This is a nice piece by Johah Goldberg of National Review:
"I had to chuckle at a lengthy post on a [liberal] website by a guest blogger named Sara Robinson:
'Every American over the age of 10 knows what the GOP and the conservative movement stand for. [...] low taxes, small government, strong defense, traditional families. See? You know the tune, and the harmony line, too. Ok, now: What do Democrats and progressives stand for? Take your time. It's a tough question. Give up? So have most progressives. Even the movement's most deeply committed members often have a hard time answering this one. And that is the problem. [...]'
Robinson goes on and on in this vein, as if hers were a new observation. The reality is that this is one of liberalism's mossier cliches. Whenever liberals get in trouble, [they will argue] it is not because they are wrong, it is because they have not communicated their [ideas] sufficiently. A few years ago, this claim was best reflected in the writings of George Lakoff, the linguist who thinks everyone will love trial lawyers if we just call them "public protection attorneys". This idea has great and obvious appeal to liberals [democrats] because it places the blame on the public for failing to appreciate just how right [the liberal elite] are, while offering themselves a backdoor compliment: we are too smart to talk at the hoi polloi's level.
That said, i think Robinson is right about one thing. Progressives do have a branding problem. But it stems from the nature of progressivism. What progressivism stands for is having progressives be in charge. Period. Progressivism stripped of all its pretensions and its many good intentions (and it does have many good intensions) is at its core the dogmatic belief that the familiar band of technocratic egalitarian statists [democrats] should be calling the shots.
This is the upshot of liberalism's much vaunted "empiricism" and hostility to labels, ideology, etc. When liberals [democrats] claim they do not believe in labels, what they are saying is that they don't want to be locked into a view, an idea, a principle, that will constrain them later.
This view is what defined FDR's "experimentalism" and JFK's "cool pragmatism." JFK argued that "political labels and ideological approaches are irrelevant to the solution" of contemporary challenges. "Most of the problems...that we now face are technical problems, are administrative problems." These problems "deal with questions which are now beyond the comprehension of most men" and therefore should be left to the experts. These days, if you hear a libearal invoke pragmatism, you can reliably translate his statement into "shut up we know what to do." This has more or less defined Obama's 'pragmatism' since he took office.
Even where progressives claim to be laissez-faire - say in matters of sexuality or abortion - there is always an implied expiration date (does anyone believe that progressives will remain so dogmatically pro-choice the day homosexuality can be prevented in utero?). It is very hard to find an area where liberals claim to be truly liberal (by which i mean libertarian) and their love of freedom is not conducive to their preferred outcome. Personal liberty is awesome, so long as you eat the right food and smoke fashionable plants. They are for free speech in principle, but would define away disagreement as a 'hate crime'. Dissent is the highest form of patriotism when it is liberal dissent, while the dissenting tea partiers are [called] plain old racists.
This arrogant double dealing mindset is what creates progressivism's branding problem. They cannot admit to their real slogan: "shut up, we are in charge."
Johan Goldberg, National Review, Nov. 2010
