This longish diatribe against “progressives” (i.e., left-wing extremists who aren’t Communists) appeared in my weekly Substack recommendations. Intrigued by the title, I printed it out and read it (I can’t read on screens.) Que’s thesis is one you’ve often seen me advance: “progressives” have gone so far that they’ve alienated much of the Left, and must acknowledge this honestly before Democrats get a decent chance of winning substantial power.
Que’s indictment is on the mark, but his proposed solutions (see below) seem unworkable—something Que realizes. In other words, he thinks that wokeness will hang on tenaciously until its advocates apologize and work with moderates to “center-ize” the Left, but that this is highly unlikely.
Click below for a free read, but subscribe if you like the content of “Edokwin Editorial”. Que is described as “a prolific storyteller and journalist. A lover of (micro-)blogging, Que’s primary areas of interest are arts, entertainment, philosophy, and politics.”
Que’s thesis starts with a laundry list of “progressive” sins, though it’s ironic to use “sins” for calling out a movement based on moral certainty (see below). I’ve bolded one sentence.
Rationalized bigotry and identitarianism. Political violence and terrorist apologia. Mass migration madness. Cancel culture. Overreaches around BLM, COVID, trans issues, and so much more. The 21st century progressive movement’s mistakes turned outright malfeasance make it one of the most totalizing failures of activism, public policy, global governance, and general wellbeing. It is a global phenomenon, with far reaching and overwhelmingly negative implications.
Keir Starmer’s approval rating sits at 18 percent. His government—barely a year old—polls at 19 percent. A far right party that didn’t exist two years ago, Nigel Farage’s Reform, has surged to 31 percent support, nearly matching Labour and the Conservatives combined. This pattern repeats across the Western world. Trump’s return in America. Wilders in the Netherlands. Le Pen’s surging support in France. Germany’s AfD. The far right isn’t ascendant despite progressive politics & policies. It’s ascendant because of progressivism.
The only hope for this movement, which has been the vanguard of leftism for most of my adult life, is to moderate and make massive mea culpas. I am not optimistic on either front however. The only thing worse than its terrible track record is the constant gaslighting about it.
Before singling out six areas in which, says Que, “progressives” have alienated the rest of America, he points out one specimen of what he calls “craven complicity”: columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein. To Que, Klein epitomizes the problems afflicting “progressives” called out on their nonsense. Klein, like others of his ilk, “adjust their language just enough to avoid total campaigning disasters and PR implosions, but they never question the core conviction that animates everything they do: We are the moral vanguard, and opposition to our program stems from bigotry, ignorance, or malice.”
And that, Que argues, is the main reason why progressivism has failed, and failed largely because Americans can’t stomach it. It is “progressives'” air of moral certainty. so that they see no point engaging in introspection about their views, nor arguing about them. They are, they believe, morally right, even when they’re tactically wrong. And it is this smug air of moral rectitude that regular Americans—however dumb “progressives think they are”—can see right through, and reject. A summary:
Here’s what people like Harris, and also Andrew Sullivan, understand that most progressive critics miss: The problem isn’t just that progressives got specific policies wrong. It’s that they’ve constructed an entire worldview in which very basic things most human beings take for granted are deemed “fundamentally and morally wrong.”
That foreigners are not citizens, and citizens’ interests come first. That children are not adults capable of consenting to irreversible medical procedures. That rapid demographic transformation of neighborhoods affects quality of life. That borders serve legitimate functions. That merit matters. That parents have primary authority over their children’s education and upbringing. And that the wrongness of racism & sexism leave no space for social justice carveouts; racism against Asians, Europeans, and Jews is still racism, sexism against men (misandry) is still sexism, and so forth.
These aren’t fringe positions held by extremists. They’re baseline assumptions held by overwhelming majorities across every Western, liberal democracy. And progressives have spent fifteen years treating people who hold these views as moral monsters. They are a political movement that has played footsie with far left extremism for ages, and which believes radical, revolutionary social change is not only permissible but necessary, even against the wishes of the voting public.
