This is quite possibly the most ridiculous thing I’ve read on this election. Because why would a person who fought really hard for a healthcare plan back in the early 1990s, taking massive hits to her own reputation in the process, and who made a healthcare plan the absolute central policy of her campaign in 2008, not have the guts to push though a healthcare plan of any kind? The far left is just engaging in strange revisionism now.
Prohibition is only a unique issue of the times if you define it narrowly as “alcohol prohibition”. The War on Drugs is essentially the same issue. And whatever lesson we had to learn in the 20s seems to still elude us as a society. (It’s taking longer than we thought?)
It actually took pretty much all the political capital the party had to get it through. Pretty much no other priorities were possible after that. I’m not sure Clinton would have decided that passing health care was more important than all the other things she wanted to do. I actually don’t think Obama, Pelosi, and Reid would have done it either had they known what was to come. But they were under the delusion that it would be popular once passed. Clinton might have been more cautious about forcing something so unpopular through Congress given her past experience.
While I don’t agree with libertarianism, I’m all for their definitions. Liberal is the opposite of authoritarian, and progressive is the opposite of conservative. A progressive is someone who tends to look to the future to solve problems, while a conservative tends to look to the past.
Of course, that’s the lowercase “progressive,” which you used in your title. The Progressive movement is something else. I’m not sure I agree it’s a totally new movement and not one that has changed priorities over time, but the issues in the 21st century are definitely different.
Clinton currently presents herself as someone who is in line with Progressive goals, even if she thinks that progress much come gradually. Whether this authentic and not just doing what the people want, I am unsure. The reason this matters is because it means any politician is more likely to follow their own beliefs and then try to convince you that they’re really following yours, rather than actually do what you want.
The only reason I support Clinton is because I think she’s the most Progressive candidate who has a good chance at winning. As much as I like Sanders, I don’t think he has the necessary appeal to the moderates who actually decide the election.
It’s a “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” scenario.
Her public opinion last February was that it was wrong of the NSA to be doing all this stuff secretly, but otherwise trying to hedge her bets on the rest, just saying the rules should be up to the people.
More recently she’s been pushing for stronger surveillance of terrorists, likely in response to the “tough on terror” crowd she has to court to win in November. But her push was towards telling the social media groups to make it a violation of their service to use it for terrorist purposes.
Like pretty much everything, she seems to be trying to walk the line to court as many people as possible.
In American politics, a progressive is always assumed to be a liberal. Authoritarian progressivism is rather rare.
And, well, yeah. Of course there are things more important than “liberty.” If there weren’t, we’d have absolute anarchy and call it a day.
Progressive is someone who looks forward, no Repub challenger has a progressive bone in their bodies. Bernie is definitely more progressive than HRC but she is progressive on some issues. I’m voting for whomever is Democratic nominee, so progressive question is really kind of moot.
Well all of this sniping has really helped to define the term.
My read on the word is that it is a movement that believes our governmental and economic systems are rigged to benefit the wealthy and powerful (and in modern times those are one and the same). It seems as though it goes without saying that Progressives think this is a bad thing, but maybe not based on this year’s GOP primary race. I think unions are an integral part of upending the power structure, although I have no illusions about how corrupt or at least self-serving a union’s leadership can become if membership allows it (and usually it’s too late once the workers realize it)–in other words, unions can themselves become institutionalized power structures.
Because of this, it is essentially impossible for Progressives to be entrenched in power systems for any length of time and remain who and what they are. (Mexico’s “Institutional Revolutionary Party”, a contradiction in terms if there ever was one, is a perfect example.) FDR’s New Deal coalition wasn’t truly Progressive, but its 36 years in control of government accomplished many of Progressive goals. But the coalition fell apart because of the war in Vietnam, which was in direct opposition to Progressive ideals.
That’s only because of branding. Liberal has negative connotations, so now they call themselves progressives. Next they’ll call themselves “nice people” while the right are “poopyheads”.
This article linked to by Slacker here in an Election Board thread is pertinent.
Some today do want “progressive” to be the left’s Tea Party and apparently see the TP as inspirational. “Progressive” to them means, as clearly stated, “the bomb throwers” …
The thing with throwing bombs is that it is by its nature a destructive process and as noted progressive does mean actually making progress.
No, “progressive” does not mean “radical left” and it is not defined by Bernie=Progressive. Being for granting gun manufacturers virtual immunity from lawsuits is not progressive . Having worked to kill immigration reform when it was within grasp in service of pandering to union fears about potential impacts on their narrow interests is not progressive. And having found consensus by way of compromise in service of making progress does not preclude one from the label either. Populism is not the defining feature of “progressive” either.
I like Bernie. He’d be a better President than any in the GOP field by a very wide margin, and, IMHO, not as effective of one as Hillary. Hillary’s weakness is mainly that she is a poor preacher and will not optimize use of the bully pulpit. OTOH she is devoted finding practical solutions and delivering on them, to actually making progress.
To the op - not someone who would identify as “progressive” although I have realized I am less centrist and more liberal than I had thought I was - but I think Hillary can indeed claim to be a progressive who cares about actually making progress, as opposed to someone who cares about less about progress than throwing bombs, which to me is no true progressive. 
All those who wish to use the power of the government for their purposes are authoritarian. Progressives are not immune to this charge.
