Although this corner of cyberspace has been dissecting the question of what constitutes conservatism, there’s an equally important question: What is liberalism? Is it different from progressivism, or is the latter just the word people who are scared of the word liberal now use to describe themselves? On The New Republic’s Open University blog, David Greenberg has some thoughts. Here’s an excerpt:

I think there’s another reason for this budding re-embrace of liberal: the fight against Islamist jihadism. Whatever our views of Bush’s policies, liberals and conservatives agree that what divides the West from the terrorists is our commitment to liberal values--liberal in the broad sense of the term that denotes the Enlightenment traditions of freedom, equality, and human rights. Search for the term liberal on sites like that of the Progressive Policy Institute and you’ll rarely find it used in distinction to Bush-style conservatism--but often invoked in distinction to al-Qaeda-style fundamentalism. Even the Bushies use “liberal values,” if only rhetorically, to describe their project of democratizing the Middle East.

The trouble, of course, is that any definition of liberalism so broad that it includes anyone more tolerant than the Taliban doesn’t help much to draw distinctions in the U.S. By that measure Tom DeLay and Rush Limbaugh are liberals. And in the international context, they in fact are. So how do we delineate between the various shades of liberalism domestically without becoming so denominational that we end up denouncing Paul Lovestone for being a Lovestonite?

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