If you have more than a passing interest in American history, you're aware that the left hasn't always been a pastiche of radical causes and loony-toons issues. There was a time when Republicans and Democrats worked together to achieve a rough consensus on race and gender.
The idea that American society should be colorblind was shared across party lines. Equal opportunity was more than a buzzword for quotas. And anti-discrimination measures applied to all Americans, regardless of color.
What "might have been" never happened. The radical left took over the Democratic Party in the mid-1970s and has only become more radical over the decades.
Along the way, "liberalism" became such a dirty word in American politics that Democrats dropped it in favor of the nostalgic "progressivism" in the 1980s. The turn-of-the-20th-century progressives were true "reformers." They created space for unions to thrive, thus creating the modern American workforce. They created the first federal agencies to make food and water safer. Universal primary and secondary school education, workplace safety, and other important societal advances came about as a result of these true "progressives."
Modern "progressives" bear absolutely no resemblance to those early reformers. Today's radical left-wingers who call themselves "progressives" are far more interested in tearing down American society than in building anything useful.
Ruy Teixeira, writing in The Free Press, accuses today's radicals, who refer to themselves as "progressives," of hijacking the good name of the early 20th-century reformers in service to an alien agenda.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century. Instead of treating a color-blind society as a noble ideal worth striving for, progressives lost faith in the ideal when racial disparities did not immediately disappear. Instead, they began to favor color-conscious remedies like affirmative action and to oppose color-blind policies if they did not produce desired racial outcomes. As eventually formulated by Ibram X. Kendi, the author of How to Be an Antiracist, “There is no such thing as a non-racist or race-neutral policy. . . . The only remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination.”
Today, progressives tenaciously defend affirmative action and DEI programs despite their lack of connection to consensual values of anti-discrimination and equal opportunity. If they no longer support progress toward a color-blind society, in what sense do progressives still qualify as “progressive”?
In no sphere of American society has the progressive label been more abused than in the First Amendment right to free speech.
Anyone who was alive during the "Free Speech" movement at Berkeley, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, or any of two dozen major universities in the 1960s saw students fighting police and school administrators for their right to speak out on issues like civil rights and the war in Vietnam.
I was a little too young to participate in those protests, but I was old enough to see the righteousness of their cause. It's a source of tremendous pain for me today to see the grandchildren of those activists on the other end of the billy club supporting the squelching of speech they disagree with.
Now, in institutions where progressives dominate (universities, the arts, the Democratic Party, and so on), speech has been conflated with “violence” and “harm” and making people feel “unsafe.” The free expression of ideas now takes a back seat to such things as “microaggressions.”
A question posed to 18,000 registered voters by RMG Research in 2023: “Language policing has gone too far; by and large, people should be able to express their views without fear of sanction by employer, school, institution, or government. Good faith should be assumed, not bad faith.”
It turns out that 76% of voters agreed with that statement while just 14% disagreed.
"The fact is that on everything from identity and merit to prosperity and technology, today’s progressives have abandoned their former goals of universal uplift based on universal values and aspirations," writes Teixeira. Indeed, some of those goals have been adopted by the right while the toxicity of left-wing ideals has driven the Democratic Party off a cliff, electorally speaking.
Until the radicals are sidelined and silenced, Democrats will be wandering in the wilderness, hoping their fortunes will change before they're forced to change their party.