The latter sentiment is true, but the former isn’t, actually. A fire department is not authoritarian, but it is a use of government for a specific purpose.
Because he wasn’t ever for that and there is no such blanket immunity. They can still be liable for faults or for negligence, such as harm caused by malfunctions or selling a firearm to someone who clearly it’s ineligible to purchase one. They instead cannot be subject to nuisance suits if someone chooses to use a firearm in an illegal manner.
“Next?” I’ve been calling them that since 1968.
Well depends-some aspects of their Tea Party such as their insistence on primarying any candidate not sufficiently ideologically pure or antagonizing anybody not already converted through government shutdowns ought not be imitated-but their Leninist discipline and zeal for enforcing orthodoxy is commendable and ought to be imitated.
Sometimes “destructive processes” are necessary to make progress which is why TRUMP’s steamrolling the Republican establishment makes him far more of a progressive force then status quo neoliberals like Bloomberg or Lieberman.
And Bernie is not even remotely “radical left”-he’s a left-social democrat closer to Clement Attlee not Vladimir Lenin. Were Sanders really of the “radical left” he’d be calling for the Koch Brothers to be sent to the guillotine and putting Martin Shkreli up against the wall, not just taxing them 90%.
Wasting political capital over trivial cultural sibboleths like guns for the sake of the secular Helen Lovejoyesque moralist suburban soccer moms, thus alienating millions of working-class voters for half-assed reform that don’t reduce gun-related deaths anyways is not “progressive”.
Supporting an immigration law that would allow the plutocrats to import millions of coolies without real rights from the developing world to undercut the wages of American workers is not “progressive”. Calling siding with the predatory sociopaths who run Silicon Valley so they can import a bunch of cowering East Indians whom they can threaten with the stick of deportation anytime over the labour movement-the basis and foundation of the left-“progressive” is such a violent perversion of the term that I actually feel physically sick to even consider the possibility.
Any movement of the left that is not fundamentally populist is worthless and complete shit. It degenerates into little better then either fashionable bourgeois liberalism driven by neurotic hausfraus weeping crocodile tears over guns and reparations utterly detached from the majority of the working-class or an ivory tower movement of autistic academics that get into schisms over whether the USSR was a deformed or a degenerate workers’ state and use that pretext to denounce the other as reactionary. The politics of the left is not charity or the SWPL Hipster’s Burden but a government of the people, by the people, and for the people and their interests.
Indeed Qin Bernie is not “radical left” … if fact the actual differences between what he has mouthed and what Hillary is for are not very great. I didn’t say he was “radical left.” I stand by my actual statement: he is not the definition of “progressive” and “radical left” is not the definition of “progressive.”
And we will disagree about whether “Leninist discipline and zeal for enforcing orthodoxy is commendable and ought to be imitated” or not.
thelurkinghorror also shares your penchant for reading that which is not written. “Blanket immunity”? No. “Virtual immunity” … to a very “special” case protection level? 100% yes. They enjoy the sort of protection that is not granted to car makers, or drug producers, other consumer product makers of any sort, tobacco companies, or even bartenders who knowingly serve someone too much knowing they are going to drive, a pretty unique level of protection granted to them because they are special … now maybe there should be legal reform that provides the same sorts of protections to ALL industries if the special protection written specifically for gunmakers is a great idea, but providing such special immunities to one powerfully lobbied industry with the only public good being that it protects the economic interests of those represented by those lobbyists is not “progressive.” At BEST Sanders vote there can be spun as Qin spun it: a realistic pandering for votes in his rural working class state.
Let me be perfectly clear … IMHO these labels are silly things used lazily by those who can’t be arsed to actually come up with opinions on issuesand who instead look to a club to join that will tell what “right thinking” is, and by those who prefer an Orwellian approach that rigidly enforces some orthodoxy of thought by some few (of which they are part of) upon others. “Progressive” is not a particularly worthless label in political discussion; “true conservative” is just as pathetic.
When Sanders supporters proverbially climb the barricade and wave a “progressive” flag, when they claim to be the definers of what citizenship within that land means, different that what that word has meant before, and then behave in a “my label right right or wrong” manner … well they are being doofuses at best.
Calling third wayers like the Clintons and Obama progressive is a bastardization of the term. At best you could try to argue they’d be more liberal in a favorable political environment.
Hillary took a brilliant angle by claiming to be a progressive like Obama. Bernie can’t attack Obama too much because he’d alienate black voters, which he desperately needs to not get blown out of the water as soon as the southern states matter. He’s stuck.
Taxation to fund the fire department is authoritarian, regardless of the obvious merit.
Immune, no. But you give a progressive the 2 axis test, and you see how often they wind up in the authoritarian quadrant. In U.S. politics, the authoritarians are generally far more conservative.
And that’s a silly definition of authoritarian. All want to use the power of the government for their purposes. The other choice is no government at all.
By your definition, wanting the police to prevent you from being murdered is authoritarian.
A democratic government exists to give power to the people. Power to the people is liberalism, not authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is ceding power to a select few.
Liberal is only a dirty word on the right. I’ve never met a single Progressive who is ashamed of being called liberal, let alone a liberal. (Conservative is a dirty word on the left, too, BTW.)
Authoritarian Progressivism is better known as Communism. Stalin is the champion in that quadrant.
I’m actually a bit more authoritarian than most progressives, and I’m still more liberal and progressive than Gandhi.