Our opponents like to call themselves “progressive,” and they have in mind a tradition of political activism that goes back more than a century.
That tradition includes some things that have become accepted, largely uncontroversial features of American politics and culture – such as voting rights for women, the direct popular election of senators, and popular primary voting for party nominees. The tradition includes other things that most progressives would rather we all forget was their work – national income taxes, say, or prohibition of alcohol sale and consumption. And the tradition also includes immense political and economic commitments – like Medicare, Social Security, and the vast regulatory bodies of the state – that are a constant source of dispute and disagreement even among those who support their aims unreservedly.
But it’s not just or even mainly such measures – measure after measure after measure, good, bad, and indifferent, the vast majority expanding government at the expense of private initiative and investment – that progressives want to recall. They also want to associate themselves, ahead of anyone else, with the good old very popular, very American idea of progress.
They want us to believe that they stand for progress, because they know that their fellow Americans believe in progress. The know that America is the true home of progress, and America has welcomed and has given birth to more social, technological, economic, and political progress than any other country.
That, I believe, is what the great progressive Ronald Wilson Reagan had in mind whenever he spoke with his inimitable optimism about the American future. It’s what made him able, in his last major political address, to respond to the Democrats’ empty calls for “change” by declaring to his fellow Republicans, “We are the change!“
I heard a gasp or two when I described the Gipper as a great progressive. I’m not referring to President Reagan’s early years as a Democrat and a union leader, or to his admiration for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for whose importance most progressives wouldn’t consider a new face on Mount Rushmore grand enough – if they could, they’d carve up his own mountain for him.
Nor am I referring to President Reagan’s occasional dalliances with impure conservatism.
I’m referring to what Ronald Reagan recognized long before most people of his day, and what he meant when he told the nation 30 years ago, upon being inaugurated for his first term, “Government is the problem.” 
Actually what he said was this, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
Ronald Reagan didn’t pretend that there was no crisis in his day, or that he didn’t see any evidence of crisis, or that government is never the solution to problems. His words rely on the opposite assumption, though we can leave it to scholars and historians to explain which crises Reagan believed government could solve.
Reagan also didn’t pretend that his political opponents lacked good intentions, that they didn’t want to solve the crisis. What he realized, and in fact had long understood, and what he explained to the nation upon assuming the presidency, was that to progress - to venture unshackled into the future by “the problem,” which was actually a great complex of problems – we needed more than anything else for government to get out of the way.
Today, one decade into the 21st Century, more than 100 years since politicians in both parties and new parties first started marching under the banner of Progress, we have every right, we need perhaps even more than Reagan did, to ask this question: Where and what is the real source of progress? Who, today, deserves to be considered “progressive”? Who really is ready, who really has the courage, imagination, and foresight, to embrace the future? Who are the real progressives?
NEXT: On the Constitutionalist Response
Attempts to equate progress with progressive political thought is a sign of progressive political thought, because it is necessary to create this illusion that government is the answer, to support progress, that helps hide it s true intent. Progressivism as a political philosophy is a repudiation of the constitutional support for natural rights, in order for the betterment of the state through statist actions. It is currently in full display in Ms. Pelosi and Obama. (Reid couldn’t punch his way out of a paper sack). It all goes back to Burke and Smith vs Rouseau. You can refuse this reality but I have no issue with realizing the difference. People who link women’s suffrage with direct election of senators show they don’t.
You blinked CK, I couldn’t resist. ;-)
You keep on repeating this and variations, yet you never provide evidence for the assertion, or respond to counter-evidence. It appears simply to be an object of faith to you.
@ JEM:
(b)
JEM wrote:
I also don’t understand what that sentence means.
And, anyway, “The Real Progressive” isn’t speaking to our philosophical ruminations. He’s not terribly interested in the historical investigation that may interest you or me. He’s making an appeal to common usage and the notion that political labels ought to mean something, and suggesting that today’s nominal progressives aren’t worthy of theirs.
Why is this even controversial to you?
Or is it even controversial to you? I look back at your while-I-was-blinking comment, and I’m not even sure whether it’s intended even to disagree with the post.
this illusion that government is the answer
Can we agree on this, that it has been a mistake to give Govt a monopoly for the currency. Couldn’t Currency be privately marketed?
I’m certain that my Asset backed paper from REXCO will outsell the paper backed paper marketed by JEMCO. If you think that the Government must be the Monopoly provider of Currency,that’s a slippery slope.
