The Blog

2020-

2020-12-15 e
PROGRESSIVES COUNTER SOCIAL REALITY
"Progressivism originated as an Anglo-American alternative to socialism and populism in the late 19th century. "

What Is Progressivism?

The dream of a utopia administered by technocrats

Twenty years ago, few Americans identified as “progressive.” Ralph Nader’s first Green Party presidential campaign changed that. Naderites needed a way of distinguishing themselves from the followers of the establishment Democrat Al Gore. In searching for a way to explain their politics to others they reached back to a term whose roots went back to the early 20th century.

In current American “leftist” discourse, “progressive,” its sister term “liberal,” and their distant cousin “socialist” all tend to overlap in general use. So it shouldn’t be surprising that all three terms are poorly understood by their opponents and adherents alike. Even admirable populist critics of America’s establishment left like Thomas Frank and Glenn Greenwald miss what progressivism truly represents and the key, degrading, historical role it has served in the development of American political culture.

Progressivism originated as an Anglo-American alternative to socialism and populism in the late 19th century. More specifically, progressive political culture was a way for the Gilded Age’s new self-styled “cosmopolitan” wealthy elite class to feel good about fighting for reforms of America’s laissez faire economic structures—but, in a manner that didn't threaten the larger Anglo-liberal tradition, or the Protestant moral norms it relied upon.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, as railway workers, brutal Pinkerton “security” forces, and even battalions of the Army battled it out in violent clashes, the reform tradition in the United States took shape in two distinctly American modes: populism and progressivism. Populism was a bottom-up movement of Middle American struggling farmers, poor working folk, and tradesmen frustrated with a late-19th-century banking and monetary system they saw as “rigged” against them. Progressivism took off as a movement of the guilt-laden offspring of coastal industrialists who looked down their noses upon the Middle American populists and the “Jays” of their “hay seed” “bumpkin” culture.

Where populism was a rural revolt against the overweening power exercised by big cities over the rest of the country, progressivism was an urban movement led by a well-educated, urban, coastal elite, which was top-down in conceptions and mannerisms. While the radical element of this new progressive class identified with what they thought of as the “other half of society” (what we would today probably call the “marginalized” or “underprivileged”), it’s important to note that progressives did not necessarily wish to give voice to the poor or the suffering. Instead, progressive intellectuals sought to elevate themselves as spokespeople for the downtrodden, on terms that cemented the grip of their own class on power.

Rather than a break or interruption in the WASP chauvinism that characterizes most of the country’s political culture, progressivism is little more than a peculiar variation of it —and wokeism is merely a new version of progressivism, updated for the secular mode of the “anti-racist” age.

... It is no accident that contemporary progressives understand universities as the central outlet to spread—and enforce—their new pseudo-secularized woke religion. The original progressives, as Eisenach notes, “saw the university as something like a ‘national church’—the main repository and protector of common American values, common American meanings, and common American identities.”

Unlike populists, who wanted state intervention in the economic sphere to help supply them with the means for personal and social autonomy, progressives wanted aggressive state intervention into the social sphere that would deprive working people of individual choices—for “their own good.” Progressives—then as now—understand “social justice” as occurring through moral reform within the self, but believe this personal transformation must be directed by morally enlightened elites wielding state power to prohibit the masses from engaging in “bad behaviors.”

Progressive temperance advocates therefore happily joined forces with the early-20th-century American religious right to tell Germans, Italians, and the “new” immigrants of Eastern Europe they needed to move away from their “festive” and “drinking” cultures toward the Puritan discipline of Anglo asceticism. Progressives thoroughly believed if “drink” was outlawed these new immigrants would no longer struggle to keep the lights on, domestic violence would “disappear,” and their adorable little children wouldn’t have to work in wretched conditions where Jacob Riis could take lamentable photos of them that made elites sad.

In our secular, post-Protestant age, contemporary progressives likewise seek to morally shame the working classes and working poor into thinking their behavioral choices and retrograde beliefs are responsible for the country’s hardships. However, in a blindness inherent to the movement, today’s progressives patently refuse to acknowledge that most working class and working poor “people of color” are mostly socially conservative. The disjuncture between the avant-garde social values of today’s progressives and the targets of their empathy is exemplified in the new refashioned spelling of Latinos and Latinas as “Latinx”—a boutique academic term that is rejected by or else unknown to the vast majority of people to whom it is supposed to apply. Woke identitarian progressivism offers non-BIPOC or LGBTQ+ persons (the far majority of the population) a nightmarish denial of their individual experiences and hardships. Progressives are then shocked when the targets of their derision become angered, and further pathologize them.

