Our Pseudo-Progressive Age

What’s in a word? In some cases, not a great deal. In other cases, pure unadulterated deception. When Antifa call themselves anti-fascists, they are deceiving. In truth, they are deriving their program from Nazi Stormtroopers. And yet, children who think that homegrown fascism is their true enemy are drawn to this movement by its deceptive name.

As noted here, when politicians and pundits drool over the greatness of our liberal democracy they are subtly enticing everyone to identify as liberal democrats. You do not need to be a proud American, you do need to call yourself a liberal democrat.

I make this point to offer a slight criticism of Joel Kotkin’s recent essay about the passing of America’s progressive moment. In truth, as I have often noted, the people who call themselves progressives today are really on the radical left. Just because they adopt the label does not make them progressive. 

Kotkin, a former Democrat who has turned Independent, explains that the radical American left has invaded and taken over major American institutions. He suggests, optimistically, that with success comes responsibility. It will now need to accept responsibility for the calamities its policies have produced in blue cities, in school systems and in the media. We still await the calamities that will befall our work corporations and banks. 

Yet, Kotkin continues to call them progressives. These people are anything but progressive. They are not liberal democrats or Teddy Roosevelt style trust busters. They are certainly not patriots; in fact, most of them hate the country, its heroes, its traditions, its customs and its mores. 

They are more reactionary, seeking a return to the halcyon days when people believed that the Communist Revolution would usher in a brave new world, a New Jerusalem, and would solve our problems. 

No one with half a functioning brain still believes that. And yet, rather than look like blithering imbeciles by calling themselves Marxists, they have rebranded themselves as progressives, the better to dupe the self-important fools that have been produced by our educational establishments.

Kotkin gives the game away in his opening paragraph. There he points out that today’s “progressives” are enacting a cultural program first promoted by an Italian Communist by name of Antonio Gramsci. Rest assured, Gramsci was not a progressive. He was a member of the Italian Communist Party.

It would be far more accurate to call this stealth Marxism than to call it progressive.

Kotkin opens thusly: 

Over the past several decades, the progressive Left has successfully fulfilled Antonio Gramsci’s famed admonition of a “long march through the institutions”. In almost every Western country, its adherents now dominate the education system, media, cultural institutions, and financial behemoths.

But what do they have to show for it? Not as much as they might have expected. Rather than a Bolshevik-style assumption of power, there’s every chance this institutional triumph will not produce an enduring political victory, let alone substantially change public opinion.

In other words, Kotkin is optimistic. He sees this cultural revolution failing. After all, when radicals take over they will normally be held to standards. They have to pick up the trash and to ensure law and order. The general public will subject their ideas to a reality test. On that score they will fail.

Yet, these pseudo-progressives are ideologues, and ideologues do not accept the verdict of reality. If their policies do not work, they blame someone else, whether Donald Trump or white supremacists. In the end they do not accept that there is a reality outside of their ideology. After all, in an ultimate form of gaslighting, they give zero weight to biological reality in determining gender identity.

Kotkin thinks that the current long march is beginning to stall. Nevertheless, it has damaged so many American institutions that we are left wondering how much time it will take for the nation to rediscover itself. Besides, it has filled universities and news bureaus with legions of social justice warriors. Are they all about to change their minds? For now, that seems like a distant hope.

Increasingly, the “march” has started to falter. Like the French generals in 1940 who thought they could defeat the Germans by perfecting World War One tactics, the progressive establishment has built its own impressive Maginot Line which may be difficult to breach, but can still be flanked.

That is not to deny the progressives’ limited successes. It has certainly developed a remarkable ability to besmirch even the most respected institutions, including the US military. But that is where its achievements stop.

So, Kotkin recounts the ways in which the radical leftist agenda has failed, beginning with the consummate stupid people who are running the Pentagon:

While the Pentagon’s top brass focused on “domestic terrorists” and a progressive social agenda, it calamitously bungled its withdrawal from Afghanistan and appears utterly unprepared for Chinese or Russian competitors. And the effect of this progressive march is plain to see: the percentage of Americans who feel “a great deal of trust and confidence in the military” has dropped in just three years to 45% from 70%.

America’s large cities are most likely to be ruled by radical leftists. The result, more and more people have been moving away from them, to the suburbs and to the exurbs:

But while the upper crust of the labour force continue to head to the dense urban cores, on the ground people are moving in the other direction. Across the high-income world, not only in America but Europe as well, the vast preponderance of growth has taken place in suburbs and exurbs. In the last decade over 90% of all US metropolitan population growth and 80% of job growth took place on the periphery. On the ground, then, the progressive dream is withering.

In America’s large cities radical mayors and prosecutors have unleashed a crime wave. And if the example of New York’s new Attorney General is any indication, they do not even understand that their idiocies have opened the door to crime.

