Progressives, as the high-flyers distinguish themselves from plodding liberals, got a word of caution from the electorate in the 2018 mid-term elections. A word was not sufficient, and so the point was driven home in 2020. In the mid-terms, progressives did make a conspicuous showing in several congressional primary elections, in two cases by upsetting old-guard Democratic incumbents. All the districts in question were safely Democratic, which meant that victory in the primary election led to victory in the general. The result was a gain for the progressive wing, but a wash for the party as a whole. Along the way, these political newcomers had captured the imagination of the press as Donald Trump had captured it two years before. They continued to ride their granted star status after taking office. Those politicians and journalists who were not among the star-struck had to gasp for oxygen when pointing out that all of the candidates responsible for the power-shifting Blue Wave of Democratic congressional victories had run decidedly non-progressive campaigns. The real national electorate was talking to the Democratic Party, but the progressive wing continued listening to an ideal one.
In 2020, the Democrats’ two-year-old House delegation of 235 seats dwindled to 222 (four more than a bare majority), including two seats to be vacated by people joining the new administration. Democratic primary voters had already given the party’s presidential nomination to the least progressive candidate in a large field, the ultimate old-guard Democrat. Joe Biden won the presidency while many Democratic candidates for other offices suffered unexpected losses or struggled to win. Biden won the popular vote in a landslide and the electoral vote by a comfortable margin, but one that hinged on narrow victories in crucial states. Any of his rivals in the primary almost certainly would have lost. This was against a president whose personal defeat was many voters’ main objective. Logically, it bore no relation to the choices people would make in “down-ballot” races; and logic pitilessly asserted itself.
The Democratic Party’s success in 2020 was limited to benefiting from a popular revolt against the incumbent president, and the scope of that success was restricted about as severely as the voters could manage. They surgically removed Donald Trump from the White House while declining to trust Democrats with much power elsewhere. This looks like aversion, but aversion to what? Progressives are saying, Don’t look at us. However, they should acknowledge that many eyes are in fact on them and try to see what others see.
Bob Woodward’s second book on the presidency of Donald Trump, Rage, relates something Senator Lindsey Graham says he told Trump as the election of 2020 approached:
If it weren't for the Democratic Party, the Republican Party would fold. They always keep us in the game. They're able to throw us a lifeline. So this defund the police, occupation of Seattle and this crazy [expletive] is going to put you back in the game.
It did, too. Trump lost only after outperforming the expectations of most polltakers. He lost despite the exertions of progressives who would speak in bombastic language and then try to tone it down — or not — with a lecture on its proper interpretation. The lecture naturally reached a smaller audience than the bombast and with its effect diminished by a counterpoint of assertions that, no, “Defund the police” meant nothing less than “Abolish the police.“ Meanwhile, the odd savant would volunteer that looting is a valid political act. The Republicans took their pick.
It's not just racial politics. From the politics of gender to those of generation, arch-progressive thought in recent years has followed principles of division and estrangement. Essentially simpatico people now come under as much pressure for their biological situations as enemies do for their hostile designs. Any past lapse in political virtue can swallow up one’s present. Only the future holds promise, because then the Left (that's the left with bells on) will have forgotten its current manias and moved on to new ones.
Trump got back in the game but still lost. Other Republicans won or came close against Democrats who found themselves plagued by a widespread view of their party as a pack of radicals. When voters heard the Republican canard to that effect, many heard no more than confirmation of the story already told in left-wing Democrats’ words and acted out in their attitudes. It was as Graham had said to Trump. In the run-up to the election, there were signs that voters who had been leaning Democratic till the cry of “Socialism!” went round were abruptly changing their minds.
Since the election, the Left has continued giving Republican propagandists choice material to work with. The New York Times, which shows sympathy with the progressive avant-garde in its editorial policy, recently remarked in a news analysis,
For now, many ambitious Republicans are glad to embrace the element of Trumpism that is most animating to the right: seizing on the most extreme ideas of the left. Such oppositional politics allows party leaders to draw attention away from Mr. Trump, reminds voters of what gives them pause about Democrats and has effectively become the adhesive binding Republicans together.
The writers cite as an example a report from San Francisco of one of those epiphanic drives to strip the name of some historical figure from a public institution. The historical figure is Abraham Lincoln. According to the chairman of the committee behind the drive, which is looking to airbrush blots from the escutcheons of forty-four schools, Lincoln “did not show through policy or rhetoric that Black lives ever mattered to [him] outside of human capital and as casualties of wealth building.” The mayor, to her credit, is not on board; nor are many other San Franciscans. That doesn’t stop rightists from having a field day simply by disseminating available truth. To propagandize would be to paint the lily.
