Liberal v. progressive

Kevin Drum links to a recent poll showing how voters self-identify along the lines of liberal, moderate, conservative. The results are depicted in the graph to the right, and the differences are pretty startling.

Obviously, the term "liberal" has a distinctly negative connotation for many Americans. I suspect for many it's about the same as "leftist." The term "conservative" can mean almost anything from wanting to preserve the environment to wanting to preserve slavery. But, on the whole "conserving" and "conservation" sound good.

It would be nice if we could get people to think "liberal" means "liberty" and "liberation" and things like that, but they don't seem prepared to do so. It's not only the far right's efforts to define "liberal" as a dirty word, since the percentage self-identifying as "liberal" has hardly changed at all since at least 1976. It's obviously something more persistent and deep-rooted.

So, what should we do about this? I know from his earlier posts that KissWeb would prefer we stand up and say, "We're liberal and we're proud of it!" To some extent, I agree with that. But, on the other hand, we may be swimming against the current to do that. I don't know how a similar poll would come out if you substituted the term "progressive" for "liberal," but I suspect it would find a higher percentage saying they were "progressives." Words like "modern" and "forward looking" come to mind as synonyms. And, antonyms are things like "backwards" and "old fashioned." Who wants to be seen as "backwards" and "old fashioned?"

So, maybe it's best to describe ourselves as progressives rather than as liberals.