An 80 year Progressive era? Says who?

From Democrats’ first big chance to check Trump may make them look even weaker by Stephen Collinson.  Just a boring political update on the tussles over the continuing resolution to keep the government funded.  Trump and his crew, despite the odds, have finessed Democrats into a corner where they either have to go along with the proposed resolution or shut down the government, which could make things conceivably worse for them.  

What was interesting was in this paragraph.  More for what it reveals about the Beltway mind than anything else.

Democrats’ choices will play out against a backdrop of mounting frustration from progressives, whose despair after the 2024 election has turned to horror as Trump has turned Washington upside down in his first 50 days in office and set about fracturing the liberal world order that has prevailed for 80 years.

80 years?  Since the end of World War II?  

Seems to me that there is both a clear and possibly widespread bifurcation.  The Liberal World Order of 1945 to the 1990s or so.  Internationally we had shared defense burdens with NATO and related alliances, a commitment to global free trade, and domestically, our traditional three-branch government with each pulling their weight.

Since sometime in the 1990s, and definitely since 2008, we have been in the Progressive era characterized less by free markets, free trade, constitutional governance, natural rights and far more on governance by "phone and pen" and with a focus on divisive policies which suppressed trade and natural rights.  

That Collinson seems to think that the past twenty years are similar to the liberal world order of 1945-1995 is perplexing.  

He's old enough for him to be aware of the earlier era (just).  He is English so he may simply not have been familiar with the American until recent years.  

Ah - that might be it.  From his LinkedIn, he didn't come to the US till 2006 working as a White House correspondent during the Obama administration, the break from the past with the emphasis on ideological policy and governance by "phone and pen."  If his assumption is the pre-Obama was similar to Obama, that explains the paradox.  He doesn't realize the split between the old Liberal order and the new Progressive order ushered in by Obama.

Still, I would have expected an editor to have caught the error.  Though they may not exist nay more with the ever diminishing CNN.