The evil commie, socialistic, liberal, nazi progressives are coming, the evil commie, socialistic, liberal, nazi progressives are coming.
Glenn Beck and the war on progressives
A generation after Democrats fled from the term "liberal," the right is going after "progressive," too
By Mike Madden
AP/SalonWASHINGTON -- Wake up, America, there's a new, dangerous threat on the horizon: progressives. You may have heard about them if you've been paying attention to the right sources. They come from the 1920s, they're basically socialists -- or maybe fascists -- and they're here to steal your country.
A generation after Ronald Reagan and his allies turned "liberal" into an epithet, conservatives are going after the term many Democrats adopted in its place. Glenn Beck and his paranoid Fox News Channel ranting is just at the forefront of what appears to be a movement to demonize the word "progressive," in hopes of scaring voters away from the left. "Progressivism is the cancer in America, and it is eating our Constitution," Beck told thousands of adoring fans at the conservative CPAC conference last month. "And it was designed to eat the Constitution. To 'progress' past the Constitution." The National Review ran a whole special issue on progressives in December; staff writer Jonah Goldberg even published a book on the subject, "Liberal Fascism," two years ago. The latest ad for Liz Cheney's new group, Keep America Safe, prominently features Attorney General Eric Holder declaring that progressives are about to run the nation -- before seguing, sharply, into asking whether Holder's pals share the values of al-Qaida.
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"On the left, cold-war liberals and neoliberals were not what anyone wanted to be, and the right had done a job on 'the liberal elite,' the 'tax-and-spend liberals,' etc.," says George Lakoff, a Berkeley linguistics professor who has consulted with Democratic leaders on how different words can affect political battles. "So many of us went to 'progressive.'"
That seems to have worked. A few years ago, a Rasmussen poll found 39 percent of voters reacted negatively to calling a politician "liberal," compared to only 18 percent for "progressive." Just a couple of months ago, the Des Moines Register's Iowa Poll found 42 percent of Iowans -- including 15 percent of Iowa Republicans -- considered themselves progressive.
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But listen to Beck, or read the sources of his paranoia, and there's a far more sinister history involved. Progressives, in Beck's telling, were the prototypical European authoritarians, tied just as closely to fascists and Communists; the progressive notion that government could help change things for the better (instead of just staying out of the way of the free market) becomes the ideological glue that unites those two disparate movements. "Where did the progressives go, where did they come from?" Beck asked at CPAC. "All of a sudden, I'm not a liberal, I'm a progressive. It was the opposite a hundred years ago. I'm not a progressive, I'm a liberal. I mean they keep -- they keep changing their names. Every time they wake America up to their policies, they have to change their names. What are they going to be next, the Royal Order of the Orange? It doesn't matter. They're running out of names." Not long after that, he went on a long tangent praising Calvin Coolidge. At times, Beck really does seem to want to go back to a time before the Progressive Era. On Wednesday's show, he scoffed at the notion of national parks and monuments, asking -- dead seriously -- why the country doesn't just drill for oil in all of them to wipe out the national debt...
The net effect of most of his rhetoric, though, just adds up to a spooky conspiracy theory that's hard to follow because it jumps around so much. "It mixes up these abstract ideas of the original Progressives with notions of European fascists and socialists and Communists -- it lumps them all up and they all sound bad," Halpin says. "They never actually repudiate any of the key advances of the Progressives that most people take for granted today." In Beck's version of history, the Founding Fathers come out as the heroes for fighting against the Progressives -- never mind that they predated them by over a century. "They just have this, 'We're going to vaguely associate with fuzzy good things, and we're going to bad-mouth things that sound like they're evil,'" Halpin says...
After all, it's one thing to spin conspiracy theories and imply that your opponents are goose-stepping Nazi Communists hell-bent on seizing all private property. It's another thing altogether to have a debate over whether to abolish the weekend, or go back to the pre-"Jungle" days of no meat inspection. Last time conservatives went after the term Democrats used to define themselves, the damage lasted a generation. Progressives may laugh at Glenn Beck now, but if his assertions keep going unchallenged, they might not be smiling for long
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