PROGRESSIVES AGAINST PROGRESS: At Commentary on Friday, Noah Rothman wrote:

Thanks to people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, among other firms in this sector, ferrying people and satellites into orbit is once again a domestic affair. From the private investors who made this happen to the public-sector interests contracting their services, everyone seems to agree that this is a more productive model for pursuing future endeavors in space.

Critics of all this believe their skepticism is a mark of their seriousness. They are (quite literally) down to earth in their distaste for what the New Republic’s Jacob Silverman called a “tragically wasteful ego contest” that allows these entrepreneurs and their “untaxed billions” to avoid confronting “earthly inequalities.” But in their otherwise noble pursuit of fairness and equality, these progressives would consign us to stagnation.

Bezos, who dreamed of colonizing space long before he was a self-made billionaire managing a service to which two-thirds of all U.S. households subscribe, foretells of a future in which he imagines most heavy industry conducted off-world. The materials we strip-mine from the developing world at great human cost–which allows the left to post class-conscious nostrums on social media–will be derived from asteroids. The power generation that burning fossil fuels would otherwise produce will instead be generated in fusion reactors using helium-3 atoms—a technologically feasible advance that is possible in the near term only by mining this isotope from lunar regolith. Free-floating cylindrical colonies in orbit powered by solar energy—which, absent an atmosphere, is not limited by our earthly need to store this weather-dependent resource in lithium-ion batteries—herald a future of near-limitless growth.

All this sounds science fictional. But then, so, too, did the idea of “space billionaires” competing with one another to do what was the exclusive province of ungainly government enterprises just ten years ago. We’re at the precipice of a new age. It will be marked by spectacular undertakings, the immense rewards of which will be enjoyed by all. What we’re privileged to witness is the flowering of progress. It’s a tragic irony that the only people who seem unhappy about all this are our self-described progressives.

Since “Progressivism” is where time stands still, it’s not surprising that they’ve been unhappy about technological progress for quite some time, as Fred Seigel wrote in an article with the same headline 11 years ago at City Journal:

Why, then, did American liberalism, starting in the early 1970s, undergo a historic metanoia, dismissing the idea of progress just as progress was being won? Multiple political and economic forces paved liberalism’s path away from its mid-century optimism and toward an aristocratic outlook reminiscent of the Tory Radicalism of nineteenth-century Britain; but one of the most powerful was the rise of the modern environmental movement and its recurrent hysterias.

If one were to pick a point at which liberalism’s extraordinary reversal began, it might be the celebration of the first Earth Day, in April 1970. Some 20 million Americans at 2,000 college campuses and 10,000 elementary and secondary schools took part in what was the largest nationwide demonstration ever held in the United States. The event brought together disparate conservationist, antinuclear, and back-to-the-land groups into what became the church of environmentalism, complete with warnings of hellfire and damnation. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, the founder of Earth Day, invoked “responsible scientists” to warn that “accelerating rates of air pollution could become so serious by the 1980s that many people may be forced on the worst days to wear breathing helmets to survive outdoors. It has also been predicted that in 20 years man will live in domed cities.”

Thanks in part to Earth Day’s minions, progress, as liberals had once understood the term, started to be reviled as reactionary. In its place, Nature was totemized as the basis of the authenticity that technology and affluence had bleached out of existence. It was only by rolling in the mud of primitive practices that modern man could remove the stain of sinful science and materialism. In the words of Joni Mitchell’s celebrated song “Woodstock”: “We are stardust / We are golden / And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.”

Ayn Rand didn’t intend for The Return of the Primitive to be a how-to guide.