Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. If your politics are left of center, what do you call yourself? The terms typically used, liberal and progressive, have been changing over time. Liberal fell out of fashion in favor of progressive in recent decades or at least the word progressive started to be adopted more. Now progressive is under new scrutiny and an article in The New York Times sees social democrat as on the rise and some say, democratic socialist. What do these different terms mean these days and how are they different from each other?

This interesting Times piece is titled, Some on the Left Turn Against the Label "Progressive". It explores how some Democrats, who once shied away from the label liberal in the 1990s, embraced the word progressive, but now that may be changing too, as people questioned the very idea of progress. With us now is the author of that article Blake Hounshell, editor of The New York Times On Politics newsletter. Again, it's titled, Some on the Left Turn Against the Label Progressive. Blake, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Blake Hounshell: Thank you for having me. Great to be here.

Brian: Listeners, if you are left of center politically, how do you label your politics and how did you come to decide which of these terms best describes you, and has it changed for you over time? 212-433-WNYC. Do you use the term liberal, progressive, social democrat, democratic socialists, or something else entirely? 212-433-9692. As we get into this idea of progress and what our relationship even is with the idea of progress, do you believe in progress in the way Martin Luther King frames it? Say, in that famous quote, which is cited in the article, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

Does history have a direction or do we deceive ourselves if we think so? Do we deceive ourselves if we think so, ironically, making justice inequality even harder to achieve or maybe you see progress in a way conservatives do as something not to aspire to for other reasons? Conservatives, you can call too. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Such an interesting piece that you wrote, Blake. Can we start with where the word liberal came from and what made it start to give way to progressive?

Blake: Sure. There's the liberal in the sense of the kind of enlightenment era use of the term, which is-- that's what people call classically liberal. Folks like Adam Smith, one of the founding thinkers of capitalism. Up until even the 1940s, there were people that we would consider conservative today who used the label liberal to describe themselves. Herbert Hoover, who was the president on the eve of the Great Depression, called himself a liberal, and today at Stanford University there's an institution in his name, The Hoover Institution, that's a bastion of modern conservative thought. These labels tended to shift over time.

Brian: That's what they call classic liberalism which really means free market economics, right? The government off businesses backs.

Blake: Exactly. That's exactly right. That was what Adam Smith is known for. People like that. Friedrich Hayek called himself a liberal.

Brian: What's the difference between a progressive and a liberal today or let's say in the last 20, 30 years? Is it how far left? Is it what sounds strong versus weak? Is it something else?

Blake: I think, as I say in the article, the terms have become spongy. They tend to mean whatever people want them to mean, but I think the generally accepted usage is a liberal is someone who's center left, someone like a Hillary Clinton, whereas a progressive is someone further left like a Bernie Sanders. There was this interesting moment, that I talk about, during the 2016 presidential primary where Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders actually squabbled over who was a progressive. Clinton said, "Well, I'm a progressive who gets results," implying that Sanders didn't. It's been contested, but generally, I'd say now people see people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders as on the progressive end of the Democratic Party.

Brian: You quoted Georgetown historian Michael Kazin who called the term progressive spongy. What did he mean by that?

Blake: I think he means that it has this kind of flexible usage. Now what we're seeing is in a lot of these primary races for House and Senate seats, you have these progressive challengers who are going after centrist Democrats and the centrist Democrats are often calling themselves progressive too. It's a label that both wings of the Democratic Party have embraced over time and as the progressive wing of the Democratic party gets stronger, those centrists are-- they're wrestling with the same terminology that I talk about in the article.

Brian: So to bring it up to the present moment, why are some on the left turning against and even warning against the word progressive?

Blake: I think part of it is just a natural contrarianism, reacting to the fact that progressive has become this really omnipresent, dominant term. That's definitely part of it, but I think the deeper reason is that a lot of folks on the left just dispute the idea that history has a certain direction. That's baked into the notion of progressivism. Progress is part of the word progressivism.

There's a lot of pessimism on the left about the direction of the country, climate change is a big factor in this and the folks that are quibbling with the use of the term progressive would say, "Well, progress doesn't always go in one direction." There's another component of it, which is that progress is also in the eye of the beholder. My notion of progress might be different than your notion of progress. Some of this is a bit academic, but these labels tend to have a lot of political power once they get into the public arena, so it's an important discussion.

Brian: So about this being a time of rising pessimism in progressive circles, certainly, there's a feeling it may be counterproductive to cite or to believe Martin Luther King's quote, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice," which you referred to in the piece because, I guess, that makes progress toward equal rights seem inevitable like you just have to wait for it when things are actually going backwards these days. Maybe it's worth pointing out that King was a fighter. He was nonviolent, but a fighter for justice every minute of his adult life. Maybe citing that arc is a motivator for people to keep fighting or I don't know how people are hearing it.

Blake: No, that's exactly right. One of the people that I spoke with for the article is a guy named Matthew Sitman, who was a former Christian conservative, who is now on the left and he was one of the people who turned me on to this trend on the left. What Sitman said to me was that there's a very deeply Christian idea here, which is that in the very long run, in the long arc of the universe, the long moral arc of the universe, we're going to reach this moral ideal.

