Newsflash: Lieberman is a “leading progressive voice”
According to newly hopeful carpetbagger group Third Way, that is. Michael over at Reading A1 neatly dissects this new
use of “progressive”:
It occurs to me, after all, that Third Way isn’t really making an argument about political strategy: or rather, the argument it’s making is just so much intellectual kabuki. What it’s really doing is defining a marketing niche: and the chief thing being marketed are the Third Way careerists themselves, who hope with reports such as these to occupy a nice, rewarding slot in the Democratic consulting ecology. (As far as what I mean by careerism: the principals of Third Way all seem to have cut their teeth on a would-be grassroots group turned insider advocacy shop called Americans for Gun Safety, and are now trying to leverage that earlier work into some sort of franchise. Nick Confessore has the goods on AGS in this 2002 American Prospect article.) You almost can’t fault the Third Wayers for the disgusting trash they’re purveying: which is, after all, simply an expression of the sort of thing that their Senate patrons are most comfortable hearing. The real story here isn’t Third Way, it’s the parlous moral and intellectual state of the Democratic center-right that Third Way has been custom-designed to serve.
And if an honorable, historically rich term like “progressive” has to get hollowed out for Third Way to perform that service: well, what’s a little linguistic collateral damage? It’s not like history means anything to these people, anyway.