by David Greenberg

I'm delighted to have Geoffrey Nunberg, whose writings I've admired for a long time, contributing to this blog, and I'm glad that he picked up a thread--on the differences, if there are any, between liberals and progressives--that Casey Blake and Eric Rauchway debated a few weeks ago. A couple of additional thoughts. Geoff has written a brilliant chapter in his new book Talking Right about the vicissitudes of the word liberal. But in his recent post--and the "Fresh Air" essay he links to--he takes it for granted that "progressives" today constitute a real group distinct from liberals. Progressives, he suggests, are the "Berkeley professors or social activists"--the people I'd call "leftists"--who are avoiding the tainted "l-word." But while the two types deserve to be separated, I'd argue that the progressive label is now being used by all varieties of Democratic types--not just leftist but also mainstream and centrist--to escape the liberal tag. For the crunchy left, progressive may hold appeal because it evokes Henry Wallace, who used the standard in his 1948 presidential campaign. But centrist Democrats use it just as often, picking up the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt's very different party (Robert La Follette's Progressive Party of the 1920s might be seen as a bridge between the two, but it would be a rickety bridge). Consider Bill Clinton, whose policy shop was the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank still around today, though it seems to have been eclipsed in the media by the Center for American Progress--another Clintonite organization that prefers (two-thirds of) the term progressive. In fact, going back to the 1980s, it was more often Democratic Leadership Council-types and other self-styled moderates who were eager to jettison liberal and often took up the near-synonym progressive, which had been discarded and thus in the general parlance carried few associations with either Wallace or TR. And so it came to seem that everyone was a progressive, no one a liberal. But wait: just in the last year, it seems, a few liberals have begun to reclaim the name. Why? First, to admit the obvious. Second, to avoid painful evasions ("If being a liberal means believing that sticking to my principles, then I'm a liberal..." Or: "I don't believe in labels..."). Third, because intuitively people are grasping Nunberg's point that the more they shun the label, the more the right gets to define it. And so Peter Beinart's book declares that "only liberals" can win the war on terrorism, and Todd Gitlin and Bruce Ackerman declare "We Answer to the Name Liberals." I think there's another reason for this budding re-embrace of liberal: the fight against Islamist jihadism. Whatever our views of Bush's policies, liberals and conservatives agree that what divides the West from the terrorists is our commitment to liberal values--liberal in the broad sense of the term that denotes the Enlightenment traditions of freedom, equality, and human rights. Search for the term liberal on sites like that of the Progressive Policy Institute and you'll rarely find it used in distinction to Bush-style conservatism--but often invoked in distinction to al-Qaeda-style fundamentalism. Even the Bushies use "liberal values," if only rhetorically, to describe their project of democratizing the Middle East. In this context of international conflict, liberal suddenly drops its associations with Volvos and lattes and starts to evoke more noble images of education, voting, free speech, and freedom of religion. It's starting to sound like a label we don't have to run from at all.