That doesn't mean there are not going to be setbacks along the way and it doesn't mean we don't have to fight for a better world. I think that's the context in which certainly Martin Luther King intended his remarks and I think it's probably how Obama intends it, although, Obama tended to maybe over deploy the phrase in different contexts and I get into some of that in the article.

Brian: Jay in Sunnyside wants to weigh in on, I think, exactly this point. Jay, you're on WNYC. Hi, there.

Jay: Hello. I'm so glad to be on with you and with this very interesting discussion and very interesting essay. There's one small quibble I might have, if I understood it correctly, that one does not need to believe that progress is happening towards a glorious future now in order to embrace the idea that we want to support progress towards our political goals, whatever they may be. In that sense, that word is no different from conservative. What is it that the Conservatives, "want to conserve"?

I would also want to moan a little bit about use of the word liberal in this country as something you alluded to before. The word is very rarely used to mean anything left of center anywhere else. Parti Liberal, for example, in the French-speaking Switzerland, is a pro-business party. One thing that it does is it undermines any possibility of discussing neoliberalism, which is essentially that human beings are nothing more than units in the marketplace. It's terribly confusing if people think that neoliberal, the word Neo modifies American's definitions of liberalism, rather than the classical kind.

Brian: Right.

Jay: I hope I made some sense.

Brian: Yes, you make a lot of sense. Yet, the word liberal came to mean in this country, maybe it was in the '60s, maybe it was an FDR's time, not exactly sure of the starting point, came to mean left of center, you were more for civil rights and other equal rights of various kinds who were more for regulation of the market by the government whereas those who were conservative were not. It took on a particular American meaning at least for a number of decades, right, Jay?

Jay: Yes, I feel it's somewhat limiting to our possible understanding, a greater understanding of the kind of neoliberalism that the economy is embracing now.

Brian: Right. Jay, thank you very much for an interesting call. To some of what he said, Blake, you write in your piece that in the '80s and '90s, Republicans successfully demonized the word liberal to the point where many Democrats shied away from it in favor of labels like Conservative Democrat, and progressive came out of that. It's funny in that respect, because on the one hand, I think, if the Reagan-era Republicans managed to demonize the word liberal for a lot of swing voters, it's because they saw liberalism is going too far left as causing cultural decay in the 1960s, however, they define that.

That's one reason that the word liberal became unpopular for Democratic Party politicians to use. By the same time, there are people may be more like our caller, Jay, who started to see liberal as two centrist squishy and therefore embrace progressive. Liberal got hammered from both sides.

Blake: Yes, absolutely. I was only 10 years old at the time, I was a political junkie even then. I remember the Dukakis campaign against George H.W. Bush in 1988. Bush hammered Dukakis as a Massachusetts liberal. 16 years later in 2004, John Kerry ran against the son, George W. Bush. Once again, the Bush family wheeled out this term Massachusetts liberal, it's hard to know how effective it was, but neither Dukakis nor Kerry were ever president. Clearly, that had some power in the political arena.

Brian: You write in the piece that now the term social democrat is on the rise, give us some context there.

Blake: Social democrat's a very common term to describe European parties, the lefts, in Scandinavia, in Germany. I would make a distinction between a Social Democrat and a socialist whereas, I think, historically, socialist meant that you want to seize the means of production, nationalize the coal mines, that sort of thing. That kind of thinking, it has been, I think discredited largely in the public mind. Social democrats are people that support a large, robust welfare state like you think of Sweden kind of cradle-to-grave safety net. That's really when someone like a Bernie Sanders talks about democratic socialism, that's what I think he means, he's not someone who's out there wanting to nationalize private industries.

Brian: It's come up on the show, and I can't even remember whether it was from a call or from a guest. The question why doesn't Bernie Sanders, why don't AOC and others who call themselves democratic socialists just call themselves social democrats? If they call themselves Social Democrats, they're going to sound like a much more benign thing, like they identify with the democracy and success of social policies that they have in Scandinavia or somewhere like that, social democrat. If they call themselves democratic socialists, where socialist is the noun, then it more sounds like something closer to the old Soviet Union. I don't know the answer to why democratic socialists versus social democrat, do you?

Blake: Well, I wasn't able to ask Bernie or AOC about this directly, but I did speak about this with Michael Kazan, the Georgetown historian. His theory was that the democratic socialists are really trying to make a sharp distinction between their politics and the politics of the Democratic Party. If they call themselves Social Democrats, even though Social Democrats as lowercase D, in some people's minds they would be conflating their views with those of the Democratic Party.

Brian: Interesting.

Blake: Part of this is an attempt to distinguish themselves and say, "You know what? I'm not a mainstream Democrat like those guys who in their view are captured by interests like Wall Street." They're trying to say, "I'm something different." They're really trying to own the word Socialist and rebrand it, even though I think, as Kazan says and you just alluded to, that's a pretty fraught exercise in the context of American politics.

