Who Owns the Word “Progressive” in America

There was a time when calling yourself a progressive told us something fairly clear about your politics.

You believed society could be made better.

You believed that racial discrimination was wrong, that minorities deserved equal protection, that women deserved equality, that workers deserved dignity and that government had an obligation to protect people who lacked power.

You believed in expanding civil rights. You believed in free speech, even when the speech made you uncomfortable. You distrusted authoritarianism. And, perhaps most importantly, you believed that certain rights belonged to human beings simply because they were human beings.

That was the moral language of much of the progressive movement I grew up knowing in America.

Sixty years later, we still use the word progressive. But increasingly, I wonder whether we are describing the same political philosophy at all.

Something fundamental has changed.

And nowhere is that change more visible, or more consequential, than in the progressive movement’s relationship with Israel.

The progressivism of the 1960s

The progressive movements of the 1960s and 1970s were hardly perfect. They contained ideological factions, excesses and contradictions of their own. However, their great moral achievements came largely from an extraordinarily powerful idea:

The individual should not be judged by the group into which he or she was born.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that his children would be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin captured something much larger than the struggle against segregation.

It expressed a universalist ideal. Black Americans deserved equality because equality was a human right. Women deserved equality because equality was a human right. Jews, Catholics, gays and lesbians and other minorities deserved protection because a liberal democracy could not assign different rights to different categories of people.

The political left challenged institutions because it believed those institutions were failing to live up to universal principles.

That distinction matters.

The argument was not that universal principles were themselves the problem. The argument was that America was failing to honor them. The civil rights movement did not say equality before the law was a fiction that should be discarded. It demanded that America finally practice it.

That was progress. A different meaning of progressive

Today’s progressive politics increasingly begins somewhere else.

Rather than seeing society primarily as individuals possessing universal rights, a significant part of the contemporary left sees society through relationships between groups and power.

Who possesses power? Who historically possessed it? Who has been marginalized? Who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed?

Race, gender, sexuality, colonial history and economic status become not merely important considerations but organizing categories through which political events are interpreted.

There are understandable reasons this happened.

Formal equality did not erase generations of discrimination. Institutions could proclaim neutrality while perpetuating enormous inequalities. The experience of minorities was often ignored by majorities that assumed their own experience was universal.

Progressives were right to expose many of those failures. But somewhere along the road, an important intellectual shift occurred. Identity stopped being one factor in understanding injustice and increasingly became the framework through which injustice itself was understood.

And once politics is organized primarily around power relationships between groups, morality can begin to change with the identity of the participants.

The weaker party acquires moral standing. The stronger party acquires moral suspicion. The colonized possesses legitimacy. The perceived colonizer must prove innocence. And complicated human beings are placed into increasingly simple political categories.

That is a very different philosophy from the universalism that animated the best of the civil rights era.

Then came Israel

Israel presents an enormous problem for this worldview because Israel stubbornly refuses to fit neatly into its categories. Jews are one of history’s most persistently persecuted minorities. We were expelled, segregated, massacred and ultimately subjected to an industrial campaign of extermination in Europe.

Yet today Jews also possess a state, an army and political power.

Israel is geographically located in the Middle East but is frequently described in progressive discourse as Western. Jews have an ancient connection to the land, yet Israel is routinely described through the language of colonialism. Israelis can simultaneously be descendants of Holocaust survivors, refugees expelled from Arab countries, immigrants from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union, and families that lived in the region for generations.

Try fitting all of that onto an oppressor-versus-oppressed chart.

You cannot.

But political movements built around simple moral categories have difficulty tolerating complicated stories. And so Israel increasingly gets assigned a role:

Powerful. Western. Colonial. White. Oppressor.

Palestinians are assigned the opposite role:

Powerless. Indigenous. Colonized. People of color. Oppressed.

Once those roles have been established, enormous amounts of information can be filtered through them.

Israeli actions become evidence of oppression. Palestinian actions are understood primarily through the context of oppression.

History becomes compressed.

And moral judgments that would be straightforward almost anywhere else suddenly become remarkably difficult.

October 7 exposed the contradiction

For me, October 7 was one of the clearest demonstrations of how far this transformation had gone.

Hamas terrorists crossed into Israel and murdered civilians, burned homes, kidnapped families and committed atrocities against people who had no conceivable responsibility for Israeli government policy.

One might have expected the progressive response to begin with the oldest principle of the left:

Civilians are civilians. Human beings possess dignity regardless of nationality. Violence against innocent people is wrong regardless of who commits it.

Many progressives did respond exactly that way. That should be remembered.

But something else happened almost immediately. Before Israel had even buried its dead, demonstrations appeared placing the massacre within the language of resistance, colonialism and liberation.

The victims themselves were being politically categorized. Israelis were not simply people who had been attacked. They were members of an oppressor class. And once people are assigned to an oppressor class, empathy can become conditional.

That should trouble anyone who still believes progressivism is rooted in universal human dignity.

Israel became the progressive exception

There is another contradiction. Progressives ordinarily celebrate societies struggling with their own imperfections.

They defend LGBTQ rights. Women’s equality. Religious pluralism. Minority rights. Independent courts. Free elections. A free press. Labor protections. Environmentalism.

Israel contains fierce domestic movements fighting over precisely these questions.

Israeli women organize. Israeli Arabs organize. Israeli LGBTQ citizens organize. Israeli environmentalists organize. Israeli Jews demonstrate against their own government by the hundreds of thousands.

Israel is not a progressive utopia. Far from it. Nor should criticism of Israeli governments, including severe criticism, be confused with hostility toward Israel.

I have criticized Israeli governments myself and will continue doing so. And that is precisely the point.

The older progressive instinct would have been to engage with the people inside a flawed democracy trying to make it better. Increasingly, the contemporary progressive instinct is to place the entire country into an ideological category.

Hence, Israel becomes not a society but a symbol.

And once Israel becomes a symbol of colonialism or oppression, the actual Israelis living inside it almost disappear. That is one of the greatest failures in the progressive conversation about Israel.

What happened to universalism?

The deepest disagreement, therefore, isn’t really about Israel. It is about the meaning of progressivism itself.

Is progressivism fundamentally about universal human rights? Or is it fundamentally about redistributing power among competing identity groups? Those ideas sometimes lead to the same place. But not always. Universalism says racism is wrong regardless of who practices it.

Identity politics asks us to consider the power relationship between the people involved. Universalism says targeting civilians is wrong regardless of the political cause. A politics centered on oppression can be tempted to interpret violence differently depending upon who is considered oppressed.

Universalism says minorities deserve protection everywhere. Identity politics can struggle when a historically persecuted minority becomes politically powerful.

That is precisely the Jewish dilemma. Jews did not stop being a tiny global minority because Israel became powerful. Jewish history did not disappear because Israel developed an army.  Israelis did not surrender their individual humanity because their country became militarily stronger than its enemies.

Yet today’s progressive politics in America increasingly seem unable to hold these ideas simultaneously. Perhaps the old progressives were more progressive.

This brings me to an uncomfortable conclusion. Perhaps the progressives of sixty years ago actually had the stronger claim to the word. Progress means expanding the circle of people to whom our moral principles apply. It means recognizing humanity where previous generations failed to see it. It means refusing to judge individuals simply by race, religion, nationality or ancestry. It means insisting that rights we demand for ourselves must also belong to people we dislike.

That was the moral achievement of the civil rights generation.

A politics that divides humanity into competing categories and then applies different moral expectations to each of them may be radical. It may be fashionable. It may even sometimes identify injustices that older liberalism overlooked.

But I am no longer certain it deserves automatically to be called progressive.

Because there is nothing particularly progressive about replacing one hierarchy of human worth with another.

And that matters enormously for Israel Israel has spent years trying to answer progressive criticism with facts. We explain history. We explain terrorism. We explain security. We explain borders. We explain Hamas.

Sometimes those explanations are necessary.

But perhaps we have misunderstood part of the problem. The argument over Israel is increasingly taking place inside a political vocabulary that has changed beneath our feet.

When Israelis talk about security, many progressives hear power. When Israelis talk about Jewish self-determination, they hear nationalism. When Israelis talk about returning to an ancestral homeland, they hear colonialism.

When Israel describes itself as a tiny country surrounded historically by hostile forces, many younger progressives see a powerful state confronting a stateless people.

We keep answering the accusation. Perhaps we also need to examine the intellectual framework producing the accusation.

That does not mean dismissing Palestinian suffering. Quite the opposite. A genuinely universal politics must be capable of seeing Palestinian humanity and Israeli humanity simultaneously.

It should be possible to mourn a Palestinian child without turning an Israeli child into a political abstraction. It should be possible to condemn Hamas without ignoring Palestinian aspirations. It should be possible to criticize Israel without questioning the legitimacy of Jewish national existence. And it should be possible to believe passionately in Israel while demanding better from its government.

That, to me, is what genuine progressivism should look like.

A word I am reluctant to surrender

Perhaps this question matters to me because I am reluctant to surrender the word progressive.

I grew up believing progress meant moving society toward greater tolerance, greater equality and a wider recognition of human dignity. Those values helped transform America. They helped break segregation. They opened institutions that had excluded minorities. They expanded the rights of women. They helped create a society in which people who had once been forced to hide who they were could demand to be treated as equals.

That political tradition deserves enormous respect. And that is precisely why I find today’s debate so painful.

I do not believe defending Israel requires abandoning progressive values.

I believe almost the opposite.

The progressive values I learned are among the reasons I defend Israel’s right to exist, while also defending the rights and dignity of Palestinians and demanding that Israel live up to its own democratic ideals.

The question I increasingly find myself asking is not why Israel has moved away from progressives. It is whether parts of the progressive movement have moved away from progressivism.

Sixty years ago, progress meant widening the circle of human empathy. Today, too often, we seem to be deciding who deserves to remain inside it.

And if that is progress, then perhaps it is time we asked where, exactly, we think we are progressing to.

This is the second in a series of articles analyzing the American political environment leading up to the 2026 midterm elections