@ Sully:
(b)

Why are we getting so hung up on this much abused and loaded with deceit and propaganda word?

Because Glenn Beck has been shouting at us that it's the name of a cancer with which we cannot co-exist.

narciso wrote:

(I’m not sure where your attribution of the ballot initiative to the Progressives comes from, but that’s procedural too)

Direct democracy is a classic demand of first wave progressivism. Again, no one would suggest that the Progressives invented the referendum - that would be absurd. However, it featured among the tools the Progressives demanded in order to deal with concentrations of power and corruption. California's initiative process was finally instituted, after an extended political struggle, as one consequence of the election of the very progressive Hiram Johnson as governor.

http://www.healthvote.org/index.php/site/article/democracy_by_initiative

The above-linked summary jogged my memory: Johnson's package also included the "recall" mechanism that was used to remove Rose Bird (liberal anti-death penalty chief justice), that has come into discussion again in re the Prop 8 case, and that also led, eventually, to the replacement of Gray Davis by the Governator.

Needless to say, that last one didn't work out as conservatives might have hoped. Interestingly within this discussion, Arnold sought a set of ballot initiatives - all designed in the classic progressive mode to break up concentrations of power and misgovernment, but with their main targets the reactionary liberal power structure. They were defeated in part by a well-financed campaign on behalf of those vested interests, in part by other factors especially popular complacency. I think if they or something like them were tried again today, backed by Tea Partiers, they'd do a lot better, but their failure crucially helps explain the emergence of the center-left hybrid green girly-man Arnold from what he originally put before the voters.

JEM, you proceed by a logical chain, but essentially you're working backwards and from the top down, and by way of egregious acts. That's one narrative of progressivism, but against it is a completely different one that is equally self-consistent and testable, and a lot easier to understand and reason with than it is to understand and reason with a cancer.

It's like writing a history of conservatism that - off the top of my head - proceeds through Mike Huckabee and George W Bush through Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, Richard Nixon, George Wallace, Douglas MacArthur, Warren G Harding, and so on, ignoring the distinctions that a serious conservative would make (e.g., that Richard Nixon was no conservative), and instead emphasizing dereliction of duty, wedge issues, hypocrisy especially about constitutional limitations and protections, whatever. You can bring Ronald Reagan into the conversation, too, as long as all you remember is that he posed as a deficit hawk but left huge structural deficits behind, that his foreign policy comes down to Iran-Contra and Lebanon, and that he just stood around and followed pie in the sky missile defense dreams while the Soviet Union imploded all on its own, and so on, and so on.

At a certain point, you come back to the present and to what is, and make judgments about what's achievable. We've reached the point where a guy like Ryan can propose major reforms of Medicare and Social Security, and not be laughed out of politics as a dreamer. That's progress, for lack of a better word. I would characterize his plan as a species of conservative progressivism. Sarah Palin is also a conservative progressive - in fact, she's made a contribution to the history of progressivism by turning "progress" into a transitive verb. She hasn't yet taken a clear position on entitlements, and it will be interesting to see where she lands, but I'll betcha it's a heckuva lot closer to Ryan than to Ron Paul. As governor, she embraced, and took credit for, numerous typically progressive reforms in Alaska. Her battle with entrenched partisan cliques was like something out of the early 20th Century progressive history of California. In what she does say about Health Care, she hits "common sense patient-centered reforms" over and over - pure conservative reformism, conservative progressivism - no bomb Medicare and build a new system from the ruins from her.

Both Palin and Ryan envision and advertise reform of government, justified in terms of greater efficiency and sustainability, defeat of corruption and special interest influence, power to the people, and so on. Those are all authentically and classically progressive goals. They embrace different means of achieving those goals than were available to or of interest to the early progressives. In 1900, the unions were a progressive force. Today, they're reactionary - they've become the political machines that the progressives once upon a time opposed, just as professionalized civil service has become a massified version of 19th Century patronage.

Making things into all-evil anti-democratic progressives versus the eternally virtuous libertarian conservatives may simplify things, but I think it's a dead end, and will lead to self-destructive and divisive politics as well.

JED, as ever you show yourself very well-informed and well-read, but I find your reply somewhat beside the point. There's nothing new under the sun, and nothing comes from nothing - so of course there were precursors to Progressive Era reforms and impulses, and shared authorship across the generations. One major argument in defense of progressivism is that it's, in fact, fully in keeping with American traditions and typical American impulses in favor of social justice and political reform.

A related point is that many of the concerns and interests associated, exclusively or not, with progressivism are aspects of life and government that most of us take for granted and would defend, at least until and unless practical substitutes were found and readied for implementation - efforts that would inherently resemble, arguably equate with progressive-style reform initiatives.

Maybe, for example, you see the initiative process as a bad thing. I don't really know. I think it has been over-exploited in California, and has had the unintended consequence of freeing the legislature to be even more irresponsible and encouraging the judiciary to be even more political, but I don't support repealing it at this point, not when it's functioning as one of our last lines of defense, and I gave two examples above of its being used to serve conservative purposes of some significance. In the meantime, no governmental operation is going to be perfect, and we shouldn't expect it to be.

