WE MUST RECLAIM THE WORD ‘PROGRESSIVE:’
I’ve grown tired of hearing the term progressive used to describe people and policies that embody anything but progress. The word suggests a movement toward liberty, reason and human dignity. But what now passes for “progressive” ideology is a regressive assault on foundational principles: race-based social engineering, denial of biological truth, hostility toward the rule of law and an obsession with censorship disguised as compassion.
Progress gave us the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, constitutional government and equal protection under the law. It was built on Enlightenment ideals – reason, open inquiry and the primacy of the individual over tribe. The ideologues now claiming the label have rejected those very foundations. They call for defunding police, institutionalizing racial favoritism, redefining sex as a matter of feeling and punishing speech that deviates from their ever-shifting orthodoxy.
Let’s be clear: this is not a progressive left, and it’s time to retire that label altogether. What we’re dealing with is a movement of Neo-Jacobin ideologues – absolutists who don’t seek reform, but reeducation. Like their namesakes from the French Revolution, they speak the language of justice while enforcing ideological purity through coercion and public shaming.
As Calvin Coolidge said on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence:
About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.
It was also during the 1920s, as the late Fred Siegel wrote in his 2014 book The Revolt Against the Masses, that “Progressivism” stole a huge base from laissez faire classical liberals and rebranded as “liberalism,” after the brutal, racist Woodrow Wilson had made such a hash of the P-word during WWI:
For the ardent Progressive Frederick Howe, who had been Wilson’s Commissioner of Immigration, the pre-war promise of the benign state built on reasoned reform had turned to ashes. “I hated,” he wrote, “the new state that had arisen” from the war. “I hated its brutalities, its ignorance, its unpatriotic patriotism that made profit from our sacrifices and used it to suppress criticism of its acts. . . . I wanted to protest against the destruction of my government, my democracy, my America.” As part of his protest, the thoroughly alienated Howe distanced himself from Progressivism. Liberals were those Progressives who had renamed themselves so as to repudiate Wilson. “The word liberalism,” wrote Walter Lippmann in 1919, “was introduced into the jargon of American politics by that group who were Progressives in 1912 and Wilson Democrats from 1916 to 1918.” The new liberalism was a decisive cultural break with Wilson and Progressivism. While the Progressives had been inspired by a faith in democratic reforms as a salve for the wounds of both industrial civilization and power politics, liberals saw the American democratic ethos as a danger to freedom at home and abroad.
Having spent the 20th century running roughshod over the traditional definition of liberalism, and with progressivism now becoming increasingly tainted, it’s entirely possible that the left may rebrand once again, just as they did a century ago.