What is a progressive?

• Author: Nichols, John
• Position: COMMENT - Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders - Essay

The most absurd assertion in the media coverage of the 2016 Democratic presidential race--and that's a high bar in a year where media coverage has been monumentally absurd--is the suggestion that Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have been arguing about who is more progressive.

Sanders and Clinton are not arguing about who is more progressive. That would require them to have a shared definition of progressivism. They don't.

They are speaking different languages that happen to use the same word. I understand this because I have watched the evolution of the word "progressive" from an expression of political radicalism to an expression of political caution.

My great-grandfather was a member of the movement that, more than a century ago, defined progressivism as a radical response to traditional and establishment politics--first in Wisconsin and then nationally. As a campaigner for Robert M. La Follette, he understood progressivism as La Follette did.

La Follette called the progressive movement into being with a remarkable 1897 speech in which he decried politics "dominated by forces ... that thwart the will of the people and menace representative government." La Follette identified the forces: "corporations and masters of manipulation in finance heaping up great fortunes by a system of legalized extortion" and elected officials who become the pawns and partners of the corporations.

To restore equal rights and equal responsibilities, La Follette called for a movement that would upend not just political pawns but corporate power. He warned that politicians who accepted the money of corporations and wealthy campaign donors would always do the bidding of corporations and wealthy campaign donors. "Do not look to such lawmakers to restrain corporations," said La Follette. "Do not look to such lawmakers to equalize the burden of taxation. Do not look to such lawmakers to lift politics out of the ways of darkness."

Rather, he proposed to "make one supreme effort" to beat "the money power" and to establish a system where the people might choose economic and social justice over corporate domination.

La Follette proposed a "progressive" political movement that had as its purpose fundamental change. The people who made that movement, people like my great-grandfather, took that message to the farmsteads, crossroads towns, and county courthouses of rural Wisconsin. And they won. They gave progressive Republicans control of the governorship and the...