But even if these changes are not permanent, at least not entirely, city residents will still have to contend with another pitfall of the progressive agenda: rising crime. Twelve American cities have experienced record homicides this year; all are ruled by Democratic, often progressive, leaders, many of whom explain away crime and excused, even praised, the looting and mayhem caused by protestors in the summer of 2020.

And let us not forget the damage done by the teachers’ unions and their leftist enablers. One notes, with Kotkin, that many parents have finally figured out what is going on. They are voting in school board elections and even pulling their children out of public schools.

All of these are good signs, but the problem is, once you damage a child’s cognitive development, it does not just reverse itself because you elected a new school board. We are going to be living with the fallout of these policies for many years.

Yet despite this visceral impact on urban neighbourhoods, it is in education that our new hegemony could have its most long-lasting impact. The West’s new educational mandarins, increasingly strident and increasingly influential, have no use for our liberal inheritance, which they consider little more than a screen for racists and misogynists.

In colleges and universities radicals have wrecked humanities and social science education. In a nation where people believed in reality tests, they would have concluded that we should de-wokify these aspects of advanced education. Instead we are allowing the academic world to politicize science education.

These trends have long been evident in the fading humanities and social sciences, but now even the sciences are becoming politicised. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that universities are losing credibility even among some traditional Leftists, who marvel at how they burnish their progressive credentials while making huge profits off their endowments and seriously underpaying most of their employees.

Kotkin finds reasons to be less pessimistic than I:

And just as with the growing disaffection for the military, teachers, students and parents are starting to push back. A number of teachers who have been “cancelled” or otherwise threatened for dissenting are now fighting back in the courts. There’s also considerable criticism from parents and alumni, some of whom are now pledging not to contribute to their schools, and instead support well-publicised and well-funded efforts to start new initiatives, such as the recently announced University of Austin. Even more importantly, would-be students are also voting with their feet: after decades of rapid expansion, the number of college students enrolments fell by 5% last decade, and dropped an additional 6.5% since 2019.

Still, he notes that many public school systems are going all woke and are eliminating merit as a consideration for admittance or even graduation. Keep turning out credentialed fools and see how far that gets you:

Likewise, only one in three Americans have confidence in their public schools, where the education establishment’s goal seems to be to obliterate merit. In my adopted home state of California, this “post-colonial” approach includes deemphasising the importance of tests, excusing bad behaviour, and imposing ideology on often ill-educated students. The San Diego Unified School District, meanwhile, is busily getting rid of mandates for such things as knowing course material, taking tests, handing in work on time, or even showing up; all these, the district insists, are inherently “racist”. This in a state that ranked 49th in the performance of poor, largely minority students. (Still, the situation could be worse: neighbouring Oregon no longer requires any demonstrable proof of competence to graduate.)

The mass media has been part of the long march. They have undermined public confidence in their product, and sometimes this is bad for business. At other times it has been proven good for business. Still, social media companies cancel conservative voices with complete impunity.

Meanwhile, the mass media, particularly its legacy outlets, constitute another progressive bastion losing credibility. One recent survey found that barely one in three Americans trusts the media, including a majority of Democrats, while only 15% of Americans have confidence in newspapers. Part of this surely stems from their bias: although there remain some powerful conservative voices, notably on talk radio and Newscorp properties, the vast majority of journalistic power lies with the Left. It’s the same story with social media, which increasingly dominates news access and is also widely distrusted.

Unless the media oligarchs find ways to repress these elements, a resurgence of free thinking may rescue journalism from progressive editors and journalism schools.

Again, radical policies have failed so spectacularly that a rational nation would discard them. Instead, they have even infiltrated corporations, to the point where one wonders how long American business will continue to function:

Yet perhaps nothing is more ironic, and potentially dangerous, than the takeover of the corporate suite by progressive ideology….

Today this diversity of viewpoints is being obliterated by design, with corporate behaviour now married closely to the notion of the “great reset” and “de-growth”: an economy where improving conditions for the masses is replaced with lowering carbon emissions and diversity tokenism. Such standards, of course, do not apply to snotty private schools attended by their offspring, or areas that are home to their mansions.

The oligarchs may feel they deserve dispensation from the masses by their “good deeds”, but people are not as stupid or malleable as the ruling elites believe. Trust in major corporations, never too robust, is below 20%, less than one third that for small businesses. It is slowly becoming apparent that ‘woke capitalism’ will never solve divisions which are essentially economic. The key, notes Richard Parsons, former President of Citigroup, lies not with racial quotas or hiring transgender workers but the economic growth and opportunity. There will never be “unity”, he suggests, until people “feel it in their pockets”.

One sympathizes with Kotkin’s optimism. And yet, a shadow of doubt creeps into our thinking.

You cannot just undo decades of damage by waving a wand. Too many people have too much invested in the new culture now. The road back will be treacherous, and those whose careers and credentials were granted during the days of the radical long march will fight tooth and nail to retain their privileges, but also to retain the status that they have been granted, at times for no good reason.