Historical progressivism, which I think we would be well served to distinguish from the progressivism of today's Progressive Caucus, for example, stood for reform, and articulated its concerns in relation to the rise of industrial capitalism. It was an era during which the economy of scale and the power of concentration magnified the power of corporations and government. As the movement matured, attempts were made on the national and even international level to institute progressive reforms of commensurate scope, typically in the name of efficiency.

We've learned a lot in the intervening years about the inefficiencies of scale, and we've also developed tools that allow a kind of decentralized efficiency that was unavailable or non-apparent ca 1900. Yet, historically, the progressives were at least as concerned with local control and conditions as with national transformation - or any showdown with the Constitution. Some important progressives sought to amend the Constitution to fit their goals, but so have many conservatives. It's as much a part of the basic Constitutional rule set as any other aspect of our system.

Progressivism was and remains a manifold phenomenon, sometimes with mutually contradictory parts, as we should expect of any "spirit of the times." It's not the same as any particular thinker's or politician's or party's program - or worst mistakes - or the use some later figure or figures made of its impulses and expectations. Many of those same impulses and expectations animate Glenn Beck and the Tea Party today, for good and ill.

Or, to continue the Muckraker theme, it seems to me that a huge amount of the typical complaint against the "lamestream" Media is that it's not muckraking like it's "supposed" to. Though the Founders envisioned (and experienced) a free press acting in approximately the same fashion, it was a central feature of the Progressive Era to revive and realize that vision. The expectation that the press should be actively ferreting out and exposing corruption and misgovernment, that it's one of the prime purposes of the free press, is an expectation handed down to us by the Cancers.

@ Sully:
I may have the nomenclature wrong, but I believe Galbraith is what you would call a 3rd generation or 3rd wave progressive. You'll notice (I searched) that the word "progressive" doesn't even appear in the Dalrymple article. Galbraith followed Keynes and also (late) Progressive-associated economists/economic writers like Mills and Veblen. I see him more as emblematic of American liberalism than of progressivism.

McCain-Feingold was in many respects a classic progressive reform initiative aimed at breaking up corruption and cronyism, but I don't think either sponsor, or W, would accept that it was certainly unconstitutional. Nor was the effort some fiendish plot to destroy the Constitution. Opinions on the underlying constitutional questions vary, and, on the basis of zero expertise, I happen to agree with you that they were wrong and support the Supreme Court's lawful review and judicial revision of the bill.

Americans, including legislators, have a right to be wrong, too. It's not treason to have bad ideas.

JEM wrote:

As to the Cancer Analogy, where your critique on substance fails is that the progressive movement, those who were honest back in the day, and even sometimes today [...], acknowledge that their preferred prescriptions are not compatible with the Constitution government put in place by the Founders. They would have to kill that version of government. In essence acknowledging their incompatibility.

Please be specific when you are referring to those Constitution-killing (P)rogressives. Seriously. Woodrow Wilson, for instance, is not the be-all and and-all of Progressivism. In fact, he was a latecomer, and a political opponent of other people who had just as much a right to the name and to determine the legacy.

It seems to me that the vast bulk of what everyone outside the Beck-inflamed right associates with historical progressivism was accomplished by lawful means, including the constitutional process of amendment - some good, some bad, some mixed, but 100% constitutional. Much of the progressive legacy has to do with local control and participatory democracy. All of the Californians struggling to defend Proposition 8 from runaway courts or who de-funded the state via Proposition 13, starting off the great tax revolt that Reagan rode to the presidency and that has crucially defined conservative fiscal policy ever since, are defending one of the centerpiece reforms of the real Progressive Movement.

@ Sully:
Yeah, that Jane Addams, what a self-seeking social climber.

Who are we talking about when we talk about "Progressives"? William James? Hiram Johnson? Addams? Robert LaFollette? What exactly is it about machine politics and crony capitalism that you like so much better than citizen checks on the concentration of power through ballot initiatives and referenda? What is it about city managers that makes them so un-constitutional? I could go on and intend to, but it seems to me that most of you all are dealing with an enemy image of the Evil Progressive that shifts according to whatever present purpose.

Glenn Beck is much in the mode of a classic Muckraker. They were progressives, too.

@ narciso:
Don't know if it amounts to the same thing, and I'm not aware of anyone, even Olbie's fans, who take him "seriously." I think he has a constituency of one.

As for Progressivism being offered as a salvation for all sins, doesn't every major political philosophy purport to provide comprehensive answers (not the same thing as perfect solutions)?

@ adam:
I'm not sure where you get your confidence in Beck. I'm not convinced that he's capable of consistency or of resisting overstatement. In other words, he might have a real living and breathing Cancerist during segment B, and treat her respectfully, then be back by segment C or the finale with the most provocatively emotive and apocalyptic summary he could manage.

I agree that a "we got ourselves into this mess" theme would be interesting, but it can easily be turned into "we got ourselves into this mess by letting the cancer grow and failing to excise it with sufficient remorselessness." Or "We must take full responsibility on ourselves - for having listened to them."