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So much is in a name. You’d think in terms of names, The Right would have it all over The Left. Right: correct, justified, proper, morally good. All the synonyms stand in its favour. Left, by contrast, is synonymous with: abandoned, deserted, alone. Left is from the Old English meaning “weak,” as in the weak side of the body, which left is for the more than two-thirds of humans who are right-handed. In Latin, left was “sinister,” which also doesn’t have good connotations. Left for dead. Two left feet.

Maybe that’s why the Left has taken to calling itself “progressive.” In this week’s New Yorker, Adam Gopnik argues that the 47 novels of Anthony Trollope, who was born 200 years ago last month, have continuing appeal at least partly because politically “he was unquestioningly a liberal of an ideologically rigorous kind — exactly what we mean by a ‘progressive,’” not unlike the New Yorker itself, he might have added. In passing, Gopnik provides the perfect definition of a “big-government liberal (as someone who) prefers bureaucrats to stockbrokers,” though what kind of choice is that? A little later in the same issue, Ryan Lizza profiles Senator Elizabeth Warren, “anchor of a progressive wing of the Democratic Party,” a characterization, given the glowing profile, he clearly intends as favourable (though use of “a” rather than “the” is intriguing: how many progressive wings do the Democrats have?).