2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Liberals aren't Democrats? [View all]merrily
(45,251 posts)"liberal" means--and that is complicated by the fact that we are getting more global: "Liberal" means something very different to someone from abroad than it does to a 1960's hippie. And what a1960's liberal thought was further right than what liberals before McCarthy thought. Today, a lot of people simply think it's something like a synonym for "Democrat."
"Progressive" is another word that seems to mean different things. In 2008, both Obama and Hillary referred to their policies as "progressive." The founder of the Progressive Policy Institute, Will Marshall, was a DLC founder who signed the PNAC letter, urging Bush to invade Iraq. http://www.publiceye.org/pnac_chart/pnac.html I don't think most people who are calling themselves progressives on DU mean the same thing by that word as Hillary and Marshall do. Just a hunch.
Basically, I think we may need a new word, one that will mean the same thing to European DUers as it means to USians and one that distinguishes the policies of the Republican left (who founded the Progressive Party) from those of Democratic left.
The policies of Teddy Roosevelt, apart from his racism, were indeed ahead of their time before women got the vote. Today, not so much. But the Will Marshall/DLC brand of progressivism doesn't go as far as Teddy on all things. Teddy was adamantly against monopolies, like the ones Disney and Comcast have become. You don't see a lot of that from Third Wayers.