A lot of people probably define progress as leveling whereas many others define it as freedom. Others probably define it as the restoration of morals. Three different priorities as I see it, three different visions. It’s not easy to argue means when you can’t agree on ends.
Seth Halpern wrote:
Gotta disagree with you – those are rather dourly moral, subjective, and abstract for American visions of “progress.” I think that the American definition would be much bigger, realer, practical, and obvious. A man, a plan, a canal, Panama! Healthier, wealthier, wiser – more opportunity, more knowledge, longer lifespans – abler to leap even taller buildings in ever smaller fractions of a bound. Able to kill more enemies with a single bomb. More neighborhoods nicer to live in than before. Material and measurable, in other words, but I also think it all goes back to the Constitution and before the Constitution – shinier cities on ever more splendid hills, from sea to outer space, more just, more tranquil, better defended, more prosperous, more blessedly free, etc.
CK, I think you’re right about how most Americans–most everybody, probably–would define progress. But all those goodies are products of society; they aren’t in themselves what makes a society productive.
Yes, the material progress goes back to the Constitution and before, to the basic assumptions and rights of British law. But blessed freedom doesn’t just naturally keep growing. It is always in danger of being stifled with good intentions.
You take it as read that direct election of senators is a boon. Well, maybe and maybe not, but the legal offshoot of that, the “one man one vote” rule for Representatives has been a disaster. It has led to unbelieveable gerrymandering and the multiplication of “safe” districts in every state, so that we have Representatives, who were intended to be the most directly responsive to the electorate, racking up 20 and 30 years in Congress, while never having to answer a hostile argument on a major issue. As a result, we have Representatives who vote for cap and trade, during a recession no less.
Our society is robust enough to carry a heavy load of this kind of junk and still make material progress, but it is certainly far less free than it was at the height of the progressive movement. Now we have governments declaring smoking and transfats off limits to citizens, requiring seatbelts, legislating lightbulbs. Our election laws have contributed to this narrowing of freedom. And the direct election of senators was the first step in this direction.
Here in Northern New Mexico the identification of progress with economic growth is not so obvious. Still comparatively Catholic, less visible disparities in wealth, occasional rather outspoken hatred of the rich and more subtle tension with the Anglo – and that’s before I get to the culture vultures and the over aged hippies. My Hispanic plumber charges $150/hr, dislikes unions but almost idolizes Oboes.
Of course this isn’t a Reagan or even a Giuliani state of mind. Maybe it’s not even quite American – yet. But I wouldn’t hazard a guess what American demographics will yield. I wouldn’t make economically libertarian assumptions knowing what other waves of immigrants produced in the way of political demands.
Sheesh. Obama. Some spellcheck.
CKM — has it occurred to you yet that you’re not in a majority here in associating Progressivism with benign, Panama-palindrome-type progress? :-)
We built the Erie Canal and wrote at least a dozen popular songs about it, long before there were any twinkles in eyes that resulted in Theodore Roosevelt, the carving up of Central America, and the Panama Canal. We laid a railway from the Atlantic to the Pacific before TR too. Lewis and Clark explored the great northwest much earlier than that. The steamship, the reaper, the telegraph, the light bulb (anyone else channeling 4th grade here?) — an awful lot of forms of progress occurred before Progressives gained political power or secured their perch in academe. Manifestly, it did not require their political philosophy, or their set of agenda items for government, to produce progress in invention, continental vision for civil projects, and so forth.
Progress in invention and technology is great, but it certainly isn’t something Progressives, the political and philosophical movement in America, can take credit for, or have had any inherent relationship to.
Their signature achievement has been enlarging government, because they’re all about identifying social problems and addressing them with government. That’s what all of their leading lights advocated and worked toward.
Margo wrote:
Just to be clear, neither the “speaker” nor I state that direct election of senators is a boon – just that it’s “accepted and largely uncontroversial.” As for gerrymandering and the rest – why wouldn’t problems in the system of that sort be ripe for reform, and why wouldn’t that reform be similar in spirit and intent to the kinds of democratic reforms the original progressives sought to effect?
One could attempt an argument from voting patterns that the “nanny” state, effectively the feminization of American/Western politics, governance, and culture, is a natural result of Women’s Suffrage – but I don’t see many conservatives even glancing in that direction. (JEM might rise to that bait, I’m not sure.) Again, it’s accepted and non-controversial.
I’m also wary about making the overall less free/more free judgment on the terms you offer. Why isn’t social progress among those denied opportunity in education, government, the professions, mainstream associations, etc., at least as valid a reference point as freedom from business regulation and dietary pointers?
