How progressivism went mad
A short history
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.
This defection by progressives was ironic because, for the first three decades of the Cold War, the progressive legacy remained largely intact. Despite the rise and fall of McCarthyism and the general public’s acceptance of the new Cold War consensus, the welfare state installed by the New Deal was left unmolested and the US did not withdraw from or dissolve the United Nations.
All the same, it was an era of frustration and increasing anger for the movement. While progressivism’s achievements were preserved, the movement did not advance. This threatened progressivism’s essential belief in the inexorable onward march of history and the conviction that progressivism was on the right side of that history. Moreover, events indicated to progressives that the US was now on the wrong side of history. America appeared to be retarding progress itself. Thus, progressives came to identify the US with the forces of reaction the movement had always despised. Over time, even the New Deal consensus itself began to be seen as an obstacle and, as the years in the wilderness wore on, an enemy.
Progressivism would rise again, however, with the civil rights movement. Contrary to popular myth, progressivism had never been monolithically anti-racist. Wilson himself was bitterly racist and went so far as to resegregate the federal government bureaucracy. Racist ideas like eugenics had been entertained and even advocated by several prominent progressives. Nonetheless, the Progressive party’s one redeeming feature had been its stance on civil rights, and by the late 1950s and early 1960s, the cause captured the imagination of progressives with the same intensity as abolitionism had gripped opponents of slavery a century before.
It was at this point that progressivism decisively shifted from a political faction to something like a messianic movement, perhaps influenced by the major role played in the civil rights struggle by religious groups. Progressivism began to believe that institutional reform and political activism were inadequate. It considered such measures too slow and too compromised to meet the urgency of the moment. The black population, it concluded, was in existential danger and those who stood in the way of their redemption were a satanic force, a form of absolute evil.
Moreover, as the civil rights movement began to meet with considerable success, culminating in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, progressives felt a sense of unstoppable momentum. The wind was at their backs. As a result, their dreams expanded. They began to imagine that a total redemption of American society might be in the offing that would reverberate well beyond the issue of black rights. In Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream and president Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, progressivism saw vertiginous heights approaching.
It is easy to say and it has been said many times that this redemption was prevented by the Vietnam War. To this day, progressives and others claim that the war’s immense material cost came at the expense of the Great Society, which was never allowed to become more than an empty shell. This is a convenient narrative, but it is untrue. Billions of dollars were invested in the Great Society and, with some exceptions, it did not work. Poverty got worse, urban areas continued to decay, racial animus grew more bitter and violent, crime skyrocketed, riots erupted across the nation, cities like New York almost went bankrupt, and the country was gripped by a general sense that things were coming apart.
Equally devastating to the progressive movement—and the left as a whole—was the kamikaze politics of the 1960s New Left. The New Left was never fully of the progressive movement but was in many ways its heir, and progressives were usually in sympathy with New Left goals if not with New Left methods.
It is often forgotten that the New Left’s primary target was not the conservative forces in American life—which were marginal in any case—but the Democratic party itself. The New Left failed to remember that nothing in history is permanent. It took the New Deal for granted and, convinced it would never go away, felt that the left had the luxury of seeing the Democrats as a demonic force to be conquered. The Democrats, the New Left concluded, were not just an impediment to progress but were also prosecuting a genocidal war against defenseless people of color in Vietnam. That this was nonsense was irrelevant to the New Left, which from its very beginnings was a genuine messianic movement and thus very much capable of believing and doing almost anything.
The New Left’s goal thus became nothing less than smashing the Democratic party and its establishment: the urban political machines, the giant trade unions, the blue-collar constituencies that were economically liberal but socially conservative, and all the various party mechanisms that empowered them and maintained their grip on the party. When the New Left rioted at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, they succeeded in their goal and effectively handed the presidency to Richard Nixon. The New Deal consensus never recovered and the progressive movement went down with it.
In less than a decade, then, the progressive movement had gone from the vertiginous heights of power and the cusp of messianic redemption to marginalization and mourning. There it remained throughout the 1970s as its cousins on the New Left collapsed into nihilism and terrorism. This only exacerbated America’s swing to the right, which was institutionalized by Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. The neoliberal reforms enacted by Reagan effectively put an end to any hopes of expanding the New Deal or realizing the Great Society. The glorious experiments had failed.
The psychological toll taken by this catastrophe was immense. The essence of the progressive creed was that things were getting better. Now, in the movement’s view, they were most definitely not getting better. In fact, they were getting a great deal worse.
In the face of this, progressives became increasingly embittered. Like the rest of the left, they began to descend into contempt for and often outright hatred of their own society, which they believed had become—and perhaps always had been—a force for evil. They had once fought to save their country from economic collapse and squalor. Now their country had abandoned them. Perhaps they had been wrong to try to save it. Perhaps it ought to be reformed not to improve it but to change it so fundamentally that it would be quite a different country altogether. In effect, their attitude became something very like “If we can’t have this country, you can’t either.”
