From the Archives: "Progressivism"

This Short Essay was Published at "Parcbench" in 2015

This article, published at the defunct web publication ParcBench several years ago, is a follow-up to the other ParcBench article in the last post. Thanks to Gregory Zeigerson and Greg Victor.

In my last ParcBench article, I argued that the term “liberal,” contrary to near-universal belief, is (epistemologically and historically) a variation on the term “liberty” and those who advocate it.  I argued that those who advocate (economic and personal) liberty should take the term back from today’s left (whose forerunners stole it).

In this article, I will consider another term widely ascribed to and used by the left as a self-identifier: “progressive.”  Is the popular understanding of this term accurate?  Indeed, is it understanding at all?  What does the concept “progressive” actually refer to in reality?

Unlike “liberalism,” “progressivism” never had a different denotation or connotation.  It coincided with the rise of an ideological and political movement that began a formidable rise around the 1880s (along with its more fundamental, parent philosophy, pragmatism).  Then and now, “Progressives” seek to expand the power of the state and increasingly hamper and regulate the remnants, the vestiges, of market capitalism that remain.  It was (and is) not an entirely partisan movement—the first progressive U.S. president was Republican Theodore Roosevelt.

It helically coincided with progressive education (and with pragmatism, which preceded and influenced both movements, especially the educational movement).  While Pragmatist philosophers like Ambrose Bierce, William James, and John Dewey rejected Plato’s correspondence theory of truth and Aristotle’s logic (denying objective reality and reason), progressive pedagogical theorists like Dewey and Alexander Sutherland Neill denied the need for cultivating a student’s conceptual faculty and for traditional subject matter and pedagogical method.  Both rejected principles and ideology as irrelevant if not harmful.  Pragmatism’s theorists also corrupted language in a culture of practicality-oriented Americans, flaunting the words that Americans admired and claiming to embody what the words stood for while actually subverting them and perverting them.  The concepts the pragmatists falsely claimed to embody included practicality, freedom, novelty, and progress.  [For more details, see Leonard Peikoff’s The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America (New York: Stein and Day, 1982), particularly chapter 6 (“Kant Versus America”).]

Consistent with the pragmatist spirit of the turn of the last century, Progressives presented themselves as proponents of non-ideological expediency, unprincipled actors practically altering the details of American politics (e.g., then-new antitrust laws and coercive labor legislation that unions favored) in order (they maintained) to save the American system in the name of progress for the mass of American workers.  In the minds of most observers, “progressivism” is a variation of the word progress (and includes, in this context, economic progress).

The word has another (lesser-known) connotation: gradually (progressively) altering an entity or system into something else.

Consistently enough with the lesser-known connotation, early progressives were significantly closer to the culture and system that immediately proceeded them than today’s counterparts (and even most of today’s “conservatives”).  Roosevelt was a disastrous president but, compared to most of his successors (Republican and otherwise), he looks like a Founding Father (at least as far as his domestic policy is concerned).  Leading progressive theorist Herbert Croly, the author of The Promise of American Life and a co-founder of The New Republic (and a seminal influence on Roosevelt), was a patriot and a better kind of “nationalist” (compared to the internationalism of far leftists across the centuries) who supported coercive union, wage, and antitrust legislation but did not believe in the efficacy of welfare.

Today, Croly would look like a relative paragon of economic liberalism (which, of course, should be a redundancy) and nineteenth-century Americanism.  Like the American culture and economy they ineluctably and inexorably weakened, progressives themselves gradually (progressively) declined over the decades (and became increasingly statist).  The movement that started as an ostensibly American movement that claimed an intent to “save America” and American liberty has become increasingly anti-American (and, in general, no longer even fights for free speech).  A movement that once celebrated dissent as patriotic now routinely ridicules anyone with a modicum of (true) liberalism as a “simplistic” hick and counsels a credulous, unconditional trust in government (especially when Democrats are in power).  There are still exceptions—Sam Smith and his publication Progressive Review did important investigative reporting on the Clinton Administration (including the mysterious violent death of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster, which leftists and rightists in the mainstream media ignored), and Christopher Hitchens and Dave Marsh (among others) criticized Clinton from the left.  These exceptions are aging and vanishing, however.

So, what does “progressive” mean, then and now (since only the details have changed significantly)?  What are the concept’s referents in reality?

Whatever its representatives may wish or believe, it does not have anything to do with political or economic progress.  It is a reversion to superannuated statism after a brief century or two of freedom.  It is part of the Endarkenment counterrevolution against the Enlightenment.  Among economists, there is widespread agreement that progressive legislation harms the poor people it purportedly is supposed to help (there is more such agreement, in fact, than there is among scientists regarding anthropogenic catastrophic global warming).  The results of statism (including the pluralistic mixture of statism and capitalism that is currently still in vogue) are in, and honest observers see which part of the mixture is causing the problems.  Progressivism’s economic legacy includes (but is not limited to) inflation, high cost of living, high Consumer Price Index, high property taxes (passed on to renters), and job destruction.  But even dishonest observers should be able to see Progressivism, over the decades, incrementally increasing statism and fascism, in their own views and in American politics.  Recently, Republican George W. Bush outspent Democratic Great Society architect Lyndon Johnson; signed the Patriot Act and the TARP bailouts; and outlawed the incandescent lightbulb (among countless other statist and progressive transgressions).

Progressivism, a lá Fabian socialism, slowly oozes socialism into a culture by degrees (fascism is a form of socialism).  Equally gradually, its proponents lose their remaining virtues and their ties to (genuine) liberalism.  This is a concrete application of the principle Ayn Rand explained in her essay “The Anatomy of Compromise.”

Although the term “Progressivism” is somewhat misleading and has been misused, it, unlike “liberalism,” has a kind of validity in today’s popular usage.