To call yourself progressive is to claim the future as your permanent address and to assign everyone who disagrees with you a seat somewhere in the moral lowlands. It is an annexation of time itself, performed before the argument begins.
But a claim that large invites an obvious test.
Take the movement's central commitments one at a time and ask of each whether it carries us further from the arrangements that humanity spent centuries and oceans of blood escaping, or back toward them. Run that test honestly, and the results are close to uniform. Nearly everything the contemporary left says is regressive in its essence. Not merely mistaken, not merely excessive. Regressive.
Sir Henry Maine wrote in 1861 that the movement of progressive societies had been a movement from status to contract, from a world in which your position was fixed at birth by blood and caste to a world in which you were judged by what you did. That sentence contains much of what the modern world achieved through actual progress.
Now consider a hiring regime that sorts applicants by ancestry, a university that admits by lineage-adjusted formula, a conference that assigns speaking authority by pigmentation. That is not the frontier of human freedom but a caste system with a diversity officer, installed by people who loudly imagine themselves the heirs of the abolitionists.
Consider what has happened to speech. Every free society had to fight its way out from under blasphemy law. Progressives have rebuilt the ancient apparatus and renamed the parts.
There is a body of doctrine that may not be questioned. There is a category of statement punished not because it is false but because it is profane to the nouveau religion. There is excommunication, which we now call cancellation. There is a Holy Office, and it now calls itself a misinformation desk. There is the public confession, in which the accused stands before the assembly and recites his failings in the approved vocabulary, hoping to be readmitted. Mao's cadres called that a struggle session. Nobody calls it progress except the people running it.
Then there is inherited guilt. The idea that a man carries the moral debt of his ancestors in his blood is among the oldest and most destructive notions in human history, and the slow work of Western law was to dismantle it and establish that guilt is personal.
Privilege pedagogy resurrects the doctrine wholesale, and in its cruelest form, because the older versions at least offered a sacrament. There was confession, there was baptism, there was a road out. The new version offers permanent stain and endless penance with no absolution available at any price.
Watch what has become of truth. The universalist claim, the one that made abolition thinkable and the Declaration writable, is that there is one human reason and one human nature, and that an argument is valid or invalid regardless of who makes it.
Standpoint epistemology discards that and rules instead that truth is a property of the tribe, that a claim must be weighed according to the identities and feelings of the claimant and his audience. This is the communal mental world of the clan, dressed in seminar vocabulary. Both abandoned the universal for the tribal, which is where mankind started and where mankind bled.
The economics run in the same direction. Rent freezes revive Diocletian's price edict, the just price set by decree rather than discovered by exchange, and shortage arrives on schedule. Degrowth openly proposes a return to managed scarcity and is preached by people who have never spent a winter in one.
Even the body has reverted. Empirical science rests on the agreement that the object observed outranks the observer's assertion about it. A regime that requires the chromosome and the skeleton to yield to feelings and declaration has not advanced beyond Lysenko, who also knew what biology was obliged to say before he looked. It is enforced by men who have never once considered that they might be the ones burning the books.
And then, of course, there are the Jews, because there always are. Nothing exposes the direction of travel like the speed with which the progressive movement recovered the oldest hatred in Europe and sold it as the newest idea on campus.
The blood libel returns as the claim that Israelis harvest organs, target children by design, and commit genocide. The conspiracy of hidden Jewish power returns as a theory of lobbies and donors that any reader of the Protocols would recognize on sight. The ghetto returns as the segregated dormitory and the graduation ceremony from which the wrong students are excluded. The mob at the synagogue door returns as the mob at the Hillel door. There is no innovation here at all, only a very old European product with a new label, sold to keffiyeh-draped students and activists of all ages dutifully trained never to inspect the contents of anything marked anti-racist.
Dr. Murray Bowen had a developmental perspective on this which sprung from his work on family systems and differentiation theory. He described societal regression as the condition in which a society under chronic anxiety begins making decisions to relieve the distress of the moment rather than on principle, and his observations predicted the symptoms precisely: individual responsibility collapsing into group emotion, blame as a governing style, the demand that everyone else change so the anxious may feel calm, and the steady erosion of the capacity to think under pressure.
That describes a movement which cannot tolerate a dissenting sentence and has mistaken fusion with the group for moral seriousness. Low differentiation always feels like solidarity from the inside. From the outside it looks like a mob that has learned to cite sources.
None of this makes all the people involved wicked. Most are young, most are frightened, and most have been handed a vocabulary that flatters them for the very reflexes they should have been taught to govern. But sincerity is not a direction. The fact that an idea is fashionable this year tells you nothing about which century it belongs to.
Judge the destination. On caste, on heresy, on inherited guilt, on tribal truth, on the Jews, the destination is behind us, and we have been there before. We know what it costs because our grandparents paid for it. The honest name for this movement is not progressive. It is nostalgic, and what it longs to regress back to is the world the modern West was built to escape.
Image created using AI.
Daniel Winston is a marriage and family therapist who studied for decades with Dr. David Schnarch. He runs twelve-hour intensives for couples, has trained more than 150 senior therapists worldwide in the Crucible Approach, and volunteers as an emergency medic and on a search-and-rescue team.
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