Re: There's a flawed premise in there though - Edit 1
Before modification by Isaac at 14/03/2010 02:59:00 PM
It's not limited to liberals, ideologues truly believe what they are selling - normally - so when their brand name get's a bad smell, they invariably assume it's because they've been slandered and misrepresented... and of course that's always going to be partially true on as big a stage as a entire nation over decades, so they rarely have to hunt to find people to point the finger at and cry 'slander'.
However, typically they are responsible for much if not most of their bad image, they just can't bring themselves to believe that people might reject their ideas because they obviously make sense and are correct, so people are stupid and have been tricked. Unfortunately airing such attitudes, while most ideologies can get away with it, further compounds the objections to liberals, who are considered by most to be elitist who think everyone is stupid and can't see past their theoretical Utopian visions. So it's sort of a double whammy and changing names to progressive even further compounds it because the left already has a reputation for liking to make cosmetic name changes 'Oh, don't call them X, call them [lengthy confusing politically correct term]' further highlighting the problem.
However, typically they are responsible for much if not most of their bad image, they just can't bring themselves to believe that people might reject their ideas because they obviously make sense and are correct, so people are stupid and have been tricked. Unfortunately airing such attitudes, while most ideologies can get away with it, further compounds the objections to liberals, who are considered by most to be elitist who think everyone is stupid and can't see past their theoretical Utopian visions. So it's sort of a double whammy and changing names to progressive even further compounds it because the left already has a reputation for liking to make cosmetic name changes 'Oh, don't call them X, call them [lengthy confusing politically correct term]' further highlighting the problem.
well, i'm not saying that the left doesn't engage in elitism or any of the other things you're talking about. and i also accept, as i said in another thread on this site, that zealots will always be zealots no matter which side they're on. but there is no denying that "liberal" has turned into a catch-all for the right to demonize any issue they don't like, and part of that includes changing the label so that it's not as stigmatizing as the "liberal" one.
There's an element to that that a lot of people miss, much of the GOP feels that the left stole the word liberal and perverted it, so for much of the core party it was word that got stolen and perverted and became dirty, so a big chunk of it wasn't trying to make the word dirty to hurt the dems, it was about genuine anger of our concept of liberalism, classic liberalism, being stolen and twisted to be about socialism and statism. How fair and accurate that is being rather irrelevant, many older GOP do feel that way and have passed the sentiment on to a lot of the newer GOP, and that sentiment is very strong with a lot of northern republicans, especially in the northeast and a bit less so in the midwest, those two places having orignally been the GOP's strongholds..