Posted on 08/03/2016 7:51:39 AM PDT by ProgressingAmerica
Coming off of the Woodrow Wilson years, the Democrat Party was the de-facto Progressive Party in the United States. Theodore Roosevelt's efforts had failed, and the GOP remained as having some constitutional elements in it.
With the rise of Calvin Coolidge and the roaring 20's coupled with a reduction in government that makes most of us jealous, progressivism was looking like it was permanently eliminated.
Technically, it was. In order to ensure its own survival, progressivism had to lie and say it was something else. That chosen title was "liberalism". Most of the time, when you and I think about how liberals are destroying this country - um, no, they aren't.
Liberals are not destroying America. Progressives are destroying America. So, who re-introduced progressivism as liberalism, and when did this re-branding occur?
It was rebranded by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, at his acceptance speech for the 1932 Presidential nomination. He said:
Yes, the people of this country want a genuine choice this year, not a choice between two names for the same reactionary doctrine. Ours must be a party of liberal thought, of planned action, of enlightened international outlook, and of the greatest good to the greatest number of our citizens
Liberalism never stood for "planned action". Liberalism never stood for the utilitarian "greatest good to the greatest number". "Reactionary" isn't a liberal word. This is the perversion.
This, is where it took place.
July 2, 1932. Mark the date.
He proclaims that the "great indomitable, unquenchable, progressive soul" of Wilson is with them.
Paragraph 8 is the key - where he conflates "progress" and "liberalism" as being the same thing. That's the turning point. That turning point - it is very difficult to understate how important that is. And finally, paragraph 15, which I quoted above in the main body of blog posting.
Re-branding and re-naming has a long history, rooted in the ideology of progressivism. We see them do that today with for example, anybody remember the ACORN scandal? The progressives have been re-naming and re-branding themselves since Edward Bellamy and the Nationalist movement jump started this nightmare.
FDR: Constitution? We don’t need no stinkin’ Constitution!
I don’t say often enough how much I appreciate your ongoing series. Thanks.
Note there are plenty of Progressives in the GOPe.
Did the author ever hear about the Progressive Party?
This is why I have always called them Regressives.
A regression to feudalism is all they stand for.
The “liberal” label was just a tool: promoting tolerance & diversity was crucial to softening mass opposition to the intolerable, guilting the public into putting up with, and even defending, that which conservatism long knew should be stopped because of hard-learned lessons of history. Once tolerance of such harmful memes was normalized, the Left dropped the “liberal tolerance & diversity” facade and went on the attack to destroy their now-docile opposition.
They’re not liberals.
They’re not progressives.
They’re aspiring totalitarian oligarchs.
The rebranding had to take place because of ideological links between Progressivism and the Nazi’s. They chose “Librealism” as their new brand for a simple reason. They wanted to glom onto a legacy of achievement that wasn’t theirs.
The Democratic Party is neither progressive nor liberal it is Cowardly Communist....in a free nation...otherwise that bunch could not thrive here without a Dictator...oh wait a second....
Liberalism in the original sense was a philosophy of limited government, personal liberty, and economic freedom. Robert Taft, Sr., Grover Cleveland, and Thomas Jefferson were liberals in the original and proper sense. The best way to describe it would be as a small-l libertarian philosophy, though culturally conservative.
At the start of the Twentieth Century the term "liberal" meant the same in America as it still does in the rest of the world - essentially, what is called "conservatism" in American Newspeak. Of course we "American Conservatives" are not the ones who oppose development and liberty, so in that sense we are not conservative at all. We actually are liberals.But in America, "liberalism" was given its American Newspeak - essentially inverted - meaning in the 1920s (source: Safire's New Political Dictionary). The fact that the American socialists have acquired a word to exploit is bad enough; the real disaster is that we do not now have a word which truly descriptive of our own political perspective. We only have the smear words which the socialists have assigned to us.
And make no mistake, in America "conservative" is inherently a negative connotation - we know that just as surely as we know that every American marketer loves to boldly proclaim that whatever product he is flogging is NEW!
If you read The Road to Serfdom (Reader’’s Digest Condensed Version here), you will see that FA Hayek used the term “liberal” to denote people who today would be called “conservatives” in America. That is because Hayek, an Austrian, learned English in America before the meaning of “liberal” was essentially inverted, according to Safire's New Political Dictionary, in the 1920s. And the meaning of “liberal” was not changed in Britain, where Hayek wrote Serfdom during WWII.
Yeah what about people like James B. Weaver and William Jennings Bryan?
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