Richard Collins' TownHall.com column yesterday echoes what I said earlier this week about Hillary Clinton's statement that "I'm not a liberal, I'm a progressive" was just a bait-and-switch.
What is interesting about her answer is that it is both true and deceptive. It is largely true that liberal used to mean someone who believed in individual rights and freedom. And it is true that in the late twentieth century it was successfully connected to big government and liberal social views.
What Senator Clinton fails to mention is that the reason this occurred is because it was accurate. If you were a liberal in the 60s, 70s, and 80s you were for more government involvement in peoples lives. And when liberals speak of individual freedoms they don’t mean less government, they mean the lack of choice for children’s schools; the right not to pray in school; and gay marriage.
Her preference for the term progressive is equally deceptive. The way she describes it you would think that progressive and liberal are two very different political philosophies. But this is not actually the case. Liberals adopted the term progressive because conservatives had successfully exposed the term for what it was: more government control of people’s lives. Progressive seems like a positive term. Who can be against progress?
0 comments:
Post a Comment