If such material came from outside the left boundary of the Democratic Party, it would be a headache not of the party’s own making. Republicans’ use of it against the Democrats would then be deceitful propaganda. However, that is not the case. The cause of the Democrats’ headache is internal, not to say inherent. It’s an offshoot of liberalism in a party from which offshoots can’t hope to separate themselves and still thrive in American electoral politics. Instead, they try to grow within the party.
The internal dynamics of a conservative party reward constancy. Those of a liberal party reward ferment. As moral endeavor is vital to modern liberalism, it naturally becomes the medium of competition among liberals. To be a leader in propagating the partisan consensus is good. To be the author of some new development in it is better. This is also the way among academics, and liberal circles are rife with academics.
Here we enter progressive society. Academics are not the whole of it, but they set its tone. Members who are not professional intellectuals tend to be amateur ones and engage in the same evolutionary striving. So, for example, a perfectly intelligible campaign against racism begets a new campaign against monuments to the Confederacy – again, intelligible in essence – which begets general hostilities against people of the past who lived in benighted times and were themselves somewhat benighted. Each front has its self-made commander eager for distinction. Others’ misgivings about scorched-earth warfare offer a chance to prove oneself stalwart by leaving no earth unscorched. And that is how Abraham Lincoln arrives on the ash heap of history.
Academics' political activism, like their scholarship, is characterized both by the personal quest for a place on the leading edge and by habits of classification, naming, and reductive theorization. Add the legacy of Marxist critique, and you get activism that emulates feudal strife. Progressives’ critics call them “illiberal” with perfect justice, not irony. The progressive offshoot is not an ultraliberal one. The words liberal and progressive alert us from the start that they’re not going to mark stages on a single scale, because they stand for different ideas of good. The liberal idea is freedom from pernicious forms and forces. The progressive idea is advancement to a state without contradictions. Where liberals trust in minds, progressives trust in the management of them. Once progressives have, for example, noted anomalies in customs pertaining to sex and gender, they can’t rest till all anomalies have been stamped out, down to the last pronoun. Once confirmed in a secularist belief system, they can’t tolerate any vestige of religious thinking — down to the last “God only knows.” Not to put too fine a point on it, they’re a bunch of obsessives.
They’re also children of Marx. It’s no use quibbling over degrees of conscious subscription to Marxist doctrine. Marx lives in the idea of the oppressor class, now applied as readily to a race or a sex or an intersection of categories (“heterosexual cisgender old white male”) as to the bourgeoisie. Stalin lives, too, in the conformism and the penchant for indoctrination. Mao lives in the public shaming, with its prompted self-denunciation and its professional banishment. Lenin lives in the conceited cynicism that produces sophistry to order. Sometimes old-school leftism announces itself outright, as in Socialist Feminism, or hints at its pedigree, as in the critical of Critical Race Theory.
Any practised apologist for Castro’s Cuba, when pressed about the regime’s specific evils, would blithely fall back on some general, high-toned non sequitur (“Is it so wrong to seek economic and social justice?”). The people who are giving the Democratic Party its headache today often make exactly the same move. When the slogan “Defund the police” was criticized by Barack Obama and others for having injured the party electorally, Representative Rashida Tlaib added insult:
Rosa Parks was vilified & attacked for her civil disobedience. She was targeted. It’s hard seeing the same people who uplift her courage, attack the movement for Black Lives that want us to prioritize health, funding of schools & ending poverty, rather than racist police systems.
This kind of insult is wonderfully intricate. The speaker replaces your argument with a straw man; thinks you’re too stupid to notice; or thinks you’ll notice, get the attribution of stupidity, and take offense; if so, doesn’t mind offending you; and doesn’t care if you know it.
The American public sees it all, but the Left doesn’t care. It’s playing to a crowd of the imagination: a new electorate that will surge forth and throw the old one onto the ash heap of history with Abraham Lincoln. First, the young intelligentsia will assert themselves in droves. Then, stirred by their example, the slumbering-giantry of ordinary people will awaken to their own progressive nature and prove America to be in fact a leftward-yearning nation. After all, opinion surveys show broad support for one progressive policy after another.
What’s wrong with that vision, as the displaced conservative Ross Douthat has warned us both before and since the election, is that affirmative answers to individual questions objectively phrased by polltakers don’t add up to anything like a favorable view of the Left. The moment people find that they’re being offered a comprehensively progressive diet, they recoil from the hand that wants to feed them. They know the type. If they’re old enough, they’ve been observing the progressive type in embryo (the liberal elite) for decades. The big problem is not the policy. It’s the type.
Preachy. Smug. Glib. Far gone in theorizing and wordcraft. Convinced that they’re God’s gift to the world, except that they neither believe in God nor believe any good of people who believe in God. Anyway, bent on setting the world straight as only they know how. Down on America. Overbearing, pompous. Cold and hot; never warm.
