I thoroughly enjoyed this Jonah Goldberg piece in on the USA Today website about the changing nature of political labels, something we have noticed and discussed at JLF over the years. I was flabbergasted to find that Hillary Clinton had commented on the matter during a recent Democratic debate, somehow I missed it:
Hillary Clinton was asked to define what a liberal is and declare whether she was one.
“You know,” the New York senator said, “it is a word that originally
meant that you were for freedom … that you were willing to stand
against big power and on behalf of the individual. Unfortunately, in
the last 30, 40 years, it has been turned up on its head, and it’s been
made to seem as though it is a word that describes big government,
totally contrary to what its meaning was in the 19th and early 20th
century.”“I prefer the word ‘progressive,’ ” Clinton continued, “which has a
real American meaning, going back to the progressive era at the
beginning of the 20th century. I consider myself a modern progressive.”