As a result of all this, progressivism found itself in permanent opposition. In the end, it was marginalized even within the Democratic party. Throughout the 1990s, Bill Clinton led the party toward the center, hoping to recapture the national consensus that had eluded it since the reign of Lyndon Johnson. He succeeded for a time, but in 2000 the progressives launched their own kamikaze attack in the form of leftist activist Ralph Nader’s third-party bid for the presidency. “If we can’t have your party,” they decided, “you can’t have it either.” Nader’s candidacy is widely credited with engineering the defeat of then-vice president Al Gore and ushering in progressivism’s next bête noir, George W. Bush.
Ironically, it was Bush’s presidency that gave the progressives both the party and eventually the country back again. The September 11, 2001 terror attacks reignited the left in general, though at first this only provoked another backlash. The radical wing that was heir to the New Left mostly celebrated the attacks. It saw them as righteous vengeance against a country and a civilization the radicals had by now long despised. In their most ridiculous cliché, they proclaimed that the attacks were “the chickens coming home to roost.” How poultry related to the issue at hand was left unclear.
Needless to say, Americans didn’t much care for this. In the face of national outrage, the radical left shut up fairly quickly and retreated to its ivory towers, silent but seething and determined to have its vengeance.
The progressives did not go quite as far as their radical allies, but they were willing to admit that there was something in what the radicals had to say. The radicals’ scorched-earth bitterness resonated with progressivism’s deep resentment of the American society that had rejected it and the American right-wing that had toppled progressivism from power.
The movement never quite denounced the War on Terror itself, but it worked with the radical left to undermine its more punitive aspects. What swept progressivism back to power, however, was the Iraq War. The movement embraced the anti-war protests that preceded and accompanied it, and led the war’s growing chorus of critics as the ensuing occupation began to go wrong. As the American public moved against the war, the progressives rode the wave of discontent to major victories in congressional elections.
The 2008 global financial meltdown, however, was the key to their restoration. Almost overnight, the crisis demolished the neoliberal consensus and made statist economics politically viable again. Even the Republicans were rushing to pump government money into the ailing economy. People finally realized what progressives had known all along: The market cannot solve everything.
Better still, in the person of Barack Obama, progressives at last found a new John F. Kennedy: a personification and focus of their messianic hopes. They transformed America’s first truly viable black candidate for president into the object of a fanatical cult of personality, bringing together all the ideological labors of the past four decades: Profound racial guilt, distaste for capitalism, absolute belief in the redemptive power of the state, vulnerability to political charisma, reification of emotion over reason in policymaking, and a profound refusal to face the actual horrors of life.
Needless to say, it worked. Propelled by the economic collapse rightly blamed on his rivals, Obama indeed became president. But with the triumph of its messiah, the progressive movement found itself in an insoluble dilemma: It still resented America for what America had done to it, but now it had the task of ruling the America it resented.
It found a solution in the form of self-flagellation. In power at last, progressives proclaimed themselves the nation’s redeemers. They formulated a narrative of original sin, perpetual guilt, and ultimate absolution through the public spectacle of masochistic repentance. This took the form of a kind of demonization of history: The past was nothing but a veil of tears, a lachrymose epic in which a white/male/heterosexual/cisgender elite had crushed, enslaved, and slaughtered more or less everybody else. The only way to purge this original sin was for the members of this criminal elite to admit their guilt, bend the knee to their victims, and hand over power to a caste of saints composed of the progressives themselves.
Gripped by these religious passions, the progressive movement began to embrace a strange form of what might be called “benign” totalitarianism. Especially in academia, it constructed a culture of denunciation and punishment in which resisting the saints or rejecting their catechism was not political disagreement but heresy. To stamp out the heretics, speech was policed, livelihoods held hostage, dissidents purged, and reeducation imposed. Like previous inquisitors, the progressives told themselves that they were in the business of saving souls; indeed, of saving the soul of the nation. Thus, it was for the sinner’s own good to be bludgeoned into virtue. As for the inquisitors themselves, they believed they had the best of intentions and were thus inherently pardonable and their indulgence perpetual. Now, at last, they ruled and the kingdom of God was at hand.
The reign of the saints was short. It was not just ended but shattered by the election of Donald Trump in 2018. There is much that is horrifying about Trump but, looked at objectively, it is clear that he did represent something quite real: First, a right-wing backlash against neoliberalism; second, an even more ferocious backlash against the benign totalitarianism that the progressives had, by then, only half-constructed.
As a messianic political movement, the progressives could not help but see this backlash and Trump himself as the devil—the ultimate adversary. Trump became the incarnation of the satanic forces that were on “the wrong side of history.” He stood in the way of the forward march of humanity. Whether Trump deserved to be hated or not—and in many ways he did—the progressives’ hatred of him was not really moral or political. It was transcendent in nature.