Going into the elections of 2020, the Democratic Party had high hopes of winning not only the presidency but also an expanded majority in the House of Representatives. The polls even showed Democrats ahead in so many senatorial races that it seemed likely they would gain a clear majority in the Senate as well. This second, decisive Blue Wave would enable them to advance their agenda unimpeded, once they had negotiated their intra-party differences. The progressive wing made it known that they, as rightful owners of the party, expected a large concession of influence from the anticipated Biden administration. They regarded Biden as the necessary front man for a party still struggling with its transition to their kind of politics. Once in office, he was to listen to them. They would complete the transition by driving the agenda.
They might have begun to doubt this projection of history months before, when they had heard their champion, the democratic-socialist Bernie Sanders, account for a disappointing turn in the primary race.
This is a campaign which is trying to bring, and it is not easy, people who have not been involved in the political process. So if you might want to ask me, maybe as a follow-up question, “Have we been as successful as I would hope in bringing young people in?” And the answer is no. We're making some progress, but historically, everybody knows that young people do not vote in the kind of numbers that older people vote in.
The political engagement of youth was a crucial premise of the whole progressive project, but here was new evidence that progressive youth had been punching above its electoral weight in the contest for attention on social media. Nearly a year earlier, Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy of The New York Times had reported a disparity between progressives’ presence online and in the Democratic Party as a whole. To gain power, they would have to overcome a numerical disadvantage by combined feats of turnout and proselytism or else bring their own politics closer to the mainstream. It would not be enough simply to claim ownership of the future. However, the turnout hurdle was probably too high in any case; and winning friends was not their forte. The progressive cause continued to express itself in lecturing and scolding. (The number of people who perversely rebel against advice to wear a mask during the current pandemic might have been smaller if that advice hadn’t triggered associations with leftist nannyism.)
The Democratic disappointment in the general election of 2020 has not brought the party’s left wing down to earth, so far. As Joe Biden has formed his administration, progressives have instructed him in ways to implement their agenda and pressed him about the biological diversity of his appointments. They show no sign of awareness that their position has been weakened by the electoral consequences of trying to popularize socialism and to turn a broad movement for racial justice into a vehicle for radical politics.
There’s no longer any excuse but vanity for continuing to listen to an ideal electorate and not the real one. The Left’s ideal electorate, millions of people awaiting the progressive call as one, is a projection of overweening ego. The real electorate has millions of different minds of its own, and not enough of them cotton to the progressive type. Many are well-disposed toward items on the progressive agenda, but not toward the political culture that identifies the agenda with itself. Some people fear that culture; others dismiss it. Here are two big reasons.
Monomania
Progressives, seen as others see them, are people who live in the grip of fads and fixations. Great things come and go, but while a thing is great it must be taken to its logical extreme. On top of the logic, there’s a personal need to be as far advanced as anyone else. There’s also a somewhat radical view of ends and means.
For example, once the #MeToo movement had begun, progressive supporters swiftly bid each other up until a flat “Believe women” was the standard of seriousness about fighting sexual aggression against women. A woman’s word was to be sufficient for establishing guilt, at least in the court of public opinion. But only in the realm of sexual offense; and, presumably, only when accuser and accused were not both women. A woman bringing a charge of sexual assault, unlike the same woman bringing a charge of non-sexual assault or of trespassing or of theft, would be entitled to outright belief.
A movement to believe accusers outright could never have gained purchase in any other context, but this was the context célèbre of the day. So we got a revolving assortment of rationales devoted to justifying “Believe women”: that sexual abuse is a particularly grave offense, though not so grave as to warrant safeguards against false accusation; that “Believe women” simply means one should start by believing women (which is simply begging the question); that “Believe women” is just a way of saying one should listen to women (which it isn’t); that, anyway, #MeToo is the great thing now, and sexual offenses are notoriously hard to prove, so we can shrug off the usual abhorrence of lynch law. After all, it’s not physical lynching, and it’ll put the fear in men.
As with “Defund the police”, a slogan was chosen for its toughness as the right stuff to give the troops, then half-heartedly tenderized and minced for general consumption, and ultimately — inevitably — left to work its mischief on public digestion of a progressive cause. Worthy causes deserve more intelligent management. However, progressive activism is characterized by compulsive mismanagement and by a tragicomic swarming of bees in the bonnet: cultural appropriation, microagression; secularism, abortion; the politics of race and of gender. The feminist movement alone has gone through a series of radical assertions. For a while, it asserted that there was absolutely no difference between men and women other than the obvious physical ones. Then it switched to asserting that women were the superior sex (wiser, more courageous, less egoistic, better at cooperation) and viewing men as the cadet branch of the human family, if not a malign alien species. Then came the challenge of transgender womanhood. Here were people without a woman’s experience of life, without a baby girl’s lot, but with a female identity and a burgeoning presence on the social-justice agenda. A period of confusion ended with public feminists collectively rallying to the latest cause, but not before some had declared that trans women were not in fact women. The new orthodoxy soon trampled them. Born women who wished to debate the nature of sexual identity, let alone hew to the core assumptions of feminism, now faced summary ostracism as transphobic reactionaries.
