ABSTRACT
In the opening chapter of this book we suggested that, beginning in the early 1980s, in response to the defeat of liberalism by the Reagan Right, and after groping for a model of reconstruction, the Left reconstituted itself as a latterday version of progressivism. This was not the result of a single decision by some maximum leader or leadership cabal, nor does it appear to have been the result of a purposeful debate in some wider circle that resolved itself in a consensus on nomenclature. Rather, it was a bit of a messy process-at least in the sense that key individuals and groups on the Left struggled for a time to overcome their shock at what had befallen them, then staggered forward, gradually regaining their rhetorical footing. Coming from a variety of directions and with varying pace, the policy activists, the ideologues, the social philanthropists, and the altruists who compose what we now think of as the Progressive Left slowly converged on their new language and on the strategy it opened up for rebuilding their movement.