Worse still, Trump’s election meant that, once again, progressivism had been rejected by the American people it sought to save. Progressives now began to wonder if, in the face of the devil’s triumph, the American people really deserved to be saved. The resentment that had been an indelible part of the movement since 1968 began to harden into the outright hatred that had once been confined to the radical left.
Trump was defeated by Joe Biden in 2020, but Biden was relatively moderate and thus a compromised man in progressive eyes. Thus, his victory did little to alleviate the movement’s resentment and rage. The progressives believed they were still in the wilderness, their work not yet done and their antichrist poised to rise again in four years.
As a result, the progressive movement and the remains of the New Left essentially merged and became all but indistinguishable. Today, progressivism looks to a new generation of radicals—shock troops and foot soldiers far more extreme than Obama ever was—given to acts of extreme ideological, rhetorical, and physical violence to restore progressivism to government.
It may be that these radicals will succeed, but it is unlikely they will ever command the loyalty of more than half the country—if that. Given this, as well as the fanaticism of Trump’s most passionate supporters, who have descended into their own messianic cult of personality, severe social unrest and an even more bitterly polarized nation seem inevitable and, perhaps, unavoidable.
From this short and somewhat bleak history, a few general conclusions can be drawn:
First, with the lone exception of the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, and perhaps not even then, progressivism has never been a consensus movement. Its values and mores have always been those of an elite class and had limited appeal beyond it. Certain policies advocated by progressives have enjoyed consensus support at certain times, but the movement itself has always remained that of a small but powerful minority.
As such, to enact its policies, progressivism has had to be essentially oligarchical. It has been argued by the likes of Robert Michels that essentially all political movements and systems are oligarchical, but there are certainly some that are more oligarchical than others. A consensus movement may be ruled by a small number of people, but it has wide appeal and support, and thus enjoys the affirmation of a democratic majority. This has rarely been the case for the progressive movement.
Furthermore, it appears that progressivism has only become progressively more oligarchical—largely out of necessity. Most movements that desire radical change and fail to enact it become more radical over time. Progressivism is no exception. Thus, as it has veered away from the American consensus, progressivism has been forced to impose its ideology via increasingly non-democratic means; including, at times, the endorsement or practice of outright physical violence.
The lone recent exception to this was the Obama presidency. But in terms of governance, Obama was forced to hew as close to the center as possible while still pursuing center-left policies. This left progressives dissatisfied and ultimately enraged, leading to their rejection of Obama’s designated successor Hillary Clinton in favor of the much more radical Bernie Sanders.
This points to one of the most striking aspects of progressivism, which is its total inability to absorb defeat or failure. As a messianic movement, it reacts to electoral defeat and the objective failure of its policies not by adjusting itself to political sentiment or the verdict of events, but by doubling down on its transcendent convictions and remaking reality to fit them.
The cost of such behavior is obvious: By doubling down on the ideas that led to defeat, the movement experiences further defeat. By continuing to push failed policies, the movement only compounds its failure. By constantly remaking reality to overcome these psychological blows, the movement eventually loses its grip on reality itself.
The result of this is not pretty: A political movement that, for all intents and purposes, has gone insane. Worse still, a movement that is determined to impose its insanity on everybody else.
Oligarchy does many things, but it does not seek to control reality. The only political system willing to make the attempt is totalitarianism. As a result, progressivism has now begun to exceed oligarchy and enter into the realm of the totalitarian. The most obvious example of this is academia, where the progressive dictatorship of the professoriate imposes its vision of reality with an iron fist. If it could put people in reeducation camps, it would. But there are now pockets of progressive totalitarianism throughout American society and there is little indication that the process will be arrested any time soon. At the very least, it will only stop if financial, political, or legal pressure forces it to do so.
All of this is ominous enough. But most ominous, perhaps, are the unintended consequences of progressive excesses. One can only think of the assassins of Caesar, who struck out of the best of motives—a love of liberty foremost among them. But by killing the man they saw as a tyrant, they set in motion a chain of events that destroyed themselves and the republic they loved. Ultimately, Rome ended up under the rule of a tyrant more powerful than Caesar ever dreamed of being.
It is not impossible that, like many forms of political messianism, progressivism will suffer a similar fate. In its attempt to impose its vision, it may create a backlash exponentially more intense than any preceding backlash. So intense that it will topple not only progressivism but the republic itself. It has happened before, after all.
Trump may, in his heart of hearts, want to be a god-emperor, but he lacks the discipline or talent to become one. It is not impossible, however, that amidst intense civil unrest, a new Octavian could emerge. Such a man, far more politically adept than Trump but equally lacking in scruples, would be a threat unprecedented in American history. If the excesses of progress force enough people to take the side of such a man, then progressivism’s long and troubled history will have a terrible end: Progressivism will have destroyed the society it worked so hard to transform into a kingdom of virtue.