What’s in a Name? Liberals are Now Progressives, and Centrists are—What?

I confess. I missed it. Somewhere back there, probably while I was watching the Bush administration turn a bind eye toward billion-dollar stock brokerage firms and banks, and allowed people who had no business buying a house to buy one, the liberals re-branded themselves. Maybe it happened while Seattle was busy spending more time on Arizona border affairs and international weather conferences than on police and fire issues. I’m not sure. 

I don’t know if the folks on the left had a contract with some multinational PR firm, or it just grew out of their normal obsession for access to the rudder of government, but all of a sudden everything and everyone on that side of the spectrum became “progressive.”

It’s brilliant. Think about it. If you aren’t progressive, you’re regressive. Or maybe you’re aggressive, or degressive (is that a word?).

And conservatives – well, since I have not received their three-color printed newsletter in the snail mail yet, I don’t know what they call themselves. Maybe “techless” or “analogs?” Anyway...

It’s not easy being a centrist, an honest, solid middle-of-the-road person. You stand out in a place like this, where the populace is composed of libertarian home-schooler types. But that’s me. I’m a clean-water, fast-free-clean buses, no-seat-belt/no-helmet kind of guy. I’m a – what do you call us, anyway?

So we here at Washington State Wire have been thinking – what could good, caring, fiscally realistic, socially conscious folks call themselves? We have gone through a dozen good names. We’ve thrown away some bad ones: “Thinkers,” “Solids,” “Limes.” Limes? Well, if you believe that there is a lot of merit, both civic and profit-minded, to being reasonable about our impact on mother earth, but before you adopt green policies you want to think it over a little, and you’re a little cautious about doing something without proof – well, then, green and yellow make kind of a lime color.

But if I have to stop and explain it every time, that doesn’t work very well, either.

So as of today we’ve narrowed it down to three terms—“realists,” “forwards,” and “centrogressives”.