In USA Today, Jonah Goldberg has some thoughts on Hillary's eschewment of the word "liberal" for "progressive". Which is progress of a sort--the left avoids the L-word like the plague during every election, a trend which dates back a surprisingly long time. When I interviewed James Piereson recently, he mentioned Kennedy's use of the "Missle Gap" fable to position himself as somewhat to the right of Nixon (and by extension, Eisenhower):

Kennedy saw, partially because of his father—his father was an arch-reactionary—that to be tagged as a liberal was a kiss of death in electoral politics, and he avoided that.

As for Hillary, Jonah writes:

Clinton's answer taps into the common complaint on the left that the word "liberal" has fallen into disrepute not because of the policies of liberals, but thanks to the villainously cynical distortions of conservatives. "The greatest triumph that conservatives ever achieved," liberal columnist Clarence Page recently complained, "is to make liberals embarrassed to call themselves 'liberal.' "

Right. The failures of the Great Society, bussing, racial quotas, high taxes, the Vietnam War (both its beginning and end), Jimmy Carter's "malaise," the nuclear freeze movement, lax law enforcement, speech codes, abortion on demand, bilingual education and, of course, Michael Dukakis: We're expected to believe none of these things can be weighed against liberalism. Liberalism, after all, is never wrong. It must be those mustache-twirling henchmen Lee Atwater and Karl Rove who are to blame.

One might also ask, if Clinton laments how liberalism has become identified with big government, why it is she wants to revive the progressive label. After all, if liberal is a misnomer for statists, progressive represents a long-overdue return to truth in labeling. In Europe, after all, liberals are the free-market, small-government types. But in America, the same people came to be called conservatives in no small part because they were trying to conserve liberal ideas of limited government amid the riot of social engineering during the Progressive Era that Clinton is so nostalgic for.

Indeed, she's right that self-described liberals championed the sovereignty of the individual, which is why the authentic liberals were hated by progressives who believed that, in the words of progressive activist Jane Addams, "We must demand that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement, and shall be content to realize his activity only in the connection with the activity of the many."

As late as 1951, Sen. Robert Taft, "Mr. Republican" to his fans, insisted he wasn't so much a conservative as merely an "an old fashioned liberal."

Even so, progressives were more desperate to seize the l-word for themselves because they needed it more. They so ruined the word "progressive" — particularly during the excesses of World War I — that they had to abandon it like a rider leaving an exhausted horse behind. By the late 1940s, "progressive" became little more than a euphemism for a Stalinist or at least a useful idiot for Moscow.

As Jonah writes, if Hillary wants to eschew being called liberal for "the well-rested progressive label", then "conservatives shouldn't get in the way, if for no other reason than some of us Adam Smith tie-wearing right-wingers are tired of hearing socialized medicine described as a liberal idea".

Update: Speaking of updates to the Newspeak Dictionary, Ace has a modest proposal for the next edition of the AP Stylebook.