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Thursday 11 March 2010

There’s a solid history behind the term that appealed to many Democrats, as well. The Progressive Era brought America, among other innovations, direct election of senators; the right for women to vote; antitrust regulations and the first limits on corporate power; child labor laws; the eight-hour workday; and national parks. “Folks at [the Center for American Progress] clearly identify with the animating values and spirit of the original Progressive Era,” says John Halpin, co-director of CAP’s Progressive Studies Program. “This is not a dodge, it’s a proud association.” But listen to Beck, or read the sources of his paranoia, and there’s a far more sinister history involved. Progressives, in Beck’s telling, were the prototypical European authoritarians, tied just as closely to fascists and Communists; the progressive notion that government could help change things for the better (instead of just staying out of the way of the free market) becomes the ideological glue that unites those two disparate movements. “Where did the progressives go, where did they come from?” Beck asked at CPAC. “All of a sudden, I’m not a liberal, I’m a progressive. It was the opposite a hundred years ago. I’m not a progressive, I’m a liberal. I mean they keep — they keep changing their names. Every time they wake America up to their policies, they have to change their names. What are they going to be next, the Royal Order of the Orange? It doesn’t matter. They’re running out of names.” Not long after that, he went on a long tangent praising Calvin Coolidge. At times, Beck really does seem to want to go back to a time before the Progressive Era. On Wednesday’s show, he scoffed at the notion of national parks and monuments, asking — dead seriously — why the country doesn’t just drill for oil in all of them to wipe out the national debt. Glenn Beck and the war on progressives

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