NYT

On liberal vs. progressive

“There are,” Sullivan writes, “beneath the fury and the name-calling, two core narratives in conflict [over Eich], and they are driven by two different approaches to politics. For the sake of argument, let’s call one a progressive vision and the other a liberal one.” The liberal side, he argues, channeling former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett, sees itself in the business of winning arguments, not ending them, and would reject the idea that some arguments should just declared out-of-bounds, too offensive or too wicked to admitted to political debate. But for progressives, Sullivan suggests, the goal of “a progressive culture in which some things are unsayable is the whole point” of political engagement:

This is not a minor disagreement. It’s a profound one. One side wants to continue engaging the debate.The other wants one side to shut up. I think you also see this difference in the responses to Jon Chait’s new piece on race in the age of Obama. Progressives see the scale of the historically-loaded injustice that African-Americans face every day and cavil at any attempts to minimize or qualify the iniquity of those on the right who still deploy its rhetorical codes. Liberals still insist on some fairness, on not jumping to conclusions about an entire party’s or a single person’s racism, on seeing that human beings are not so simple as to be reduced to such ideas as “hate”, on maintaining some kind of civil discourse which right and left can engage in, which eschews too-easy charges of bigotry.

One seeks to get to a place where a conversation ends. The other seeks never to end the conversation, and, in fact, gets a little queasy when any topic is ruled out of bounds in a free society.