Has antisemitism killed progressivism?

The movement has not only ceded the moral high ground but detonated it with a nuclear bomb.

A lengthy essay by Ruy Teixeira of the American Enterprise Institute titled “The Progressive Moment Is Over” is currently making the rounds on conservative sites. It posits that progressivism’s moment of peak political and cultural influence has passed and it now faces ignominious defeat. The movement’s epitaph has yet to be written, but progressivism is done.

“As far as progressives were concerned, they had ripped the Overton window wide open and it only remained to push the voters through it,” Teixeira writes. “In their view, that wouldn’t be too hard since these were great ideas and voters, at least the non-deplorable ones, were thirsty for a bold new approach to America’s problems.”

“So they thought,” he states. “In reality, a lot of these ideas were pretty terrible and most voters, outside the precincts of the progressive left itself, were never very interested in them. That was true from the get-go but now the backlash against these ideas is strong enough that it can’t be ignored. As a result, politics is adjusting and the progressive moment is well and truly over.”

Teixeira asserts that progressivism’s collapse is due to its stances on four issues: immigration, policing (or lack thereof), identity politics, and energy policy (or lack thereof). He holds that progressive policies on these issues are opposed by the overwhelming majority of the American people. By pursuing them in the face of this opposition, progressives have irrevocably alienated the very voters who put them in office. Of this, political suicide is made.

There is a great deal in what Teixeira says, but I am not at all certain that he is right. It is a bit premature to declare the death of progressivism. It is true that, at the moment, the right feels that the electoral momentum is on its side and conservatives are beginning to contemplate a future in power. However, while there are some indications that Donald Trump is pulling ahead in the presidential race, the polls remain close and unstable. Trump could most certainly lose. If he does, progressives will see it as not just a victory but vindication. Despite Joe Biden’s collapse, a deeply discontented electorate, and nominating the worst candidate imaginable, the Democrats still won. Progressivism is not done, they will say, Trumpism is done.

Moreover, even if Trump wins, progressivism will continue to wield enormous power. The institutions it dominates, especially academia—over which it exercises totalitarian control—are not democratically accountable and have no Constitutional limits. Even if progressivism is finished electorally, it is far from finished institutionally. Elections are not the only path to power.

Nonetheless, I think Teixeira is right that progressivism has suffered a massive political and cultural blow. For example, except for the Trump interregnum, the United States has been under progressive rule more or less since 2008 and people are not happy with the results. A slew of recent polls from both right- and left-leaning sources show that roughly 60% of respondents believe that the country is on the wrong track. Teixeira himself cites a series of polls showing that on numerous issues, such as energy policy and race relations, progressive policies are indeed massively unpopular. 

I think there is another factor at work, however. There is little data on the subject, but the rise of progressive antisemitism and its coalescence into the movement’s Red-Green Alliance with Islamic supremacism was likely a catastrophic self-inflicted wound. Progressives’ rampage across college campuses, open support for terrorism, systemic discrimination and violence against American Jews, and use of virulently genocidal rhetoric hacked the legs out from under the movement.

The reason this wound was so devastating is that progressivism’s entire claim to power is ultimately a moral one. Progressives understand that their movement demands a very great deal from people, such as the forfeiture of rights like free speech and assembly, enormous amounts of money, and, at times, submission to psychological torture. Progressives justify these demands by claiming that their victims have a moral obligation to accede to them. While this is obviously self-serving, progressives believe quite sincerely that it is the case. To them, the electorate are sinners in the hands of an angry God and must be punished.

This often works because people have a strong streak of masochism in them. To some extent, they like to be admonished and punished. Fire-and-brimstone preachers would never get anywhere in life if this were not the case. But such indulgence is not perpetual. At a certain point, telling people they are terrible human beings begins to yield diminishing returns. People start asking themselves whether they really need to put up with all this abuse.

Over the past year, progressives have not just prompted but forced Americans to ask this question. After all, it is not only Jews who have been abused by the Red-Green Alliance. A great many non-Jews have seen their streets infested by mobs, their children’s hard-won college experience ruined, their country’s flag torn down and replaced with terrorist symbols, and so on. 

Perhaps most importantly, Americans saw progressives openly violate one of American society’s most sacred compacts. President George Washington eloquently described this compact in a 1790 letter to Rhode Island’s Jewish community, in which he pledged that the new United States would give “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” America at its best has held to this compact. But the Alliance demanded sanction for bigotry and assistance in persecution. The majority of Americans seem to have understood that if bigotry and persecution can be sanctioned and assisted in the case of the Jews, they can be sanctioned and assisted against anyone. They saw that progressives had declared war on America’s soul.

I think that most progressives are entirely unaware of the extent of the damage they have done to themselves. Indeed, this damage is existential: By revealing their genocidal antisemitism and demanding that all other Americans either submit to or collaborate in it, progressives not only ceded the moral high ground but detonated it with a nuclear bomb. And the moral high ground is, in the end, all that progressivism has. Without it, they cannot stop the American people from asking: Why should we listen to these people? After all, progressives might call their enemies Nazis, but now they are acting very much like Nazis themselves. Nothing kills the saint faster than hypocrisy.

Whether this moral self-immolation will prove to be the death knell of progressivism remains to be seen. Electoral defeat will impede the movement but not stop it. Wide-ranging reforms and consistent enforcement of existing codes and laws will be necessary to dislodge its totalitarian rule over various institutions. What is certain, however, is that progressives have done what all self-appointed saints eventually do: They have revealed that they are just human beings like the rest of us, and not particularly good human beings at that. If progressives have any sense, they will now adopt at least the facade of ethical modesty. If they fail to do so, they will not only go down to defeat but transform their once dominating movement into nothing more than a contemptible and very bitter joke.