Blagdaross

(adapted from my comments on Matt’s site.)

It’s a cliche by now that in Europe liberal means the opposite of what it means in the US, which is a lttle off.

You do see people use liberal as a synonym for rightwinger sometimes, but most rightwingers are conservatives, and there are center-left as well as center-right liberal parties in Europe, and they’re all pretty centrists. Libertarians in Europe, and to a lesser extent the US, call themselves liberals, or even the only true liberals. I don’t really think most libertarians are any kind of liberal.

I think most US progressives who call themselves liberals tend to be liberal in the “real” sense. One may think that liberal in the US refers exclusivley to progressives, but it just truck me I can think of a few exceptions, namely the whole beltway pundit establishment. Cohen, Broder, Weisberg, Hiatt, Raines, Keller, etc. The pain caucus. They’re often described as liberals and some cases embrace the term. They don’t refer to themselves as progressives, and indeed, they aren’t.

LB wonders about the difference between a progressive and a liberal. (Also.) The commenters in that thread all assume the terms are either interchangeable, or mutually exclusive. That’s not at all how I think of them.

One might ask oneself if liberal, (or conservative or socialist) means anything these days, and I can’t say all other definitions are wrong per se, but I think my use of the term makes more sense, and leads to less muddled thinking.

Progressive I would define as someone who is strongly committed to egalitarianism, the common good, changing the world for the better, and internationalism. Like leftwing, but an absolute term, whereas left should be a relative term.

Liberal I would define as someone who is strongly commmited to liberty, personal autonomy, suspicion of state power, the rule of law, proceduralism, reason, rational discourse, enlightened self interest, internationalism, concentration of power, and arguably being for a market economy and against central planning, among other things.

So egalitarian liberals is one type of progressive along with social democrats, radical socialists, marxists, some varieties of populists, most communitarians among others (as well as unaffiliated progressives).

LB post seems to be thinking of the US late cold war era use of the terms. The crowd that reads Counterpunch and the Progressive still wants the term for themselves, but then they also, absurdly, claim “leftist” for themselves.