You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

Can We Please Have the Words "Progressive," "Liberal," "Centrist" and "Conservative" Back Please?

Sticks and stones, amIrite? We all learned the saying as kids. But, hot flash, in politics calling opponents names actually does hurt them. Which is the point. Which is why people do it. And the media goes along with it because it both adds drama to the stories they are writing and it enables them to speak in short-hand which is often helpful for headline writers and for lazy pundits.

In fact, I’m sure labeling people has been a messaging strategy since the first Greek politician stood on an olive box in ancient Athens and attacked his opponent as being too much of a dove on Persia and then the Athens Daily Bugle led with “Left-Leaning Anacletus of Plaka Called Soft On Darius the Great.”

These ancient impulses have been magnified by media that speaks in soundbites and Tweets and is constantly seeking ways to communicate with people in code because, well, reading is hard especially with all those silent consonants and dipthongs and things.

(I’m speaking present day here. The ancient Greeks were much better at dipthongs.)

Weaponizing Words

These trends have in turn led to new opportunities for people to weaponize words although to be quite honest, the right-wing in the U.S. have been much better at this than the left. Over the course of just my lifetime I’ve watched as terms that once seemed fairly anodyne, descriptions rather than blunt instruments, were weaponized and had their meaning twisted to the point that those who once proudly embraced the labels started to ditch them.

FDR was a champion of “liberalism” when it was a good thing. So his political enemies called him a “red” or “socialist” instead. But after a while, particularly after the success of Ronald Reagan and the failures of liberals like George McGovern and Michael Dukakis and the conclusion of many in the political world that “liberalism” was a political loser, it became a kind of slur. Never mind that the roots of modern liberalism were during the Enlightenment and the idea of liberalism, often traced to philosopher John Locke, lay at the heart of the thinking of America’s founders. Don’t confuse the issue with facts.

In the wake of Reagan however, Democrats, like those in the Clinton Administration, of which I was part, embraced a “third way” which, in shorthand, was “centrism.” To this day my daughters, both enlightened and smarter than me, mock me for chest-thumpingly declaring I was a “radical centrist.” I mock me for it too. In fact, that is what I am doing right here in this paragraph. I was, as I have written, wrong for supporting “centrist” policies that actually have contributed heavily to inequality and thereby divisiveness and dysfunction in America.  

It is no wonder that those who were uncomfortable with the term centrist because of the centrality of compromising to middle groundish views, started back then to call themselves progressives. Why not? It was a fine old term with roots in periods of reform and social progress in the U.S. that evoked the names of people like Robert La Follette and Teddy Roosevelt.

This led to a two-front war for progressives. The right and the center both ganged up and did what they could to make the term “progressive” as much of a political slur as liberal had been. Even though when you think about it, it’s hard to be against progress.  

In any event, given the abuses it has endured, when I hear people snarl or hiss the word “progressive” out of their mouths, I think of Inigo Montoya’s immortal words, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

I could go into much greater length here about the many times in my life I have encountered such labeling wars—as in the desire of one group to call itself “realists” in foreign policy which immediately implied those who don’t agree with them were out of touch with reality while they labeled their opponents “idealists,” or how some were called “traditionalists” and others “transformationalists,” or how economic policymakers embraced terms like being for “free markets” or “free trade” because it implied people who might have sought to regulate things (like say, sending children into coal mines) or impose tariffs or duties (on say, goods that were being dumped from one market into another) were against freedom! They never really want to get into whose freedom. But that is a subject for another day.

The key is that these terms have morphed over the course of my life and recently, the weaponization of them has both increased and the media has largely played along or made matters worse. How has that worked? Not well. Not well at all.

Speaking in Code

Terms like “progressive” are now used as code by the right and by the center. When the right say it, they are often associating it with particular images of progressives that suit their (racist, misogynist) narrative, like “the Squad.” What is their problem with “the squad?” You know as well as I do, it usually means, for MAGA times “a group of empowered women of color.” Which scares the crap out of them. Meanwhile, “centrists” may not be quite as racist but they love to condemn “progressives” for other reasons—some of which they are just making up as they go along. Notable, recently, in this regard is the assertion that progressives are “anti-Israel” and by extension “anti-Semitic” and even “pro-Hamas” whereas “centrists” are “pro-Israel.”

WTF? Since when is opposing the mass slaughter of innocents especially “progressive?” Why is such a fundamental moral issue perverted by given a place on a political spectrum? And how is opposing such slaughter “anti-Israel” or “anti-Semitic” or “pro-Hamas” when many in Israel hold that view and in fact, opposing any other view, like that of the Netanyahu administration, is actually anti-the best interests of Israel? (More on this in a moment, but let me reiterate my view that being supportive of the current Israeli government is actually anti-Israel and contrary to Jewish values.)

