by Stephen Soukup
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.
For the better part of the last half-century, the word “liberal” has largely been a pejorative in American political discourse. Just this past week, for example, The New York Times huffed, puffed, and hyperventilated over the acronym AWFUL—which stands for Affluent White Female Urban Liberal and has taken on new prominence since the death of Renee Good—insisting that it’s a “derisive” term that reeks of misogyny.
Much, but not all, of the degeneration of the word “liberal” can be traced to the 1988 presidential campaign between George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis and the plan employed by Bush’s campaign strategist, the brilliant and controversial Lee Atwater. From the start of the campaign, Atwater and Team Bush labeled Dukakis a “Massachusetts Liberal” or a “Northeastern Liberal,” painting the Democratic nominee as out of touch with average Americans. He was, they said, a “liberal elitist,” mostly interested in protecting the privileges of criminals like Willie Horton, and thoroughly indifferent to the struggles and plaints of the middle class.
By the time that November rolled around, Atwater had effectively characterized Dukakis as effete and soft on crime and had stripped the word “liberal” of what little meaning and credibility it had left. After having been down nearly 20 points at the start of the race, Bush won by almost 8% and a commanding 426-111 count in the Electoral College. It wasn’t quite Reagan-Mondale in ‘84, but it was still a cakewalk. The Massachusetts Liberal limped home in disgrace.
The irony in Atwater’s strategy—and in the changes it wrought on the American political lexicon—is that Dukakis wasn’t actually a liberal. Rather, like most Democrats today and since the late 1960s, he was a “progressive.” 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. The differences between liberal and progressive may seem small or, at times, even irrelevant, but they are not. They are immense and entirely germane. Especially today—the day we celebrate the federal holiday dedicated to, perhaps, the last great American liberal—it’s worth exploring those differences.
By way of preface, let me say that I am not what you’d call a huge fan of liberalism. As a conservative, I think that liberalism is radical at its heart, often lacks prudence, and is animated by fictions and fancies. As a skeptic of the Enlightenment, I think that liberalism—a political byproduct of the Enlightenment—is prone to hyper-optimism and profound arrogance, both of which have contributed to the problems that make modern civilization so prone to ugliness and self-destruction. Moreover, I think that liberalism sows the seeds of its own destruction, overemphasizing individualism, which leads, in turn, to the atomization that can foster authoritarianism.
All of that said, I nevertheless concede that 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. Although I would argue that the American Revolution and Founding were mostly conservative in nature, of the Enlightenment era but not of the Enlightenment per se, I wholeheartedly acknowledge that liberal elements played a significant part in both, especially in the contributions of Jefferson and, to a lesser extent, Madison.
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 the “Social Gospel” and eventually into Woodrow Wilson’s administrative state. Progressivism advocated a weak and largely powerless democracy, with professionally trained administrators handling the major tasks of governance. It replaced the God of antiquity with the god of science and, worse still, presumed that scientific methodologies could both explain man’s actions and ideas and govern them as well.
The differences between progressivism and liberalism are starkly presented in the two following quotes, the first from John Dewey, an icon of the Progressive Movement and one of the most influential American thinkers since the Civil War:
Natural rights and natural liberties exist only in the kingdom of mythological social zoology. Men do not obey laws because they think these laws are in accord with a scheme of natural rights. They obey because they believe, rightly or wrongly, that the consequences of obeying are upon the whole better than the consequences of disobeying… But in any case, not natural rights but consequences in the lives of individuals are the criterion and measure of policy and judgment.
The second quote comes from the pen of the man whom we celebrate today, in his most famous work, his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”:
Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.” Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.
Unfortunately, as I say, Martin Luther King, Jr. may have been the last great public liberal in American history. Liberalism, at least as a force on the political left, was interred along with him after that fateful day in April 1968.
Today, the left venerates his name but derides his legacy. Whereas King spoke about his dream that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” today, the left does precisely the opposite and offers pseudo-scientific racialist explanations for man’s behavior and his collective guilt. Today, the left distinguishes just laws from unjust laws based solely on the partisan affiliation of those enforcing them. Today, the left chooses violence, interference, and disorder over King’s “collection of facts” and “negotiation.” 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.”
In short, the left embraces progressivism over liberalism.
More than anything, Michael Dukakis was a hapless fool. His progressivism was arrogant and self-serving, but it was mostly meant to be benign. His successors today are different; they are wrathful and malignant. Not one of them is a “liberal.” And by extension, not one of them is a descendant of the man or the political tradition we celebrate today. RIP, MLK. RIP, liberalism.
Stephen Soukup is the Director of The Political Forum Institute and the author of The Dictatorship of Woke Capital (Encounter, 2021, 2023)
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/01/19/liberalism-vs-progressivism-thoughts-on-mlk-day/
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