[Puppage]

A progressive is someone who’s afraid to call themselves what they really are, liberals.

[Rurudyne]

I'm not unhappy with them abandoning that term ("liberal") since they really aren't liberal at all, neither in terms of classical American liberalism nor in terms of historical political liberalism.

They just assumed the term and treated anyone else who wasn't as mindlessly radical as they were as if they weren't liberal.

True liberalism is, in the American context, that which upholds:

Limited government.

Decentralized administration of governance.

Constitutional (enumerated) authority for governance.

English Common Law — which is to say laws sourced on a known basis that is not the invention of those under the law (and therefore not considered arbitrary).

Personal responsibility.

Rights sourced in English Common Laws and Natural Laws giving rise to ideas like "Inalienable Rights".

"Progressives", on the other hand, fully an passionately enjoin:

Potent government.

Centralized administration of governance.

Arbitrary authority for governance.

Arbitrary authority for laws (Administrative Laws, which unlike ECL are purely political in nature).

Collective responsibility.

Privileges sourced only in the political process giving rise to "civil rights".

They are actually in the larger historical context true political conservatives (much like an out-of-control Bismark) only separated from the French Terrors, or Fascist and Stalinist regimes by their attachment to civil rights (often gone wild) and the mere pretense that they adore a truly liberal Constitution that they would be factually loathed to be governed by. Ditto for our rightful Common Laws — they would hate to imagine that there are rights which people may not rightfully possess no matter how much they may want them (the flip side of inalienable rights).

This is why, when a former French President used the term "ultra-liberals", he used it in reference to President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher rather the President Clinton or Senator Kennedy.

Now, I'm not gonna opine we can just take our term back — it will take decades of their neglect and our careful sanitation to lift their funk from off of it — but at least some of them aren't using it anymore.