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........

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