RUY TEIXEIRA: How Progressives Blew It.

It wasn’t so long ago progressives were riding high. They had a moment; they really did. Their radical views set the agenda and tone for the Democratic Party and, especially in cultural areas, were hegemonic in the nation’s discourse. Building in the teens and cresting in the early ’20s with the Black Lives Matter protests and the heady early days of the Biden administration, very few of their ideas seemed off the table. Defund the police and empty the jails? Sure! Abolish ICE and decriminalize the border? Absolutely! Get rid of fossil fuels and have a “Green New Deal”? Definitely! Demand trillions of dollars for a “transformational” Build Back Better bill? We’re just getting started! Promote DEI and the struggle for “equity” (not equal opportunity) everywhere? It’s the only way to fight privilege! Insist that a new ideology around race and gender should be accepted by everyone? Only a bigot would resist!

Progressives thought they had ripped the Overton window wide open and it remained only to push the voters through it. In their view, that wouldn’t be too hard since these were great ideas, and voters, at least the non-deplorable ones, were thirsty for a bold new approach to America’s problems.

In reality, a lot of these ideas were pretty terrible and most voters, outside the precincts of the progressive left itself, were never very interested in them. That was true from the get-go, but now the backlash against these ideas is strong enough that it can’t be ignored. As a result, politics is adjusting and the progressive moment is well and truly over.

Well, likely “temporarily on pause,” or waiting to be replaced with even zanier ideas. Is it possible to put the brakes on the left’s goals of the past ten or twenty years in the age of the social media?