# 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:** 7\ **Page:** 3
**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 12, 2008, 1:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-discard-the-political-label-progressive-i-say-no/476069/41 "2008-12-12T01:37:00Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > What’s so inferior about America, that we can’t do what the Euros have done? Federalism + corruption. It’s very hard to make change, you have to buy people off, & no matter what you advocate, the right-wing demands its viewpoint be treated as equally valid if not more so. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2008, 5:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-discard-the-political-label-progressive-i-say-no/476069/42 "2008-12-13T17:28:37Z")
> [@foolsguinea](#): > > Federalism + corruption. It’s very hard to make change, you have to buy people off, & no matter what you advocate, the right-wing demands its viewpoint be treated as equally valid if not more so. So it **has** been, but I think the RW now is looking at a landscape where it will be doomed to very slow political marginalization, not because of any swing-of-the-pendulum but because of permanent demographic, generational and cultural changes – see [here,](http://www.amazon.com/Emerging-Democratic-Majority-John-Judis/dp/0743254783/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-0323301-0796122?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1182621390&sr=1-1) [here](http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070709/perlstein) and [here](http://people-press.org/report/312/trends-in-political-values-and-core-attitudes-1987-2007). It’s not going away, of course – it’s too well-established in its grassroots organizations and astroturf organizations and well-funded think-tanks and wholly-owned media outlets and usually-reliable superrich donors – but henceforth it will find itself becoming just a little bit less relevant with each election cycle. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2008, 6:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-discard-the-political-label-progressive-i-say-no/476069/43 "2008-12-13T18:42:41Z")
I think you should stop trying to manipulate words to mask your beliefs. You’ll notice Conservatives don’t do this. I find this one of the more Orwellian aspects of the modern left- they always seem slightly dishonest about what their true goals are. Take think tanks. You can almost always tell a conservative think tank, because they don’t hide their ideology. The American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation are clearly right-wing think tanks. But the left-wing think tanks tend to hide their ideology behind generic names, such as the Center for Defense Information, or the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Likewise, people on the left are constantly mucking about with labels to keep people guessing as to their true intentions. If ‘Liberal’ takes on a negative connotation, the right thing to do is to educate people and convince them that being liberal is not bad. Instead, you call yourselves ‘progressive’, thinking you can shed the baggage of the past with a new name. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2008, 6:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-discard-the-political-label-progressive-i-say-no/476069/44 "2008-12-13T18:58:27Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > I think you should stop trying to manipulate words to mask your beliefs. . . . If ‘Liberal’ takes on a negative connotation, the right thing to do is to educate people and convince them that being liberal is not bad. Instead, you call yourselves ‘progressive’, thinking you can shed the baggage of the past with a new name. Yes, yes, that was the very first of Lind’s points. But in the OP I’m proposing for debate an entirely **different** point about the word “progressive.” Read it again. (Oh, and when I called the New Party “NDP-inspired,” I meant by Canada’s [NDP](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_democratic_party) – which in my estimation is progressive, **not** socialist even though that might be a word some members prefer.) ---
**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2008, 7:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-discard-the-political-label-progressive-i-say-no/476069/45 "2008-12-13T19:50:38Z")
Boy, you really got me that time **Sam**! I was about half a page into a blistering “balderdash, sir” type reply when I finally caught the wry twinkle in your verbage, that oh-so-subtle Canadan drollery! (Probably from living amongst Minnesotans for so long, gave me a more sensitive awareness of post-modernist irony…) Does Canada have a version of _The Onion_? The SDMB is too modest a forum for such wholesale hilarity. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2008, 12:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-discard-the-political-label-progressive-i-say-no/476069/46 "2008-12-16T00:11:02Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > (Oh, and when I called the New Party “NDP-inspired,” I meant by Canada’s [NDP](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_democratic_party) – which in my estimation is progressive, **not** socialist even though that might be a word some members prefer.) And I was kinda wondering, **Sam,** is that your impression too, as a politically sophisticated Canuckistani? ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2008, 12:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-discard-the-political-label-progressive-i-say-no/476069/47 "2008-12-16T00:42:33Z")
You mean is the NDP socialist or progressive? Quite frankly, I find it hard to apply any of these labels any more, because their definition seems to be changed so often that I’m never sure what it’s supposed to mean at this particular place and time. As for the NDP, you can really only judge them by what they’ve done when they’ve controlled provinces, because they’ve never come close to having federal power. Provincially, the NDP tends to favor more progressive taxation, higher government spending, and plenty of regulation of the economy (greater environmental regs, higher minimum wage laws, etc). In practice, what they actually do runs the gamut. The NDP under Bob Rae in Ontario tried to implement progressive policies (low income housing projects, rent controls, etc), and reacted to the 1991 recession the same way ‘Progressives’ want Obama to - by spending a whole lot of money in classic Keynesian fashion on infrastructure, social assistance, etc. He tried to pay for it by raising taxes on the rich and giving tax cuts to the poor. Pretty much exactly what Obama promised. The results were a disaster. Rae promised 70,000 new jobs would be created from his spending spree. It never happened. The Ontario govenment went from a small surplus to a 9 billion dollar deficit and higher taxes, with very little to show for it. Ontario’s economic performance with all that spending wasn’t really any better than the other provinces, and his social housing programs created gluts of houses in some places and damage to the real estate markets and to real estate developers. The fiscal imbalance became so severe that Rae had to start rolling temporary layoffs of public employees (called “Rae Days”) to try to curb spending. Within two years, the NDP had a 6% popularity rating. The NDP has learned somewhat from Rae’s disaster, and is not quite so reflexively left-wing anymore. The NDP government in Manitoba has run a reasonably tight ship, bringing in balanced budgets and cutting taxes, and as a result has held on to power since 1999. The Manitoba NDP retains a few progressive impulses, such as increasing access to higher education, but most of its ‘progressive’ policies are not fiscal - supporting same-sex marriage, adoption by gay couples, etc. I think Manitoba is a pretty good model for where progressives can actually govern effectively. Forget about the socialist tax-the-rich stuff, and stop seeing everything as an opportunity for a Keynesian ‘stimulus’. Run a solid economy, keep spending and taxes reasonably low, then build up political capital that you can use to change social policy for the better. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-we-discard-the-political-label-progressive-i-say-no/476069.md?page=2)