not knowing their history, I guess...

[acroyear]

Joe's Political Jottings - not knowing their history, I guess...:

For progressives -- the liberal kind -- this confusion may come with a silver lining. As Gallup points out, the word has avoided being "pigeonholed," and the scant opposition it receives from political moderates may indicate that, unlike "liberal," it hasn't become a dirty word.

Because while Progressive today doesn't have the smell of death to it that "Liberal" does, it did 90 years ago during the Republican Conservative boom of the 1920s, the post-Wilson, post-Teddy, anti-Progressive backlash. At that point in time, the efforts of Progressives were, as today, being systematically taken down, and anti-Progressive rhetoric was at a high in newspaper editorials.

So Progressive HAD become the dirty word, and thus the word never uttered by the Liberals that came in to clean up the mess of the Depression.

Since Liberal was the word free of the baggage, it became necessary to add baggage to that, all the while Progressive as a word disappeared from the lexicon and into history.  And as I've written before, it takes 1 generation to make an event history, and a second generation to make it forgotten.  The attack on "Liberal" started post-Ike, now almost 50 years ago, effectively 2 generations.  That has now run the course such that people forget it ever happened and forget what it was before when Liberal was ok and Progressive was wrong.