I’ve learned much about American culture by observing how social groups name themselves. For example, groups against abortion want to be named “pro-life,” while those who support the option to abort would prefer to be called “pro-choice.” People who live in a war zone are either “combatants” or “non-combatants,” while the accidental killing of a “noncombatant” is the innocent-sounding, “collateral damage.”
The list of such euphemisms – and dysphemisms – seems endless in today’s “politically correct” society. Still, naming reveals how people wish to be seen by others. Doublespeak changes public perception. It’s a way to be liked. To be accepted.
But sometimes naming assumes a sinister hue, as when it purposely obscures a group’s agenda or goals. Is a “concentration camp,” for example, merely a place where prisoners are held in dense quarters? I think not. Such naming dis-informs, for it aims to trick and cajole us, to hide behavior or agenda.
Consider the name, “progressive.” This name would make sense if liberals, who dearly want to be called “progressive,” actually desired progress. But progressives are regressive, not progressive. They look to the past, bitterly nostalgic for a time when big and beautiful political ideas were fresh, and hope sprung eternal.
Yesterday’s progress is today’s regress. For yesterday is done. Quite past. Revisiting yesterday is futile. Still, progress will be made, though “progressives” won’t be the ones to make it. Progress will be made by contemporary populists who want to upend yesterday’s idea of progress, replacing it with their own, radical vision. They’re the real progressives. The pushers of a new agenda.
If history is a red thread woven through the plaid character of our nation’s events, progress requires finding the end of that thread and then weaving it in a forward direction. Progress occurs when the red thread of history moves with the leading edge of the cultural fabric, the big and small events that comprise daily American life. Progress does not break with the past, but is a conscious movement away from it.
Progress, too, is incremental — one stitch at a time.
Progressives want to take that thread and reweave it through the old, tattered cloth. They want to follow the line of the old red thread, doubling the thickness of its path. Progressives, then, aren’t interested in progress – moving forward from this point in history – but, rather, want to capture an era of American history when things were big: big manufacturing with a big employee base, big public schools with few alternatives, big unions with coercive union contracts, big media concentrated in three big networks and a couple big newspapers, and so on.
The biggest desire of big-hearted progressives, though, is a big and bigger government. But we’ve done this before. Do we really want to reweave the end of the red thread of history back to the 1960s? Or the 1930s?
We’ve already woven the red thread of our nation’s history through the bigness of the 1960s. Progress won’t happen if we look back to the old Johnson years when a “Great Society” was imagined, but never actualized, or even further back to FDR’s New Deal and the massive centralization of power that followed. The New Deal is quite old now and the Great Society wasn’t very great … or even good. So why would progressives try so hard to revive these old ideas? Is theirs a wistful, fading recollection of ideas that looked beautiful, on paper, but never worked when instituted?
Could it be that progress isn’t their goal, that the progress they seek is regressive?
History has moved on. The leading edge of our social and cultural cloth isn’t static, but moving. And our political system – the red thread – must move with it, not against it. This is progress.
Progress stitches forward.
Kristen Burroughs is a candidate for the House of Representatives in LD7. An educator, her doctorate and graduate degrees are from the University of Chicago and Yale University.
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The Progressive movement has always been regressive. Samuel Gompers in the 1890′s argued in his famous essay Meat vs. Rice Reasons for Asiatic exclusion that too many Chinese will lower the standard of living in this country.
Woodrow Wilson 1912 said that the Klan movie “Birth of a Nation” is a great movie and that every one should see it. Wilson also passed some of the most regressive segregationist laws. His reasoning? The ideology that was en vogue at the time eugenics. Which was an echo of Samuel Gompers statement about Asians.
FDR among liberal circles was thought of as a civil rights leader. But it was FDR immediate predecessors that pushed for desegregation. Thomas Dewey FDR’s predecessor desegregated the New York Government. Harry Truman desegregated the military in 1947. If you immediate supervisor can desegregate why couldn’t you? The reason why is the same “progressives” that passed Social Security voted to have all Japanese Americans put in internment camps in Arizona and the American west.
It was these same “Progressives” that fought against the civil rights legislation. What is not often discussed is that before LBJ was President he was LBJ the Senate Majority Leader. During the 1950′s LBJ fought tooth and nail against the civil rights bills of the 1950′s.
It was also the progressives that fought for a welfare state that has destroyed African American families. The quality of life for those in the inner cities went backward. Cities that were full of vibrancy life were destroyed.
The collective action of the progressive movement hurts minority groups individual achievement and self worth. Progressives fancy themselves as those that “think different” but that is precisely the type of people that they hurt.
The article was a hogepodge of assumptions about what the author thinks progressives want. The Great Society wasn’t very great? Economically disadvantaged children and elderly were fed and assisted with shelter. Groups outside the power structure such as southern blacks were given a better legal platform from which to fight for voting rights. And all this bothers you, humm. What I find really interesing is that you offered no ideas of your own.
It’s easy to get into semantics and talk about all the supposed ‘good’ that was accomplished by taking care of others, which is the main hew and cry of the progressive or democratic movement. We’re better because we care, we’re for ‘social justice.’ The Progressive Party was founded in 1912 by Teddy Roosevelt, and the philosophy for the party was based upon New Nationalism. Roosevelt insisted that only a powerful federal government could regulate the economy and guarantee social justice.
Unfortunately the ‘doing good or social justice’ philosophy is based on a great degree of economic egalitarianism through progressive taxation, income redistribution, and even property distribution.
Federal government should not be the entity that helps the disadvantaged and elderly. Americans have shown their generosity and willingness to help those in need with time and money. Example: Thousands of private citizens giving of their time and money for refugees of Hurricane Katrina, while the Federal Government failed miserably, wasting millions of tax dollars on the mobile home fiasco, etc. The more government jobs and agencies and programs, the better Progressives like it, and they do not care how well they operate. I heard a quote the other day. It was something like this: “liberals/progressives care about humanity in general, but not the individual, while conservatives care more about the individual.”