Que then singles out six areas in which “progressives” went too far (characterizations are mine, and bolding within quotes is Que’s). Que’s quotes are either indented or in quotation marks, and my comments are flush left.
a.) Cancel culture and the suppression of discourse, something that Americans see as an extreme form of “mob justice”). Que’s conclusion: “Progressives must apologize for treating disagreement as a moral emergency and for wielding social ostracism as a political weapon.
b.) The Covid-19 pandemic. Que thinks, and many agree, that “progressives” over-enforced things like masking and closing schools, to the detriment of American well-being. He’s not saying that precautions needn’t have be taken, but that they went too far, and were mandatory rather than voluntary. He argues that, especially in blue states, responses involved not using available evidence but “suppressing legitimate scientific debate.”
Que is right to some extent, especially in light of Fauci’s and Collin’s recently-revealed attempt to suppress investigation of the origin of the virus, but at the time it wasn’t clear what the scientific evidence was, as there was no time to accumulate it. To a large extent, health departments and the government acted on their best guess, and they sometimes got it wrong. And some were certainly wrong in suggesting (and implementing, in Vermont and New York), the idea that minorities get prioritized at the expense of other people more susceptible to infection and death. Que’s conclusion: “Progressives must apologize for treating emergency powers as a blank check, for suppressing legitimate scientific debate, and for the generational harm inflicted on children who lost years of education and socialization to policies that didn’t work.”
c.) Hamas’s attack on Israel. I’ll quote Que here:
Nothing has more starkly revealed progressive moral bankruptcy than the response to the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre.
Within hours of the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust—an orgy of rape, torture, murder, and kidnapping that killed over 1,200 people and harmed thousands more—segments of the progressive left were…celebrating. The Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter posted an image of a Hamas paraglider. Democratic Socialists of America rallied in support of Palestinian “resistance.” Harvard student organizations issued statements blaming Israel for its own massacre.
The reaction stunned even moderate progressives themselves. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, wrote: “for a long time i said that antisemitism, particularly on the american left, was not as bad as people claimed. i’d like to just state that i was totally wrong.” CNN’s Jake Tapper described the aftermath as “a real eye-opening period in terms of antisemitism on the left.” New York Governor Kathy Hochul spoke of a “category five hurricane of left-wing antisemitism.”
The pattern was unmistakable: progressivism’s oppressor/oppressed binary had trained a generation to see Jews—successful, often “white”-presenting—as oppressors whose suffering didn’t count. When Hamas terrorists raped and murdered Israeli women, the feminists of #TimesUp, #BelieveWomen, and the #MeToo movement stayed silent. When progressive university professors failed to condemn celebrations of the massacre, they revealed that their commitment to “social justice” was conditional on the identity of the victims.
This is absolutely true. The condemnation of Israel began before it even went into Gaza, and a lot of antisemitism that had lain latent before October 7 was quickly revealed. Jews became “Zios,” a euphemism confected by anti-Zionists, who are the same as antisemites. Many NGOs, as well as the UN, were arrantly favoring Hamas over Israel: Doctors without Borders, for example, repeatedly condemned Israel for perpetuating “genocide” without (or only rarely) condemning Hamas. Que’s conclusion: “Progressives must apologize to Jews for creating an intellectual and moral environment where celebrating the mass murder of Jewish civilians became acceptable in progressive spaces, and where opposition to that celebration gets you called a hater yourself.” Harvard has sort of done that, but “progressives” in general? Naah.
d.) Trans issues. “Progerssive” moral certainty has gone so far here that even if you think that biological men shouldn’t compete in women’s sports and generally shouldn’t be put in women’s prisons, you are tarred as a transphobe. But most American’s aren’t afraid of or hate trans people; like me, they believe that trans people should have the same dignity and respect as anyone else, but also that “trans rights” sometimes clash with other rights (as in sport, which has men’s and women’s divisions for a reason), and those clashes must be discussed and resolved.
Que:
Few issues better demonstrate progressive detachment from reality than transgender policy—and few reveal more starkly the gap between progressive rhetoric and progressive belief.
Let’s be clear about what Americans actually think. Large majorities support allowing trans adults to transition to the gender they want. Large majorities support banning discrimination against trans people. These are not controversial positions. They represent basic decency.
But Americans also believe, by even larger majorities, that: genetic human sex is real and determined by biology, not subjective feelings; children should not undergo irreversible medical transitions, especially without parental consent; male sex athletes should not compete in women’s sports; women deserve single-sex spaces for privacy and safety.
According to Ezra Klein, these majority positions are “fundamentally and morally wrong.” Not mistaken. Not worthy of debate. Fundamentally and morally wrong.
