What's the difference between a progressive and a liberal?

Zogby defines progressive as Very liberal in their surveys.

I never noticed the term progressive (except for the magazine) until after the term liberal was recently demonized.

What my understanding is that liberal refers to the broad base of knowledge and opportunities for learning (also known as ignorance). The mind stays open to new ideas and delights at the challenge of actually confronting their own entrenched systems.

I understand progressive to mean that you are seeking progress for mankind. Not only do you stay open to new and better ideas, but you actively try to implement them as a contribution to society. We are forever seeking out ways to help the humanity collective.

It is my understanding that since the right wing noise machine had spent 30 years making the term liberal a dirty word, that using the term progressive was a way to combat that. The term progressive has been adopted by many along the liberal spectrum (including those in the Democratic Party that some may view as pretty conservative).

I believe it's intended to be just a description like liberal or conservative, not a formal political philosophy (as it had been considered in the past).

I appreciate the responses so far. If I might generate a bit more thought about this, Here is a quote from blogger David Sirota, posted 10/10/05

"I often get asked what the difference between a "liberal" and a "progressive" is. The questions from the media on this subject are always something like, "Isn't progressive just another name for liberal that people want to use because liberal has become a bad word?"

The answer, in my opinion, is no - there is a fundamental difference when it comes to core economic issues.

It seems to me that traditional "liberals" in our current parlance are those who focus on using taxpayer money to help better society. A "progressive" are those who focus on using government power to make large institutions play by a set of rules.

To put it in more concrete terms - a liberal solution to some of our current problems with high energy costs would be to increase funding for programs like the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). A more "progressive" solution would be to increase LIHEAP but also crack down on price gouging and pass laws better-regulating the oil industry's profiteering and market manipulation tactics. A liberal policy towards prescription drugs is one that would throw a lot of taxpayer cash at the pharmaceutical industry to get them to provide medicine to the poor; A progressive prescription drug policy would be one that centered around price regulations and bulk purchasing in order to force down the actual cost of medicine in America (much of which was originally developed with taxpayer R&D money)."

The entire article can be accessed at

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/whats-the-difference-bet_b_9140.html

Sirota also wrote a piece using Barack Obama's plan to get better fleet fuel mileage as an example of a liberal rather than progressive program. So, I wonder if this information causes anyone else to see a distinction between liberal and progressive. I do find the comment about a progressive working for change to be helpful. And the comment about there being no difference is also still in my mind.

My favorite "definition" of progressive comes from the script for Camelot (taken from T. H. White's "Once and Future King," in which Arthur is trying to figure out how to get the knights to quit whacking for might and whack for right:

Act I, Scene three

[Arthur is pacing, trying to capture an elusive idea that has been bouncing around in his mind for years, having to do with channeling military (knightly) might in righteous ways. He suddenly stops, turns, and says to Guenevere,}

Arthur: Jenny, suppose we create a new order of chivalry?

Guenevere: Pardon?

Arthur: A new order, a new order, where might is only used for right, to improve instead of destroy. And we invite all knights, good or bad, to lay down their arms and come and join. Yes! [Growing more and more excited.] We’ll take one of the large rooms in the castle and put a table in it, and all the knights will gather at the table.

Guenevere: And do what?

Arthur: Talk! Discuss! Make laws! Plan improvements!

Guenevere: Really, Arthur, do you think knights would ever want to do such a peaceful thing?

Arthur: We’ll make it a great honor, very fashionable, so that everyone will want to be in. And the knights of my order will ride all over the world, still dressed in armor and whacking away. That will give them an outlet for wanting to whack. But they’ll whack only for good. Defend virgins; restore what’s been done wrong in the past, help the oppressed. Might for right. That’s it, Jenny! Not might is right. Might for right!

Guenevere: It sounds superb.

Arthur: Yes, and civilized. . . .We’ll build a whole new generation of chivalry. Young men, not old, burning with zeal and ideals. . . .

Guenevere: Arthur, it will have to be an awfully large table! And won’t there be jealousy? All your knights will be claiming superiority and wanting to sit at the head.

Arthur: We shall make it a round tale so there is no head.

Guenevere: [totally won] My father has one that would be perfect. It seats a hundred and fifty. It was given to him once as a present and he never uses it.

Arthur: [suddenly doubting] Jenny, have I had a thought? Am I at the hill? Or is it only a mirage?

This conversation incorporates the idea of "improvement of society" mentioned by others, as well as a slightly rueful take on the progressive's natural inclination to talk (or, as we might say given George Lakoff's interest in language) the USE of language.

A.M.

Personally, I would accept either label, and don't think most people know the subtle difference.

JFK's version:

Sen. John F. Kennedy, acceptance of the New York Liberal Party Nomination, September 14, 1960.
What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label "Liberal?" If by "Liberal" they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer's dollar, then the record of this party and its members demonstrate that we are not that kind of "Liberal." But if by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people

their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties -- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal."
But first, I would like to say what I understand the word "Liberal" to mean and explain in the process why I consider myself to be a "Liberal," and what it means in the presidential election of 1960.
In short, having set forth my view -- I hope for all time -- two nights ago in Houston, on the proper relationship between church and state, I want to take the opportunity to set forth my views on the proper relationship between the state and the citizen. This is my political credo:
I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, in human liberty as the source of national action, in the human heart as the source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas. It is, I believe, the faith in our fellow citizens as individuals and as people that lies at the heart of the liberal faith. For liberalism is not so much a party creed or set of fixed platform promises as it is an attitude of mind and heart, a faith in man's ability through the experiences of his reason and judgment to increase for himself and his fellow men the amount of justice and freedom and brotherhood which all human life deserves.
I believe also in the United States of America, in the promise that it contains and has contained throughout our history of producing a society so abundant and creative and so free and responsible that it cannot only fulfill the aspirations of its citizens, but serve equally well as a beacon for all mankind. I do not believe in a superstate. I see no magic in tax dollars which are sent to Washington and then returned. I abhor the waste and incompetence of large-scale federal bureaucracies in this administration as well as in others. I do not favor state compulsion when voluntary individual effort can do the job and do it well. But I believe in a government which acts, which exercises its full powers and full responsibilities. Government is an art and a precious obligation; and when it has a job to do, I believe it should do it. And this requires not only great ends but that we propose concrete means of achieving them.
Our responsibility is not discharged by announcement of virtuous ends. Our responsibility is to achieve these objectives with social invention, with political skill, and executive vigor. I believe for these reasons that liberalism is our best and only hope in the world today. For the liberal society is a free society, and it is at the same time and for that reason a strong society. Its strength is drawn from the will of free people committed to great ends and peacefully striving to meet them. Only liberalism, in short, can repair our national power, restore our national purpose, and liberate our national energies. And the only basic issue in the 1960 campaign is whether our government will fall in a conservative rut and die there, or whether we will move ahead in the liberal spirit of daring, of breaking new ground, of doing in our generation what Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson did in their time of influence and responsibility.
Our liberalism has its roots in our diverse origins. Most of us are descended from that segment of the American population which was once called an immigrant minority. Today, along with our children and grandchildren, we do not feel minor. We feel proud of our origins and we are not second to any group in our sense of national purpose. For many years New York represented the new frontier to all those who came from the ends of the earth to find new opportunity and new freedom, generations of men and women who fled from the despotism of the czars, the horrors of the Nazis, the tyranny of hunger, who came here to the new frontier in the State of New York. These men and women, a living cross section of American history, indeed, a cross section of the entire world's history of pain and hope, made of this city not only a new world of opportunity, but a new world of the spirit as well.

Dated, but something to consider.

Historically the term "liberal" has held a few different meanings. Studying anthropology, I got comfortable with fact of the "modularity" or "inertia" of words. Words, like physical structures, are convenient to reuse for new purposes, and there is no natural need for the new meanings/uses to be at all germane with their original meanings/uses.

In the 19th c. the bearers of the Self-Regulating Economy myth were known as liberals. The term was conceived as referring to economic freedom ("liber-"). The robber barons, and the people justifying and securing their wealth were generally known as liberals. Modern economic conservatives' claim to the title "conservative" comes from their claim to this antique, ridiculous, "stark utopia" as Karl Polanyi put it.
 
In 1961 New Deal disciple and Columbia historian Charles Forcey published a book titled "The Crossroads of Liberalism: Croly, Weyl, Lippmann, and the Progressive Era, 1900-1925". The book asked the same question 45+ years ago and by way of an answer to it he chronicles the transformation of the term fom its earlier usage to the modern, 20th century conception of liberal. This new sort of liberalism was, likewise, still concerned with freedom, but began to ring with populism (the Progressive Era was ultimately a populist movement) and took on more of sense of FDR's Four Freedoms. The Industrial/Victorian/Colonial Era sort of liberalism was concerned with freedom in a very libertarian, survivalist sense applied to economic situations. The evolving 20th century sense was more general in its application and was a populist doctrine of the people's "Freedoms Of" and "Freedoms To".

Food and drug safety regulations, women's suffrage and anti-monopoly legislation were solutions modern liberals can claim proudly. A few less successful, but no less liberal, programs were drug and alcohol prohibitions (don't fool yourself, drug prohibition, like alcohol prohibition, creates more damage than it fixes), the federal income tax, the streamlining of military organization, the beginning of the military-industrial complex and the advent of US military interventionist policy.

A keen distinction between the two liberalisms was that the victorious 20th c. liberalism proclaimed a "Freedom from Want", where the deposed 19th c. liberalism clamied that one was entitled to whatever spoils or suffering the law of the jungle delivered them. It's ironic that anti-science, Christian fundamentalists so often champion the "Darwinian" freemarket fundamentalist theology, but I won't go off on that digression.

In 1960 JFK delivered a speech on precisely this topic, wondering about the term's definition. It is clear from the text of the speech that the term liberal was already being used as a slur by enemies, and saddled with very familiar connotations- fiscal waste, cowardice abroad and a bad centralization habit. It seems from his 1960 description,


I would contend that one definite characteristic of the term liberal is its absolute ambiguity. Like all things, these concepts are in flux. We are inventing the definitions as we go, and I don't mean "We" in too abstract a sense- I mean you and I, as we procede in our lives, one conversation to the next, are cementing in the public consciousness our definitions of these terms everytime we use them. I'd recommend defining your own sense of progressivism/liberalism and using it often, without being too circumspect with regard to society's concensus definition.