Don’t get it twisted, in terms of the progressive silence on the new Cold War. For nearly a century, commentators have closely associated liberalism with progressivism. For instance, in a 1931 piece in The New Republic, Edmund Wilson identifies the latter as that which “which has generally become known as liberalism” to contemporaries. Liberal philosophy also contains what its supporters would consider a benevolent nationalism, that is, a system to both export self-determination to indigenous peoples and produce abundance at home. This abundance would be spread out benignly enough, thanks to an “American spirit strong enough to compel… Capitalism to restrain… itself.” Of necessity, then, the liberal makes the moral assumption of an underlying harmony of interests, in which, in the phrase of C. Wright Mills, “greed and ruthlessness are reconciled with justice and progress.”
On the other hand, journalist Gerard Colby-Zilg—also identifying progressivism with corporate liberalism—defines the first as an “instrument of conservatism,” in the sense that it is the “rationalization of the old order to meet the needs of the new monopolistic order.” This radical view presupposes a psychological derivation of the idea of progress in terms of political ideology, as in Karl Polanyi: “Hope—the vision of perfectibility—was distilled out of the nightmare of population and wage laws,
— source counterpunch.org | Scott Vance | Jul 29, 2022