This is the progressive tell.
Que’s solution: “Progressives must apologize for sacrificing children’s health to ideological purity, for eliminating women’s spaces and sports, for calling majority opinion immoral, and for making reasonable discussion of transgender policy impossible.” I agree, but again, this ain’t gonna happen. One thing I’ve learned, from my own “cancellation” for the views expressed above, is that ideologues will never broach questioning of their views.
e. The DEI “debacle. Que has written about it here. Originally well-meaning (and still held as “morally right” by its advocates), DEI, promoted mostly by progressives and those who are relatively well off, became by 2020:
. . . . a multi-billion dollar ecosystem of administrators, consultants, and training programs. Universities created massive bureaucracies dedicated to DEI, often with more administrators than faculty in some departments. Corporations mandated unconscious bias training despite no evidence it reduced bias. Hiring and promotion decisions were made with explicit racial preferences defended as “equity.”
The contradictions were glaring. Progressives who claimed to oppose essentialism reduced people to their demographic categories. They claimed to empower minorities while treating them as fragile victims requiring constant protection. They denounced discrimination while implementing explicit racial discrimination in admissions and hiring.
Most perversely, DEI’s benefits accrued primarily to affluent, educated minorities who needed help least, while working-class minorities—and working-class people of all races—were left behind. As a Tablet Magazine analysis noted, progressivism has always been an elite movement with “class condescension and a paternalistic attitude to the laboring classes” at its core.
Que’s solution: “progressives must apologize for reducing equality to a spoils system, for treating minorities as political clients rather than individuals, and for poisoning the well of genuine anti-discrimination efforts.” I should add here that, lest Que be accused of racism, he is black. Finally, we have:
f. “Migration madness.” Although now Trump and his flunkies are going overboard with their seizures and deportations, I well remember when everyone, including many Democrats, were calling for migration reform to stem the tide of people entering America illegally. (This also goes for Europe, which has suffered greatly from a policy of lax enforcement, leading to the rise of the far right in European politics.) Que:
This is the tell. Progressives will finally admit, under electoral duress, that maybe they got immigration a bit wrong. But they cannot stop believing that mass immigration remains a moral signifier, a virtue, an elevating repudiation of “whiteness.” They feel they have to adjust because Trump is dangerous and the country is full of racists, but they still believe their critics on immigration are “on the wrong side of history” and almost all bigots.
Que’s solution: “Progressives must apologize for treating immigration as a morality play rather than a policy challenge requiring trade-offs, and for abandoning working-class concerns as beneath consideration while calling basic immigration enforcement “immoral.”
You’ve already seen the problem with this critique: solutions don’t seem workable. At the end of his piece, Que recommends three actions:
- “Apologize, Genuinely and Specifically”
- “Reform Institutions and Methods.”
- “Work with Moderates to Combat Real Extremism”
For each of these Que describes what must be done specifically.
But, ridden with moral certainty, “progressives” simply won’t be able to apologize, for apologies constitute one of the hardest things for anyone to tender. I can envision #2 and #3 happening, but only if we get a centrist liberal President and Congress, and those aren’t in the offing. Even Que admits that this seems unworkable:
Will they do it? Based on the evidence at the moment, my current prediction is: “no.” The moral supremacy is too intoxicating. The institutional capture is too complete. The social rewards for performing wokeness are too powerful.
And he leaves the choice in the hands of progressives. That’s like leaving a lion the choice between eating an antelope or eating cabbage. Kudos for Que to distill the problem of “progressivism” into a bit-sized hunk, but, as John McWhorter and Sam Harris argued yesterday, wokeness (the manifestation of progressivism) seems here to stay.
You know what, it’s already too late. If you watch Miller, Noem or Trump you can’t understand how on earth someone could vote for people like these, openly, frighteningly borderline psychopaths. One is angry, rightly so, one doesn’t vote. Choosing murderous crooks is beyond acceptable and suicidal. Because they will find a way to stay. It’s Handmaid’s Tale, like Minnesota shows
re borderline — an important question is on which side of that border they reside. If it walks like a duck….
Handmaid’s Tale in Minnesota – do you mean Lt. Gov. Flanagan wearing a hijab when visiting a Somali district?
