The conceit of modern progressivism

When, in a democracy, you can't sell your ideas because no one's buying, autocracy, under the banner of morality, is the next step.

For the first time in forever, this week, I managed a bit of vacation. It did not suck!

As an elitist political movement in a democratic society, what do you do when your ideas are so poorly reasoned, so bereft of historical wisdom or support, so unpopular among the hoi polloi, and so composed of rarefied air as to reek of ozone that you can’t even give them away to anyone other than the apparatchiks in business, higher education, and the federal bureaucracy? You use whatever means are at your disposal to jam them down the throats of the infidels. If you are lucky enough to have an army of sycophants in a compliant media, you can make it all appear as principled moral rectitude.

That’s us, right now. The gamut of current progressive hissy fits, from the lawfare deployed against Donald Trump to Orwellian attacks on free speech to up-is-down anti-Israel/pro-Hamas protests going on right now at gilded institutions around the country, represent the faces of a set of dice about to come up craps.

Like it or not, Democrats flat out couldn’t beat Donald Trump on the merits of their ideas in 2016. That’s a historical fact. But instead of learning from their loss, the Democrats chose to remain insulated in their impenetrable bubbles of driveway moments so much that they were unable to see the 2016 election for the stinging verdict that it plainly was. Instead of retrospection, humility, and soul-searching, the Democrats, in their arrogance, went on the offensive with four years of Trump-Russian collusion and other fairy tales.

The fact that Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate and at the vanguard of a lot of nonsense that voters don’t like never seemed to have fazed them a bit. That trend continues.

The Democrats barely beat Trump in 2020 during a worldwide panic. Yet they have acted since then as if the narrowest of victories were a mandate for progressive excess. The truth is that if Trump had been capable of controlling his personal unlikeability even just a little bit, he’d be finishing up his second term right now.

Instead, in just a few months, all indications are that Trump could be the first president since Grover Cleveland, over a century ago, to win two non-consecutive terms.

So what do you do, as a Democrat, when your candidate is terrible and your ideals, ideas, policies, practices, and visions for the future are sufficiently unlikeable to more than half of the country that you are likely to lose an upcoming election in historical fashion? You construct an elaborate ruse to tar your opponent’s tawdry behavior as criminal and the roughly half of the country that supports him as dangerous to democracy. You portray actual criminal behavior as restorative justice, asinine behavior as moral superiority, and all manners of illiberal behavior as necessary to defend democracy.

What has been going on with much of the angst around the country since 2020 has far less to do with legitimate grievances than it does with fomenting unrest in the quest for power and control out of chaos. Name the divisive issue: George Floyd, climate change, government censorship, Israel’s response to the Hamas massacre on October 7, DEI, pronouns—each of these are about changing existing power structures in ways that benefit progressive causes and create disadvantages for everyone else.

Don’t like the inconvenience and uncertainty of offering up your ideas with data and good arguments to compete in the public square? Censor your opponents. Want to burn down social order to rebuild it in your own image but lack the army to do so? Defund the police. Want to force private businesses to cater to your environmental whims? Gin up climate change as the ultimate bogeyman and use the government to force compliance. Want to force people to accept poor ideas, coercive social structures, and unmeritorious scholarship? Jam DEI down their throats. Want to rewrite history’s success stories to elevate your own sorry existence? Distill everything through the lens of the oppressor and the oppressed. Want to put an end to actual free speech and freedom of assembly? Hide criminality behind the First Amendment.

On the latter point, despite progressives' assertions to the contrary, it's not particularly challenging to determine when free speech has crossed the line into activity not covered by the First Amendment. The First Amendment prohibits the government from interfering with your rights to free speech, peaceful assembly, and to petition the government for redress of grievances. The First Amendment does not generally apply to protests held on private property, such as Ivy League schools. The First Amendment does not protect non-peaceful protests (like occupying private buildings and holding janitors hostage).

The First Amendment does, however, quite specifically prohibit the government from interfering with your right to question, say, the government’s preferred narrative concerning the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Something that the left seems to have difficulty with.

All of this is just a small part of the conceit of modern progressivism.

As I decreed in my fatwa on the protests supporting Hamas, these are not the sole provenance of misinformed and gullible young Marxists. None of the student leaders of these protests, raised on timeouts, trigger warnings, and safe spaces, are anywhere near bright enough, worldly enough, or courageous enough to roll up on the powers that be like gangsters. Larger forces looking for power in our political system—power they could never have based solely on the strength of their ideas—are behind these protests.

I submit, as evidence for my point of view, the fact that anyone who believes that Israel is the oppressor and that Hamas is the victim in the current conflict clearly hasn’t read the Covenant of Hamas. Quite the oversight for anyone educated at a top university. Along that line, I also wonder how groups like Queers for Palestine imagine they’d fare in most Muslim countries as opposed to Israel.

But all of that is assuming that there’s reason at the other end of any of this. That’s just being plumb silly.

The game here is one of obfuscation. Muddy the waters around the First Amendment by turning it on it’s head. Redefine what constitutes criminal activity, and even something as elementary as what it means to be a citizen of this country. Make highly objective forms of knowledge, such as science and math, just other “ways of knowing.” Devalue merit for identity. Change the meaning of things as simple and well-understood as pronouns. Do all of this to sow confusion and chaos, then seize power when, in all of the confusion, the opportunity is right.

I hear a lot of comparisons these days between the conditions in the United States now and in Germany almost a century ago, in the 1930s. While some of these are apt, I think that a much better analogy may be drawn with Russia in the early 20th century. The interplay between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in pre-revolutionary Russia has interesting parallels with the current progressive movement and the rest of the Democratic Party.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks had little patience for due process, law and order, language, or anything else that got in the way of what they wanted. Like the leaders of our current progressive movement, most Bolsheviks were far-left intellectuals who couldn’t find their way from their heads to their fannies with their hands when it came to almost anything beyond the realm of their lofty ideological aspirations. Things like actually being a worker, growing food, building infrastructure, etc. And the Mensheviks, like the rest of the modern Democratic Party, thought that they could control the crazies with low-key approbation and the occasional public “tisk, tisk.”

How’d that work out for everyone?

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.