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Today’s so-called Progressive Movement is the greatest force for regression this world has ever seen
To call yourself progressive is to claim the future as your permanent address and to assign everyone who disagrees with you a seat somewhere in the moral lowlands. It is an annexation of time itself, performed before the argument begins. But a claim that large invites an obvious test.
Take the movement’s central commitments one at a time and ask of each whether it carries us further from the arrangements that humanity spent centuries and oceans of blood escaping, or back toward them. Run that test honestly, and the results are close to uniform. Nearly everything the contemporary left says is regressive in its essence. Not merely mistaken, not merely excessive. Regressive.
Sir Henry Maine wrote in 1861 that the movement of progressive societies had been a movement from status to contract, from a world in which your position was fixed at birth by blood and caste to a world in which you were judged by what you did. That sentence contains much of what the modern world achieved through actual progress.
Now consider a hiring regime that sorts applicants by ancestry, a university that admits by lineage-adjusted formula, a conference that assigns speaking authority by pigmentation. That is not the frontier of human freedom but a caste system with a diversity officer, installed by people who loudly imagine themselves the heirs of the abolitionists.
Consider what has happened to speech. Every free society had to fight its way out from under blasphemy law. Progressives have rebuilt the ancient apparatus and renamed the parts.
There is a body of doctrine that may not be questioned. There is a category of statement punished not because it is false but because it is profane to the nouveau religion. There is excommunication, which we now call cancellation. There is a Holy Office, and it now calls itself a misinformation desk. There is the public confession, in which the accused stands before the assembly and recites his failings in the approved vocabulary, hoping to be readmitted. Mao’s cadres called that a struggle session. Nobody calls it progress except the people running it.
Then there is inherited guilt. The idea that a man carries the moral debt of his ancestors in his blood is among the oldest and most destructive notions in human history, and the slow work of Western law was to dismantle it and establish that guilt is personal.
Privilege pedagogy resurrects the doctrine wholesale, and in its cruelest form, because the older versions at least offered a sacrament. There was confession, there was baptism, there was a road out. The new version offers permanent stain and endless penance with no absolution available at any price.
Watch what has become of truth. The universalist claim, the one that made abolition thinkable and the Declaration writable, is that there is one human reason and one human nature, and that an argument is valid or invalid regardless of who makes it.