Progressivism as the Radical Left

I have long noted that "the progressive netroots," as our political antagonists on the other side like to call themselves, are today's radicals, the ideological descendents of the New Left revolutionaries of the 1960s (people like Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground terrorists).

Today's progressives have very little in common with the true early-20th progressive reformers, such as Governor Hiram Johnson of California, who brought direct democracy to the state's voters in 1911.

I often get smeared as "wingnut" by some reality-challenged bloggers (for example, here and here) for making this argument, because the left today can't stand being identified for what they truly are. So it's with pleasure that I share Michael Lind's new piece, calling on progressives to end their charade: "Is it OK to Be Liberal Again, Instead of Progressive?":

If you were a progressive in the '60s and '70s, you were likely to think that Truman and Johnson were warmongering "corporate liberals" under the control of the "military-industrial complex" and that the Democrats and Republicans were indistinguishable. For the moderate and conservative Democrats of the DLC to call themselves the new progressives was the equivalent of moderate, secular Republicans calling themselves the new fundamentalists.

At least the far-left progressives were honest. They genuinely despised the mid-century American liberals, whom they viewed simply as another species of bourgeois imperialists. This is another one of the reasons I dislike the term "progressive" ... Why share a label with anyone who romanticized Ho Chi Minh or Fidel Castro?

Actually, because so few Americans identify "progressives" with this strain of left-wing extremism, it's unlikely that today's left will abandon the term.

I imagine there's still some kind of positive glow associated with the idea of a political movement that supports "progress." That's the last thing today's leftists want, however. They want a new (old) New Deal/Great Society combo, complete with WPA-style government spending programs, taxes on the rich (those making $250,000, which was about $35,000 in 1960, for comparison, but folks at that income level back then didn't think they were "rich"), and the endorsement of blame-America-first ideology at the highest levels of the foreign policy establishment (in that respect, thank goodness we might see Hillary Clinton taking over Foggy Bottom).

Daniel Halper at Pajamas Media argues that Barack Obama's already thrown the Democratic Party's hard-left contingents under the bus. Yet, given the tantrum-prone propensity of the progressive hordes, the president-elect may find their endless harangues a bit overwhelming at some point.