Brian: I think we're going to get a really interesting perspective from our next caller, if I'm understanding my board correctly. I think Alec in Morningside Heights told our screener that he's the son of the legendary socialist activist, Michael Harrington. Alec, you're on WNYC. Do I have that right? Are you Michael Harrington's son?

Alec: Yes, I am.

Brian: Thank you for calling in. What would you like to add to the conversation?

Alec: Well, I think everything that I was going to say has been said. The distinction between democratic socialist and social democrat is one that I don't think is really understood in this country. I don't necessarily think it does need to be understood. Where I would make that distinction is whether you believe in the collective control of what a Marxist would call the means of production, what the rest of us would call industry.

My father, to the end of his life, believed in that as the ultimate goal. In the short run, he was a Social Democrat, which as you've said, I associated with basically every advanced wealthy democracy, including the United States, but to a much lesser degree, but having a comprehensive welfare state and regulation. I do think that Bernie Sanders and AOC are being somewhat disingenuous when they use the term Democratic Socialist rather than Social Democrat. I also wonder, however, if this is just hair splitting, and it only matters to people who are familiar with European politics.

The last thing I would say is, my problem with the progressive movement is I do have a problem with what is now being called the woke focus on policing language. I want to and in some cases, art and literature, I want to say clearly, that I'm a supporter of equal treatment, civil rights, treating people decently. I am a supporter of all these things. I think that the policing of language and the policing of our literature puts us in dangerous territory. However, the right has managed to do us one better at this point by actually putting it into laws with say, Ron DeSantis campaign against what he calls wokism. That's a jumble of things, but that's what I had to say.

Brian: Yes. People who are on the other side of that last issue that you raised will say language can equal violence or language can produce physical violence, language actually disadvantages people if it's used in certain ways. It's not just about speech that can be separated from consequences, right?

Alec: Yes, I would say in the course of my lifetime, I've seen the opposite happen. Before I was born back in the 1950s and '60s, the people who were the censors, the people who were the Puritans, were the Conservatives, were the ones for whom the sacred cows were God and country, family, and the military. You had the Mort Saul's and the Lenny Bruce's and the Dick Gregory's and the Richard Pryor's sticking their fingers in the eye of the conservative Puritans.

I started to see in the '80s when I was an adolescent, the backlash against us being put in that position of being the policers of language with things like the Truly Tasteless Joke Book and Andrew Dice Clay's comedy. I think that this focus on language actually turns bigoted language, bigoted humor into daring irreverence and that it actually provides camouflage for the real bigots to say, "Oh, I'm just a champion of free speech and I'm just going after the Puritans."

Brian: Interesting. Alec, thank you very much for that perspective. Obviously, that could start a whole other conversation with people who would disagree with that, but really interesting thoughts there from Alec, who identified himself as the son of the famous socialist activist Michael Harrington. This is WNYC-FM HD and AM New York, WNJT-FM 8.1 Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 Netcong, and WNJO 90.3 Toms River. We are in New York and New Jersey Public Radio and live streaming at wnyc.org.

As we begin to finish up now with Blake Hounshell, who writes a politics newsletter for the New York Times, which raised very interesting questions in his latest addition about the words liberal and progressive and social democrat and democratic socialists, the latest article titled, Some on the Left Turn Against the Label "Progressive". Where does this have to go Blake and maybe listening to Alec, maybe you need to do a subsequent newsletter on the term Woke, and who was once for and who may be now against it because originally, it wasn't that long ago that people were using Woke with no irony or sarcasm at all on the left to refer to people who have been awaken to the racial injustice in the world and other injustices.

Blake: Yes. Just to piggyback on what Alec said, which I thought was very insightful, language, especially in the context of politics, language does have real power. I think the fact that we are arguing over terminology like Woke and what it means and this idea that too many people on the left are policing speech. I think that just indicates just the power of language in our politics and it does matter what labels we use to describe things, which is exactly why I wanted to tackle this.

To your point about Wokeism, one thing that I think people forget about conservatism is that in one sense, conservatism just means preserving the status quo, and if the status quo has become dominated by progressive ideas, then it's natural for progressives to become the new small see conservatives trying to preserve the gains they've made in society. I think it's only natural that you'll see some on the left try to lock in some of the new ideas that they brought into the public arena in the '70s and '80s.

Brian: Blake Hounshell, editor of the New York Times on Politics newsletter, again, his latest piece is titled, Some on the Left Turn Against the Label "Progressive". Blake, just tell everybody because I'm not sure, can people only see this if they're subscribed to your newsletter, which I think means they have to be subscribed to the Times or is this in the paper or on the general Times website or app too?

Blake: It comes out in the newsletter and then it goes online. It's available for subscribers, but you know what after this show, I can create a guest link on my Twitter account @NYTBlake, and people will be able to read that for free and hopefully, if they like it then they can subscribe to the time, and I can get paid.

Brian: All right. Well, I'm glad that you'll make it free for our listeners and you certainly sparked some interesting and I think important conversation among everybody. We could have kept going for a long time with all the calls that are still on the board. Thank you very much.

Blake: Thank you for having me, Brian.

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