A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Oops

I seem to have accidentally deleted a long post I just wrote and published on the meanings of “progressive,” “liberal,” etc. Oh well. You win some, you lose some.

Maybe I’ll attempt an actual substantive post a bit later.

UPDATE: Jeremy had the lost post in his Bloglines and was kind enough to paste it in the comments below, for those who are interested. Thanks!

ADDENDUM: I think I would want to add to what’s written below that what I said about pluralism applies, I think, not only within societies but among them. In other words, if there’s no single obviously correct ordering of human values, then different societies will legitimately differ in the ways in which they seek to embody those values. Thus there is no one “correct” polity that all polities must strive to approximate. This obviously doesn’t imply that all polities are equally good or bad, however.

6 responses to “Oops”

  1. eatingwords

    I had saved it in my Bloglines account to read later. Here it is:

    There’s been a bit of a debate going on recently over the meaning of the terms “liberal” and “progressive” and the fact that many folks on the Left now seem to prefer the latter.

    Part of the reason for the switch is that “liberal” is widely believed to have been discredited by conservatives such that it’s become associated with a host of negative things (e.g. social permissiveness, big government, weakness on national defense). However, it’s also been proposed that there’s a more substantive difference in meaning beyond just an attempt at re-branding.

    This is complicated by the fact that “liberalism” refers not just to one side or the other in current political debates, but to the political philosophy that underlies much of our tradition. Liberalism in this sense includes things like: the rule of law, private property, individual rights, limits on government, etc. In this sense most American conservatives and progressives are “liberals” of one flavor or another.

    With this understanding of liberalism in mind, it’s also been suggested that liberals are more concerned with process while progressives are interested in particular outcomes. This is a distinction that probably can’t bear too much weight since process influences outcomes and we always have ends in view when asking about what the best process is.

    Nevertheless it is probably fair to say that “progressive” connotes a more teleologically-driven political outlook, whereas liberalism, at least on some views, isn’t seeking to realize particular values but to create a framework within which free people can pursue the values they think are best.

    Personally, I probably count as some variety of liberal (maybe a “conservative liberal” or a “liberal conservative”). I still stand by what I wrote here about the purposes and limits of politics, an outlook I described as “chastened” liberalism, and one heavily influenced by Augustine.

    Regarding the concept of “progress,” I think what makes someone a geniune progressive is the belief that social and moral progress can be acheived without sacrificing anything of permanent value. In other words, progressivism is prone to viewing the past as a miasma of darkness and oppression from which people need to be liberated. This is the opposite of the true conservative who yearns to return to some “golden age” whether it be the 1950s, the 19th century, or the 13th century. Liberation, for the progressive, is a decidedly unmixed blessing.

    A different, and I think better, view is that there is genuine progress but that it often, if not always, has attendant unforseen and unintended consequences that are cases of geniune loss. Progress is always purchased at a price. Industrialization eventually raised the standard of living for many, many people, but it cost the peasantry their independence and forced many into lives of drudgery. Realizing something approximating equal rights for African-Americans required a bloody civil war and the encroachment of the national government into areas previously undreamt of. Women’s liberation and control over their own bodies has been accompanied by the widespread acceptance of abortion. And so on.

    Now, conservatives of various stripes (agrarians, anti-Federalists, “family values” conservatives) will point to these unintended consequences and say that they show the wrongness of the progressive project that caused them. Meanwhile, progressives will downplay the negative side-effects or deny that they’re even bad. But I think it’s better to acknowledge that some of those losses were losses of things that have geniune value, even if we decide that all things considered, it was worth it.

    One of the most important insights of liberalism is that there is a plurality of values and that there isn’t unanimous agreement about how to rank those values. This is also one of the strongest arguments for a liberal regime: that pluralism requires a certain reticence on the part of government about enforcing a particular ordering of values. Sometimes enforcing a particular arrangement is unavoidable, but it should at least be done with the knowledge that there are losers as well as winners. And that it’s not going to be obvious to everyone that the new state of affairs is an improvement over the old.

