Quick Take: The Progressive Meltdown

The defense of “our democracy,” it seems, requires dynamite and bulldozers

The progressive vision of political and constitutional reform

---

“It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” This iconic—also apocryphal—quotation from the Vietnam War has been used and misused since the journalist Peter Arnett launched it on its career in 1968. Though at the time it was held up as an example of the madness of the military mind, the concept it implies, creative destruction, has a certain validity. The question is whether or not it applies in a particular case.

Just now American progressives are passing through a period of Strum und Drang: The certitudes that long comforted them have suddenly dissolved. For decades they felt secure in their control of certain key institutions: academia, the media, the judiciary, the permanent bureaucracy of the administrative state. But then the world turned upside down. Of those key institutions, the first two have fallen into disrepute and decay, the third can no longer be relied upon, and the fourth has demonstrated its systemic incompetence. For an ideology whose claim on political power is based on the alleged superiority of elite opinion and credentialed expertise, this is nothing less than a disaster.

Human nature being what it is, however, there’s no disaster than can’t be explained away with lame excuses and magical thinking. Donald Trump, for instance, reacted to his loss in 2020 by constructing an alternate reality in which he, not Joe Biden, won the election. And despite a total lack of evidence to that effect, Trump and his core supporters cling to that comforting fantasy.

Confronted with the collapse of their world view, progressives are doing much the same thing: The real problem, they insist, is that “our democracy” has come under attack—for “our democracy,” you see, exists merely to validate and promote the preferences of progressives.

The most obvious example of this progressive delusion is abortion. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, progressives denounced its ruling as an assault on democracy by a bunch of jurists whom nobody had ever elected. Never mind that Roe was put in place by an earlier bunch of jurists, similarly never elected, and that Roe’s demise actually subjects the question of abortion to democratic accountability.

Such complaints about the undemocratic character of the Supreme Court were never voiced by liberals and progressives in those happier times for them when the Court embodied a comfortable liberal majority. Back then they were just fine with the idea of national policy being set by judicial fiat. And always, they have staunchly defended judicial precedents that favor their ideological preferences. Only now, with a conservative Court majority in place, are progressives calling for the Court to be packed or emasculated for the sake of “our democracy.”

And their displeasure with the Supreme Court extends over the whole of the Constitution. Now that things aren’t going their way, progressives shout that after all, the Constitution was written by slave-owning white guys, and that our government’s founding document was framed for the purpose of preserving the institution of slavery. Thus the Constitution is illegitimate and should be radically amended if not discarded altogether.

There is, however, a rather large question hanging over this claim: Why then did thirteen of the seventeen slave states that existed in 1860 feel compelled to secede from the Union? If the Constitution protected slavery, they had nothing to worry about, right? But the Constitution did not protect slavery, and the secessionist leaders knew that it didn’t, which is why they felt compelled to take their states out of the Union and form a new country with a constitution that did embody such protection.

Of course, all these radical proposals—wrecking the Supreme Court, repealing the Second Amendment, abolishing the Electoral College, blowing up the Senate filibuster, et al.—are fantasies whose main value to progressives is therapeutic. Donald Trump soothes his disordered mind by insisting to himself and others that he did too beat Joe Biden in 2020. Progressives assuage their angst by telling one another that the defense of “our democracy” demands dynamite and bulldozers to level all institutions and traditions that bar the way to the Radiant Future.

It has become necessary to destroy America to save it.