Hillary is not a liberal. That’s not really news if you go back to the original meaning of the word liberal.

At the recent CNN/YouTube debate, 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.”

After you dig through the Hillaryspeak, what’s left is an admission that she is in favor of big government - freedom and the individual are damned.

Hillary’s progressive America tells you what you can do while driving, what foods should be banned, where your children should be educated and what kind of health care you should be entitled to. Hillary’s vision of a progressive America will lead to the Stepfordization of America.

Senator Clinton is right about one thing, modern liberalism has nothing to do with freedom.

The failures of the Great Society, bussing, racial quotas, high taxes, the Vietnam War (both its beginning and end), Jimmy Carter’s “malaise,” the nuclear freeze movement, lax law enforcement, speech codes, abortion on demand, bilingual education and, of course, Michael Dukakis: We’re expected to believe none of these things can be weighed against liberalism. Liberalism, after all, is never wrong. It must be those mustache-twirling henchmen Lee Atwater and Karl Rove who are to blame.

One might also ask, if Clinton laments how liberalism has become identified with big government, why it is she wants to revive the progressive label. After all, if liberal is a misnomer for statists, progressive represents a long-overdue return to truth in labeling. In Europe, after all, liberals are the free-market, small-government types. But in America, the same people came to be called conservatives in no small part because they were trying to conserve liberal ideas of limited government amid the riot of social engineering during the Progressive Era that Clinton is so nostalgic for.

Indeed, she’s right that self-described liberals championed the sovereignty of the individual, which is why the authentic liberals were hated by progressives who believed that, in the words of progressive activist Jane Addams, “We must demand that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement, and shall be content to realize his activity only in the connection with the activity of the many.”

It’s going to be a rough ride if Hillary wins. Government plunder will rise to new levels. People who dare to make too much money will surely pay huge penalties. Perhaps Hillary will go so far as to render home schooling an act of treason.

Hillary is correct, she is not a liberal. She is moving left and currently calls herself a progressive. By becoming a progressive she has moved herself closer to the political philosophies of Joseph Stalin and Karl Marx.

Why ‘liberal’ doesn’t quite fit - Opinion - USATODAY.com

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