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Comment by lightbyte | Hacker News Reader

I think the name of the organization that is running the ad is also a problem. They seem to be trying to co-opt the "progressive" label for something that is completely opposite to what it is supposed to (over the last few years) stand for.

I can't tell if they are intentionally doing that for nefarious reasons. Imagine seeing a "Conservatives for repealing the 2nd amendment" ad. I would assume they have some ulterior motives there.

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I think the ad is utterly genius (in a nefarious way) because it's making me want to play devil's advocate soooo badly. The authors are clearly trying to get people to conflate "H1-B abuse" with "immigration".

People can be against H1-B abuse and NOT be anti-immigration.

It was really weird to me when people in the 21st century started calling themselves to differentiate themselves from other sorts of liberals. Modern progressives and the progressives of the Progressive era share many features but traditional progressives were strongly associated with moral paternalism and eugenics. Seeing people I would have called liberals start calling themselves progressive was as jarring as Trump's use of "America First". And I think that nativism isn't unknown to modern progressives. I think Bernie Sanders is commonly considered a progressive and he was very down on immigrants depressing native worker's wages.

I hadn't known that historical perspective, thanks. I was glad when the term started to become popular because the US post-Reagan era had made "liberal" into a term used to insult and degrade without considering the actual ideas of any instance.

I was shocked at Sanders amount of success, because I had grown up believing that the US public would immediately discount any associating with the word "socialist" (even by those that actually had beliefs not far from socialist views, and even allowing that Sanders positions aren't actually 'socialist' as used in Europe).

I suspect "progressive" was embraced for such reasons, but given how much I've been wrong about most anything political on the past decade+, I'd love to have actual evidence.

> he was very down on immigrants depressing native worker's wages.

I'm not a Sanders supporter, but just wanted to point out that one can be both pro-immigrant (wanting to increase general immigrant quotas) and against programs like H1B that are designed to suppress salaries in specific industries.

Well, most Sanders supporters are way more pro-immigrant than he is so being pro-Sanders doesn't really mean that much here. There was some great reporting in I think the New York times a while ago on the beliefs of the supporters of various presidential contenders. And yes, you can certainly be against a certain policy without being anti-immigration. I'm for drastically expanding US immigration but replacing H1Bs with programs that don't tie people to a particular employer is something I would support.

You used [1] but didn't provide a link at the bottom. Did you forget to cite something?

Oops, I was going to list an example then decided not to. Thanks for pointing that out.

liberal used to mean economically and socially liberal, that is, free market economy and let people live their lives. Now we have to call them classical liberals. What does progressive stands for? Who decides what progress is? Is increasing the quality of life of 10 by decreasing the quality of life of 100 progress?

"Liberal" isn't a terribly useful word in the US these days, given how wide the democratic party's non-existent platform is.

I agree "progressive" isn't the most useful re-use of the word, but I would emphatically call it anti-nativist (or rather, pro-globalist) these days, or just "leftist".

Political labels in general are ill-fitted to static definitions. People are always stealing terms, twisting others, for demagogic needs. "liberal", "conservative", "progressive", "leftist", and "alt-right" are all pretty terrible for anything but, uhh, cultural identification, and don't indicate much of anything about you politically.

On the contrary, their stance is more in line with the traditional view of progressivism. It's only fairly recently that free market capitalists tried to push for open borders and mass immigration under the guise of "progress". There's a simple reason why the big tech companies want more immigrants. It suppresses wages. It changes the dynamics of supply and demand of the workforce in order to take power away from workers and give it to employers.

If you're against the 1%, you should be against these neoliberal immigration policies.

What's changed is the needs of the political classes. The democrat party has been in something of a death spiral for decades (arguably since the 50s) and is critically dependant on imported voters. Without the massive immigration that has happened post-1965, the political party configuration would have almost certainly fractured and reformed along quite different lines by now. But ongoing immigration has kept the democrat party in its rather ossified form highly competitive (as they lost "American" voters, they gained immigrant votes).

This is why they were so terrified of Bernie Sanders. He got a lot of support from working class whites who have been trending Republican for decades. But a figure like Sanders would derail the agenda (immigration and all) that is keeping a never ending stream of Kennedys in power.

Yea, this is a conversation that people should be having, the "progressive" part seems to just be a straight up lie/misdirection. Hard to take it seriously.

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