The proof of a sound progressive is the ability to leap from one squirrel cage to another without missing a step.
Platonism
If American progressivism has its manifest culture of fads and fixations, it also has its underlying grand illusion and its sleight-of-hand.
First the sleight-of-hand. For decades, people on the left have typically espoused — or affected — moral relativism and epistemological constructivism. The conception of absolute standards they treat as arrogant parochiality. However, this display of enlightened freedom from absolutes, while it has apparently become second nature to many leftists, puts an easy-going face on quite a severe, puritanical mentality. The more the focus shifts from philosophizing to political action and then to the use of whatever power can be gained, the more it transpires that the Left believes in absolute truth and wants to enshrine it without further delay. Its affectation of relativism and constructivism serves the purpose of discrediting those edifices which it aims to replace while supporting a myth in which new edifices are constructed by the collective wisdom of the people. Where progressives predominate, freely-ranging thought will be stigmatized. One will lend one’s voice to the approved line or be deemed in league with the enemy. All this is plain enough to the casual observer. It hurts the progressive cause.
And then there’s the grand illusion: that America’s progressives, who are conventionally imagined as being farthest along on the liberal spectrum, must be the most thoroughgoing democrats. In truth, they’re something quite different. They’re Platonists.
Although The Republic is required reading for serious students of government, it’s by no means a blueprint for democracy. Of the five forms of government which Plato defines, he ranks democracy second from the bottom in desirability and argues that it leads to the very worst form, tyranny. His favorite is an aristocracy of those who possess the qualities of philosopher king. This concept is the unacknowledged soul of the progressive type that makes its home in American society. The progressive type wants the demos to be solicitously governed but wouldn’t want to be governed by the demos. This, too, is plain to see. A politically untutored mind is fully competent — and possibly quicker than a tutored one — to size up the progressive type and judge what will probably follow when that type gains a seat at the table in government, especially having seen it before in administrations national and local. Indoctrination. Zero tolerance. Great leaps. Petty manias. Language purges. Symbols rampant on a field of social engineering. And always an air of superior intelligence.
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Progressives have often noted that many of the changes and improvements they advocate enjoy widespread support among the electorate. Now they need to take note of the way their substantive message is defeated by the overdrawn gestures and overbearing attitude of the messenger. In the months before the general election of 2020, it became the conventional wisdom that the Democratic Party’s left wing represented its future and would dominate the next administration even if it did not capture the presidency. The Left would settle for influence over policy and personnel in return for having helped the centrist presidential nominee oust a demagogue. Big of the Left. But that was before the election. When the results were in, the demographic theory of history showed signs of failing peer review, and the obstreperous progressive type had shipwrecked many Democratic candidates.
Every time we recall that the Republicans falsely portrayed Democrats as socialists, let us also recall that progressives had handed them that very word to use as a weapon. Would they have used it successfully in any case? We’ll never know. We do know that progressives won half the battle for them by naïvely trying to normalize the word, pleading that it’s perfectly respectable overseas (overseas!) and offering scholarly enlightenment about different modes of socialism.
We also know that members of the Left, seconded by dutiful if perspiring members of the mere left, broke voters away from the Democratic cause with their rhetoric about defunding police departments, their apologias for violent protest, and their rolling war on historical figures and narratives.
If progressives hadn’t been flying so high, they might have noticed that American soil — the soil they must work — is stubbornly inhospitable to such seed. The way they’re going, they shouldn’t expect to garner much support even among the people they regard as their natural constituency. Residents of high-crime neighborhoods are not, by and large, keen on the idea of less robust policing. Working-class Americans are never going to reimagine themselves as figures in a socialist-realist mural, striding into the sunrise with tools on their shoulders and love of the collective in their hearts. They can imagine themselves contented and confident, but not on quite those terms. The economic justice that millions of Americans want may require some infringement of capitalism, but that can’t be an end in itself. The racial justice that a growing majority of Americans demands must mean the dissolution of barriers by all people of good will, not the creation of a proprietary domain by black academics and activists.
Progressive policies have a great future in America, but not while they’re associated with the progressive type. It’s time for the people who have embodied that type to come down to earth, walk with the electorate, and master the ways of Progress American-style.
