of these seems a particularly good description of what is going on in America at the moment. “Conservatism” – no less than its foes “liberalism” or “communitarianism” – has become one of those words that are now as imprecise as they are emotionally charged. Open a newspaper and you can find the word used to describe Jacques Chirac, Trent Lott, the Mullah Omar and Vladimir Putin. Since time immemorial, conservatives have insisted that their deeply pragmatic creed cannot be ideologically pigeonholed. > > But, in philosophical terms at least, classical conservatism does mean something. The creed of Edmund Burke, its most eloquent proponent, might be crudely reduced to six principles: **a deep suspicion of the power of the state; a preference for liberty over equality; patriotism; a belief in established institutions and hierarchies; skepticism about the idea of progress; and elitism.** Winston Churchill happily accepted these principles: he was devoted to nation and empire, disinclined to trust the lower orders with anything, hostile to the welfare state, worried about the diminution of liberty and, as he once remarked ruefully, “preferred the past to the present and the present to the future.” > > To simplify a little, the exceptionalism of modern American conservatism lies in its **exaggeration of the first three of Burke’s principles and contradiction of the last three.** The American Right exhibits a far deeper hostility towards the state than any other modern conservative party. . . . The American right is also more obsessed with personal liberty than any other conservative party, and prepared to tolerate an infinitely higher level of inequality. (One reason why Burke warmed to the American revolutionaries was that, unlike their dangerous French equivalents, the gentlemen rebels concentrated on freedom, not equality.) On patriotism, nobody can deny that conservatives everywhere tend to be a fairly nationalistic bunch. . . . Yet many European conservatives have accepted the idea that their nationality should be diluted in “schemes and speculations” like the European Union, and they are increasingly reconciled to dealing with national security on a multilateral basis. American conservatives clearly are not. > > If the American Right was merely a more vigorous form of conservatism, then it would be a lot more predictable. In fact, the American Right takes a resolutely liberal approach to Burke’s last three principles: hierarchy, pessimism and elitism. The heroes of modern American conservatism are not paternalist squires but rugged individualists who don’t know their place: entrepeneurs who build mighty businesses out of nothing, settlers who move out West, and, of course, the cowboy. There is a frontier spirit to the Right – unsurprisingly, since so much of its heartland is made up of new towns of one sort of another. > > The geography of conservatism also helps to explain its optimism rather than pessimism. In the war between the Dynamo and the Virgin, as Henry Adams characterized the battle between progress and tradition, most American conservatives are on the side of the Dynamo. They think that the world offers all sorts of wonderful possibilities. And they feel that the only thing that is preventing people from attaining these possibilities is the dead liberal hand of the past. By contrast, Burke has been described flatteringly by European conservatives as a “prophet of the past.” Spend any time with a group of Republicans, and their enthusiasm for the future can be positively exhausting. > > As for elitism, rather than dreaming about creating an educated “clerisy” of clever rulers (as Coleridge and T.S. Eliot did), the Republicans ever since the 1960s have played the populist card. Richard Nixon saw himself as the champion of the “silent majority.” In 1988 the aristocratic George H.W. Bush presented himself as a defender of all-American values against the Harvard Yard liberalism of Michael Dukakis. In 2000, George W. Bush, a president’s son who was educated at Andover, Yale and Harvard Business School, played up his role as a down-to-earth Texan taking on the might of Washington. As a result, modern American conservatism has flourished not just in country clubs and boardrooms, but at the grass roots – on talk radio and at precinct meetings, and in revolts against high taxes, the regulation of firearms and other invidious attempts by liberal do-gooders to force honest Americans into some predetermined mold. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2008, 8:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-discard-the-political-label-progressive-i-say-no/476069/14 "2008-12-07T20:16:37Z")
> [@shallora](#): > > The greatest fault of progressives is that they often try to come up for a reason for change after first advocating the change has to be made. I’ve never seen an example of that. Could you provide one? ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2008, 8:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-discard-the-political-label-progressive-i-say-no/476069/15 "2008-12-07T20:40:51Z")
The fact that utopa is impossible doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t strive to achieve it. Because even if utopia is impossible, it is still possible to achieve a state which is better than it is currently. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2008, 9:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-discard-the-political-label-progressive-i-say-no/476069/16 "2008-12-07T21:05:39Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > The fact that utopa is impossible doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t strive to achieve it. Because even if utopia is impossible, it is still possible to achieve a state which is better than it is currently. True – if you go slow and careful, by experimentation, giving yourselves the opportunity to learn lessons from unintended consequences. That’s the progressive way (in theory; in practice, progressives have to push as hard as possible for change as fast as possible to get anything done at all in a non-progressive political environment). Lenin, triumphant in the October Revolution, proudly declared, “We shall now proceed to build the socialist order.” – unreflectively confident that his Bolsheviks knew how to **do** that, all at once, from top to bottom throughout Russia’s society and economy, when socialism was a thing that had never before been tried in history on a large or lasting scale, and the Bolsheviks were mostly intellectual ideologues with no experience in commerce, industry, administration or government – not even as a party-in-opposition. We know how that worked out. ---
**Author:** ![Olentzero](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/90ced4/32.png) [@Olentzero](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Olentzero)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2008, 9:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-discard-the-political-label-progressive-i-say-no/476069/17 "2008-12-07T21:19:37Z")
> [@shallora](#): > > I disagree completely. I mean, really, conservaties “resist” change? Sure. Take, for instance, the issue of Prop 8 in California. Now here I’m not talking about the voters who passed it, but the people and organizations who built, organized, and ran the “Yes on 8” campaign. Social attitudes towards the acceptance of gays and lesbians has softened greatly over the last two or three decades, to the point where anti-discrimination measures have been put on the law books, and in some states (like CA) and towns gay marriage has been officially sanctioned. How do conservatives in California respond? A campaign to amend the state constitution in order to outlaw gay marriage. That’s resistance to change right there. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2008, 2:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-discard-the-political-label-progressive-i-say-no/476069/18 "2008-12-08T14:43:46Z")
> [@foolsguinea](#): > > Thus the right seems as full of usefully “new” ideas as the left, though its ideas & schemes are unproven. Oh, I think most of the right’s ideas & schemes have been given a fair field test, by now. And failed. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2008, 3:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-discard-the-political-label-progressive-i-say-no/476069/19 "2008-12-08T15:00:59Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > Oh, I think most of the right’s ideas & schemes have been given a fair field test, by now. And failed. Admittedly, any debate on that question is complicated by the fact that the left and right cannot even agree on by what standards to measure failure or success. ---
**Author:** ![Olentzero](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/90ced4/32.png) [@Olentzero](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Olentzero)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2008, 11:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-discard-the-political-label-progressive-i-say-no/476069/20 "2008-12-08T23:32:27Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > Lenin, triumphant in the October Revolution, proudly declared, “We shall now proceed to build the socialist order.” – unreflectively confident that his Bolsheviks knew how to **do** that, all at once, from top to bottom throughout Russia’s society and economy, when socialism was a thing that had never before been tried in history on a large or lasting scale, and the Bolsheviks were mostly intellectual ideologues with no experience in commerce, industry, administration or government – not even as a party-in-opposition. We know how that worked out. What does any of this have to do with keeping or discarding the label “progressive”? [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-discard-the-political-label-progressive-i-say-no/476069.md?page=2)