Anecdotally speaking, David Greenberg's hunch that the War on Terra' is transforming "liberal" from a label describing George McGovern to one denoting Thomas Paine seems right. I've noticed no end of ostentatious moderates ("wankers," in common parlance) proudly wielding the term to display their principled opposition to the Muslim world. As Greenberg writes:
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.
In this context of international conflict, liberal suddenly drops its associations with Volvos and lattes and starts to evoke more noble images of education, voting, free speech, and freedom of religion. It's starting to sound like a label we don't have to run from at all.
Eh. Maybe. I've actually begun using the word "progressive" more often, as I don't feel like wrapping myself in any cloak Christopher Hitchens will beg to share. That guy reeks.
