What is a "progressive"?

How the hell can we know when the people who call themselves that don't know...............

For House Democrats, 2011 is likely to be the year of the progressives.

The midterm elections largely purged the party of moderate Blue Dogs, meaning that for the first time the Congressional Progressive Caucus will represent more than forty percent of Democrats in the House. There’s no question Democrats are now a progressive party. The only problem: nobody can agree on what the word “progressive” actually means.

And not for lack of trying. While many have tried to define the term — John Podesta of the Center for American Progress wrote an entire book on the subject – no consensus has emerged. Call a dozen different self-described progressives, and you’re likely to get as many different explanations of what a “progressive” is.

“I’m not sure what the definition is,” conceded James Rucker, executive director of Color of Change. “I don’t love the term.” Rucker co-founded his organization with former White House “green jobs czar” Van Jones, so there isn’t much question about where he stands politically. But the term still strikes him as opaque. “I think it’s kind of the new ‘liberal,’” he said.

Ambiguous? That may be the point. “People use the word ‘progressive’ these days in part because the word liberal has been discredited by the right,” said Roger Hickey, co-director of Campaign for America’s Future, a Washington-based non-profit that touts itself as “the strategy center for the progressive movement.”

For the record, liberals discredited themselves when liberal policies never worked or in most cases were counter productive. So they felt a need to rename the brand because the old brand translated to "dysfunctional". As a result, they had the need to rename their dysfunction to something coll and trendy so they came up with "progressive".

Take the case of liberal policies on poverty. We've spent how many trillions of dollars on poor people so they won't be poor anymore. The result? We've got more poverty now than we ever had in the past with the extra amenity of poverty of the collective soul.

I can tell you what "progressive" isn't. "Progressive" isn't anything about progress. Take energy. Now you would think that "progressive" policies would mean more "progressive" man made production like nukes. But they actually want to take us back to baking bread with the sun or knit with wind powered sowing machines.

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