I have recently written about the rise of what I believe is a form of barbaric progressivism. That is, it seems that American progressivism has concluded what is essentially an alliance with barbarism and thus become barbaric itself. As a result, it has violated all of its professed principles and embraced such monstrous ideologies as radical Islam, racialism, antisemitism, and totalitarianism. It has come to support the calculated use of political violence, terrorism, and even genocide. In academia, the one institution wholly controlled by progressivism, the movement has taken on almost every aspect of a messianic cult. It has, in other words, gone mad.
This derangement may have been inherent in progressive ideology all along, but it is also the result of a historical process that began well over a century ago. It is worth exploring this history, if only to discover precisely how and at what point everything went off the rails.
Progressivism did not begin as a messianic cult. At least, it was no more messianic than many other American political movements. Indeed, messianic sentiments have been hardwired into the American republic from the beginning. It sought to become a “shining city on a hill”—an oblique reference to Jerusalem—that would construct an “empire of liberty” to fight tyranny around the world and usher in a new age of human freedom.
Thus, progressivism certainly had historical predecessors, perhaps most notably the abolitionist movement. Progressivism itself, however, was born out of the specific socioeconomic and political discontents that followed the Civil War.
In the decades following the war, the US rapidly industrialized and urbanized. Simultaneously, massive waves of immigration brought about immense and permanent demographic and economic changes. All this resulted in immense wealth for some and crippling poverty for others. The railroad or oil magnate and the slum child became symbols of the age. The social and moral implications of this were universally acknowledged and a new generation of reformers sought to ameliorate the collateral damage of the new American capitalism. Such reform efforts began to coalesce into a single if fractious movement that came to call itself by the name of progress.
From its origins, progressivism was defined by its class origins. It was essentially a kind of elite populism. That is, its leaders were almost entirely from the upper-middle class. They acted out of a sense that, as the “fortunate” members of society, it was their duty to improve that society. There was also, one imagines, a certain amount of unconscious guilt involved. Nonetheless, their motives were altruistic. They felt that charity and compassion compelled them to care for the “less fortunate” and pursue the necessary reforms to ameliorate their plight.
This was a somewhat new phenomenon. Certainly, the upper-middle class had been a large part of the abolitionist movement. But in the case of the new progressive movement the ambitions were larger and the methods more systematic and comprehensive. Progressivism sought much more than an end to a deplorable American institution. It wanted to remake society as a whole.
President Theodore Roosevelt considered himself a progressive and certainly enacted many policies the movement advocated, but he was never entirely of it. He was, for example, a passionate imperialist, with which many progressives were profoundly uncomfortable. This was not the case with progressivism’s most notable early triumph: The election of president Woodrow Wilson in 1912 followed by, at the end of World War I, the formation of Wilson’s brainchild—the League of Nations.
The League of Nations was pure progressivism. It was intended to replace the old balance-of-power politics that many believed had caused the most horrendous war in history. More than that, it sought to place international relations on a higher moral plane. The League’s ultimate ambition was not solely to foster fraternity among nations and create a forum for negotiation, but to create a kind of global perpetual peace. This world would be, as Wilson put it, “safe for democracy.” In the form of the League, the protean messianic ambitions of the progressive movement emerged in full. It would not just save the poor and downtrodden. It would save the world.
The League of Nations, however, proved an embarrassing failure. Infamously, it completely failed to stop the rise of fascism and Nazism or to prevent the resulting war. Even before that, however, it brought about a devastating domestic political defeat for progressivism. Despite his best efforts, Wilson failed to convince the American people and their representatives to approve joining the League, ruining his health in the process. This was followed by the victory of conservative forces in the 1920 presidential election and their decade-long dominance that followed.
Not for the last time, the progressive movement was saved by catastrophe. When the US economy collapsed in 1929 and the long Great Depression began, the movement finally had its chance to seize the commanding heights of American society. It did so in the form of president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Roosevelt was a quintessential upper-middle-class progressive and, over the 12 years of his reign, he gave America the “shock treatment” it needed. He enacted a plethora of reforms that laid the foundations of the American welfare state and, once World War II broke out, ended the struggle between isolationists and internationalists in favor of the latter.
The hegemonic progressivism of the New Deal perhaps reached its zenith when Wilson’s old vision was finally realized in the form of the United Nations. With the founding of the UN, the US at last forewent its skepticism of international entanglements. It not only joined the organization but took the lead in establishing it and structuring its procedures and powers.
Even more than its predecessor organization, the UN was in many ways the embodiment of progressivism itself. It was conceived and saw itself as a manifestation of the “end of history,” a means of redeeming the world by fostering peace, preventing war, and expanding progressivism’s domestic reforms to the rest of the world. Through the UN, progressivism established itself as a global power.
But tragedy struck again at the moment of triumph when Roosevelt suddenly died in 1945. The progressive movement regarded his death as something close to a world-ending catastrophe, but this proved inaccurate. What ultimately drove progressivism from the heights of power was the dawn of the Cold War.
Many progressives opposed communism and, with reservations, believed it had to be resisted. But just as many of them had convinced themselves that communists were merely “liberals in a hurry.” As a result, progressivism as a movement proved incapable of recognizing the Soviet Union’s imperial ambitions. The US’s attempt to counter these ambitions was seen as a betrayal of the grand ambitions of Wilson, Roosevelt, and their brainchild the UN. When it became clear that not the UN but the US and the Soviet Union were going to dominate the post-war world, the progressives began to retreat into pacifist fantasies.
In 1948, outraged by the Truman administration’s decision to lead the Democratic party into the Cold War, progressivism turned to a third-party presidential bid by former vice president Henry Wallace. Backed in part by the Communist party, Wallace’s Progressive party advocated reconciliation with the Soviets and blamed the emerging Cold War on US policies. Wallace failed to win a single state, but the Progressive party’s narrative of the Cold War and its paradigm of American culpability would survive and only become more bitter and vehement.
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