Trump has worked against racism. In my opinion that is a good thing. Trump has enforced the border. In my opinion that is a good thing. Trump has opposed males in female sports. In my opinion that is a good thing. Trump ordered the capture of Maduro. In my opinion that is a good thing. Trump has ordered the bombing of Iran. In my opinion that is a good thing. I could add many more entries.
Hmm, could you be more precise and less vague with your “like Minnesota shows”? What are you refering to? The somali fraud of 1 billion covid payments, the shooting of a protestor who drove at an officer, what exactly is the thing you mean?
Superb, refreshing highlight, thanks.
I heard this on eXtwitter the other day, thought I’d share it :
“[..] in order to identify a mismatch between the state of reality, and the meaning of a sentence, you have to have a model of reality.
Not just one model, of language. ”
-Devon Eriksen
https://x.com/devon_eriksen_?s=21
… IMHO this (referring broadly to Large Language Models) highlights the imperative to accurately account for how theory plays out in the real world, with numerous individuals’ interests/needs/objectives/etc.
I think that’s exactly what Quinn Que is uncovering here. Reality v Theory.
Or, according to Car Talk theory (ref. 1) :
H = R – E
Where
H=Happiness
R=Reality
E=Expectations
Ref 1 : Magliozzi, Dewey, Cheatem, & Howe
I consider Progressives to be neo-Marxist, their ideology subsitution race and gender for traditional class struggles, but aiming at the same end: the destruction of “Capitalism.” They have no interest in saving Liberalism. Liberalism is part of the cultural superstructure that stems for Capitalism. If Liberals want to save Liberalism, then they need to jettison Progressives and channel their anti-Stalinist forebearers. In reality, there is more in common between the Left and Right than there is between the Left and the Progressives. One of the Progressives accomplishments is to obfuscate that fact, as the Communists before them did.
🎯
The book what’s our problem by tim urban nicely sums it up
See? Again, it happens. Collateral knowledge strikes again.
A good piece!
But at present I don’t agree with Que entirely about school closings and mask mandates. Especially about the school closings. That issue has been distilled down into two factions as if there were only two factions: Those on the left for school closings (forcing safety as a better-be-safe-than-sorry precaution, and I know better than you), and on the right for keeping them open (in-person schools work better [they were absolutely right about that], and Freeeedoommmm!!). But what is forgotten is that there was at least a third side, the third side being our under-paid teachers who I recall were uniformly against keeping schools open. They did not want the certainty of getting Covid while in many cities during that crazy period hospitals were overflowing, and bodies were being stacked in refrigerated trucks. Remember those times? And many teachers had families of their own and aged parents who depended on them and lived with them. Teachers belong to unions, so that factor about their families and parents held sway over all of them. I do recall this third side being a major point about that policy, only now I never hear about it.
Mask mandates are more complicated, but I will just say that they mitigated Covid (I think), but only to the extent that people used them right. But they commonly weren’t being used right.
It wasn’t the mandates and the school closures that bothered me*, it was the attitude of people who damned those who suggested maybe those strictures went too far (mask mandates) or the cost was too high (closing schools). I remember vicious insults and opprobrium hurled against anyone foolish enough to speak up.
Personally, I saw the value of masks under many (but not all) situations, so I wasn’t opposed to them. I was against school closures because I had a son in high school at the time. It was predictable; most of his class is far behind academically and his graduating class had the lowest number of students go on to college since the 1950s. We were too enamored in the internet as a means of teaching (there is simply no substitute for in-class, teacher-led teaching) and over confident in both its ability as a teacher and our own discipline at home. School closings cost a generation their place in the world.
*I agree we had little info at the time so maybe erring on the side of caution was warranted, and perhaps, forgivable. It’s something we should learn from, not hate on each other about. But c’est la vie.
It was a crazy learn-as-we-go time, but the more vocal sorts were not an open minded mind-set.
I teach classes at a university, and Covid still has a huge footprint in the form many more online classes. Back then, students were miffed about being online. Now they want it, and online classes heavily outcompete in person classes for enrollment. The reasons for this are complicated.
Now, online classes are more often very well designed. We weren’t ready to be good back then. Now we are. I think my online intro bio class is quite good bc I worked hard on it. It’s full, as always, with a large wait-list of students trying to get in.
I saw the Covid issue from the perspective of an ex-military instructor of biological warfare defense.
