The Journey of Indefinite Government  Print Friendly  So what is
“liberalism” today?  Is it a mere grab-bag of miscellaneous
policy preferences, or some coherent thing, with an intelligible
cause and purpose?  In an ambitious project, historians Donald
T. Critchlow and W.J. Rorabaugh aim to answer these questions. 
In their book, Takeover: How the Left’s Quest for Social Justice
Corrupted Liberalism, the authors argue that contemporary
liberalism represents an coherent political project that was
launched in the 1960s by the “New Progressives.”  These
reformers rejected the modest aims of the old liberals, who,
according to the Critchlow and Rorabaugh, had sought merely to
mitigate the evils of industrial capitalism.  Instead, the New
Progressives aimed for a comprehensive transformation of the
American economy and even the whole society, by means of a
massive expansion in the size and scope of the government. 
Consequently, today’s liberal agenda “is much more radical and
encompassing.”  As the title of their