Progressive Democrats see their ideology as the path to the final unification of mankind that will usher in Utopia.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, I take a contrary view.
Apparently, so do the people of Sri Lanka.
If you haven’t seen the reporting, the Sri Lankan government has fallen, their economy is in shambles and the Prime Minister who ushered in “progressive”/WEF style governance and economic policies based on “green” mandates and ESG scores that resulted in food and fuel scarcities has fled, his private home burned to the ground.
Sri Lanka was doing just fine until all this came along.
The answer to the “problem” of global climate change was to eliminate chemical fertilizers and go organic, which resulted in a 20% drop in rice production, 50% price increases and imports increasing by $450 million to prevent starvation.
Progressives love to go after unsolvable “problems” because those are the ones that they can fund and “work on” forever and never have to be judged on a result. To say that you want to alleviate poverty for example, is quite different from saying that you are going to end it.
But when I think about it, unsolvable problems are the natural state of mankind – at least at the macro level. To think that all poverty can be eliminated for all of society an unlikely endpoint; however, an individual can lift himself out of poverty through his own actions. Communism has proven over history that central planning and total wealth redistribution do not alleviate poverty or create equality, they only equally spread the misery, oppression, and poverty to all.
No one (except the leaders) can escape poverty or increasing their liberty in these collectivist systems.
The progressives don’t really hate freedom, they just define it very, very differently.
Modern conservatism is about “freedom of”, as in freedom of opportunity, self-determination, liberty. Progressives define it as “freedom from“, as in freedom from economic risk, political risk and social risk. The former requires minimal regulation and control, the latter requires maximum regulation and control. This is a sharp dividing line separating the right and left in America – where classical liberals (modern conservatives) wish everyone to experience life to its fullest and on their own terms, modern progressives want to use government control to “protect” everybody from life.
A salient example is found in the words of the progressive icon, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
In his Annual Message to Congress on January 6, 1941 (now known as the State of the Union Address), Franklin Roosevelt presented his reasons for American involvement in WWII. This speech eventually came to be known as the “Four Freedoms Speech”. In it he outlined four “freedoms” forming the basis for protecting Britain (and the western world) from the encroaching tyranny – these were the freedom of speech, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear.
FDR masterfully combined two constitutionally enumerated rights, freedom of speech and worship, with two “rights” that were not constitutionally expressed and are impossible to define or obtain – the freedom from want and from fear.
These also illustrate the progressives desire to create “positive” liberties instead of the negative ones defined in the Constitution. With freedom of worship (religion) and speech – the Constitution states that government is constrained from doing anything, that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…”
Freedom from fear and want are positive “liberties”, requiring government to act and are “liberties” not enumerated in the Constitution.
The reason that the Founders chose to list only negative liberties is that it is impossible to write down every individual liberty in a country that is founded on individualism. That is why America was created as a monument to individual freedom – freedom means being able to do what we want if that doesn’t compromise the liberty of another individual – but progressives hate that because in their minds, it creates disharmony, discord, and disorder.
Since freedom from fear and want are undefinable conditions at a macro level, government uses those and other similar undefinable conditions to exert their power for the “good of the collective”. The way they do this is to attempt to “equalize” liberty by restricting it for one group while allowing special liberty to others and by doing so create the very lack of harmony, happiness, and unity they claim to seek.
It is this action of picking winners and losers as they pit individual against individual and group against group that in my estimation guarantees both economic and societal conflict in a so-called “progressive” world. There can only be peace when the individual experiences the freedom to define and resolve his own challenges and is not restricted or disadvantaged by an arbitrary entity.
When solving a collective problem means that individuals must be subjected to coercive actions they oppose, conflict is assured. Since this is the very basis of progressivism, it seems clear that this ideology is never a stabilizing force, it is quite the contrary.
Just look at Sri Lanka.
Dick Durban was on the news today, condemning Joe Manchin and all Republicans for their alleged failure to support lower drug prices. It is a shame that corrupt congressmen like Durban can never seem to write a bill that addresses simply one problem. Most Republicans would support a stand-alone bill that lowered drug prices in America. What causes gridlock is when these sensible proposals are saddled with Green phantasies and LGBTQ+++ bullshit.
My only quibble is with their dislike of disharmony, discord and disorder. They might say they dislike these three, but they rely on them to give them the power to enact a never ending litany of policy prescriptions. Claiming all the while that the next program will solve the problem, we continue down the primrose path. No, what they truly dislike is a free society where their ideas are exposed as fraudulent, and they no longer have the power to create disharmony, discord and disorder.