A lot of the response to Covid was performative or just symbolic. It also seemed like some of the people making the decisions were just enjoying vindictively exercising their authority.
What shocked me was the casual cancelling of people’s basic rights and liberties, which should only be done when there is overwhelming need to do so, and then solemnly, and after thorough reflection.
Mark and Edward, I am going to quibble a bit with the idea that “we just didn’t know.” By April of 2020, it was already clear from multi-country case data and hospitalization reports that there was a nearly 1000-fold difference in fatality rates between the elderly and children. As to schools, Sweden never closed the schools for children under 16 during that frenzied spring of 2020. They saw no deaths in schoolchildren, very few ICU admissions, and a childhood case rate comparable to neighboring countries that did shutter the schools. Studies on teachers were mixed, with some showing infection risk comparable to other non-healthcare professions, and some showing elevated risk. But the data wouldn’t have mattered even had it been more widely distributed: people were afraid—and most of their political “leaders” actively fanned that fear rather than leading.
Except that they’re not “far right”! Really, they aren’t! This is just lazy from Que. What are they? Well, Que himself summed it up:
“These aren’t fringe positions held by extremists. They’re baseline assumptions held by overwhelming majorities across every Western, liberal democracy. And progressives have spent fifteen years treating people who hold these views as moral monsters.”
Far more baffling is that, at least as regards the UK, the main issue is not illegal migration, it is legal migration. Totally against the wishes of the electorate, recent governments, both Tory and Labour, have been handing out visas to third world migrants to come and live in the UK at rates of between half a million and a million a year!
These are mostly Pakistanis, Syrians, Afghanistanis and similar. Not only do they have radically different and incompatible cultures (they are mostly Muslims), but they are mostly low-education and low-skilled migrants who either do low-skilled jobs of the sort that will soon disappear (e.g. taxi driver, delivery driver) or are unemployed. The majority of the third-world migrants to whom the government has issued visas live in taxpayer-subsidised housing and live on benefits (and then ask to bring family members to join them, which is then granted).
The migration has proceeded at such a pace that children of British people now make up only about half of those in primary schools. The other half are children of migrants.
Why do Labour do this? Maybe owing to notions of “social justice”? Maybe because the migrants vote Labour? (Although they might soon found their own Muslim parties, which has Labour terrified and doing anything to appease Muslims.)
Why did the Tories do this? No idea. It’s baffling. The only explanation is that they were afraid that, if they didn’t, the BBC would call then “racist”. But this is why the Tories are now only about 17% in the polls.
Reform are the only party who are vocally against mass migration. That’s why the others are screaming “far right”, trying to demonise Reform and scare the voters away from them.
I have been driving Uber part time for nine years. Several years ago, after a rash of sexual assaults, drivers were required to take a two hour class about sexual harassment/assault. There was plenty of discussion about this at the time on various chatrooms, etc. Turns out the vast majority of sexual assaults were committed by men from the Middle East or South Asia. Hmmm…
I’ll keep it short: The “morally certain” will not be issuing mea culpas. They are morally certain, after all.
So true.
Hence Trump Derangement Syndrome, Farage Derangement Syndrome, or more generally, I would argue RDS… Reality Derangement Syndrome. If you believe that something is 100% certain, without any attachment to evidence, then that is a faith. And people of a faith cannot apologize without becoming apostates.
Norman, we are dead branches in their garden. Best we can hope for is to be ignored. Worst case scenario is we end up in the burn barrel 🙁
Don’t know if it’s so important to apologize as to simply abandon untenable positions and, um, move on. Just slink away, shut up, and bring forth programs and ideas that address real problems and that voters like. I think there’s precedent for that. It’s just politics.
This is news to me, troubling, astonishing:
“insisting that minorities get vaccinated at the expense of the agéd…”
Not that I’m disputing it — I would like to learn more, so, citation, anyone? — in the meantime I’ll do my own research.
Google AI (might be woke): No, racial and ethnic minorities were not vaccinated at the expense of the aged in the USA; in fact, early data showed the opposite, with white, older adults receiving a disproportionately larger share of initial vaccine doses compared to minority groups. ”
Maybe someone can provide a credible source that shows otherwise? I really want to know!
