By Any Other Name
by digby
Wake up, America, there’s a new, dangerous threat on the horizon: progressives. You may have heard about them if you’ve been paying attention to the right sources. They come from the 1920s, they’re basically socialists — or maybe fascists — and they’re here to steal your country.
A generation after Ronald Reagan and his allies turned “liberal” into an epithet, conservatives are going after the term many Democrats adopted in its place. Glenn Beck and his paranoid Fox News Channel ranting is just at the forefront of what appears to be a movement to demonize the word “progressive,” in hopes of scaring voters away from the left. “Progressivism is the cancer in America, and it is eating our Constitution,” Beck told thousands of adoring fans at the conservative CPAC conference last month. “And it was designed to eat the Constitution. To ‘progress’ past the Constitution.” The National Review ran a whole special issue on progressives in December; staff writer Jonah Goldberg even published a book on the subject, “Liberal Fascism,” two years ago. The latest ad for Liz Cheney’s new group, Keep America Safe, prominently features Attorney General Eric Holder declaring that progressives are about to run the nation — before seguing, sharply, into asking whether Holder’s pals share the values of al-Qaida.
Of course, “progressive” also happens to be the way nearly every Democratic lawmaker, activist and politician describes him- or herself these days
This is why I never stopped calling myself a liberal. There’s just no use in running away from labels because the right has demonized them. It’s not about the label, it’s about you. And you can’t run away from yourself.
I think it’s probably a good idea if people just stop looking at the solution to conservative attacks as a “branding” problem.
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