With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

Robert S. McElvaine: Let's Start Calling Conservatives "Regressives"

[Robert S. McElvaine is a professor of history at Millsaps College and the author of ten books. He is a frequent contributor to the op ed pages of the major national newspapers and blogs for the Huffington Post.]

It has been about three decades since self-identified "conservatives" pulled off the remarkable feat of turning liberal into a four-letter word. Now they're trying to do the same to progressive.

At the recent CPAC convention in Washington, television screaming head Glenn Beck wrote the word "Progressivism" on his traveling chalkboard and proclaimed, to howls of approval, "This is the disease. This is the disease in America... It is progressivism."...

Mitt Romney's contribution was "liberal neo-monarchists." Michele Bachman was... Michele Bachman.

It's time to fight back in an appropriate manner.

I have for several years been urging progressives to stop calling these people "conservatives," which they plainly are not, and instead to call them what people who long for the bad old days of the Robber Barons, William McKinley, and Calvin Coolidge really are: regressives....

So, from this day forward, whenever you find yourself about to say or write the word "conservative," replace it with the accurate term, "regressive."
Read entire article at OpEdNews