What’s a pro­gres­sive, anyway?

Why are so many liberal writers so anxious to persuade us that, deep in his heart of hearts, Tim Kaine is, too, a progressive?

The term has a long and unruly his­to­ry, which I’ll be get­ting to. But the com­mon-sense mean­ing of ​“pro­gres­sive” is some­one who is pret­ty darn lib­er­al. In fact, you might even say that it sig­ni­fies pol­i­tics that are dis­tinct­ly to the left of lib­er­al. That, at least, has been the con­tem­po­rary con­no­ta­tion of the word for as long as I’ve been fol­low­ing pol­i­tics. Increas­ing­ly these days, the term is being dumb­ed down into utter meaninglessness.

Take, for instance, Thad Williamson’s curi­ous and con­fus­ing In These Times piece, which praised Hillary Clinton’s selec­tion of Sen. Tim Kaine as her run­ning mate. In his arti­cle, Williamson min­i­mizes the impor­tance of ide­ol­o­gy as a cri­te­ri­on for judg­ing polit­i­cal can­di­dates. Ide­o­log­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions, he says, amount to lit­tle more than lit­mus tests that are ​“use­less in mak­ing more com­plex judg­ments” about can­di­date qual­i­ty. Yet at the same time, he refers to Kaine as ​“pro­gres­sive” (a term he doesn’t define) and plays up Kaine’s record as sup­pos­ed­ly ​“the most pro­gres­sive gov­er­nor in Virginia’s his­to­ry.” Argu­ing that: a) ide­ol­o­gy doesn’t mat­ter much, but b) Tim Kaine’s ​“pro­gres­sive” record is one of the rea­sons he’s such a swell can­di­date makes no sense.

Williamson is not alone; plen­ty of oth­er lib­er­als are twist­ing them­selves into pret­zels to declare Tim Kaine a pro­gres­sive as well. But if we look at Kaine’s pol­i­tics on a right/​left spec­trum, it’s clear that he is one of the more con­ser­v­a­tive mem­bers of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty. His roll call votes for the 113th Con­gress (the most recent fig­ures avail­able) rank him as the 41st most lib­er­al sen­a­tor (out of 57 who cau­cus with the Democ­rats). And then there are his posi­tions on a wide range of core pro­gres­sive issues: Kaine has close ties to the finan­cial indus­try and has sup­port­ed poli­cies such as anti-labor right-to-work laws, ​“free trade” mea­sures like NAF­TA and fast-track­ing the TPP, destruc­tive envi­ron­men­tal prac­tices such as frack­ing, and abor­tion restric­tions like the Hyde Amend­ment and parental noti­fi­ca­tion laws. (Since being pegged as Clinton’s VP, he has reversed course on right-to-work and the TPP.) That’s a pic­ture that should raise alarm bells for those of us who actu­al­ly are progressives.

So why are so many lib­er­al writ­ers so anx­ious to per­suade us that, deep in his heart of hearts, Tim Kaine is, too, a pro­gres­sive? Prob­a­bly there’s a desire to exag­ger­ate Kaine’s pro­gres­sivism because Hillary’s own pro­gres­sive bona fides are ques­tion­able. But most­ly it seems that today, the pro­gres­sive label has become lit­tle more than a mar­ket­ing tool, a sig­ni­fi­er deployed to dis­tract us from that the actu­al con­tent of the sig­ni­fied. How did we arrive at this sad state of affairs?

A lit­tle his­to­ry is order. Like ​“lib­er­al” and ​“con­ser­v­a­tive,” ​“pro­gres­sive” has long been a con­test­ed term. The capital‑P Pro­gres­sive move­ment, which emerged in the 1890s and flow­ered in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, embraced sci­ence, moder­ni­ty and the use of gov­ern­ment to solve social prob­lems. The Pro­gres­sives sup­port­ed a wide range of polit­i­cal caus­es, includ­ing antitrust laws, women’s suf­frage, food and safe­ty reg­u­la­tions, edu­ca­tion­al reform, the fed­er­al income tax and mea­sures aimed at root­ing out polit­i­cal cor­rup­tion. But in addi­tion to its left-wing social jus­tice ori­en­ta­tion, Pro­gres­sivism also had a dark­er side. Some lead­ing Pro­gres­sives — such as Theodore Roo­sevelt, who unsuc­cess­ful­ly ran for pres­i­dent on the Pro­gres­sive Par­ty tick­et in 1912 — sup­port­ed ugly polit­i­cal projects like eugen­ics and imperialism.

Under dif­fer­ent incar­na­tions of the Pro­gres­sive Par­ty, the agrar­i­an pop­ulist Robert La Fol­lette and Hen­ry Wal­lace also ran as third-par­ty pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates, in 1924 and 1948, respec­tive­ly. By the time of Wallace’s can­di­da­cy, how­ev­er, the Pro­gres­sive Move­ment as such had died out, hav­ing been super­seded by the New Deal lib­er­al­ism of the 1930s and 1940s. But the asso­ci­a­tion of Wal­lace and his sup­port­ers with the term pro­gres­sive may have led to a shift in the word’s con­no­ta­tion. Wallace’s Pro­gres­sive Par­ty was at the left­most flank of the Amer­i­can polit­i­cal spec­trum. The par­ty emerged as an alter­na­tive to the anti-com­mu­nist Cold War lib­er­al­ism that had tak­en hold in the after­math of World War II. Unions, the gov­ern­ment and oth­er insti­tu­tions were busy purg­ing and black­list­ing reds and fel­low trav­el­ers; Wallace’s Pro­gres­sives wel­comed them. The party’s plat­form sup­port­ed labor rights, attacked Jim Crow and accused Repub­li­cans as well as Democ­rats of being ​“the cham­pi­ons of Big Business.”

