A SMALL DISSENT ON “PROGRESSIVE” REPLACING LIBERAL: I was a college student in the Boston area from 1985-1988. At my school, the lefty activists did not have the standard liberal-moderate-conservative understanding of politics. Rather, they called themselves, stationed on the far left, “progressive”; liberals and moderates were “conservative”; and conservatives were “reactionaries.”

In this environment, Gov. Michael Dukakis chose to call himself a “progressive” rather than a “liberal,” to station himself, at least rhetorically, on the far left of his party. When he ran for president, however, the media consistently reported along the lines of “Dukakis calls himself a progressive, not a liberal, to try to appear more moderate to voters.” The truth, as noted, was the opposite, but it served Dukakis’ political prospects as he wrapped up the Democratic nomination, so he went with it.

Thus, the media took the term “progressive,” meant to convey leftist radicalism, and turned it into a more palatable, more moderate version of liberal. But the activist “progressive” left always understood their agenda to be stripping the American left of its vestiges of classical liberalism–free speech, some respect for property rights, belief in color-blindness–in favor of a totally illiberal agenda.