Okay, so is it my fault that he’s an unusually musical plumber?
Progressivism is the antithesis of economic libertarianism but you could argue that it is also bred by it. I mean, how long did all those ultimate bizarro libertarians, the slave holders in the newly settled Deep South, think they could preserve their little pseudo-feudal biracial paradise? How long did the Robber Barons and the textile manufacturers of the Gilded Age think they could go on importing millions of Slavs, Irish, Italians, Jews and Chinese – a large portion of them female – before their workers took political (as opposed to economic) advantage of sheer numbers? This is the box we keep getting ourselves into.
CK, as always you ask a great question. Why wouldn’t those problems caused by “one man one vote” be ripe for reform? I think there are several reasons.
1. The underlying framework is based on a constitutional decision by the Supreme Court, buttressed by the civil rights acts. As soon as a state moves to change its redistricting procedure (not the results, the procedure) it will be hit with lawsuits based on these. And these laws are themselves immune from alteration by Congress or even reinterpretation by the Supreme Court.
2. All the legislators who would be the engines of changing the arrangements are themselves elected under the arrangements.
3. The populace as a whole has almost lost the sense that representatives should be citizens who serve for a short time representing other citizens. Long-term representatives are better at getting goodies for their states. These goodies have no basis in the Constitution, they are the debased descendants of the Progressives’ idea that government should provide for the welfare of individuals. At this point, they are not primarily directed to individuals but to corporations, unions, government entities and other large rent-seekers, but the myth remains.
About woman suffrage and the nanny state: No doubt more women are nannies by inclination. But I didn’t hear the clamor out there for new light bulbs. That was arranged by GE and its representatives in Congress. I didn’t hear the yell going up for seat-belt laws and car-seat laws. These followed the pattern we should expect of a bureacracy–once you get the idea of requiring a seat-belt for the driver, so he or she doesn’t lose control of the car in an accident, hurting someone else, you go on to seat-belts for the passenger, air-bags, and then special protection for the children. When you are a bureacrat assigned to the seat-belt desk, you aren’t going to resign when all the drivers buckle up; you are going to seek new fields to conquer.
If Seth asked his Northern New Mexico neighbors whether they would prefer an air-bag-free car costing $2000 less than the current models, I would bet a lot of them would say yes. They might even use the money saved to do something that would improve the health of their children.
They are being protected against their will. And that in a nutshell was the historical Progressives’ attitude toward the lower classes and especially immigrants. This is the origin of some of the apparently benign causes they backed, and also of some that look less nice now, like the eugenics initiatives.
Let’s look the denial of opportunity to minorities that you mention last. The Jim CRow laws were the product of unions in the South, seeking to eliminate competition.
But when the great migration took place of blacks from the south to northern industrial centers in the 30′s, 40′s, and early 50′s, black income and opportunity rose strongly. At that point, blacks had a higher employment level than whites and income and education levels were rising strongly. Blacks also had a higher level of intact famlies.
What stalled it? Some factors: Welfare was widely extended, given directly to unwed mothers below the age of majority, instead of to their guardians, attached to no work of education requirements. Public housing was required to be open to all, including those with criminal records. These measures were taken in order to “help” people, but they have caused the destruction of the low-income black family, and the destruction of black shopping districts. Of course, the progressives didn’t like these because they were not integrated, but they provided a friendly environment for black-owned small businesses and professional services, supporting a black middle class and hiring unskilled and teen workers.
Also, progressives noticed how smelly and dangerous those factories were–the steel mills of Gary Indiana, the small casting and stamping shops, even the unautomated car assembly plants. These workers had to be protected from air pollution and on-the-job risks, and city neighborhoods had to be protected from pollution. So urban manufacturing jobs for less-skilled mature workers were driven out.
Last I’ll mention the child-labor and minimum-wage laws. So well intentioned! When I was 10, I did lawnmowing for neighbors in a suburban neighborhood. Sure, it was illegal, but it drew no one’s attention. But if an immigrant starting a landscaping company goes out to the suburbs with his 10 year old helping out on a weekend, he will be in trouble. Almost every responsible workign adult starts by taking little odd jobs like mowing, dog-walking, baby-sitting as an early teen or younger. But in poor areas of the city, the neighbors who can hire you are few. If you can’t get slightly more formal work, you don’t get this initiation into work at all.
Then, as a completely inexperienced 16-year-old, from a crime-ridden neighborhood where good teachers flee from the schools, you go out to find a job. You have a poor education, no job experience, no references–and you have to be paid a certain amount per hour! At this point, it doesn’t really help that one really smart kid in the class has been tapped for Harvard.
