What does "progressive" mean in America now?
Ludwig Wittgenstein taught that the meaning of a word can be found in how it is used. In the United States, how the word “progressive” is used in political parlance has changed since 2020.
In March 2020, progressive referred to the movement in the Democratic Party, led by Bernie Sanders’ presidential run, to elect Democrats who espoused progressive political goals, which is basically Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Second New Deal. What Lyndon Johnson wanted to do before he screwed the pooch by escalating the imperialist intervention in Vietnam.
After victories in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, Sanders was poised to take an unsurmountable lead on Super Tuesday. By the end of March, after blatant intervention by Obama and the Democratic media propaganda outlets, Joe Biden was shambling towards the White House.
The progressive Democratic voters, such as myself at the time, were stunned, demoralized, and then disoriented along with everyone else when the Covid lockdowns slammed down. Sanders’ movement, already fractured, fell apart under a combination of Sanders’ craven capitulation to Biden and the total dislocation of our lives by confusing and contradictory Covid mandates and closures.
Then came the general election. There were fierce debates between progressives who had all supported Sanders about whether or not to vote for Joe Biden, or any other corporatist Fascist bastard of a Democrat, and there was a big split.
I don’t have the numbers, but it’s got to be several million who voted for Bernie who did not vote for Biden, and the polls indicate very few of us voted for Trump. Most of those millions just didn’t vote in November, which is one important reason why the Democratic margin in the House of Representatives was so narrow.
Then a jagoff pothead comedian in his undoubtedly very nice basement, Jimmy Dore, challenged the progressive Democrats in the House to refuse to vote for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker unless she publicly committed to having a straight up or down floor vote on Medicare for All.
In the middle of a pandemic that was supposed to be something approaching smallpox levels of illness and death, from the tone of the newscasts.
#ForceTheVote, it was, and it was a great political experiment. Confront progressive Democrats with a very simple, effective, and symbolic political tactic and demand that they mean what they said on the campaign trail.
They didn’t mean what they said. Not one member of the Squad went along with the idea. And they haven’t stood up to Biden or Pelosi since. Bernie Sanders never used his power in the Senate to kill a single Biden proposal to force Biden to give him any concessions.
The Squad and Bernie are still considered progressive. So what does the word mean to many of us now? A progressive politician is someone who wants to become a celebrity like AOC. A progressive congresscritter is one that will say they are far all of these wonderful things, and then refuse to use their power to fight for those things in the legislature.
Progressive means weak. Progressive means celebrity. Progressive means hoping against hope that for the electoral system will deliver an FDR just one more time.
It’s a fool’s dream. We’ve seen twice now that will never be allowed by the Democratic Party.
And we’re going to see what the Party and its propagandized voters do to somebody who defied both Hillary and Joe Biden on May 3rd when Nina Turner’s truly awful campaign will be crushed by the Democratic machine.
Progressive means doing nothing to fundamentally change the status quo.
That’s enough for any reasonable person of any ideology to not trust politicians who call themselves progressive. So I guess I’m no longer a progressive. I’m certainly no longer comfortable applying that term to myself.
Socialist, Marxist, radical, and revolutionary at least ring true for me and I don’t feel dirty thinking of myself in those terms. Other former progressive voters who are done with all Democrats may rightly choose to describe themselves in other terms than I, but I think that word progressive has been too corrupted for leftists to accurately use for awhile.