Reply #7: yes [View All]

[Rich Hunt]

Lately, a lot of people bandy about the word 'progressive' without (apparently) having taken the time to understand the history of progressivism and the connotation of the word. It's not a synonym for 'liberal' or even 'very liberal'. This drives me up the wall. According to a number of people, apparently just about everyone in the Democratic party is 'progressive', when the reality is that very few of them are.


http://progressiveliving.org/progressivism.htm

Progressives are typically portrayed as being "far left", and yet this characterization is in many ways misleading. This impression arises largely because the elitist mass media simplistically portrays American politics as being a one-dimensional split between "liberals" and "conservatives". In fact, American politics are far more complex, and can't be properly understood unless we add (at least) one more dimension: elitism vs. populism. When we add this additional dimension, it becomes clearer that many self-styled "conservatives" are in fact wealthy economic elitists who have little in common with cultural conservatives or cultural liberals, and that their distance from the political center is much greater by far than the distance of progressives, whose views, when accurately represented, are far more mainstream than those of virtually any elitist.