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<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I used to be a Liberal. I believe in liberal ideals, like the Affordable Care Act with an option for government insurance like Medicare for anyone who wanted it. Like we ought to have at least two more years of public education available for everyone for free. That we ought to make a huge government-run effort to fix the environment, with an emphasis on reducing hydrocarbons and making energy from renewable non-polluting sources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I used to be a Liberal. I looked to the \u201cliberal lions\u201d of the Senate, Hubert Humphrey and Ted Kennedy, Russ Feingold and Sherrod Brown, as role models and defenders. Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson were liberals (at least Johnson as far as civil rights were concerned). And I \u201cthought\u201d that the term \u201cliberal\u201d was changed to \u201cprogressive\u201d for political reasons. Somehow in the 90\u2019s people thought that \u201cliberal\u201d was bad, so they came up with a new term for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was listening to former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner last night. Turner is a co-chair of the Bernie Sanders campaign, and made it clear that unless you were \u201call-in\u201d on the Sanders\u2019 agenda, you weren\u2019t a \u201cprogressive\u201d. Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, paying off all college debt, and taxes on the wealthy: all are gospel. If you aren\u2019t for all of it, then you aren\u2019t a \u201cprogressive\u201d. I like a whole lot of those ideas, but I also have trouble seeing a path for their absolute acceptance by even a small majority of Congress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the \u201cold\u201d days, the Bernie Sanders movement would have been considered beyond the \u201cliberal\u201d wing of the Party. Social Democrats in the German or United Kingdom mold were beyond the scale of modern American politics. So the Sanders movement has taken the title \u201cprogressive\u201d and left the rest of the Democratic as \u201cmoderates\u201d. But moderate means something very different to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mike Bloomberg is a moderate. While he has some more \u201cprogressive\u201d notions, like gun control, he is essentially a Wall Street Democrat. Bloomberg is closer to the \u201cRockefeller Republicans\u201d of old, a moderate wing of the Republican Party that has ceased to exist. The remnants, with nowhere left to go, became Democrats, just like the former Republican mayor of New York.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jimmy Carter was a moderate, the Governor of Georgia running to the middle to win the Presidency. In fact, one of Carter\u2019s biggest difficulties in governing was in gaining cooperation with a Democratic House and Senate, both more liberal than him. Their inability to reach agreements to govern helped get eight years of Ronald Reagan\u2019s administration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bill Clinton and the \u201cBlue Dog\u201d Democrats were moderates. They were more concerned about balancing the budget than many of the social issues that would cost money. At the time, they were able to reach agreements with many of the Republicans, who still were in the Bloomberg moderate lane. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But there seem to be no more moderate Republicans left. Folks like John Kasich, who appears to be a more moderate Republican today, is really a traditional conservative of old. It\u2019s just that the Party has moved so far to the right \u2013 Kasich looks like he\u2019s in the middle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are however moderate Democrats, including many of the new House of Representative members who turned Republican seats in the 2018 election. It was those moderates who won control of the House, basically filling the vacuum that the \u201cnew\u201d Republican Party left in the middle of the ideological spectrum. These are also the Democrats who most fear a Sanders\u2019 Presidential candidacy. They know that they can\u2019t move so far to the left to reach Sanders without losing their Congressional Districts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s all a question of semantics, but semantics has political consequences. Just as current Republicans today claim the \u201cconservative\u201d title of old, when in fact they are far right of traditional conservatives, so the Sanders\u2019 camp is claiming the progressive label. They are far past what a traditional liberal, a Paul Wellstone or Gary Hart would be. By taking the \u201cprogressive\u201d label, they are trying to mainstream what is a more extreme ideology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That doesn\u2019t mean their ideology is wrong. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What it does mean is that there is little common ground between the extreme of Social Democrats and even the moderates in their own party. Where is the compromise allowing a more diverse Congress to move legislation, that the \u201cmy way of the highway\u201d purity test doesn\u2019t allow? In our Democracy, there has to be a way to reason, and compromise, to achieve almost anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n