"Go Back to When It First Came into Political Currency"

"As the political scientist Michael Sandel has pointed out, however, such positive rights are inherently on fragile ground unless they have the support of a strong community consensus, which in a modern liberal society can be achieved only through a civic republican politics. The defining theorists of the Progressive era understood this. Perhaps the most philosophically ambitious among them was John Dewey, who synthesized the liberal and civic republican traditions by way of a new concept of democracy itself: Democracy is not, Dewey argued, merely a mechanism for majority rule; it's an ongoing deliberative process through which bearers of individual rights address issues facing their political community as a whole and chart its future together. He redefined, in other words, the 'negative rights of liberalism and the 'positive rights' of civic republicanism as mutual necessities."

At The New Republic, Win McCormack presses "for progressive to be truly meaningful again."