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It was really weird to me when people in the 21st century started calling themselves to differentiate themselves from other sorts of liberals. Modern progressi
by Symmetry 9y ago
It was really weird to me when people in the 21st century started calling themselves to differentiate themselves from other sorts of liberals. Modern progressives and the progressives of the Progressive era share many features but traditional progressives were strongly associated with moral paternalism and eugenics. Seeing people I would have called liberals start calling themselves progressive was as jarring as Trump's use of "America First". And I think that nativism isn't unknown to modern progressives. I think Bernie Sanders is commonly considered a progressive and he was very down on immigrants depressing native worker's wages.
- ergothus 9y agoI hadn't known that historical perspective, thanks. I was glad when the term started to become popular because the US post-Reagan era had made "liberal" into a term used to insult and degrade without considering the actual ideas of any instance. I was shocked at Sanders amount of success, because I had grown up believing that the US public would immediately discount any associating with the word "socialist" (even by those that actually had beliefs not far from socialist views, and even allowing that Sanders positions aren't actually 'socialist' as used in Europe). I suspect "progressive" was embraced for such reasons, but given how much I've been wrong about most anything political on the past decade+, I'd love to have actual evidence.
- jnbiche 9y ago> he was very down on immigrants depressing native worker's wages. I'm not a Sanders supporter, but just wanted to point out that one can be both pro-immigrant (wanting to increase general immigrant quotas) and against programs like H1B that are designed to suppress salaries in specific industries.
- Symmetry 9y agoWell, most Sanders supporters are way more pro-immigrant than he is so being pro-Sanders doesn't really mean that much here. There was some great reporting in I think the New York times a while ago on the beliefs of the supporters of various presidential contenders. And yes, you can certainly be against a certain policy without being anti-immigration. I'm for drastically expanding US immigration but replacing H1Bs with programs that don't tie people to a particular employer is something I would support.
- scythe 9y agoYou used [1] but didn't provide a link at the bottom. Did you forget to cite something?
- Symmetry 9y agoOops, I was going to list an example then decided not to. Thanks for pointing that out.
- bassman9000 9y agoliberal used to mean economically and socially liberal, that is, free market economy and let people live their lives. Now we have to call them classical liberals. What does progressive stands for? Who decides what progress is? Is increasing the quality of life of 10 by decreasing the quality of life of 100 progress?
- drb91 9y ago"Liberal" isn't a terribly useful word in the US these days, given how wide the democratic party's non-existent platform is. I agree "progressive" isn't the most useful re-use of the word, but I would emphatically call it anti-nativist (or rather, pro-globalist) these days, or just "leftist". Political labels in general are ill-fitted to static definitions. People are always stealing terms, twisting others, for demagogic needs. "liberal", "conservative", "progressive", "leftist", and "alt-right" are all pretty terrible for anything but, uhh, cultural identification, and don't indicate much of anything about you politically.