Progressive's Without Progress
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
There isn't very much progress in the progressive
movement. Progress is the expansion of
possibilities. Progressives however have a
Malthusian obsession with the scarcity of all
things. They believe that we are about to run out of
everything from energy to water to wealth and
education and that like starving survivors on a
lifeboat we have to redistribute everything.
The progressive outlook predates the notion of
progress. Its ideal is a static society, sustainable
in its material practices and so utterly moral in
its social attributes that it becomes immune to
change. It is founded on the intertwining of the
material and the moral through the insistence that
the scarcity of material things makes their
redistribution mandatory by an activist moral elite.
There is nothing as reactionary as utopia and no
group as reactionary as utopians. A perfect society
is a place that is immune to change. The search for
such a society is the quest for an absolute way of
living. Both the quest and the way of living become
as unchallengeable as any theological utopia founded
not on bad economics and political parochialism, but
on a deeply spiritual faith.
The progress of progressives is not a rocket to the
stars, but a slow elevator climbing up a constricted
shaft to their ideal society. It's only progressive
in the same sense that a television channel that
moves from one show to the next within the confines
of its programming is. It's programmed progress, not
the progress of exploring infinitely expanding
possibilities.
The left is actually deeply conservative. It is
difficult for people in countries being contested by
the left to see this because they observe the left
as revolutionary and destructive. But every
attempted conquest is accompanied by violent
disruptions. The domestic left destroys everything
it does not control as part of a cultural war; not
because it seeks an open society of perpetual
creative ferment.
Once the left achieves its dream of absolute power
in a nation, that nation becomes socially backward,
technologically backward and culturally backward.
There is a reason that the USSR, Cuba and North
Korea were not producing compelling new cultural
products for export the way that their sympathizers
in Hollywood did and do. It's the same reason that
they don't keep having revolutions.
The creative energies harnessed by the left are a
revolutionary tool for achieving an ideal society.
Once that miserably ideal society is achieved,
everything is regimented and unplanned change is
locked out of the equation because reactionary
progressive utopias have to be relentlessly planned.
Science and culture are forcibly slowed down.
Individuality is discouraged. Conformity produces
mediocrity in all fields. Time slows down and utopia
sinks into its own progressive muck.
Americans had trouble believing that the left of the
counterculture had much in common with the
conformist cultural factory of the USSR until the
flower children became professional activists and
politicians and ran a system of stale conformity
interspersed with tedious displays of traditionally
transgressive arts. The very slogan, Keep Berkeley
Weird, is not revolutionary. It's traditionalist.
Nothing is more conservative than keeping things the
way that they used to be.
On the opposite coast, the old radical artists and
poets complain that the East Village isn't what it
used to be and landmark everything in sight. Men and
women who once did mountains of cocaine fight every
bar liquor license with the outraged spleen of
suburbanites threatened with a landfill.
The paradox of keeping weird things weird is that
weird then just becomes another tradition and
another proprietarian cultural impulse to avert a
changing world by clinging to the way things used to
be when you were young and everything made sense.
It's not really keeping things weird, it's keeping
the weird things that come from a changing outside
world, out.
Utopians always carry that narrow-minded fragility
with them. Their perfect society is always doomed by
the rising tide of morality in the affairs of men.
The more they try to hold on to it, the more it
breaks apart right in front of their eyes. The left
only believes in change when it moves in their
direction. But once change has been achieved, then
their ideal is a static changeless society.
Progress is confidence in human capabilities. The
progressive movement however is tragic. It depends
on the egocentric tantrums of individuals for its
philosophy, its art and its activism; but it firmly
believes that only the collective can make society
work. And only the collective can lock it in.
Progressive utopians project their sense of
fragility onto all material things. Fuel, water and
even the atmosphere are all on the verge of running
out. Everything must be safeguarded, counted and put
in a locked box where qualified personnel will only
distribute it at need. And that includes any and all
human activities which might cause the warming of
the planet.
Socially they are just as bad. Not only is wealth
finite (except when they're spending it) but so is
everything from education to employment.
The left doesn't think in terms of making more, but
of redistributing what is available. Its goal is a
static society in which everything is "fair", rather
than a rapidly progressing society society that is
unfairly distributed, but that focuses on creating,
rather than sharing, and produces more for all.
Progressives equate progress to redistribution. They
view the planet and every microcosmic society within
it as a lifeboat with a finite amount of supplies to
pass around for survival's sake. Their idea of
progress is achieved when the redistribution
achieves their ideal of fairness and no further
bouts of redistribution are needed. Since that day
will never come, utopia becomes an economic police
state.
The progressive idea of progress is a sack race with
a hundred feet in one sack. Progress must be
communal. It must meet the needs of all
stakeholders. It must comply with every detail of
the plan. And so it is no wonder that we hardly
build big things anymore or dream great dreams.
Vision is individual and it's deeply disruptive. It
changes the way that everyone lives.
Visions lead to utopias, but once utopia is
achieved, there is no more room for vision. Visions,
like viruses, are competitive creatures. When a
Vision achieves a static order by killing all other
visions, then vision dies, but that Vision remains
with its dead hand on the wheel of history.
The vision of the left is a dead utopia, a tradition
of weirdness and a hoarder's obsession with storing
everything from the economy to the atmosphere in one
lockbox before the sky falls. The utopian is really
a cynic, certain that individualism will unleash
everyone's worst impulses, and offering instead the
iron order of his vision.
Utopia believes the worst of everyone and
everything. It fears its own mortality and scents
the taste of death on everything. It is convinced
that the sky will fall, that everyone will starve
and that the utter undoing of humanity is only a
land use resolution or unrecycled plastic bottle
away.
Progressives lock everyone into their narrow
regimented and regulated idea of progress because
they distrust people and they even distrust the
universe. They are children certain that everything
they love is about to be taken away from them and
closet fascists obsessed with their moment of
heroism when they rush out of the phone booth,
biodegradable cape blowing in the wind, and save
humanity from itself through a benevolent police
state that extends into absolutely every area of
human activity.
There is no progress in progressivism. There is
instead a deep fear of progress. Utopians fear the
unregulated and unplanned and they replace the true
expansive progress of the human spirit with the
false progress of social controls. Human genius is
sold on the block in exchange for bureaucracy.
Progressives view every element of the world, from
the grand vistas of oceans and skies to the minute
intersections of human society as too fragile and
limited for unregulated progress. Under their rule,
progress in this country, once its secular faith,
has slowed to a crawl outside of a few select
industries that are able to move faster than the
speed of progressive regulations.
The only way to resume progress is to fight the
progressive movement.