I remember that. From google I found
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/05/health/covid-vaccine-first.html
A “medical ethicist” at Pennsylvania said; “it is reasonable to put essential workers ahead of older adults, given their risks, and that they are disproportionately minorities. ‘Older populations are whiter. … Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.’ “
Here’s an assessment of the ethics of doing that: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2771874
I may have been mistaking in thinking that it was actually DONE rather than just suggested, but it certainly was suggested. I’ll try looking harder. But the quote you give shows who was getting the vaccine tather than what was being discussed for prioritizing. In the meantime, I’ll omit that as a fact and just give it as a suggestion above.
Here’s another discussion: https://edhub.ama-assn.org/jn-learning/video-player/18551637
Remember that prioritizing members of minorities means they’re treated as members of a group rather than individuals, while the best strategy is to prioritize INDIVIDUALS on the basis of how likely they are to get infected, get intubated, or die.
Public health officials charged with getting everyone vaccinated where they can’t all be done at once must make group allocation decisions as to who gets vaccinated first. They don’t/can’t assess any individual’s risk of death or severe disease to decide if this named person coming to the vax clinic should get vaccinated today or be told to come back in a month when there is more vaccine delivered. (In a steady state of low endemicity, yes, but not in a pandemic where the goal is to do the greatest good for the greatest number as fast as possible with limited resources.) Rather, Public Health has to send out a cattle call: “Everyone over 70: Your turn.”
Ontario went with descending age groups almost entirely because age swamped everything else in death risk, and we ignored race, health conditions, and socio-economic status entirely. No individual characteristics (other than age) figured into when you got your e-mail that there was vaccine waiting for you at a nearly pharmacy. The vaccine allocation authority had no way to know who had high blood pressure, who was obese, who was poor, who was black or South Asian.
Now, if it had turned out that almost everyone in one particular identifiable racial or social group, but none in any other group, was as likely to die at 45 of Covid as an 80 year old in poor health actually was, then there would have been a scientific case for vaccinating that group first….if you could figure out who they all were and where they lived to send them an invitation to jump the queue. Or if warehouse workers were dying like flies, we could have vaccinated them as a priority regardless of age. But while you’re doing all that detective work, you’re not jabbing vaccines into arms. And despite all the race- and SES- parsing of the 2020 Covid statistics that the equity-seeking social justice crowd wanted to base vaccination policy on, there was nothing that trumped age, so that’s what we went with as a group identifier for vaccination in 2021.
I will say, in response to Que, that measures to control epidemics of contagious disease have to be mandatory. Public health has the statutory power to do almost anything to protect the population’s health. It’s not optional when it really counts.
Do a Google search, in AI mode, asking:
It turns out that at least two states, Vermont and Montana, prioritized members of minorities over others who were more susceptible to infection. Here’s one article from Scientific American.
A quote:
Note that this assumes that ALL people of color are at higher risk of complications, which is simply not the case. Prioritization should be done on the ground of likelihood of infection/severe illness/death, not ethnicity. Yet a well-off Nigerian would ge preference over a poor Asian-American.
Thanks to those above who looked further.
(I have been jammed this morning and I had quoted Google AI from the question: was COVID vaccine given to minorities in preference to white people” (something like that) and quoted their first summary. Not surprised to it turns out it was more complicated than that, a patchwork of recommended and implemented policy. So much around this latest pandemic very complicated, and setting the stage for a worse next one — it’s about host behavior.
It’s interesting to me that there seems here to be recognition that the vaccine was a good and important thing (it was, and is) and I’ll leave this issue of, um vaccine policy before word limits are exceeded — what is the equivalent of Right Woke — ? Vaccine preventable disease morbidity and mortality already on the upswing —
Dear Mr Coyne,
your skeptical inquirer article, which I like very much, says, and this is supported by other sources as well, that different “races” have different predisposition to illness. “Race”, so I read, is important to consider for a doctor, in some contexts. Why is it not possible that african-descent people do indeed have a different likelyhood of severe illness from a covid infection, that is not solely caused by environmental factors?
Critical theory, your views are hated so much you don’t mention them. You can only criticize the other side -“I will now deconstruct …” – is a tell. Well, I can deconstruct the kitchen in about two hours with a wrecking bar and sledgehammer. But I don’t actually have the skills to rebuild/remodel the kitchen. Whenever you hear the “I will now deconstruct” ppl, stop them in their tracks and tell them to actually construct something, because they have nothing. They hate capitalism but they won’t tell you what their replacement is.
