Why Progressives Mislead

[Valin]

City Journal:

Their coalition is fragile.

John O. McGinnis

Winter 2015

 

Barack Obama’s supporters and detractors don’t agree on much, but as the president enters his final two years in office, they have voiced a common complaint: the president lacks competence. They cite multiple management breakdowns, such as the disastrous rollout of the Obamacare health-insurance website, which have eroded public support; his lack of engagement with Congress, which has impeded his legislative agenda; and his chronic inability to address serious problems before they become full-blown crises, undermining Americans’ confidence in his leadership.

 

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On top of these structural difficulties, the progressive coalition has also become harder to maintain. Over the course of the twentieth century, free-market capitalism created unprecedented mass affluence. The average income of Americans grew by more than four times in the last century, making the United States the wealthiest nation of any substantial size. Citizens now have more to lose from interventions in the free market, because they are better off. It’s hard to imagine that a progressive party could maintain control of both the House and Senate for 20 consecutive years and the House for 40 years, as did the Democrats earlier in the twentieth century.

 

Faced with these constraints, today’s progressives must resort to more misleading and sometimes coercive measures, as they seek to bring about equality through collective responsibility; they must rally support by looking beyond economics, to cultural and social identifications, in a bid to maintain the support of voters with little need for government intervention. They also want to limit the voices of citizens at election time, and thereby magnify the influence of the press and academia, which lean sharply in the progressive direction.

 

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From its inception, progressivism has posed a threat to constitutional government. It has sought to replace limited and decentralized governance with dynamic, centralized authority in order to force some arrangement of equality on the nation. Because the world has a way of upsetting abstract designs, progressivism depends on empowering administrators to impose its frameworks while disempowering citizens from resisting these coercions. The Obama administration’s push for unilateral presidential authority to disregard the law is thus the logical extension of the progressive program. Opposition to this program requires nothing less than a rededication to our Founding ideals: our nation must be governed by the rule of law, not the rule of an elected monarch or of a legally privileged aristocracy.