Old Wine, New Bottle

In the ranks of progressivism, everything old is new again

Oh, for the good old days…

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A few years ago, Senator Bernie Sanders, Bolshevik of Vermont, came up with what he believed to be a brilliant idea: post office banking! Once upon a time, you see, there was something called the United States Postal Savings System, which operated from 1911 to 1967. It did not provide full-service banking but merely accepted deposits from the public, on which it paid a fixed interest rate, usually around two percent. Deposits were not held by the Post Office Department but were redeposited with national banks. A small portion of the interest earned thereby was taken to cover the system’s administrative costs, and the rest went to the depositor.

Why Senator Sanders thought it a good idea to revive and expand that antique system is a mystery. When the Postal Savings System was established, bank failures were frequent, there was no such thing as government deposit insurance, and credit and investment opportunities for the general public were severely limited. The Postal Savings System’s deposits were guaranteed by the full faith and credit of the United States, so to many Americans back in the day before the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation came along, it seemed like a good deal. But today, why would anybody want to deposit money with the Postal Service? In this age of online banking and ATMs, what services could such a system provide that banks, credit unions, etc. cannot? Comrade Sanders’ bright idea is that typical progressive phenomenon, a solution in search of a problem.

It’s indeed odd that American progressives, who purport to stand for progress, give their gnarled little hearts to so many things whose time has come and gone. Labor unions, for instance—the leftie cheerleading on their behalf never ends. But despite all the breathless happy talk about unionizing Starbucks and Amazon, union membership in America continues to decline. The last real bastion of union power is located in the public sector, and it’s not a pretty sight. The atrocious behavior of the teachers’ unions during the pandemic should have been enough to disabuse anybody of the notion that organized labor embodies virtue, high ideals, and general wonderfulness. But progressives simply shut their eyes to the ugly reality that today, unions represent nothing more than the collectivization of greed and thuggery.

What gives the comrades a real case of the shivers is a new idea. School choice, for instance—proposals to empower parents with more of a say in their children’s education are received in progressive circles with cries of horror. And charter schools? Oh, the humanity! The argument against such proposals is that any sort of change would “harm public education.” Never mind that all too often, public education inflicts harm on the students it’s supposed to be educating. Despite abundant evidence that the American public education is outmoded and profoundly dysfunctional, progressives defend it against all proposals for reform.

Like cavalry horses answering the trumpet, the comrades turn to the past for their solutions. Is a conservative Supreme Court handing down decisions not to their liking? Progressives take their cue from good old FDR, and float proposals to pack the court with creative leftist jurists. Is “climate change” threatening to destroy the planet? Progressives mobilize to fight it with a Stalinist-style Five-Year Plan, rebranded as the Green New Deal.

Even their embrace of the zany cult of gender is old wine in a new bottle. Long before Dylan Mulvaney arrived on the scene to besmirch the reputation of Bud Light, there was the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus, better known by his nickname, Elagabalus. The roster of Roman emperors includes a fair number of notable eccentrics, but none who matched the reputation of Elagabalus.

Cassius Dio relates that one "husband of this woman”—he meant the Emperor—was Hierocles, an ex-slave and chariot driver. He goes on to say that Elagabalus called himself Hierocles's mistress, wife, and queen, and that he wore makeup and wigs, demanded to be addressed as a woman, and sought a physician who could equip him with a vagina by means of surgery. And in the Augustan History, admittedly not the most reliable of sources, Elagabalus’ transgressive sex life is described in salacious detail. Unfortunately for him the ancient Romans were not at all progressive, and Elagabalus met his end at the hands of his own fed-up Praetorian Guard. If the transgender movement wants a patron saint and martyr, he’s their…man.

Then there’s the reframing of history to make it fit the progressive template. An example of progressivism’s addiction to the modified backward glance was supplied recently by Substack’s own Professor Heather Cox Richardson in a paean to those golden years, 1933-81:

I write a lot about how the Biden-Harris administration is working to restore the principles of the period between 933 and 1981, when members of both political parties widely shared the belief that the government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights.

Now of course, this is an exercise in mythmaking. It’s more than a bit of a stretch to say that there was broad political agreement on “civil rights” between 1933 and, say, 1960. Nor can it be said that FDR, the inaugurator of Professor Richardson’s Golden Age, was a champion of civil rights. But leaving aside such fabulism, what’s striking about this historical myth is its appeal to the lessons of history—which are not as obvious as the comrades would like to believe. FDR embarked upon his presidency ninety-one years ago, and America was a very different country back then. Whatever one may think of the New Deal, it’s no more relevant to contemporary America than Diocletian’s Edict on Prices or the United States Postal Savings System. The lessons of history are not that simple: If only we could do as FDR did. The lessons of history, to the extent that history supplies lessons, are studies in enigma.

Progressives might fire back that they do too champion forward-looking reform, for instance the suppression of the undemocratic features, so-called, of the Constitution of the United States: the Electoral College, the equal suffrage of the states in the Senate, the Supreme Court, federalism. But this is nothing new, either. It goes back to the Progressive era, when advanced thinkers like Woodrow Wilson aspired to replace constitutional government with the rule of scientific elites, embodied in an expanded administrative state. Sound familiar?

Even more sinister is progressivism’s sneaking envy of the untrammeled power at the disposal of totalitarian regimes. Thomas Friedman, that thinker of great thoughts and bestower of profound insights, has been heard to sigh that that the Chinese Communist oligarchs have a freedom of action that American progressives can only dream of. Not for them the messy business of political coalition building and deal making—not for them the sad necessity of splitting the difference. “So let it be written; so let it be done”: Pharaoh’s command is progressivism’s beau ideal, and it explains the persistent popularity of socialist and Marxist ideas on the Left. It will be recalled that the leaders of Black Lives Matter have described themselves as “trained Marxists.” What could be more reactionary than that?

One can only conclude that progressivism has no idea what it’s progressing toward. Its body of dogma is a pig’s breakfast of contradictions. Its commitment to infrastructure is countered by a mania for regulation that imposes delays and raises costs for even the simplest construction project. Its commitment to public education is undermined by ideological and cultural indoctrination via critical race theory and the cult of transgenderism. Its reverence for civil rights is contradicted by the doctrine of group rights and a visceral hatred of free speech. And its claim to be leading the way into a Radiant Future is refuted by progressivism’s fervent embrace of so many old, bad ideas.