Class condescension and a paternalistic attitude to the laboring classes lives at the core of progressivism, both in its early 1900s origins and its 2020s “woke” offshoot. This moralistic bias informs the confident declarations from educated professionals clustered in hub cities that the only reasons Middle American “Trump supporters” have for opposing mass immigration is xenophobia and racism. Progressives at The New York Times point to graphs created by neoliberal economists that show low-skill illegal immigrants do not in fact replace, or compete with, established American citizens for jobs. They offer these graphs never acknowledging that the field of economics, like most in the so-called “social sciences,” is one where nearly any thesis can be “proven” by pairing a skewed data set with the “right” assumptions. Why would anyone, except of course a bigot or an ignoramus, question the knowing class?

Progressivism is a mindset driven, if not ruled, by the technocratic impulse. The foundation of the progressive critique of laissez-faire liberalism arose largely due to late-19th-century American intellectuals’ envy of Kaiserreich-era theories of the German state; the American system of elite, research-centered higher education originated as an imitation of the German model. During the Gilded Age, jaunting off to Germany for a stint of graduate work was a key rite of passage for many American intellectuals, and most of the key figures of the progressive movement received at least part of their education in Germany. During an era when very few Americans attended higher education, more than 9,000 Americans studied at German universities—nearly 2,000 in 1880 alone.

From their experiences in German classrooms, many progressive intellectuals gained exposure to the country’s mandarin model of civil service scholars—professors and university-trained experts to whom the Prussian government looked for advice when crafting social, economic, and political policy.

... Unlike populists and socialists, progressives did not embrace the language of class conflict when protesting large proprietorship capitalism. They did, though, concur with Marxists’ love affair with expansive state power. Progressives had no complaints about working people answering to elite-controlled institutions and organizations as long as those institutions agreed with their preferred sensibilities—just like contemporary progressives like Obama and Kamala Harris have never had any qualms taking millions from Silicon Valley lobbyists and “entrepreneurs,” who, like the politicians themselves, boast the requisite elite credentials.

The real problem with America, contemporary progressives believe, doesn’t lie in the system that makes their families and friends rich. It lies within the uncouth behaviors and general immorality of the undereducated Americans whose lives they must rationalize. The “racist” police, the “sexist” and “homophobic” rubes saying nasty things to their coworkers or on Twitter may not have much wealth or capital, but their class standing is much less important, according to the progressive mindset, than the power conferred by their white or male “privilege.”

In the progressive model, counteracting the thought crimes and behavioral failings of American heartlanders provides the mandate for their coastal superiors to monopolize power while pushing economic inequality to the periphery of legitimate social concern. Clinton- and Obama-style progressives would gladly usher in a world where everyone is employed at the woke Amazon-ExxonMobil-Kraft-Apple-Disney megacorporation complex. Even if most workers are systematically disempowered by this setup, there’s still justice in such a future as long as the corporate executive committee is allotted equitable “representation” to “marginalized” identities and the full range of gender expressions.

Walter Benn Michaels, the accomplished literary scholar and author of The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality argues that affirmative action serves one central purpose: allowing wealthy white liberals to feel good about their privileges. What's the fun in winning the supposedly meritocratic game if you know it’s rigged in your favor? Every “Black” and “brown” face wealthy and well-connected white elites see next to them in an Ivy League classroom, corporate boardroom, or academic committee meeting lets them know that the system is just—and that they earned their own places based on their merits. As for the poor, the vast majority of whom are white, if they wanted a better future they could have “studied harder in school” or, as Rahm Emmanuel recently put it, “learned to code.”

... In the woke version of the state of nature, all ethnic groups, sexual orientations, and genders would, if not for systemic racism and bias, be found equally in all job categories, educational admissions, and government offices. Aggressive diversity, equity, and inclusion practices are carried out in the name of anti-racism and similar ideologies with the aim of restoring society’s supposedly natural, uncorrupted state.

Today’s woke progressives demand Americans recognize cultural differences but never accept any differences in outcome. Representational correctness has become the greatest unifying orthodoxy among elites—so much so that even right-wing institutions and think tanks today refrain from confronting the utopianism that lies beneath it. No one wants to be called a “racist”—and woke progressives use the threat of this charge to bully opponents into submission.

... Now well into its second act, progressive racialism serves the same function it did in the Gilded Age: Hiding class and regionalist prejudice beneath cultural battles. Smiling darkly in the shadows lurks America’s unspeakable injustice—an economic system that is generous to the rich and cruel to the poor. (read more)

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