    So I think that liberalism, at least my preffered form of it, is going to take a more ambiguous and ironic view of progress. The fact that there are a plurality of values whose correct ordering is by no means obvious means that any given state of affairs is going to realize certain ones only imperfectly, if at all. In fact, it’s to be expected that progress on one front will often be accompanied by loss in other areas, giving progress an unavoidably tragic character.

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  2. Lee

    Hey, thanks!

    Reply
  3. gaius sempronius gracchus

    Liberalism is in direct line of descent from enlightenment politics and thought primarily empowering the bourgeoisie in rebellion against the aristos and the kings.

    Progressivism is in line of descent from a politics meant to protect or advantage the working class and other “little people” from the greed and exploitation of the relatively great, and more particularly the great barons of industry, the malefactors of great wealth, the plutocrats, and the wicked capitalists.

    The two have flirted since the Progressive Era, and even nearly wed during the New Deal.

    But to this day liberalism retains a stronger connection with capitalism and the upper bourgeoisie, while progressivism is more hostile to capitalism and more working class in inspiration.

    But everybody’s pretty loose with both words, anyway.

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  4. Lee

    There’s definitely a working-class populist strain of progressivism (Bryan, certain upper midwest progressives), but there was also a very technocratic managerial version, as well as TR’s nationalistic variety.

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  5. Gaius Sempronius Gracchus

    Quite so.

    All the same, note the content of TR’s vision as he laid it out in his 1912 speech.

    http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/trarmageddon.html

    He called for democratic Constitutional reforms, trust-busting, extensive regulation of the economy, and a social and economic bill of rights (not his words) that FDR would call for again and that we still don’t have.

    Full employment. The right to strike. As much free education as you can stand. A good wage (“a living wage”) for all in safe working conditions, with working hours not excessive. A secure retirment. Universal health care.

    The target of the whole program is to tame capitalism to protect the rest of us, but primarily to protect the working class, as they are the most exposed to remorseless capitalist rapacity.

    Who, for the progressive, is the enemy of freedom and self-rule? The ruling rich man in all ages and the capitalist in the modern world, as well as his proxy and tool, the great corporation. And of whose freedom is he the enemy? That of the people.

    If progressives are asked to look for ancestors further back than the Progressive Era, they look at the Levellers of the English revolution. They tend to cite the same people Marxist historians gorify when they write “history from the bottom up.”

    If liberals are asked to look for ancestors further back than the Progressive Era, they look at the major figures of the enlightenment who originated the concerns of bourgeois liberalism and began to paint the portrait of the modern, bourgeois liberal republics and constitutional monarchies, all of them notably and intentionally lacking direct and universal participation of the people in power.

    Who or what, for the liberal, is the enemy of freedom and self-rule? Before the 19th and 20th Centuries, the Church, the King, and the Aristocracy.

    And later additions to the list? The people with their various proxies and pseudo-proxies including Socialism and Communism.

    And, for the branch of this family tree that became modern conservatism and libertarianism, the regulatory state, social democracy, progressivism, and anything that hinders the free reign of capital.

    Note well. For the progressive the list of enemies of freedom includes at its very top the capitalist and the great corporations. For the liberals it includes the people.

    That marks a significant difference to this day.

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  6. Kevin Carson

    Progressive also has an ambivalent meaning. Hillary tied it directly to the “Progressive” Era in America, at the turn of the twentieth century. That particular form of Progressivism is surely the direct ancestor of big government liberalism: managerialism and the social worker mentality applied to the every human problem. But “progressive” is more commonly used in reference to the strand of the moderate left (and the subgroup within the liberal wing of the Democratic party) influenced by the New Left from the late ’60s on. These days, a self-described “progressive” is likely to be friendly to green-type politics–even if he’s death on the subject of big-G Greens and their effect on electoral politics. And as odd as it seems, the latter stand is (IMO) more open to decentralist and free market approaches (as witness Dean Baker and RFK2).

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