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.
I FIND YOUR TERMS ACCEPTABLE: WSJ Op-Ed: Don’t Hire My Anti-Semitic Berkeley Law Students. “The student conduct at Berkeley is part of the broader attitude against Jews on university campuses that made last week’s massacre possible. It is shameful and has been tolerated for too long. It’s time for the adults to take over, and that includes law firms looking for graduates to hire. … If you are a legal employer, when you interview students from Berkeley, Harvard, NYU or any other law school this year, ask them what organizations they belong to. Ask if they support discriminatory bylaws or other acts and resolutions blaming Jews and Israelis for the Hamas massacre. If a student endorses hatred, it isn’t only your right but your duty not to hire him. Do you want your clients represented by someone who condones these monstrous crimes?”
IT’S A BAD WEEK FOR THE IVY LEAGUE: Hard at Work for Hamas at Brown – No Longer a Hypothetical Problem. “The faculty of Middle East Studies at Brown, like most universities in the country, is comprised of the usual suspects. Typically brandishing PhDs from Georgetown, Columbia, or Berkeley, they engage in nonstop caterwauling about Israel. Settler colonialism, apartheid, occupation, Jews have no connection to, or place in, the region and the always popular comparison of Israel to Nazis are a few of the mantras they chant by rote. All are are yawn-inducing for any educated adult, but all are poisoning the college students they purport to ‘educate’.”
ART HISTORY: After 500+ Years, X-Rays Have Revealed an Amazing Secret Inside the Mona Lisa. “We know Leonardo da Vinci as a famed Italian painter, but what about da Vinci as a chemist? New research into the Mona Lisa shows that da Vinci may very well have crafted a new type of paint mixture that then endured as the norm for centuries.”
I DIDN’T REALIZE THEY TOOK SO MUCH FOR TESTS: Smaller blood draws in ICUs could prevent transfusions. “While the amount of blood drawn per tube is relatively small, ICU patients typically require multiple blood samples taken multiple times every day. This can add up to significant blood loss that contributes to anemia, or low red blood cells. ICU patients are unable to produce more red blood cells to correct for this blood loss and often require treatment with a blood transfusion.” Plus: “Most hospitals use standard tubes that automatically draw four to six milliliters (ml) of blood. But a typical laboratory test only requires less than 0.5 ml of blood.”
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.’
More from the San Fran Chronicle:
So is reclaiming the terms related to progressivism and rehabilitating their true meaning. This is challenging but not impossible. Progressives should aggressively rebut conservative distortions of their work, and articulate their genuine intentions.
The Republicans, and the moderate Democrats who naively carry their water, want to lead California down a dangerously regressive path. The first step to stopping them is to reclaim the terms progressives once popularized, and remind people of their true meaning.
“Our analysis shows a single SLS Block 1B will cost at least $2.5 billion to produce—not including Systems Engineering and Integration costs—and NASA’s aspirational goal to achieve a cost savings of 50 percent is highly unrealistic,” Martin wrote in an audit of the agency’s plans, which was published on Thursday.
The main problem with the SLS rocket is not its performance—the vehicle’s debut during the Artemis I mission in late 2022 was virtually flawless—but rather its extremely high cost. Independent reviews of the vehicle, which Congress mandated that NASA build more than a decade ago, have found that NASA is unlikely to have a sustainable deep space exploration program built around such an expensive heavy-lift rocket.
Digging into Martin’s report, it’s not difficult to see why. The SLS rocket is powered by four main engines derived from the Space Shuttle program. The cost of these four engines is $582.7 million, or $146 million per engine. This means that a single engine on NASA’s rocket costs roughly the same amount that the space agency paid for an entire mission on the Falcon Heavy rocket — $178 million for the Europa Clipper spacecraft.
The Psyche mission that launched on a Falcon Heavy last week cost an estimated $113 million. SLS has a lot more lift than Falcon Heavy does but not that much more, dollar for dollar.
Starship — when Washington finally lets testing proceed — is supposed to bring costs down dramatically from even that.
InstaPundit is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a
means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
