Hillary's a Progressive?

Amanda Carpenter's TownHall.com column today looks at Hillary Clinton's claim that she's not a liberal, she's a "progressive."

Clinton lamented that the word "liberal" had been "turned on its head" to be "made to seem as though it’s a word that describes big government, totally contrary to what its meaning was in the 19th and early 20th century."

"I consider myself a modern progressive," Clinton said. "Someone who believes strongly in individual rights and freedoms, who believes that we are better as a society when we're working together."

A few of Clinton’s answers, however, sounded like they came from a big, government liberal.

I concur that "liberal" no longer means what it once did. Liberalism originally embraced personal freedom and shunned government intervention in people's lives; many if not most of the founders of the United States could be described as liberals, in the classic sense.

However, modern liberalism is an altogether different animal than it was in the 18th Century. In fact, it's almost completely the opposite of what it once was. Conservatism now embraces the set of values once held by classic liberalism.

Liberalism now rejects the free market, capitalism, and limited government. About the only thing it retains is a perverted form of individualism--one that maximizes personal license (primarily in the area of sexual freedom), so long as government elites approve of this personal license. In other words, as long as it doesn't interfere with wealth-redistribution priorities, modern egalitarianism and the latest social engineering fad.

Freedom from heavy taxation, doing what you want with your own land, private entities determining the value of their own labor, market determination of economic priorities...in modern liberalism, these all get the axe in favor of centralized government control.

Hillary and other liberals may not like the baggage that comes with the term "liberal" and "liberalism," but they have only themselves to blame. It is the essence of what liberalism causes that has produced that baggage. As people see the chaos, loss of efficiency, unfairness and and social decay brought on by liberal policies, reasonable people reject it.

Therefore, liberals don't like to be called liberals. It's why the media can always find "conservatives" and "conservative policies," but you never hear the media mention any "liberal senators" or "liberal policies."

Progressives like to define themselves as being reform-minded and being for "the little guy," but at the end of the day, there is little to distinguish "progressives" from modern big-government liberals.