Hubris and Dread

In America, it's the season of Thermidor

Paris, 1794: a scene from the first Thermidor

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Criticisms of postmodern progressivism tend to focus on its zany obsessions with race, gender, diversity, etc. And these are indeed outrageous in their perversion of reality. But they’re not essential features of progressivism. Long before anyone ever heard about critical race theory or intersectionality, progressivism was what it remains today: the party of the administrative state.

Here, I’m using the term administrative state to describe the whole complex of progressivism: not just government bureaucracies but universities, public education, intellectuals, media, foundations and think tanks, activist organizations, the Democratic Party. Such institutions and groups generate ideas and doctrines, frequently toxic, that eventually are formalized as bureaucratic rules, regulations, policies, and guidance. This is a manifestation of progressivism’s cult of expertise, its obsession with credentials, its fetishization of “the Science.” It’s also the antithesis of democratic accountability. What makes progressive ideas dangerous is not just their badness, but the existence of the progressive complex, which broadcasts them throughout society.

Thus, when progressives speak of democracy, they mean something different than liberal democracy in the classical sense. One might think, for instance, that citizen interaction with local school boards is democracy in action. But during the pandemic, when angry parents confronted their school boards over school closures, masking policies and other grievances, they were treated as insurrectionists and even terrorists. But progressivism valorizes activism to the point of confrontation—provided that it serves progressive purposes.

When the 2020 George Floyd riots broke out, pandemic-inspired bans on large gatherings were instantly suspended. Religious services were still banned in many places, businesses were still hobbled by pettifogging regulations, schools remained shuttered, but mob action in the streets of America’s cities—looting, arson, and outright violence—was justified on the grounds that “systemic racism” was a public health threat to rival COVID-19.

It may be said, indeed, that broken windows, toppled statues, burning police cruisers, and looted drugstores symbolize the progressive conception of democracy in action.

Another feature of progressive democracy is its deep hostility toward freedom of speech as a general principle. Progressives claim freedom of speech for themselves, of course, and they bestow it on favored mascot groups like the “anti-Zionist,” i.e. antisemitic, student activists who’ve been creating chaos on so many American university campuses. But they seek to deny it to those of whom they disapprove. Words are weapons, you see. They have the power to strike and kill. And it follows that speech emanating from certain quarters—the Republican Party, heterosexual white males, Jews who support the Jewish state, critics of gender ideology and “the Science,” etc.—must be suppressed, as it was during the pandemic.

All this is rooted in contempt for, and fear of, the body politic. For the dogmas of progressivism are profoundly irrational and have no popular appeal. The cult of gender, critical race theory and intersectionality, “climate justice,” the whole lunatic corpus of progressive ideology—none of it makes sense. As Mr. Orwell quipped, it takes an intellectual to believe things like that; no ordinary person would be such a fool.

The contempt dates from the earliest days of progressivism. One of its founding fathers, President Woodrow Wilson, expressed scorn for the American model of liberal democracy, as embodied in the Constitution of the United States. No less than today’s progressives, Wilson prized credentialed expertise and “the Science” over democratic accountability. He believed that the American government and political culture of his day were as out of date as medieval feudalism. He aspired to subordinate politics to administration. Congress, the courts, the states, the people—none should be permitted to impede the operations of rational, scientific government.

And fear was the subtext of that Wilsonian contempt: fear of democratic accountability, of populism, of politics itself. For enlightened administration could tolerate no opposition. What the first progressives envisioned was a government that resembled nothing so much as Lenin’s dictatorship of the proletariat, themselves constituting the vanguard party. Such a government—enlightened, scientific, rational—could hardly allow itself to be constrained by the whims of public opinion or the clamors of political opposition.

That inherited hubris and dread, amalgamated with postmodernism, is what gives contemporary progressivism its distinctive character. But though lip service is still paid to science, facts, logic, reason, liberalism, democracy, etc., today’s progressives embrace a profoundly illiberal ideology. For instance, while posing as champions of “human rights,” they embrace a doctrine of intersectionality which, if applied, would result in a rigidly hierarchal society, with every individual neatly pigeonholed.

We got a demonstration of intersectionality in action after October 7, 2023, when the leaders and administrators of elite universities indulged antisemitic campus activists at the expense of Jewish students. Those students were convenient proxies for “settler colonialist” Israeli Jews; the antisemitic activists were proxies for “oppressed brown people,” i.e. the Palestinians.

On issue after issue, postmodern progressivism demands that we reject the evidence of our senses and the whisper of our common sense. Virtually from the beginning of his presidency, everybody could see that Joe Biden was unfit to serve. The progressive complex’s response to that alarming reality was a sustained campaign of gaslighting, intimidation, and reality control. Don’t believe what you see, America! Cheap fakes! It was a blatant demonstration of the contempt and fear I have described.

It will be seen, finally, that postmodern progressivism is a destructive force. The institutions that it captures are corrupted, hollowed out. The sorry state of public education in this country today is one example; the implosion of the mainstream media is another. The Democratic Party is on the ropes, rudderless and incoherent, thanks to the outsized influence of its progressive base. Both the catastrophic presidency of Joe Biden and the disastrous candidacy of Kamala Harris were written, produced, and directed by the progressive complex.

But now the counterrevolution is upon us. It was inevitable that people would get fed up with a political faction full of terrible ideas, obsessed with ruining everything for just about everybody. That’s what put Donald Trump back in the Oval Office: all the bullying, lying and gaslighting, all those smarmy little lectures about the Science, systemic racism, white privilege, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, settler colonialism, oligarchs, fascism and “our democracy.”

Progressives got one thing right, though: the fear part.