In every national poll in recent memory, “liberal” always polls below “moderate” and “conservative.” It’s reinforced the notion that center-right politics have been in ascendance for quite some time.
But Rasmussen Reports had an interesting survey this week, which showed that when “liberal” is replaced with “progressive,” the broader dynamic changes significantly. According to the poll, 35% consider “progressive” a positive description of a candidate, whereas 32% consider “conservative” a positive label. In other words, the left’s label is now more popular than the right’s.
It stands to reason, then, that conservatives, after having tarnished “liberal,” are going to have to take on the newer, more popular, label for the left. As Kevin Drum noted, NRO’s Yuval Levin got the ball rolling.
Progressivism, after all, has a very mixed history in American politics, which takes in not only efforts to reform labor laws, bust trusts, and create national parks but also some serious doses of racism, social Darwinism, eugenics, and a very strange mix of authoritarianism and out of control populism.
The Atlantic’s Ross Douthat is also getting in on the fun.
I take Matt’s point that “Progressive” is basically just a useful umbrella term for a left-of-center coalition. On the other hand, I’m not so sure that it’s a coincidence that the revival of progressivism as a political label has coincided with a more strident secularism/atheism, a greater obsession with the supposed right-wing threat to “science” (read: left-wing policy preferences on stem cell research, cloning, genetic engineering, etc.), and a greater sympathy for Darwinism-as-a-universal-theory among thinkers associated with the political left.
Yes, Ross really did put “science” in quotation marks.
I suppose the left should consider all of this a warning shot — “progressive” is poised to get a far-right work-over.
