Liberals and Progressives are not the Same

The author of "Is There a Culture War, or What?", S T Karnick, suggests that there is a culture war and it is between the Liberals and the Progressives, and he provides a bit of a definition for each.  Put another way, there are Progressives (Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Woodrow Wilson), Conservatives (Senator Robert Byrd or the late Rep John Murtha) and Liberals (Maggie Thatcher, for instance).  Until we get these distinctions straight, our politics will always be confused.  Our political history will be distorted, wedded as it is to a French indoor Tennis Court outside Paris.  We won't be able to really explain the Democratic Party majority in the US Congress from 1933 through to Newt Gingrich.  Do we really believe Senator Hubert H Humphrey and Governor Huey P Long were in the same party?

But, to the article in The American Culture:

There is a culture war, and we need it, argues Carol Iannone on NRO’s The Corner.

I don’t like martial metaphors, but I strongly agree with Carol Iannone that there are basically two worldviews competing irreconcilably in the United States today.

One, called progressivism, derives from the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and tends to blame all human problems on imperfect social institutions. Individuals devoted to this worldview concentrate great effort on the perfecting of institutions according to their idea of social justice, which evolves as new problems are created by their efforts to transform society and its institutions.

Their opponents refer to this fundamental problem of progressivism as the Law of Unintended Consequences.

In addition, progressives of all stripes require the development of an aristocracy consisting of political, economic, social, and cultural elites who can implement the proper management of society.

The other worldview, best described as classical liberalism, acknowledges that social conditions circumscribe individuals’ choices, but they nonetheless argue that people have freedom of choice within the conditions under which they live. Such classical liberals argue for political liberty and allowance of social mobility, an essential element of which is the acceptance of the concept of personal responsibility, the willingness of society to allow people to reap the consequences of their actions, both good and bad.

We need to take a new look at our political culture and regroup the characters.

Hat tip to Instapundit.

Regards  —  Cliff