The minimum wage laws are one of the proudest boasts of the progressives, but they have been a huge barrier to black progress, and that of other minorities. In fact, the progressives have ignored or actively discouraged the very first steps on the ladder of real social progress for the poor–the first job, the first pocket-money pay. Instead, they have blasted those “dead-end” jobs that we all worked as teens.
Now they’ve moved on to dietary pointers. But revisiting the minimum wage when we have 40% of black young men in Chicago unemployed will never happen.
So my question is, Is all this an accident? Why is there no revisiting of these policies? Why is there no revisiting of the basic assumption–that some people know what is best for others, and get the government to enforce it?
@Margo: How do you explain the fact that so many of the unenlightened masses kept voting for progressives? I chalk it up to decidedly non-economic factors. As someone once said, Man does not live by bread alone, though one might argue he would be better off if he did.
Progressivism is like scientology, it starts with IQ tests, and then you start believing in acolytes of Zenu. They don’t introduce you to communism, they like Alinsky, ‘rub raw the sources of resentment’
this is how it happens in every instance
@ Seth Halpern:
At the local level turnouts for most elections are very low. In that arena the fellow promising (and delivering) free bread and circuses has a huge natural advantage because his voters are much more motivated.
The amazing thing is that the country has held to relative economic freedom for so long.
@ Margo:
Before I wing an answer to your final questions, I just want to re-state for the record – especially since on another thread I’ve been accused of being a Marxist (or of seeing the world through Marxian lenses)! – that I’m broadly and, in the end, decisively and perhaps boringly in sympathy with almost everything you say. I believe that progressivism as we know it has, as I stated in the earlier essay, become a reactionary, regressive, statist/static progressivism, obviously a contradiction in terms, a contradiction in terms several times over – in a way that provides an opportunity for conservatives to dis-mantle Progressivism, and assume the mantle of authentic progress.
There are, I think, several fallacies and natural prejudices at work here at once, but I also think it has to be said that laying full responsibility for government do-gooderism at the feet of the Progressives is to give them, depending on your perspective, either too much credit or too much blame.
From the earliest days of the republic, as in any political organization from High School chess club to empire, power leads to attempts and demands that something be done with it. We had the first Bank of the U.S., we had systematic tariffs, we had the institution of slavery and related forms of servitude, we had Indian removal and relocation, and we had struggles and clashes up to and including outright rebellion over for-your-own-good and especially-for-their-good measures, and we had major extra- or un-constitutional acts of arrogation and supererogation that, rather than being punished, were accepted and integrated into our national life and history, including of course the actual physical extent of our territory. We encounter few radical constitutionalists seeking to give the Louisiana Territory back to France or demanding reparations to the descendants of investors in the first or second Banks of the United States or to the descendants of lawful owners of slave plantations.
If you look to the Preamble to the Constitution, you have a series of simple expectations about the whole point of government. If you agree with the Federalists rather than the Anti-Federalists that signing that contract in blood was a good idea – a good deal – then you’re agreeing to establish justice, promote the general welfare, and insure the blessings of liberty to our collective selves and our posterity. From that point forward, whatever you tell yourself about Montesquieu and Madison, the devil of government owns your soul, and every further revision and interpretation is guided by those same broad intentions until and unless said contract is declared no longer in effect.
Upon encountering any sense of injustice, inequity, or unfreedom, it’s not only natural but in a sense it’s obligatory for any American to look to the governmental system “ordained and established” for whatever it has to offer on the matter. The same sense of things, and a coordinated set of obligations and expectations, pertain to state and local government as well. That is why, against some resistance from the radical constitutionalists among us, I have repeatedly suggested that the Constitution itself and the American project are in the deepest sense progressivist enterprises, just as the creation of and campaign for adoption of the Constitution was objectively a statist project, quite literally the installment of a state, if amidst very heightened awareness that the pre-Frankensteinian Frankenstein’s Monster would need to be heavily restrained lest he wreak havoc in the village.
So to cut to the chase, Americans have a tendency and a felt responsibility to go around ordaining and establishing their notions of justice – a law for everything and everything against the law. Under legal idealism, no one anywhere could be harmed without someone else having broken a law. If we could pass laws against illness, pain, and privation we would, and in a way that’s what the Dems are busy attempting right now. Someone’s paid too little for a day’s work: There oughta be a law. Someone’s denied advancement due to race, gender, creed, incompetence: There oughta be a law. In addition, we tend to want to see government as a symbolic embodiment of our morality, not just a practical instrument. We have drug laws not because, or just because, we hope that the police will stop trade in harmful narcotics, but because we want to express a collective judgment against drug abuse, and we fear that excising this judgment from the law would amount to encouragement of drug abuse. And so on ad nauseam et infinitum.
