Are Progressives Progressive?

More on that subject, from Millman, Poulos, Larison and Feeney.

Here's an interesting bit from Feeney:

the question is whether today’s (don’t call them “liberals,” call them) “progressives” operate within [the Progressive] tradition, or whether, as Yglesias has it, it describes a coalition, not a coherent worldview. One obvious fact that contradicts Douthat and Levy is that among most prominent segments of the left (intellectual, bureaucratic, activist) you don’t find much truck with the idea of progress. The traditional engines of Enlightenment progress – western reason, science, trade – have some real enemies among the multicultural, environmentalist, and anti-globalization left. Yes there is some conspicuous impatience to remove issues from public debate in the name of (real or spurious) scientific consensus, and this smacks of the old progressivism, but in general it’s the neo-Reaganite right that fetishizes optimism, believes in things like destiny and in America as the advance guard of western democratic values, etc.

I think both American political coalitions include people who fetishize optimism and progress, actually: the neo-Reaganites are more likely to locate the vanguard of progress in the United States, and the Clintonians in a somewhat more nebulous global community, but both tend toward a "bridge to the twenty-first century" visions of steady upward ascent in human affairs that has roots in the Progressive Era. Meanwhile, both coalitions include skeptics of progress as well, your Robert Borks on the one hand and your Bill McKibbens on the other. This ought to make the current left-right alignment deeply unstable (how can McKibben vote for the same party as Larry Summers? etc.), but for reasons that belong to a longer blog post than this one it holds together better than you might expect.

Comments

Do you think he meant to write "science," Ross?

Posted by Ron Mexico | July 31, 2007 4:38 PM

There are tradeoffs between the things we conserve. If societal changes are necessary to avert ecological change, then conservatives will be opposed to conservationists.

Posted by Consumatopia | July 31, 2007 5:05 PM

I can't tell if you're trying to engage in honest argument or if it's just an attempt to deny the center-left political coalition a positive label.

Feeney's just throwing out a bunch of strawmen. The far left on the environment, public health, and foreign policy don't have any real power. The last Democratic President ordered air strikes on Kosovo, proposed spending $1B annually on projects to relieve traffic congestion (mostly roads), and supported free trade at tremendous political cost. There's a debate over the marginal utility of pharmeceuticals, but that's an empirical question. The Left obivously isn't going to suggest that we stop manufacturing anti-retrovirals to to treat AIDS; we just have some skepticism of the raw power that PhrMA wields. If the lefties vote at all, they vote green, or they vote Dem because there's nowhere else to go, and the Democratic party is at least somewhat sensitive to their concerns.

The point about multiculturalism is a bit more appropriate, but only a bit; it's sort of a broader version of the bogus "why don't feminists speak out about the oppression of women in Islam?" complaint.

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot | July 31, 2007 5:26 PM

It's interesting that Ross highlighted the least accurate part of the least interesting link.

I'd say Millman has the fairest assessment, and both Larison and Poulos raise worthy critiques of Progressivism past and present that would be challenging and productive to engage with. Feeney is engaging in cutesy, David Brooks-esque straw-babble, which presumably means he's destined to earn the next high-profile gig at a serious magazine.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | July 31, 2007 5:46 PM

I'm surprised Fukuyama hasn't come up more often in this whole belabored conversation. I mean you can't get more teleological than The End of History. That's a very influential text among the neocons and it definitely has this style of my-politics-are-destiny rhetoric.

Posted by Freddie | July 31, 2007 6:07 PM

If someone is going to mention Fukuyama, someone else should give Geoge Grant some props. Forty years ago, he pointed out that New Frontier-style liberalism, Goldwater-style libertarianism and Marxism were all just sects in the greater religion of progress. Today, Marxism is mostly gone, the New Frontier has become the increasingly indistinguishable axis of neoconservatism/neoliberalism, and Marxism has mutated into a feminist social constructionism. But the common ground still overwhelms the differences.

All of which just shows that "Left" and "Right" represent unstable political coalitions, not coherent streams of thought.

Posted by Pithlord | July 31, 2007 6:16 PM

BTW, I doubt Freddie has actually read Fukuyama. If you quote the whole title, "The End of History and the Last Man," you see that Fukuyama's story isn't just happy-happy optimism. The "Last Man" is Nietzsche's phrase for a completely decadent virtueless-but-harmless bourgeois relativist. Fukuyama is not identifying his own sympathies with what he is predicting.

Posted by Pithlord | July 31, 2007 6:21 PM

The excerpt you posted really jives with my limited experience. A year or two ago in college, my sense of the term was that the progressives were the people who were the 'activist' types, who were just as likely to have some vaguely pomo idea that progress was a bad word. Liberal referred to most everyone else (..I was at UNC).

Posted by Justin Blank | July 31, 2007 7:18 PM

I would have thought this was obvious, but the political term "Progressivism" refers to a view about political justice. The late 19th century and early 20th century American Progressives, like Roosevelt, weren't self-applying the label because they were optimists about technological progress, or even that they believed that social progress was inevitable. Rather, they had beliefs about what *ought* to be the response to industrialization in terms of political justice and policy.

Contemporary Progressives, insofar as they can be evaluated as "really" being Progressive, can only be compared to the prior Progressive movement(s) on these grounds. Maybe the term just means something different now, or maybe the globalization and information economy phenomena play the role of industrialization. Either way, it seems like a silly thing to criticize the term Progressives use to refer to themselves because they aren't sufficiently optimistic, even if it is true (which I doubt) that they are less so than others.

Posted by Matthew | July 31, 2007 9:20 PM

See Virginia Postrel's book "The Future and Its Enemies" for the best explication of how both sides of the liberal/conservative divide in the United States contain both "stasists" and "dynamists."

Posted by Hampton | August 2, 2007 4:11 PM