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“PROGRESSIVES’” RECURRING REBRAND RECURRING AGAIN? In the San Fran Chronicle: Progressives under attack from right — and left.

Conservatives are once again successfully demonizing and devaluing a term embraced by liberals, and this time they are doing it with the help of Democrats.

Even in purportedly liberal bastions like San Francisco and Oakland, the word “progressive” is being twisted to denote radical ideas and inept leadership instead of hope and revolutionary change.

Republicans and many moderate Democrats have perpetuated a distorted narrative around progressivism, and any term associated with it. Both groups paint progressives as detached from reality, which diverts attention from their own patchy records on critical issues like public safety and housing.

As the late Fred Siegel wrote in 2014 book The Revolt Against the Masses, “Progressivism” stole a huge base from laissez faire classical liberals and rebranded as “liberalism” in the 1920s, after the brutal, racist Woodrow Wilson had made such a hash of the term during WWI:

For the ardent Progressive Frederick Howe, who had been Wilson’s Commissioner of Immigration, the pre-war promise of the benign state built on reasoned reform had turned to ashes. “I hated,” he wrote, “the new state that had arisen” from the war. “I hated its brutalities, its ignorance, its unpatriotic patriotism that made profit from our sacrifices and used it to suppress criticism of its acts. . . . I wanted to protest against the destruction of my government, my democracy, my America.” As part of his protest, the thoroughly alienated Howe distanced himself from Progressivism. Liberals were those Progressives who had renamed themselves so as to repudiate Wilson. “The word liberalism,” wrote Walter Lippmann in 1919, “was introduced into the jargon of American politics by that group who were Progressives in 1912 and Wilson Democrats from 1916 to 1918.” The new liberalism was a decisive cultural break with Wilson and Progressivism. While the Progressives had been inspired by a faith in democratic reforms as a salve for the wounds of both industrial civilization and power politics, liberals saw the American democratic ethos as a danger to freedom at home and abroad.

After decades of failure during the Great Depression, the Great Society, and the events leading up to the Republican Congressional revolution of 1994, the left began to rebrand as “progressive” rather than “liberal.” By 2015, Hillary Clinton, she of “vast right-wing conspiracies,” Russian collusion fabulism, and most recently, “formal deprogramming of the cult members,” was claiming, “I take a backseat to no one, when you look at my record in standing up and fighting for progressive values.”

The Chronicle notices another phrase that, as the leftist cliché goes, Republicans have pounced on:

Another phrase that fell victim to right-wing manipulation is “defund the police.” This rallying cry emerged in response to police brutality and the urgent need for police reform. Yet, conservatives skillfully spun it as an attack on law and order, suggesting that those who support reallocating money toward social services are putting the safety of communities at risk. It’s a classic case of conservatives distorting the meaning of a phrase to suit their own fear-mongering agenda.

Which is odd, because during the annus horribilis of 2020, fervent leftists were pretty darn clear that “defund the police” meant just that:

At least until the left that discovered “defund the police” didn’t play very well in many minority neighborhoods that count on law enforcement to keep the peace, to the point where: Democrats Trying to Rewrite History on ‘Defund the Police.’