Progressive

"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." -- Shakespeare

   What's in a name?
   Democrats now use the term "progressive" to describe their social welfare agenda, abandoning the term "liberal" which, to some, has become a dirty word closely allied to "socialist," which in turn is reminiscent of "communist" and therefore evil.
   It's part of an effort described here recently that details how changing a name can change the meaning.
   Reality, however, has a sometimes unpleasant way of intruding on propagandists who try to spin terms to benefit themselves or demonize opponents.
   The term "progressive" in its political use by Democrats today, is borrowed from the days of Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican president who split from the GOP to form the Progressive Party in 1912.
   After succeeding William McKinley, who was assassinated in 1901, Roosevelt was elected in his own right in 1904. He had been McKinley's vice president, and became the youngest man ever to serve as President.  (John F. Kennedy was the youngest to be elected President.)
   In 1908, however, Roosevelt chose not to run for re-election, although he could have, but instead supported the election of William Howard Taft. Roosevelt was disappointed in his friend Taft for not following strongly enough the social welfare policies TR had begun, so in 1912 he opposed Taft's renomination and left the Republican Party to form the Progressive Party.
   As a result of this split, Woodrow Wilson won the election in 1912, to become only the second Democrat to occupy the White House since the Civil War. The other was Grover Cleveland. In contrast, eleven Republicans  presided over the nation until the Great Depression, when Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat and a distant cousin of TR, was elected in 1932.
   FDR, with the support of a heavily Democratic Congress, implemented many social welfare policies familiar to the Progressives of a quarter-century earlier.
   In recent years, the terms "liberal" and "socialist" have been demonized by conservative Republicans in their efforts to regain dominance in politics and government. Consequently, the use of the term "socialist," which is perceived as negative, is now being abandoned by Democrats in favor of the term "progressive," partly because of its root word "progress."
   Even Sen. Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist who ran this year as a Democrat, has stopped using the term in favor of the revived term "progressive."
   There is some irony in the fact that Democrats are using a word originally used in the political sense by a Republican.
   Will it help to maintain the success of Democrats in seeking to occupy the Presidency, dominated by Republicans in the 19th Century? Between the Civil War and the Great Depression, there were 11 Republican Presidents and just two Democrats. Since then, there have been six Republican and seven Democratic Presidents.
   A brief look at the economic health of the nation, correlated with which party controlled the White House at the time of economic downturns and crises, makes for interesting reading.