The terms and others like them are misapplied—for political or pundit laziness purposes—in other ways too. Are MAGA extremists “conservatives?” Hardly. Are “far-left” extremists (like Julian Assange to pick just one name) actually even far-left when they actively support far right thugs like Vladimir Putin?

Before I get to several recent examples (briefly) let me illustrate my point one final way. If I were to ask you how you would describe someone who believes in gun control, a cleaner environment, higher taxes on the rich, a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and  reforms that make healthcare more affordable to everyone, what would your answer be? Probably, you’d call them a progressive or say they are “on the left.” But all these ideas are supported by more than two thirds of all Americans. By definition, while they may be “progressive” they are also “centrist” and, in the very best way, “liberal.” They are also sensible and urgently needed. And they are not by any stretch of the imagination linked to being anti-israel or pro-Hamas.

So, please, can you please let me have the terms “progressive” and “liberal” and “centrist” and even “conservative” back, please. Or, rather, let’s all take them back and despite the efforts of demagogues and those pesky lazy pundits, let’s try to restore some meaning to them, and by meaning I mean the meaningful kind.

Now, briefly, a couple of stories that are linked to this (and why I felt compelled to write this today):

• I’ve been reading a lot of takes on the Jamal Bowman loss in his NY primary. The NY Post defined it as a blow to the "Squad." This included slurs like those I describe above so I won’t detail them. But I’ll tell you what it did not include: the fact that AOC won her primary. By a lot. There were a lot of conflicting narratives around Bowman’s criticism of Israel and the massive push by AIPAC to defeat him. While it is disturbing that any group could target and marshal such resources to push out an official, I don’t think that’s the core of this story. Nor do I think Bowman’s loss has significance for “progressives” more broadly. Basically, I think this was a guy who was not a particularly good politician who was majorly out of touch with his district. (He was down 17 points from the get-go.) That’s why he loss and smart local observers agree.

• I suppose because I am a progressive I am supposed to cheer the fact that Julian Assange is now free. Even the asserted that the case against him posed a risk to national security reporters. New York Times But, look, I have been writing about national security issues my whole life and while I believe press freedoms are essential and should be inviolable, I also respect the need for there to be some things that governments should have the right to keep secret. While the charge to which Assange pleaded guilty did not have to do with such issues, he was accused in other instances of not only sidestepping such laws (which, frankly, many mainstream reporters want to be able to do with impunity) but his relationship with the Russians is troubling. And I say this because many friends in the intelligence community that I respect (and I don’t respect everyone in the IC) believe that Assange was not entirely wholesome in his motives or actions.

• The conflation of unrelated issues to serve the political agenda of an intellectually lazy pundit is well illustrated by a piece by Bret Stephens in The New York Times entitled “Should American Jews Abandon Elite Universities?” This is neither the time nor the place to take it to task point by point. That would take too long. I have too many issues with it and the way that it is argued. Suffice it to say that after several opening paragraphs that seem to present the Gaza war related protests on several campuses in a fair light (they weren’t quite as a big or disruptive a deal as often depicted) it then takes a hard turn with “But this let’s the kids off the hook too easily.” Thereafter it dumps any pretense of fairness and glides into suggestions that implied significant numbers of the protestors were “silent on October 7” and that all were guilty of appearing alongside outside agitators with indefensibly extremist views. The notion that many students who were protesting were Jewish, did condemn what happened on October 7^th, and condemned the stances of the outsiders who sought to take advantage of their protests simply is not given credence. But then it goes further and blames the establishment of “elite universities” of putting faulty ideas of “what to think and how to behave” into their little heads. At this point Stephens goes into a condemnation of schools for teaching students to feel bad for “the perceived oppressed” (not entertaining the idea that there are real oppressed…like the people of Gaza), not entertaining the idea that the protestors’ arguments had any merits at all and instead making the leap to blame their positions of “the crude schematics of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” As I said earlier, WTF?! He swiftly glides past his own view that Zionism couldn’t possible be a form of colonialism (or trigger colonialist or colonialist-like behavior), and comes to the conclusion that Ivy league megadonors and would be students ought to ditch schools like those at which protests took place. His elision from protests about a hideous war to right wing cant concerning teaching about diversity and the ugly realities of Western and US history is really a kind of remarkable literary achievement, bold and yet vacuous and riddled with logical and factual errors. His argument utterly ignores the fact that many of these students were acting out of real compassion and informed views on what produced the disaster of this Gaza War (and the 10/7 attacks that triggered) but then goes further to not so subtly get to the current slur against progressives—that they are somehow anti-Semites. He argues that caring about people who have been victims of discrimination is a step on the road to discriminating against people. It is really appalling and resonates with the rest of this too long post in ways that should not be ignored.