I still favor a broad(er) use of the p-word when it is used in reference to things like Green New Deal initiatives or a demand for universal health insurance. Also, legalizing marijuana, cocaine, and heroin is a stance that many progressives hold.
Also, look at Wikipedia’s entry about the Progressive Era. I can’t imagine anyone reading this would object to going after monopolies and demanding higher wages.
So, a broad brush to use against the word “progressive”? Nope, not gonna sign on to that.
I dislike woke progressivism as much as the next person, but disliking something is not the same as explaining history. My long-standing reading of the history of past extremisms repeatedly pointed to the same pattern. Political radicalization always exists on the fringe and then accelerates when media systems change rapidly and when economic security deteriorates. This dynamic was also warned about by writers such as McLuhan, Lippmann, Habermas, Arendt, Postman, and more recently Zuboff. Blaming woke progressivism for the rise of the right is therefore easy, but largely useless. It mistakes irritation for causal explanation.
The point I was making is that wokeness drives people on the fence towards the right. And I believe (though I can’t prove) that Kamala Harris’s incoherent wokeness helped Trump win. If votes are shifted, then it is not just “irritation”. And of course there are other factors.
So you have your “longstanding reading” and I have mine, which is that progressivism hasn’t helped Democrats move forward. What does is stuff like Trump’s tariffs, stupid pronouncements about Greenland, rise in grocery prices, and so on.
Former Democrat advisor Ruy Teixeira has written extensively on this (how insane wokeness drove voters – especially working class voters – to the Repubs) on his substack.
Trump ran ads that decried Harris’s ‘woke progressiveness’. They were ‘only’ the most effective political ads of the year. I am referring to the (legendary) “Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you”.
There are others in politics, Democrats, e.g. DIAG, who have clear arguments that the Obama/Biden “gender” policies drove people away from the Democratic Party. I recall my discomfort with learning what “being true authentic self” meant — that’s code for being a caricature of something else. I recall my disbelief in July/Aug 2024 when Jerry (PCC(E) characterized Harris as a weak candidate, hobbled by “woke”. I realized later, with more evidence, despite some of her good speeches, I was wrong. So now I donate to DIAG but still it in feels a bit like Republicans against Trump. Too little, too late, too many Dem politicians still captured, really to die on Trans Hill.
As “DrBrydon” stated, traditional Marxism emphasized “class struggles”. Traditional Marxism was “the god that failed” (the USSR, the PRC, Vietnam, etc.). The left adopted Cultural Marxism (CM) as replacement. CM is very much the dominant ideology of the media, academia, etc.
Right on all counts, and (as I’ve loudmouthed here before) Ezra Klein is the biggest phony around. A wild, full force wokester… until it became unpopular and he shifts in the wind into hard reverse. Plus a crazed jihad against “Islamophobic” Sam Harris – Ezra does enjoy his “anti racism.” You should hear him on black “victims of slavery” etc.
We make a — lot — of phonies here (witness Trump) but few reach the heights of Ezra.
D.A.
NYC
Let me try to defend (in part) Ezra Klein. He was one of the first Democrats to say (publicly) that Biden was too old to run for reelection. He has stated that the changes to California law to enable big projects to get done, are quite modest (they are). Take a look at “How Groupthink Protected Biden and Reelected Trump | The Ezra Klein Show”.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting illegal immigrants seized and deported. Yes, even if they haven’t committed crimes. They are still here illegally. They can leave and then apply for proper visas like everyone else.
I’m not so sanguine we should be supporting of adult gender transitioning. It’s very expensive and involves lifelong medications and associated medical problems. I don’t think insurance plans or Medicaid plans should cover this.
It is now finally being said that transitioning is not good for children; gender is a feeling and doesn’t represent objective reality; it might do a lot of harm, etc. If it’s true of children, then it’s true of adults. Yes, they have the freedom to choose to do this. No one should be unkind to a trans person. But as a society, we should be discouraging about an entire concept–though we skirt around it–that is false.
Incisive quote from Ruy Teixeira (Liberal Patriot Substack) yesterday: “In reality, sex is a binary; males cannot become females and females cannot become males. Transwomen are not women. They are males who choose to identify as women and may dress, act, and be medically treated so they resemble their biological sex less. But that does not make them women. It makes them males who choose a different lifestyle.”