Don’t panic, Glenn has not pulled an Arlen Specter and flipped ideologies. However, Glenn feels most Americans can identify with one political label not in use much these days: classic liberal. When someone says they’ve been a classic liberal and they voted for JFK back in the day, chances are they are nothing like the progressive liberals of today.
"If you look at the field, you can't say this about Jeb Bush, but Rand Paul. Rand Paul should be the choice of the real left. He should be the choice of the -- I shouldn't say the left. The classic Libertarian. We have to -- you know we put Progressive back into the lexicon for knowing what it was. We got people to stop calling liberals Liberals and started calling them Progressives. I really think we have to start calling ourselves classic Liberals. It is the secret, it is what we're missing. Because most Americans agree. You can't spy on me. We shouldn't have these never -- you know, these never-ending wars. You can't just throw me in jail. You can't kill me without a trial. All of these things. Those are the positions of the classic Liberal. Classic liberalism is what makes America unique. It is what makes us -- it is the reason why the Progressives took that. They took it for a reason. They took that title away for a reason. Why? Because that can't be a choice. That is the choice. That is the choice that unites most of us. That's the one where we all come down together and say look, we can live with each other. Classic liberalism. We need to be classic Liberals. I'm not a conservative, I'm a classic liberal."
"Once you understand what a Progressive is you start calling them that, you've got to take the word liberal back and let them be and wallow in their Progressiveness."
Pat seemed pretty skeptical about the idea of suddenly taking on the mantle of "liberal", but Glenn said that it's what Libertarians need to do in order to bring in people who would never align with conservatives.
"But to me, and I know you don't feel this way, there's nothing wrong with a Conservative title. I don't mind it. I like it. I'm fine with it. I'm conservative. I am. I'm a constitutional Conservative. So I don't have a problem with that title. So I do have a problem with liberalism so it's kind of a -- it's a leap too far for me," Pat argued.
"And here's your thing. You're going to miss about 20% of classic Liberals on the left that just cannot go to the conservative. I don't want to go to the conservative. I can't call it because it's -- it's the GOP.
That's Jeb Bush. You'll never get them. So we're just going to accept that? Or are we going to be the bigger ones to say, look, you can call me whatever you want. I know that classic liberal, I know that I can talk about classic liberalism and I can get the people who think like we do, they may not agree on everything, but they think like we do," Glenn said.
Watch the debate unfold below:
