What you wrote aptly summarizes why I walked away from the Democrats. I am not a Republican, and I disapprove of Trump as a person and as a political figure, so I feel unrepresented and pretty much attacked from both sides. Thanks very much for the article.
For now, but just wait. Wasn't it Yamomoto in Japan who was quoted after Pearl Harbor saying that he was "afraid we have awakened a sleeping giant?" It's going to happen. Exactly when is anyone's guess.
The disconnect is that progressives have morphed into leftists. And since class-based Marxism died with the fall of the USSR, they have moved on to something else - identity.
IMO the current leftist worldview is that one's lot in life is solely a function of privilege and oppression, which is based on one's immutable characteristics. In other words, one's material success is just an accident of birth and therefore a random variable. If success is random, then it follows that "society" i.e. government should redistribute it.
IMO the Progressive Left never really bought into the idea of free speech and freedom to begin with. They were useful tools while executing the Great Gramscian March Through The Institutions, but once that goal was accomplished the need was gone. Other Utopian societies like the USSR and Maoist China tightly controlled speech, so it isn't surprising that today's leftists want to do the same thing.
Once you realize the modern left simply switched identity for class and are executing the same playbook as the early 20th century Utopians, it all makes sense.
Great article, as usual. BUT, it's another diagnosis of Democrat problems. What are Democrats going to do in order to gain the trust of the independent voters? Republicans and MAGA can squabble over this and that and Trump can piss off independent voters, but when crunch time comes to vote, what are independents going to think? Hmm, Trump is doing what he said he was going to do even though I don't agree with some of it, or a lot of it. Then the independents weigh against Republicans and Trump what Democrats are saying and doing. All Democrats say is Trump is bad, Trump is bad, Trump is bad. AND independent voters remember that Biden was supposed to be the moderate and to be the great unifyer. What we got was open borders with 10 to 20 million illegal migrants, 500 thousand who are criminals and gang members, increased crime, increased property taxes to support the illegals, 20+% inflation due to the Inflation Reduction Act, the Green New Deal and other Democrat giveaways. So, I believe, as an unaffiliated voter who voted for Obama twice and Trump 3 times, independent voters will think twice about voting for Democrats. Democrats cannot be trusted and they continue to fight for illegal migrants criminals rights. Duh!!!
You and I and everyone here need to understand that the country is split 50/50. Last year's election wasn't some wipeout at all. Trump won by only 1.5%, and those swing state margins weren't especially wide. Not a lot has to happen for the Ds to win in '26, especially given the history of off-year elections.
I agree with you on the issues you cited, but I don't think most voters are going to care very much. Whichever party holds the stalwarts together will win in '26, I think. The economy will be critical, like it was last year.
Leave it to progressives and they’ll engineer and elections loss even if Trump does badly on the economy. We have Mamdani with his celebration of the Free Palestine cult’s genocide supporting slogans, and suggesting race-based taxation and Soviet style government grocery stores, and yet the Democratic Party is lining up to boost him and wash his image clean. Instead they’ll be tainted with the stink of his ideals and nepobaby personality.
That this appears today is more than a little fortuitous. Ruy is brilliant in identifying Dem problems, but it would seem unless he explicitly lays out necessary policy changes, his work will result in little gain for Dems.
For example, the WSJ just published a Gavin Newsom op-ed bragging of CA's Green Revolution. Newsom neglected to mention 25% of the time , the lights only come on in CA, because other states sell them their extra electricity, much of it generated by fossil fuels.
Gavin also conveniently neglected to mention CA is the birth place of "energy poverty". A term coined years ago describing the 10% of Golden Staters who at the end of each month, must choose between eating and paying for energy. The problem became so pervasive, CA quietly stopped disconnecting most residential customers from non payment of electric bills. This has rather quickly resulted in more than $1.1 billion dollars in arrears CA electric bills, that will likely never be collected.
Extrapolate that to the rest of the country, and similar national green polices do not just impoverish 4 million Californians, but 31 million other Americans. Nationally, a refusal to disconnect for non payment would quickly produce tens of billions of dollars in unpaid electric bills, and utilities teetering on bankruptcy.
Ditto for immigration. Currently according to Joel Kotkin in the LA Times, 54% of naturalized citizens, legal and illegal immigrants utilize the US welfare system. That is not sustainable. Most migrants Dems imported form 2020-2024 lack the education and skills necessary to be economically self sustaining in an expensive, knowledge economy.
The situation has nothing to do with ethnicity. Wisconsin is home to many people of Swiss ethnicity, but if you plopped a few million middle class Wisconsinites into Zurich, and told them to make a self sustaining living, most would likely fail, even though many would look like the native Swiss. The majority of new arrivals would not speak the language. Also, Zurich commerce is built on banking and insurance, two areas most middle class Wisconsin residents are unlikely to be experienced or educated.
Ruy can keep pointing out Dem policy problems, but until Dems come to Jesus on Green Policy and Immigration, their prospects for renewal seem dim.
Self-proclaimed progressives have not been especially "progressive" for some years now, according to how that term has traditionally been defined in the political realm. That's why starting years ago whenever I needed to use the term "progressive" it was lower cased and in quotation marks.
Thanks to Ruy Teixeira's spot-on directness and honesty, the "progressive" movement has been widely unmasked, exposing radical Leftists parading as do-gooder liberalism on steroids.
Now that the gig is up, the critical question for the Democratic Party is whether it will join Texeira in outing this "progressive" movement from hijacking and destroying your father's and grandfather's Democratic Party in the same way it has hijacked and ruined the very term "progressive."
As I tell my family “ This is not my Grandmother’s Democratic Party” nor the one my great grandfather fought for in the labor movement in the early 20th century.
We have one major question. To talk about how "progressives" used to be, which was sensible, confuses us some. We had never even heard the term "progressive" until Sanders gave the Presidency to Trump.
All of those accomplishments attributed to progressives don't fit with our view of what happened.
Instead, all of those accomplishments were, in our history, made by Democrats, weren't they?
We started school in segregated schools. It's been Democrats who gave us Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, ended the Vietnam War through their protests, Civil Rights, Women's Rights, supporting unions. Nary a progressive to be seen during those major culture-changing accomplishments.
And now, us old timer Democrats are the enemies of Progressives. They speak hatefully about us. Meanwhile their only accomplishment has been to turn the electorate toward Trump...twice.
We'll take the accomplishments of us old time Democrats. Give us back our beloved party of old.
The original Progressives were highly influential in BOTH parties for most of the 20th century. LaFollette in Wisconsin, both Roosevelts, the populists of the Great Plains and the West Coast. They were never a ruling party, but their ideas were intertwined with social and environmental policies for a very long time.
I think we may have a disagreement. As we mentioned above, talking about Democratic ideals and accomplishments as being due to progressivism seems to be revisionist. Nobody had even heard of the term progressive.
Francis Perkins, responsible for Social Security, identified as a Democrat. Not as a progressive. She was also a suffragette.
Progressives want to claim credit for accomplishments that were due to Democrats. We know of no facts that contradict that idea.
Instead, progressives are a totally new phenomenon. "Invented" in the past 10 years. Nobody identified themselves as progressive when running for office until recently.
There were the Progressives, and now there are "progressives." My only quibble was with your statement that you'd never heard the word before Sanders, the implication being that it's a new term. That's just not the case. Today's "progressives" hijacked Progressivism, just as today's "journalists" hijacked journalism.
Both of those things existed and did much for this country. By the way, the first and arguably the most accomplished Progressive was Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican. The reason today's "progressives" adopted the label is that the Republicans succeeded in turning the term "liberal" into an epithet, frankly with the help of many liberals themselves.
My question about your argument would be if you could tell me the difference between a progressive, 50 years ago, and a Democrat.
From the article: "American progressives used to embrace a number of universal values and aspirations that defined their political project. They sought to make life better for ordinary people by emphasizing their universal interests across racial, ethnic and cultural divisions, ensuring universal fair treatment in daily life and throughout society, promoting universal standards of merit, achievement and truth and providing universal access to the bounty from scientific achievement and economic growth. The core concept was that all Americans could prosper when treated in this fashion and that existing social and governmental arrangements should be pushed in that direction.."
These are the values of Democrats. Have been for decades upon decades. On what basis can progressives now claim those values as theirs, when not a single progressive was ever elected, nor was the term used at all until 10 years ago. Can you find sources that say that these values (listed above) were progressive and no Democratic?
Much of this post seems on target, but I think there is at least one respect in which it is not. It is not progressive to adopt a "working class" perspective if that perspective undermines the common good in the long term, which is the issue with environmental politics and policies. If "working-class people desire . . . prefer a big house in the suburbs with . . . a 'big-ass truck' or two in the driveway" advocating for policy that promotes that goal *before* we have technology to mitigate the negative effects may be populist (or "popularist") but it is not progressive because it is unsustainable and against the long-term interests of all of us. (A parallel might be adopting a popular working class position that every home should have an automatic weapon.)
Adopting short-term policies that appeal to working class voters but that are against their long-term interests by anyone's analysis is not progressive; it's populist. Negotiating policy that will find a politically viable middle ground that trades off a degree of long-term downside in order to achieve the conditions for a larger degree of long-term upside is practical progressivism.
(This form of argument was initially used to justify affirmative action policy, which was quite different from the current model of a permanent culture of semi-coercive measures to achieve an unattainable social ideal.)
And down the slippery slope you go. The notion that idealistic technocrats know best and will set the rules for an ignorant public is a core tenet of today's faux progressive Democratic Party. Climate extremism is an obvious example. Gender ideology is similarly a top-down mandate by people who believe in their moral and intellectual superiority and expect the masses to fall in line because it is the right thing to do. Good policy is the product of open debate and politically neutral institutions. When the media, academia, and our leading medical and scientific organizations have been captured by an illiberal movement that sees itself as standing above the unwashed masses, we end up with authoritarian dogma masquerading as beneficial policy. I'll take people buying trucks over woke madness.
I wrote what I did because when I see the various "sides" talking about the "working class," they hardly ever talk about the workers themselves or their lives. They seem embarrassed or something.
Your post certainly avoids the slippery slope problem, Mr. More. But the answer to slippery slopes is to be aware of them and navigate with brakes and steering, not to leap off the cliff on the other side.
Almost any policy taken to an extreme will have extreme negative consequences. (Including even free speech, without some of the constraints mandated by court rulings.) Reacting to the extremism of woke by writing off the salience of, for example, climate science entirely--regarding it as entirely "captured"--is the type of extremism we call reactionary, not true progressivism.
"It is not progressive to adopt a "working class" perspective if that perspective undermines the common good in the long term, which is the issue with environmental politics and policies."
Translation: Working-class simpletons need to step aside so the good people can run things.
How has that been going these last five years? DEI, climate hysteria, child mutilation, the pathologizing of everyday experience, the denial of biological sex, public disorder as a human right...
Individual rights, free speech, and competent and politically neutral knowledge-making institutions are prerequisites for social progress. Progressives believe that eliminating disparities is more important than protecting individual rights, they resent free speech, and they believe the media exists to promote proper beliefs.
Your translation is in error, Mr. More, and I can't defend a position I did not take.
A better translation would be: People who ignore or deny the long-term threat of climate change to all of us should not be the standard for setting policy, and that holds true even if it is a group such as the working class whose support the Democrats should be seeking and whose interests Democrats should be promoting.
In the sentence you quote, I was using the word "progressive" in the sense of "progressive in the true sense of the term," as Mr. Teixeira used it. As I noted, I agree with most of what Mt. Teixeira wrote in this post, but not with this example of policy selection for electoral or governing purposes. I was not writing to rationalize the extreme positions of those in the wing of the party generally called "progressive," I was writing to comment on what I thought good policy would be for "progressives in the true sense of the term."
I think our basic difference is that I do not think the dangerous scenarios of future climate change predicted by most climate scientists constitute "climate hysteria." Rather, it seems to me that the climate data compiled each year have only confirmed those predictions. As I'm sure you know, according to NOAA, "The planet’s 10 warmest years since 1850 have all occurred in the past decade." 2024 was the warmest among them.
The question in play is, how much marginal difference does a policy make? And, related, how do voters feel about it?
The US is responsible for about 11% of global emissions. 89% is immediately out of our control.
The biggest immediate gain would be taxing LLM use. Second would be accelerating small nuclear reactors.
Depriving Joe Sixpack of a nice suburban house and truck makes very little difference, except that it probably keeps Democrats out of office, which ironically reduces the restrictions on CO2 emissions.
This is a much more reasonable method of thinking, Lisa, but I have some points of disagreement. First, I regard an 11% share of global emissions by one country to be a very large portion. While there are now a couple of countries with greater portions, we are still one of the leading contributors and this argument effectively excuses almost every country in the world from taking steps. Very few countries can actually make a discernable difference--we are one of them.
Second, although I agree with you that taxing LLM power use and encouraging nuclear power capability are high-yield opportunities, I think you underestimate the impact of land use. When wooded areas are leveled to build new subdivisions the net effect is increased by things such as vehicle emissions (as well as the increased heat impact of asphalt) but also by the subtraction of carbon absorbing vegetation. We're not aiming for "Zero"; we're aiming for "net Zero."
But I do take your point that the balance could be favorable if giving everyone a house and truck resulted in major environmentally friendly trade-offs. I think there is no indication that people will be more inclined to support even pigovian taxes if Dems are elected on sprawl-favorable policies. Voters will just turn back to the GOP a few years later, the new taxes, etc., will be reversed, and the houses and trucks will still be built and bought. A strategy that's effective is hard to design, which is why I think Mr. Teixeira's broad brush is not helpful in this area.
who gets to determine what are the long-term interests of all of us?
you?
a bunch of unfireable bureaucrats? a bunch of academics who have never had a real job? a bunch of consultants who are already well-off and won't feel the consequences of their decisions?
Typically it’s a subset of people who are well educated, urban, love urban living, and think that the solutions they find tolerable should be accepted by everyone, and the things they don’t like should go.
So you see constant potshots at suburban living, agriculture, red meat, and cars.
You don’t see similar tirades about limiting LLM use, or reducing disposable fashion and toys, or reducing long distance shipping of goods, or encouraging sharply reduced air travel, or promoting work from home.
In theory, the only power our government has is from the people they represent. Essentially voters hire you to represent them.
Politicians can and should try to persuade, but many have gotten WAY over their skis trying to lecture voters into submission, with predictable results. Thus, Trump.
If by "the modern left" you mean a subset of the contemporary Left that calls itself "progressive" there are certainly plenty of elements that fit your characterization, Mr. Nyitray. It is a strategy of the GOP to portray the entire Left as being this subset, but I would estimate it at about 25%. I'm with Mr. Teixeira in hoping to limit their influence, but I think the path to take is the one he generally recommends: organizing and empowering the other 75% of the Left, not turning to the almost 100% MAGAfied GOP.
When you are looking at AI data centers tripling your statewide energy use, I really don’t think that someone living in the suburbs and getting a truck is the urgent place to focus.
Good question: "LLM stands for Large Language Model. It refers to a type of artificial intelligence (AI) model, specifically a deep learning model, trained on massive amounts of text data to perform various natural language processing (NLP) tasks." [I copied this from a Google AI response.
And as for "use": "Large language models (LLMs) consume significant amounts of energy, both during training and inference, due to their reliance on powerful hardware like GPUs and large datasets."
I should add that because of LLM AI I expended very little energy is coming up with this reply. However, whatever AI Google owns or licenses used up a lot of electric power to make that happen, and it's that energy use that Lisa was referring to.
"A popular working class position that every home should have an automatic weapon."
Before I unpack the arrogance and condescension embedded there, let me start with your utter ignorance. Automatic weapons are hugely expensive, heavily regulated, and very rare. I have been shooting for some years, and I never seen one nor do I know anyone out here in the countryside (whose people scare you) where the majority of houses contain guns who has an automatic.
I don't think I am going out on a limb to say that you know NOTHING about guns, and that you are chest-thumping proud of your ignorance, which ignorance doesn't keep you from spouting utter nonsense. Are you one of the geniuses who calls an AR-15 an "automatic assault rifle?" Some news: It's neither one, regardless of what your friends at the New York Times tell you.
Now, your contention that it's a popular working class position for everyone to have one of these rare automatics has a truly hateful and obnoxious subtext, which is that them stupid hicks in the countryside are gun-worshiping fanatics bent on mayhem. Yep, they're the working class, and they want to shoot 'em up.
You come across as EXACTLY the sort of coastal elitist who has destroyed the Democratic Party and will keep right on doing it until the Democrats get a couple more richly deserved ass kickings. Hear this: We don't need your help, your advice, your dictation. None of it. To quote an old song: "You can't even run your own life / I'll be damned if you'll mine."
Actually, Mr. James, I did not mean to imply this was a popular working class position. I was seeking an analogy based on exaggeration: if this were a popular working class position, Mr. Teixeira would not advocate Democrats adopt it. That is why I used "a" instead of "the" before "working class position."
You're not far from wrong: I know little about guns, though I've used them for recreation.
I can see why my parenthetical upset you, and I should have made clear I was not contending anything about there being such an actual working class position.
I live about 500 miles from the nearest coast, as the crow flies.
Okay, now that I have crawled off the ceiling (to be explained below), I accept your apology. My acceptance is sincere.
Two things to talk about that will explain my reaction. First is that I grew up in Milwaukee, which back then was at the eastern edge of flyover country. A significant civic inferiority complex. Not there now, but it was then. This put something into my rat brain about snobbery and condescension. It will never be gone.
Political parties and tendencies have two aspects. They are connected, but worth looking at separately and then tracing the connective tissue: the issues, and the culture. I can go toe to toe on issues without (usually) getting too bothered, but the culture is a different matter. The "progressive" (as opposed to old-school Progressive) snobbery sets me off in a major way. I could go on and on and on about that. If I see it, I see red.
Today's "progressives" run the Democratic Party, both at the issue level and the cultural level. This or that laughable attempt at "messaging," such as dressing Tim Walz as a bird hunter but not telling him how to hold a shotgun, only reinforces how disconnected the "progressives" who run the Democrats are. I am hypersensitive to the condescension. It makes me nail-spitting angry.
See, I am someone who has lived in the East, the Midwest, and the West, and who has driven half a million road trip miles in all 50 states. Ever heard Hank Snow's "I've Been Everywhere?" That's me. The opening line about Winnemucca? Almost 50 years ago, I slept on a football field in Winnemucca as I hitched my way to California. I have been back there three or four times, but haven't patronized one of the legal brothels. LOL
I have picked up the gift of gab over the years, and despite one career where I rubbed elbows with some of this country's smartest people, THE smartest man I.Q.-wise (164, one point shy of ol' Al Einstein) and life-wise is a potato farmer in NE North Dakota. I frequently tell him, "Camburn, you have no idea how much mileage I get out of telling stories about you." So when I see "progressives" shitting on flyover country, let's say that I don't like it one bit. That's a VERY mild and truncated version of the explosions inside of my head on that one.
On the gun side of things, well, I've been a gunner for only about 10 or 12 years, but in my Midwestern-raised earnest fashion, I have endeavored to learn everything I can about firearms. I see utter horseshit from "progressives" about guns, and remark that there's no combination quite like ignorance and arrogance.
I already did the brain dump on flyover country, so I will save you the gun brain dump. You will have to take it on faith that I know what I am talking about, always with room to learn more. Democratic "progressives" who shit on gun owners can go to hell.
I wouldn't argue with you on the condescension, Mr. James. But I don't think it lines up with the progressive/liberal split within the Democratic Party. I think it's a reflection of the dominant urban, college educated population of the party, and within that sector you'll find substantial numbers of both liberals and progressives. (I'd guess strong + less committed progressives are about 35-40% of that population, which is why I figure they're about 25% of the party as a whole.) I think it's pretty unlikely that the people who dressed up Tim Walz were progressives--I think the Harris campaign was dominated by urban, liberal staffers, and progressives tend to strongly reject the "popularist" campaign tactics that the photo-op represented. I suppose it was a re-run of the Dukakis tank photo-op.
I come from the urban East Coast, but I've lived in the Midwest almost 60 years. My take is that the caricatures of the Midwestern rube and the Coastal snob are about equally off base. Examples of both exist and that's where the memes come from, but most people just aren't very much like either one. Lots of people talk about how the "Coastal elites" are out of touch with Americans in the rural heartland, but I think Americans in the heartland are also out of touch with people in Coastal cities. My impression is actually that it's increasingly considered bad form to dump on rural Midwesterners and Southerners, while dumping on Coastal elites has no cultural penalty at all. (Which is why I particularly appreciate your reciprocal explanation.)
I've done a lot of driving too, but you're two states better than I am (can you hear the envy?). I've only been in Winnemucca once--sadly, I slept in a motel and also failed to take advantage of its unique tourist attractions.
Can't aptly summarize this development better than Ruy. My main graduate advisor, Robert Loewenberg, would have said that because the "open society" is an impossibility, it would be inevitable that those who pursue it would veer toward the most closed society of all.
Ruy’s piece here is the best post mortem I have read on the current state of the Democratic Party.
A prediction: the Party will return to its roots. The kooks who espouse wacky ideas don’t believe them any more than you and I do. But embracing unhinged ideas gets them the money they need and the attention they crave. Once they come to the conclusion that the American people aren’t buying what they’re selling, they will either fade from the scene or get religion and become born again moderates. The short list of 2028 Democratic presidential nominees will tell you how quickly this will occur.
I really think that the only way the Dems return to their roots will be if they lose in '26, which will mean they will lose in '28 as well. Elections are bloodless wars, and a signal feature of war is that defeat destroys illusions.
Even though I'm not a Republican and in fact was a Democrat for decades, I want them to lose in '26 and again in '28. It may well mean the actual dissolution of the party, Whig style, only to be replaced by something that makes sense.
The funding, leadership, idea generation, and passionate supporters for the Democrats are all hard Left progressives at this point. How can the party return to its roots when all of these people universally despise those roots, working class people, anyone a shade or two to their right in viewpoint, and America itself? They see themselves as the natural leaders, their ideas as absolutely correct, moral, and based in science, and nothing needs to change except that the stupid electorate won't listen to them. So they go on and on about the "messaging", that the media is not sufficiently supportive of their "message" (I don't know what more the legacy media could do for the Dems, they already have shredded all of their credibility telling Dem lies, and I think many of them know it). They do not admit that any of their traditional supporters have abandoned them because the average person finds the Dems to be totally out of touch with reality, and dangerous with their open borders, defund the police, and transgendering children. They have never met an average person and do not want to meet any of them, after all, average people are just too uncultured, dumb, and believe conspiracy theories rather than Science for any proper progressive to associate with. So they come up with such unintentionally hilarious political ads like the one in the last election featuring various actors playing the part of what some Dem ad manager thought actual men were like. Obviously, no one who created that ad had ever met a normal man.
Also, many of the normal people out there are getting wise to the fact that many Dem candidates for office lie that they actually believe in normal values, like Newsom saying men in women's sports is unfair on his podcast, but allowing a man to win all the trophies in the California schools sports championships a few weeks later. They lie to get elected, then vote with the crazy Left and/or implement far Left policies. A vote for a supposedly moderate Democrat is a vote for the insane progressive politics because they always vote in lockstep with the most radical elements.
I just think it’s disingenuous to take the word Progressive, which actually has a capital P and then equate it with progress because that is not what Progressivism is. Progressivism is a belief that a larger and larger government can solve society‘s problems. It seems to me that you’re really talking in the past about liberalism classical liberalism, not Progressivism. Progressivism is an incredibly slippery slope with its adjacency to socialism, Marxism and communism.
Thanks for the usual wingnut ax-grinding semantics and all-around horseshit. The original Progressives were a middle-class group that wanted good government. So you're a laissez-faire Libertarian. I share the tendency in some respects, but it's not a governing group.
Hey, that's quite the strawman that you just tried to build. But unlike, say, "The Wicker Man," I'm not going to climb inside and have you set it on fire. Do that without me, and when you're prepared to be serious maybe we can have a discussion with three digits in its I.Q.
Look, you don't have to agree with me, but try not to be stupid about it.
That's what the article is about: Why the people calling themselves "progressives" are not the Progressives whose credibility they are trying to hijack by using the label.
This essay restates what most Liberal Patriot readers already know: that today’s progressives have abandoned universalist values, merit, free speech, and working-class material concerns in favor of cultural particularism and technocratic moralism. It’s a solid diagnosis, but there’s nothing new here—and no real prescription for reform. Teixeira offers nostalgia for midcentury liberalism, not a roadmap for how the Democratic Party might reclaim it.
Above all, the Democrats stood for spreading the money around. These days, they all too often stand for reducing the standard of living by making energy more expensive. The dumbest thing they ever did was sign onto the "climate change" crap. Until they do a 180 on that, I don't see how that "abundance agenda" can ever come to fruition.
Umm, maybe they reclaim it by reclaiming it, i.e. dropping the focus on climate change, policing speech, etc. and think about what's important to their old base, like prosperity, equality, and fairness. It's not rocket science. Or they could keep doing the same things, except improve their messaging, and see how that works out for them.
Progressives have ignored the overwhelming problem of a lack of decent, well paying jobs for all. They focus, rather, on giving minority group members privileged access to the limited number of good jobs. This policy can only backfire and it has.
The terms are not precise, but what the author calls traditionally/authentically "progressive" is what used to go by "liberal." By at least the 1990s, "progressive" came to describe those whose positions are illiberal and on the left, which is what is described here. For 200+ years there was broad consensus on the principles of classically liberalism but disagreement on how those ideas translated to policy; even slave holders used the language of the Enlightenment. Progressives have always rejected those ideas and now they are in charge of the Democrats.
Indeed but ask yourself how much of this agenda has been captured by MAGA. Not the traditional Republican Party but MAGA. You may think they are insincere and some undoubtedly are but campaigning against Romney and Ryan is never going to work when the actual opponent is MAGA.
If I were Trump, I'd laugh so hard at the "progressive" use of MAGA as an epithet. What, they object to making America great again? Good luck with that. Frankly, I think one reason the Dems are so angry is that they're jealous of Trump's political cunning. Time was when the Republicans were the stodgy bastards with a perpetual stick up their asses. What happened, "progressives?" When you were liberals, you were actually good on the so-called "messaging" front.
What you wrote aptly summarizes why I walked away from the Democrats. I am not a Republican, and I disapprove of Trump as a person and as a political figure, so I feel unrepresented and pretty much attacked from both sides. Thanks very much for the article.
For now, but just wait. Wasn't it Yamomoto in Japan who was quoted after Pearl Harbor saying that he was "afraid we have awakened a sleeping giant?" It's going to happen. Exactly when is anyone's guess.
The disconnect is that progressives have morphed into leftists. And since class-based Marxism died with the fall of the USSR, they have moved on to something else - identity.
IMO the current leftist worldview is that one's lot in life is solely a function of privilege and oppression, which is based on one's immutable characteristics. In other words, one's material success is just an accident of birth and therefore a random variable. If success is random, then it follows that "society" i.e. government should redistribute it.
IMO the Progressive Left never really bought into the idea of free speech and freedom to begin with. They were useful tools while executing the Great Gramscian March Through The Institutions, but once that goal was accomplished the need was gone. Other Utopian societies like the USSR and Maoist China tightly controlled speech, so it isn't surprising that today's leftists want to do the same thing.
Once you realize the modern left simply switched identity for class and are executing the same playbook as the early 20th century Utopians, it all makes sense.
Great article, as usual. BUT, it's another diagnosis of Democrat problems. What are Democrats going to do in order to gain the trust of the independent voters? Republicans and MAGA can squabble over this and that and Trump can piss off independent voters, but when crunch time comes to vote, what are independents going to think? Hmm, Trump is doing what he said he was going to do even though I don't agree with some of it, or a lot of it. Then the independents weigh against Republicans and Trump what Democrats are saying and doing. All Democrats say is Trump is bad, Trump is bad, Trump is bad. AND independent voters remember that Biden was supposed to be the moderate and to be the great unifyer. What we got was open borders with 10 to 20 million illegal migrants, 500 thousand who are criminals and gang members, increased crime, increased property taxes to support the illegals, 20+% inflation due to the Inflation Reduction Act, the Green New Deal and other Democrat giveaways. So, I believe, as an unaffiliated voter who voted for Obama twice and Trump 3 times, independent voters will think twice about voting for Democrats. Democrats cannot be trusted and they continue to fight for illegal migrants criminals rights. Duh!!!
You and I and everyone here need to understand that the country is split 50/50. Last year's election wasn't some wipeout at all. Trump won by only 1.5%, and those swing state margins weren't especially wide. Not a lot has to happen for the Ds to win in '26, especially given the history of off-year elections.
I agree with you on the issues you cited, but I don't think most voters are going to care very much. Whichever party holds the stalwarts together will win in '26, I think. The economy will be critical, like it was last year.
Leave it to progressives and they’ll engineer and elections loss even if Trump does badly on the economy. We have Mamdani with his celebration of the Free Palestine cult’s genocide supporting slogans, and suggesting race-based taxation and Soviet style government grocery stores, and yet the Democratic Party is lining up to boost him and wash his image clean. Instead they’ll be tainted with the stink of his ideals and nepobaby personality.
That this appears today is more than a little fortuitous. Ruy is brilliant in identifying Dem problems, but it would seem unless he explicitly lays out necessary policy changes, his work will result in little gain for Dems.
For example, the WSJ just published a Gavin Newsom op-ed bragging of CA's Green Revolution. Newsom neglected to mention 25% of the time , the lights only come on in CA, because other states sell them their extra electricity, much of it generated by fossil fuels.
Gavin also conveniently neglected to mention CA is the birth place of "energy poverty". A term coined years ago describing the 10% of Golden Staters who at the end of each month, must choose between eating and paying for energy. The problem became so pervasive, CA quietly stopped disconnecting most residential customers from non payment of electric bills. This has rather quickly resulted in more than $1.1 billion dollars in arrears CA electric bills, that will likely never be collected.
Extrapolate that to the rest of the country, and similar national green polices do not just impoverish 4 million Californians, but 31 million other Americans. Nationally, a refusal to disconnect for non payment would quickly produce tens of billions of dollars in unpaid electric bills, and utilities teetering on bankruptcy.
Ditto for immigration. Currently according to Joel Kotkin in the LA Times, 54% of naturalized citizens, legal and illegal immigrants utilize the US welfare system. That is not sustainable. Most migrants Dems imported form 2020-2024 lack the education and skills necessary to be economically self sustaining in an expensive, knowledge economy.
The situation has nothing to do with ethnicity. Wisconsin is home to many people of Swiss ethnicity, but if you plopped a few million middle class Wisconsinites into Zurich, and told them to make a self sustaining living, most would likely fail, even though many would look like the native Swiss. The majority of new arrivals would not speak the language. Also, Zurich commerce is built on banking and insurance, two areas most middle class Wisconsin residents are unlikely to be experienced or educated.
Ruy can keep pointing out Dem policy problems, but until Dems come to Jesus on Green Policy and Immigration, their prospects for renewal seem dim.
Self-proclaimed progressives have not been especially "progressive" for some years now, according to how that term has traditionally been defined in the political realm. That's why starting years ago whenever I needed to use the term "progressive" it was lower cased and in quotation marks.
Thanks to Ruy Teixeira's spot-on directness and honesty, the "progressive" movement has been widely unmasked, exposing radical Leftists parading as do-gooder liberalism on steroids.
Now that the gig is up, the critical question for the Democratic Party is whether it will join Texeira in outing this "progressive" movement from hijacking and destroying your father's and grandfather's Democratic Party in the same way it has hijacked and ruined the very term "progressive."
As I tell my family “ This is not my Grandmother’s Democratic Party” nor the one my great grandfather fought for in the labor movement in the early 20th century.
Great article, as usual from Ruy.
We have one major question. To talk about how "progressives" used to be, which was sensible, confuses us some. We had never even heard the term "progressive" until Sanders gave the Presidency to Trump.
All of those accomplishments attributed to progressives don't fit with our view of what happened.
Instead, all of those accomplishments were, in our history, made by Democrats, weren't they?
We started school in segregated schools. It's been Democrats who gave us Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, ended the Vietnam War through their protests, Civil Rights, Women's Rights, supporting unions. Nary a progressive to be seen during those major culture-changing accomplishments.
And now, us old timer Democrats are the enemies of Progressives. They speak hatefully about us. Meanwhile their only accomplishment has been to turn the electorate toward Trump...twice.
We'll take the accomplishments of us old time Democrats. Give us back our beloved party of old.
The original Progressives were highly influential in BOTH parties for most of the 20th century. LaFollette in Wisconsin, both Roosevelts, the populists of the Great Plains and the West Coast. They were never a ruling party, but their ideas were intertwined with social and environmental policies for a very long time.
thank you Jim.
I think we may have a disagreement. As we mentioned above, talking about Democratic ideals and accomplishments as being due to progressivism seems to be revisionist. Nobody had even heard of the term progressive.
Francis Perkins, responsible for Social Security, identified as a Democrat. Not as a progressive. She was also a suffragette.
Progressives want to claim credit for accomplishments that were due to Democrats. We know of no facts that contradict that idea.
Instead, progressives are a totally new phenomenon. "Invented" in the past 10 years. Nobody identified themselves as progressive when running for office until recently.
There were the Progressives, and now there are "progressives." My only quibble was with your statement that you'd never heard the word before Sanders, the implication being that it's a new term. That's just not the case. Today's "progressives" hijacked Progressivism, just as today's "journalists" hijacked journalism.
Both of those things existed and did much for this country. By the way, the first and arguably the most accomplished Progressive was Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican. The reason today's "progressives" adopted the label is that the Republicans succeeded in turning the term "liberal" into an epithet, frankly with the help of many liberals themselves.
nice discussion. Thanks again.
My question about your argument would be if you could tell me the difference between a progressive, 50 years ago, and a Democrat.
From the article: "American progressives used to embrace a number of universal values and aspirations that defined their political project. They sought to make life better for ordinary people by emphasizing their universal interests across racial, ethnic and cultural divisions, ensuring universal fair treatment in daily life and throughout society, promoting universal standards of merit, achievement and truth and providing universal access to the bounty from scientific achievement and economic growth. The core concept was that all Americans could prosper when treated in this fashion and that existing social and governmental arrangements should be pushed in that direction.."
These are the values of Democrats. Have been for decades upon decades. On what basis can progressives now claim those values as theirs, when not a single progressive was ever elected, nor was the term used at all until 10 years ago. Can you find sources that say that these values (listed above) were progressive and no Democratic?
Much of this post seems on target, but I think there is at least one respect in which it is not. It is not progressive to adopt a "working class" perspective if that perspective undermines the common good in the long term, which is the issue with environmental politics and policies. If "working-class people desire . . . prefer a big house in the suburbs with . . . a 'big-ass truck' or two in the driveway" advocating for policy that promotes that goal *before* we have technology to mitigate the negative effects may be populist (or "popularist") but it is not progressive because it is unsustainable and against the long-term interests of all of us. (A parallel might be adopting a popular working class position that every home should have an automatic weapon.)
Adopting short-term policies that appeal to working class voters but that are against their long-term interests by anyone's analysis is not progressive; it's populist. Negotiating policy that will find a politically viable middle ground that trades off a degree of long-term downside in order to achieve the conditions for a larger degree of long-term upside is practical progressivism.
(This form of argument was initially used to justify affirmative action policy, which was quite different from the current model of a permanent culture of semi-coercive measures to achieve an unattainable social ideal.)
And down the slippery slope you go. The notion that idealistic technocrats know best and will set the rules for an ignorant public is a core tenet of today's faux progressive Democratic Party. Climate extremism is an obvious example. Gender ideology is similarly a top-down mandate by people who believe in their moral and intellectual superiority and expect the masses to fall in line because it is the right thing to do. Good policy is the product of open debate and politically neutral institutions. When the media, academia, and our leading medical and scientific organizations have been captured by an illiberal movement that sees itself as standing above the unwashed masses, we end up with authoritarian dogma masquerading as beneficial policy. I'll take people buying trucks over woke madness.
I wonder how many people who talk about "the working class" have ever been part of it. Sure doesn't look like it to me.
I think I qualify under any of the many different definitions.
I wrote what I did because when I see the various "sides" talking about the "working class," they hardly ever talk about the workers themselves or their lives. They seem embarrassed or something.
Your post certainly avoids the slippery slope problem, Mr. More. But the answer to slippery slopes is to be aware of them and navigate with brakes and steering, not to leap off the cliff on the other side.
Almost any policy taken to an extreme will have extreme negative consequences. (Including even free speech, without some of the constraints mandated by court rulings.) Reacting to the extremism of woke by writing off the salience of, for example, climate science entirely--regarding it as entirely "captured"--is the type of extremism we call reactionary, not true progressivism.
"It is not progressive to adopt a "working class" perspective if that perspective undermines the common good in the long term, which is the issue with environmental politics and policies."
Translation: Working-class simpletons need to step aside so the good people can run things.
How has that been going these last five years? DEI, climate hysteria, child mutilation, the pathologizing of everyday experience, the denial of biological sex, public disorder as a human right...
Individual rights, free speech, and competent and politically neutral knowledge-making institutions are prerequisites for social progress. Progressives believe that eliminating disparities is more important than protecting individual rights, they resent free speech, and they believe the media exists to promote proper beliefs.
Your translation is in error, Mr. More, and I can't defend a position I did not take.
A better translation would be: People who ignore or deny the long-term threat of climate change to all of us should not be the standard for setting policy, and that holds true even if it is a group such as the working class whose support the Democrats should be seeking and whose interests Democrats should be promoting.
In the sentence you quote, I was using the word "progressive" in the sense of "progressive in the true sense of the term," as Mr. Teixeira used it. As I noted, I agree with most of what Mt. Teixeira wrote in this post, but not with this example of policy selection for electoral or governing purposes. I was not writing to rationalize the extreme positions of those in the wing of the party generally called "progressive," I was writing to comment on what I thought good policy would be for "progressives in the true sense of the term."
I think our basic difference is that I do not think the dangerous scenarios of future climate change predicted by most climate scientists constitute "climate hysteria." Rather, it seems to me that the climate data compiled each year have only confirmed those predictions. As I'm sure you know, according to NOAA, "The planet’s 10 warmest years since 1850 have all occurred in the past decade." 2024 was the warmest among them.
The question in play is, how much marginal difference does a policy make? And, related, how do voters feel about it?
The US is responsible for about 11% of global emissions. 89% is immediately out of our control.
The biggest immediate gain would be taxing LLM use. Second would be accelerating small nuclear reactors.
Depriving Joe Sixpack of a nice suburban house and truck makes very little difference, except that it probably keeps Democrats out of office, which ironically reduces the restrictions on CO2 emissions.
This is a much more reasonable method of thinking, Lisa, but I have some points of disagreement. First, I regard an 11% share of global emissions by one country to be a very large portion. While there are now a couple of countries with greater portions, we are still one of the leading contributors and this argument effectively excuses almost every country in the world from taking steps. Very few countries can actually make a discernable difference--we are one of them.
Second, although I agree with you that taxing LLM power use and encouraging nuclear power capability are high-yield opportunities, I think you underestimate the impact of land use. When wooded areas are leveled to build new subdivisions the net effect is increased by things such as vehicle emissions (as well as the increased heat impact of asphalt) but also by the subtraction of carbon absorbing vegetation. We're not aiming for "Zero"; we're aiming for "net Zero."
But I do take your point that the balance could be favorable if giving everyone a house and truck resulted in major environmentally friendly trade-offs. I think there is no indication that people will be more inclined to support even pigovian taxes if Dems are elected on sprawl-favorable policies. Voters will just turn back to the GOP a few years later, the new taxes, etc., will be reversed, and the houses and trucks will still be built and bought. A strategy that's effective is hard to design, which is why I think Mr. Teixeira's broad brush is not helpful in this area.
Bravo.
who gets to determine what are the long-term interests of all of us?
you?
a bunch of unfireable bureaucrats? a bunch of academics who have never had a real job? a bunch of consultants who are already well-off and won't feel the consequences of their decisions?
Typically it’s a subset of people who are well educated, urban, love urban living, and think that the solutions they find tolerable should be accepted by everyone, and the things they don’t like should go.
So you see constant potshots at suburban living, agriculture, red meat, and cars.
You don’t see similar tirades about limiting LLM use, or reducing disposable fashion and toys, or reducing long distance shipping of goods, or encouraging sharply reduced air travel, or promoting work from home.
In theory, the only power our government has is from the people they represent. Essentially voters hire you to represent them.
Politicians can and should try to persuade, but many have gotten WAY over their skis trying to lecture voters into submission, with predictable results. Thus, Trump.
The modern left is authoritarian and utopian.
Historically it has been a very toxic mix.
If by "the modern left" you mean a subset of the contemporary Left that calls itself "progressive" there are certainly plenty of elements that fit your characterization, Mr. Nyitray. It is a strategy of the GOP to portray the entire Left as being this subset, but I would estimate it at about 25%. I'm with Mr. Teixeira in hoping to limit their influence, but I think the path to take is the one he generally recommends: organizing and empowering the other 75% of the Left, not turning to the almost 100% MAGAfied GOP.
What is "LLM use?"
LLMs are large language models.
They are served by massive data centers that could nearly triple energy use in my state. See https://cardinalnews.org/2024/12/10/data-centers-driving-immense-increase-in-virginia-energy-demand-report-says/#:~:text=The%20Microsoft%20data%20center%20in,to%20the%20commission%20in%20Richmond.
“If the anticipated growth in Virginia data centers continues unconstrained, the state’s electricity consumption could nearly triple by 2040.” This is based on the state report at https://jlarc.virginia.gov/landing-2024-data-centers-in-virginia.asp
When you are looking at AI data centers tripling your statewide energy use, I really don’t think that someone living in the suburbs and getting a truck is the urgent place to focus.
Good question: "LLM stands for Large Language Model. It refers to a type of artificial intelligence (AI) model, specifically a deep learning model, trained on massive amounts of text data to perform various natural language processing (NLP) tasks." [I copied this from a Google AI response.
And as for "use": "Large language models (LLMs) consume significant amounts of energy, both during training and inference, due to their reliance on powerful hardware like GPUs and large datasets."
I should add that because of LLM AI I expended very little energy is coming up with this reply. However, whatever AI Google owns or licenses used up a lot of electric power to make that happen, and it's that energy use that Lisa was referring to.
"A popular working class position that every home should have an automatic weapon."
Before I unpack the arrogance and condescension embedded there, let me start with your utter ignorance. Automatic weapons are hugely expensive, heavily regulated, and very rare. I have been shooting for some years, and I never seen one nor do I know anyone out here in the countryside (whose people scare you) where the majority of houses contain guns who has an automatic.
I don't think I am going out on a limb to say that you know NOTHING about guns, and that you are chest-thumping proud of your ignorance, which ignorance doesn't keep you from spouting utter nonsense. Are you one of the geniuses who calls an AR-15 an "automatic assault rifle?" Some news: It's neither one, regardless of what your friends at the New York Times tell you.
Now, your contention that it's a popular working class position for everyone to have one of these rare automatics has a truly hateful and obnoxious subtext, which is that them stupid hicks in the countryside are gun-worshiping fanatics bent on mayhem. Yep, they're the working class, and they want to shoot 'em up.
You come across as EXACTLY the sort of coastal elitist who has destroyed the Democratic Party and will keep right on doing it until the Democrats get a couple more richly deserved ass kickings. Hear this: We don't need your help, your advice, your dictation. None of it. To quote an old song: "You can't even run your own life / I'll be damned if you'll mine."
Actually, Mr. James, I did not mean to imply this was a popular working class position. I was seeking an analogy based on exaggeration: if this were a popular working class position, Mr. Teixeira would not advocate Democrats adopt it. That is why I used "a" instead of "the" before "working class position."
You're not far from wrong: I know little about guns, though I've used them for recreation.
I can see why my parenthetical upset you, and I should have made clear I was not contending anything about there being such an actual working class position.
I live about 500 miles from the nearest coast, as the crow flies.
Okay, now that I have crawled off the ceiling (to be explained below), I accept your apology. My acceptance is sincere.
Two things to talk about that will explain my reaction. First is that I grew up in Milwaukee, which back then was at the eastern edge of flyover country. A significant civic inferiority complex. Not there now, but it was then. This put something into my rat brain about snobbery and condescension. It will never be gone.
Political parties and tendencies have two aspects. They are connected, but worth looking at separately and then tracing the connective tissue: the issues, and the culture. I can go toe to toe on issues without (usually) getting too bothered, but the culture is a different matter. The "progressive" (as opposed to old-school Progressive) snobbery sets me off in a major way. I could go on and on and on about that. If I see it, I see red.
Today's "progressives" run the Democratic Party, both at the issue level and the cultural level. This or that laughable attempt at "messaging," such as dressing Tim Walz as a bird hunter but not telling him how to hold a shotgun, only reinforces how disconnected the "progressives" who run the Democrats are. I am hypersensitive to the condescension. It makes me nail-spitting angry.
See, I am someone who has lived in the East, the Midwest, and the West, and who has driven half a million road trip miles in all 50 states. Ever heard Hank Snow's "I've Been Everywhere?" That's me. The opening line about Winnemucca? Almost 50 years ago, I slept on a football field in Winnemucca as I hitched my way to California. I have been back there three or four times, but haven't patronized one of the legal brothels. LOL
I have picked up the gift of gab over the years, and despite one career where I rubbed elbows with some of this country's smartest people, THE smartest man I.Q.-wise (164, one point shy of ol' Al Einstein) and life-wise is a potato farmer in NE North Dakota. I frequently tell him, "Camburn, you have no idea how much mileage I get out of telling stories about you." So when I see "progressives" shitting on flyover country, let's say that I don't like it one bit. That's a VERY mild and truncated version of the explosions inside of my head on that one.
On the gun side of things, well, I've been a gunner for only about 10 or 12 years, but in my Midwestern-raised earnest fashion, I have endeavored to learn everything I can about firearms. I see utter horseshit from "progressives" about guns, and remark that there's no combination quite like ignorance and arrogance.
I already did the brain dump on flyover country, so I will save you the gun brain dump. You will have to take it on faith that I know what I am talking about, always with room to learn more. Democratic "progressives" who shit on gun owners can go to hell.
I wouldn't argue with you on the condescension, Mr. James. But I don't think it lines up with the progressive/liberal split within the Democratic Party. I think it's a reflection of the dominant urban, college educated population of the party, and within that sector you'll find substantial numbers of both liberals and progressives. (I'd guess strong + less committed progressives are about 35-40% of that population, which is why I figure they're about 25% of the party as a whole.) I think it's pretty unlikely that the people who dressed up Tim Walz were progressives--I think the Harris campaign was dominated by urban, liberal staffers, and progressives tend to strongly reject the "popularist" campaign tactics that the photo-op represented. I suppose it was a re-run of the Dukakis tank photo-op.
I come from the urban East Coast, but I've lived in the Midwest almost 60 years. My take is that the caricatures of the Midwestern rube and the Coastal snob are about equally off base. Examples of both exist and that's where the memes come from, but most people just aren't very much like either one. Lots of people talk about how the "Coastal elites" are out of touch with Americans in the rural heartland, but I think Americans in the heartland are also out of touch with people in Coastal cities. My impression is actually that it's increasingly considered bad form to dump on rural Midwesterners and Southerners, while dumping on Coastal elites has no cultural penalty at all. (Which is why I particularly appreciate your reciprocal explanation.)
I've done a lot of driving too, but you're two states better than I am (can you hear the envy?). I've only been in Winnemucca once--sadly, I slept in a motel and also failed to take advantage of its unique tourist attractions.
Can't aptly summarize this development better than Ruy. My main graduate advisor, Robert Loewenberg, would have said that because the "open society" is an impossibility, it would be inevitable that those who pursue it would veer toward the most closed society of all.
Ruy’s piece here is the best post mortem I have read on the current state of the Democratic Party.
A prediction: the Party will return to its roots. The kooks who espouse wacky ideas don’t believe them any more than you and I do. But embracing unhinged ideas gets them the money they need and the attention they crave. Once they come to the conclusion that the American people aren’t buying what they’re selling, they will either fade from the scene or get religion and become born again moderates. The short list of 2028 Democratic presidential nominees will tell you how quickly this will occur.
I really think that the only way the Dems return to their roots will be if they lose in '26, which will mean they will lose in '28 as well. Elections are bloodless wars, and a signal feature of war is that defeat destroys illusions.
Even though I'm not a Republican and in fact was a Democrat for decades, I want them to lose in '26 and again in '28. It may well mean the actual dissolution of the party, Whig style, only to be replaced by something that makes sense.
The funding, leadership, idea generation, and passionate supporters for the Democrats are all hard Left progressives at this point. How can the party return to its roots when all of these people universally despise those roots, working class people, anyone a shade or two to their right in viewpoint, and America itself? They see themselves as the natural leaders, their ideas as absolutely correct, moral, and based in science, and nothing needs to change except that the stupid electorate won't listen to them. So they go on and on about the "messaging", that the media is not sufficiently supportive of their "message" (I don't know what more the legacy media could do for the Dems, they already have shredded all of their credibility telling Dem lies, and I think many of them know it). They do not admit that any of their traditional supporters have abandoned them because the average person finds the Dems to be totally out of touch with reality, and dangerous with their open borders, defund the police, and transgendering children. They have never met an average person and do not want to meet any of them, after all, average people are just too uncultured, dumb, and believe conspiracy theories rather than Science for any proper progressive to associate with. So they come up with such unintentionally hilarious political ads like the one in the last election featuring various actors playing the part of what some Dem ad manager thought actual men were like. Obviously, no one who created that ad had ever met a normal man.
Also, many of the normal people out there are getting wise to the fact that many Dem candidates for office lie that they actually believe in normal values, like Newsom saying men in women's sports is unfair on his podcast, but allowing a man to win all the trophies in the California schools sports championships a few weeks later. They lie to get elected, then vote with the crazy Left and/or implement far Left policies. A vote for a supposedly moderate Democrat is a vote for the insane progressive politics because they always vote in lockstep with the most radical elements.
I just think it’s disingenuous to take the word Progressive, which actually has a capital P and then equate it with progress because that is not what Progressivism is. Progressivism is a belief that a larger and larger government can solve society‘s problems. It seems to me that you’re really talking in the past about liberalism classical liberalism, not Progressivism. Progressivism is an incredibly slippery slope with its adjacency to socialism, Marxism and communism.
Thanks for the usual wingnut ax-grinding semantics and all-around horseshit. The original Progressives were a middle-class group that wanted good government. So you're a laissez-faire Libertarian. I share the tendency in some respects, but it's not a governing group.
Good government and big government are not the same thing.
Hey, that's quite the strawman that you just tried to build. But unlike, say, "The Wicker Man," I'm not going to climb inside and have you set it on fire. Do that without me, and when you're prepared to be serious maybe we can have a discussion with three digits in its I.Q.
Look, you don't have to agree with me, but try not to be stupid about it.
Brilliant comeback. Just brilliant.
100%
I’m curious...Do you find many commonalities between grandpa’s Progressivism and that of today?
The Progressives and the "progressives?" I don't see much of anything material. That's what Mr. Teixeira's article so aptly examined.
I see what you did there.
That's what the article is about: Why the people calling themselves "progressives" are not the Progressives whose credibility they are trying to hijack by using the label.
This essay restates what most Liberal Patriot readers already know: that today’s progressives have abandoned universalist values, merit, free speech, and working-class material concerns in favor of cultural particularism and technocratic moralism. It’s a solid diagnosis, but there’s nothing new here—and no real prescription for reform. Teixeira offers nostalgia for midcentury liberalism, not a roadmap for how the Democratic Party might reclaim it.
Above all, the Democrats stood for spreading the money around. These days, they all too often stand for reducing the standard of living by making energy more expensive. The dumbest thing they ever did was sign onto the "climate change" crap. Until they do a 180 on that, I don't see how that "abundance agenda" can ever come to fruition.
Umm, maybe they reclaim it by reclaiming it, i.e. dropping the focus on climate change, policing speech, etc. and think about what's important to their old base, like prosperity, equality, and fairness. It's not rocket science. Or they could keep doing the same things, except improve their messaging, and see how that works out for them.
Progressives have ignored the overwhelming problem of a lack of decent, well paying jobs for all. They focus, rather, on giving minority group members privileged access to the limited number of good jobs. This policy can only backfire and it has.
Superb piece.
The terms are not precise, but what the author calls traditionally/authentically "progressive" is what used to go by "liberal." By at least the 1990s, "progressive" came to describe those whose positions are illiberal and on the left, which is what is described here. For 200+ years there was broad consensus on the principles of classically liberalism but disagreement on how those ideas translated to policy; even slave holders used the language of the Enlightenment. Progressives have always rejected those ideas and now they are in charge of the Democrats.
Indeed but ask yourself how much of this agenda has been captured by MAGA. Not the traditional Republican Party but MAGA. You may think they are insincere and some undoubtedly are but campaigning against Romney and Ryan is never going to work when the actual opponent is MAGA.
If I were Trump, I'd laugh so hard at the "progressive" use of MAGA as an epithet. What, they object to making America great again? Good luck with that. Frankly, I think one reason the Dems are so angry is that they're jealous of Trump's political cunning. Time was when the Republicans were the stodgy bastards with a perpetual stick up their asses. What happened, "progressives?" When you were liberals, you were actually good on the so-called "messaging" front.