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Whither progressivism?
The progressive movement is trapped by its own victory. As a permanent revolution, it has nowhere to go. Obama in the White House would be like Napoleon in Moscow—the only way that progressivism can “change” is to retreat.It’s a clever comment, but if it’s true, it’s only true intellectually. As an intellectual movement, liberalism has no place to go; it is burnt-out, finished; it is a dead man walking, like the indescribably creepy prime minister of Great Britain. But as a political movement, as an ideology, as a sensibility that has shaped the mind and heart of contemporary Western peoples, liberalism, Undead though it may be, still has a world to conquer. In the absence of any articulate and organized opposition to it, it has free rein to continue its campaign to destroy, in the name of its Undead gods of equality and non-discrimination, all the concrete particulars, all the achievements, of our civilization, until nothing is left. Our only hope is that liberalism will collapse before it reaches that point, or that it will be stopped by a Western anti-liberal movement that does not yet exist.
Richard Hoste (here is his blog) writes:
I’m afraid Moldbug is wrong. Where has he been during the health care debate? Liberals are fighting to nationalize a sixth of the country’s economy and would make it an affirmative action patronage scheme, as they’ve done with everything else. Also, the fact that your blog and mine are still operating shows that the American government hasn’t gone as far as those in Europe and Canada in shutting down free speech. Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 28, 2009 01:20 PM | Send Email entry |