the trouble with "progressive" (slight return)

An emailer asks

What's your beef with the term progressive? I prefer liberal myself, too, but I feel like that ship has sailed, and it is only semantics, after all. I feel that, since you're already coming from a marginal place (as you say all the time), it doesn't make much sense to look for fights to pick that don't mean anything. I don't mean to scold but I alternatively love your work and hate your self-marginalizing thing.

Well, to the broader point about my self-marginalization, you know, it's complicated, and I have little to say in my own defense. But for the subject at hand, there's two major things.

First, I tend to see the use of progressive as a capitulation. Conservatives notoriously made liberal into a bad word in the 90s. (I know this because I got a Doonesbury collection when I was 12 and read it religiously, despite knowing essentially nothing else about partisan politics at the time.) To run from the term because conservatives tried to stigmatize it is emblematic of all that was wrong with 90s-era liberal politics. I don't say that in some martyring sense, either. I'm not saying that we should have accepted the term liberal and confined ourselves to irrelevance, but rather that the refusal to fight essentially did the work for the conservatives, which again was a running theme of the Clintonite 90s. You triangulate and triangulate and before you know it you've given away the store. I have a theory of political change (which could be right or wrong) that says that people don't get inspired by political movements that don't appear inspired themselves, that people don't sign up for causes when the people espousing that cause seem embarrassed or unwilling to stand up for itself.

Second, I care because language matters. I actually disagree that the difference is entirely semantic, actually; I think that progressive has come to refer to slightly different things than liberal, in both disposition and policy stances, in a way that reflects that legacy of capitulation. And remember the etymology of progressive, with its confused relationship towards the early 20th century Progressive movement, which had some good and a lot of bad. Matt Yglesias put this beautifully in a post from several years ago (inspired by some geek commenter):

while the historically Progressives did stand for some good things, and are a part of the backstory of contemporary American liberalism, they also stood for some very bad things. Certainly, whatever sins liberalism may have committed in the 1970s as it fell into disrepute were distinctly minor compared to the problems with the Progressives.  

"Liberal," by contrast, is an important term with a noble history and a contested legacy. I think the notion that something like contemporary American liberalism is, in fact, the correct instantiation of the historic liberal project for our times is a proposition that's worth fighting for.

Words to live by.