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I’ve just listened to the @KnowYrEnemyPod about the 1776 report and am once again struck by how its account of Progressivism is head-spinningly alien from anything resembling history.
Anyone who’s read anything about progressivism knows it wasn’t a monolithic phenomenon; indeed, that’s practically its defining characteristic and a source of considerable frustration to scholars.
I ran into a scholar of progressivism at a conference once and allowed as how I was writing a book about the progressives and he said “ah, but which progressives?"
I made a joke about this, and even put it on YouTube in service of a blog post, back in 2009
About the only thing you could say progressives agreed on was making progress *away* from the existing order; as to which direction they wanted to go in, well, that was a definite “pick ‘em” situation
But to say that the one kind of progressivism was a pragmatism that rejected natural right and elevated, instead, expert commissions empowered to create “group rights” …
The number of progressives who would hit all those marks is either the null set or else could fit in a telephone booth*
*yes, I’m old
*yes, I’m old
It’s far more common, indeed, to identify anyone who vaguely resembles those people as anti-progressivism; see Elizabeth Sanders, ROOTS OF REFORM
The other quite good book I’d point to on the fault lines in the period would be J. M. Cooper, WARRIOR AND THE PRIEST
(Yes, I wrote my own book on progressivism, too, MURDERING MCKINLEY, in 2003*, which tried to account for the fault lines in it as well, you should read it, blah blah self-promotion.)
*Yes, I’m old.
*Yes, I’m old.
In any case, if you wanted to point out what came of the alleged progressive assault on the constitutional order, you’d point to the 16th amendment (income tax), 17th amendment (popular election of senators), 18th amendment (prohibition), and 19th amendment (woman suffrage).
… which are (a) all over the place, ideologically speaking and (b) none of which really fits that description of progressivism
If you wanted another locus classicus of progressivism, you could of course look at the career of Theodore Roosevelt and specifically the Progressive Party of 1912: “we stand for a living wage …” (in a speech promoting, yes, “social justice”) https://www.theodoreroosevelt.org/content.aspx?page_id=22&club_id=991271&module_id=338367
Sometimes people ask why I shifted from progressivism to the New Deal, and if I’m not in the mood to explain all the contingency involved I’ll just say “people are far more likely to agree that the New Deal existed."
(To be clear, I don’t want to take anything away from how much nonsense there is in its account of the framers, or World War II, or the civil rights movement.)
