Liberalism vs. Progressivism

The left still invokes MLK's name, but having traded liberalism's moral law for progressivism's power worship, it now repudiates the very legacy it claims to honor.

While the two terms are largely used interchangeably by political commentators today - with "progressive" being the preferred term on the left, for obvious reasons - they represent different philosophies, ideologies, and even epistemologies. In many ways, a liberal and a conservative are closer to one another in belief and political philosophy than are a liberal and a progressive.

... liberalism is/was also a mostly honorable undertaking. Its codification of universal human rights, its adoption of Augustinian and Aquinian Natural Law, and its promotion of self-government are inarguably intended to advance human flourishing and to advance the recognition of each individual’s worth and purpose in the grand cosmic scheme...

Progressivism, by contrast, is a largely ignoble experiment, an arrogant and extremist interpretation of the Enlightenment, rooted not in the belief in a permanent and unchangeable moral order, but in the haughty presumption that permanence is an illusion and that "enlightened" man can and must adapt the moral order to changing circumstances. By contrast to liberalism, which is largely derived from the English and Scottish Enlightenments, Progressivism is a product of the German Enlightenment (with more than a splash of Rousseau tossed in the mix as well). It grew out of the German historicist movement and the remnants of the Second Great Awakening, which bled directly into advocacy of... Woodrow Wilson's administrative state. Progressivism advocated a weak and largely powerless democracy, with professionally trained administrators handling the major tasks of governance...

Martin Luther King, Jr. may have been the last great public liberal in American history... Today, the left venerates his name but derides his legacy... Today, the left trains its foot soldiers to confront its adversaries and oppose them, by force, if necessary, rather than teaching them to engage in "self-purification."...