It seems that after 1948, pro­gres­sive sig­ni­fied a pol­i­tics that is left­i­er than mere­ly lib­er­al. His­to­ri­an Bev­er­ly Gage has not­ed that around this time, pro­gres­sive sug­gest­ed some­thing ​“more rad­i­cal … to be a pro­gres­sive was sud­den­ly to be a ​‘fel­low trav­el­er’.” The asso­ci­a­tion of ​“pro­gres­sive” with pol­i­tics that are firm­ly to the left lin­gered for decades — that’s cer­tain­ly how I remem­ber the term being used in the 1990s. Think The Pro­gres­sive (“peace and social jus­tice since 1909”), a mag­a­zine with pol­i­tics very sim­i­lar to those of In These Times. There’s also the Con­gres­sion­al Pro­gres­sive Cau­cus. Found­ed in 1991, the orga­ni­za­tion com­pris­es only the most lib­er­al mem­bers of Con­gress: over 70 House mem­bers and just one sen­a­tor (who hap­pens to be — you guessed it — Bernie Sanders).

But while the sense per­sists that pro­gres­sive sug­gests a hard left pol­i­tics that falls some­where between lib­er­al­ism and out­right com­mu­nism, the word has also been used to con­vey some­thing more mod­er­ate. As ear­ly as the 1970s, lib­er­al­ism was in bad odor, and some lib­er­al politi­cians were adopt­ing ​“pro­gres­sive” as their pre­ferred euphemism. Writer Rob Hager notes that Rick Perlstein’s book The Invis­i­ble Bridge recounts an ear­ly exam­ple of this strat­e­gy: when he ran for pres­i­dent in 1976, Rep. Mo Udall called him­self a pro­gres­sive, not a lib­er­al. As report­ed in the Mil­wau­kee Sen­tinel, Udall open­ly admit­ted that ​“pro­gres­sive means the same thing as lib­er­al,” but said he was drop­ping the lib­er­al label ​“because it evokes unfa­vor­able con­no­ta­tions on social issues and waste­ful spending.”

Unlike Udall, the busi­ness-friend­ly Democ­rats who rose to pow­er in the 1980s and 1990s had few ties to tra­di­tion­al lib­er­al­ism. But they faced a sim­i­lar prob­lem: what should they call them­selves? Many were aller­gic to iden­ti­fy­ing them­selves with any polit­i­cal ori­en­ta­tion at all. When he ran for pres­i­dent in 1988, Michael Dukakis claimed, ​“This elec­tion isn’t about ide­ol­o­gy; it’s about com­pe­tence” (and look where that got him). Clear­ly, these Democ­rats were cen­trists, but appar­ent­ly no cen­trist ever likes to call him­self one. How could they spice up their bland blanc­mange of an ide­ol­o­gy by asso­ci­at­ing it with some­thing cool? Ini­tial­ly, some of them accu­rate­ly defined them­selves neolib­er­als, but that label was quick­ly aban­doned. ​“New Democ­rats” and ​“The Third Way” worked for a while. But slow­ly, ​“pro­gres­sive” was becom­ing their pre­ferred descrip­tor. Their adop­tion of the term reeked of bad faith, but it served a pur­pose: It’s a hap­py-talk kind of word that can help laun­der some real­ly nasty pol­i­tics. An ear­ly exam­ple of the co-opt­ing of the term occurred in 1989, when the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Lead­er­ship Coun­cil had the brass to name its think tank the Pro­gres­sive Pol­i­cy Insti­tute.

So far as I can deter­mine, Barack Oba­ma was the first mod­ern-day Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee to iden­ti­fy as a pro­gres­sive. Inter­est­ing­ly, he did so when left-wing activists crit­i­cized his right­ward shift dur­ing the 2008 elec­tion cam­paign. Pro­gres­sive must poll real­ly well, because after Oba­ma came the great stam­pede. Polit­i­cal fig­ures such as Andrew Cuo­mo and Rahm Emanuel, not exact­ly the guys you’d invite to a meet­ing of your local Demo­c­ra­t­ic Social­ists of Amer­i­ca chap­ter, have sworn up and down that they are pro­gres­sives. Then there’s Hillary Clin­ton, who’s been run­ning around describ­ing her­self as ​“a pro­gres­sive who gets things done.” Note the con­de­scen­sion implic­it in the phrase: so the rest of us are hap­less pie-in-the-sky types who don’t get things done?

Clear­ly, Clinton’s self-char­ac­ter­i­za­tion was meant, at least in part, as a diss aimed at Bernie Sanders. Dur­ing pri­ma­ry sea­son, Sanders and Clin­ton debat­ed the ques­tion of who and what qual­i­fies as pro­gres­sive. When reporters asked Bernie whether Hillary is a ​“true pro­gres­sive,” he replied, ​“I think, frankly, it is hard to be a real pro­gres­sive and to take on the estab­lish­ment in a way that I think has to be tak­en on, when you come as depen­dent as she has through her super PAC and in oth­er ways on Wall Street and drug-com­pa­ny money.”

At a Demo­c­ra­t­ic debate a few days lat­er, Clin­ton was asked to respond. ​“I am a pro­gres­sive who gets things done. And the root of that word, pro­gres­sive, is progress,” she said. ​“A pro­gres­sive is some­one who makes progress.” Well, okay then.

Clinton’s tau­to­log­i­cal def­i­n­i­tion sug­gests that pro­gres­sive has become a mean­ing­less term devoid of ide­o­log­i­cal con­tent; a sig­ni­fi­er that sig­ni­fies noth­ing in par­tic­u­lar. In that sense, per­haps it is an apt descrip­tor after all for tri­an­gu­lat­ing politi­cians like Tim Kaine and Hillary Clinton.