As for why don’t we re-visit these assumptions, I think we do, endlessly, but more often than not we don’t remove what they’ve led to from our societal fabric. Instead, we further embroider the law, try to pretty it up or tidy it up.
And the Early Progressives didn’t start any of it, they just progressed it with the latest and greatest insights of the late 19th and early 20th Century. Some of those turned out to be wrong, others naive, others have been worn out – and a few have stood the test of time. The only odd thing is that anyone might expect things to have worked out differently. We don’t ride around in the best horse-drawn carriages of 1900, but we don’t hate the people of 1900 for their lack of motorized transport.
CK here’s another example of why it seems the effort is unsurmountable, it’s like explaining to fish the concept of air
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2010/03/12/general-us-texas-schools-social-studies_7432658.html?boxes=Homepagebusinessnews
Yes, CK, I do agree that there is always a tendency to think, “There ought to be a law.” But the nation resisted it admirably for more than a hundred years. The National Bank and the Louisiana Purchase are not examples of the nanny state regulating the daily activities of citizens; and the tariffs were actually based on the fact that neither federal nor state governments could tax citizens directly.
Slavery of course was not established by the Constitution; it was compromised about in the Constitution because it was a pre-existing institution. The anti-slavery amendments to the Constitution after the Civil War did not address either the welfare of the former slaves nor the prejudice of many who had liberated them; they guaranteed basic civil rights.
The whole idea that government was responsible for the welfare of individuals is a newer idea, for whicih Bismarck can claim some responsibility. The fact of its parentage alone should give us pause.
Margo wrote:
Well, I wonder how much of that resistance is attributable to good sense and rock-ribbed American values, and how much is attributable to lacking the technology to keep track of individuals and things in granular detail. You need at least a telegraph and a train to send an inspector out to east Bucksnort and report infractions back to Regulation Central in a timely manner, and you need industrial strength printing presses to publish and re-publish ever-expanding regulatory tomes. Even if Andrew Jackson had wanted to require seatbelts and headrests in all new buckboard wagons and no child labor in deepest darkest Florida, he couldn’t have dreamed of implementing and enforcing the regulations.
Yes, it’s very true that the technology was lacking. It’s interesting to consider what we are going to do when there is a camera covering virtually every yard of every urban street and sidewalk.
Also, the history of that period shows an immense growth in private organizations. When people said, “There’s a social ill that someone ought to do something about,” it seems they were very likely to start a mission, aid society, fraternal organization, school or college, orphanage or charity, or even a new religion.
Did you know there was an American Art Union which rewarded artists of genre, historical and landscape works? (Portraits were already lucrative.) Painters submitted their work, and the general public (a wide swath across the whole country) bought tickets. The works were exhibited, judged, and the highest awarded works brought their artists a nice payout from the proceeds from the tickets. Those works were engraved; each ticket-holder received an engraving. Finally, in a drawing, the really lucky ticket-holders were awarded original paintings. An ingenious scheme to subsidize art without a patronage system.
Dreaming up and organizing things like this requires certain expectations and certain skills which were available in that past society. And they were fostered by the expectation that bettering the world depended on people’s independent, voluntary efforts.
Self described Progressives today are yesterday’s liberals.
They know what is best for us, and hold a vicious animus toward those of us who oppose their reckless schemes. Some of them remain incorrigible idealists, but many are attracted to the big nanny state to maintain their own high place in the big nanny state. They don’t care if a dollar won’t be worth enough to buy a radish ten years from now. Somehow, they feel they will make out alright because they are connected.
So, would it any good for us to say “we are progressive too” or “it is we who are the true progressives?”
I think not. Let them keep their self serving labels, and let us ask what is progressive about pricing teen agers out of summer jobs by continuing to raise the minimum wage? Or, we can ask, how is it progress to forbid drilling for oil and gas off our own shores?
I think progressive can and will be about as effective as the word liberal once enough voters see through all the rubbish.
@ Seth Halpern:
Seth: I have an unemployed son-in-law in Las Vegas who is a very good plumber and a hard worker. My daughter, grandson and he are thinking of moving. I bet he’d be more than willing to do your work for a lot less than $150.00 per hour. Any ideas I can share with him?
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