There are definitely distinct bullet points to progressive ideology but it’s none of the sentences you stated. Your “definitions” are just a bunch of empty “feel good” mantras that also applies to anything outside of progressivism, such as fad diets, parenting techniques, football offensive strategies, etc.
Every ideology thinks they are being “utilitarian.” Every one. Maybe extreme nihilism is not utilitarian but one could argue that adopting nihilism is a fulfilling a utilitarian purpose – which creates its own paradox.
The ideas of “progressives” are not “new” – they’ve been around for hundreds of years… or thousands (depending on which documents you count and how widespread it’s practiced.)
And this is the same with every other political ideology. The ideologies can’t stop themselves from splintering with impure influences. Karl Marx: “If that’s Marxism, then I’m not a Marxist!”
Were that it was so, but admiration of the Soviet system was widespread through the entire progressive movement. As I pointed out, the big progressive magazines of the time were ALL writing articles in favor of Stalin. The NY Times had a Stalin apologist for its Moscow bureau chief. If you’d like, I could give you a big list of leaders of the progressive left who wrote approvingly of the Soviet Union.
I also pointed out that in my rather large college there was widespread support for the Soviet Union among the left-wing students and faculty. In addition, Mao had many admirers in the progressive movement, and the five-year plans and the Great Leap Forward were considered models of how to do central planning. Even today, progressive writers like Tom Friedman still think the Chinese model is a good one.
To take this back on topic, this thread is about conservatives being on the ‘wrong side of history’. In fact, the great clash of ideas in the 19th and 20th century were between two models - the capitalist model of self government and spontaneous order, and the socialist model of central planning and strong government intervention and control of the market. Conservatives were definitely on the winning side of that struggle, and communism is headed for the ash bin of history.
Sure, social conservatives are wrong about a lot of things, and even a lot of ignorant supposedly fiscal conservatives make mistakes. But progressives were wrong about the biggest issue of our time, and they threw their support behind a dehumanizing, evil philosophy of government that left a wake of impoverishment and death everywhere it was tried.
Some on the left did not like the Soviet Union, but many did. I posted some famous examples. But as I’ve been reminded many times, this isn’t an ‘American’ board, and this thread isn’t about American conservatives and liberals - it’s about the philosophies themselves. In other countries like Canada, France and Britain, overt support of Stalin and the Soviets was much more common.
That’s an excerpt from “The Day Stalin Died”, an essay by British writer and Progressive Doris Lessing (Nobel prize in Literature).
George Bernard Shaw, explaining that Stalin’s purges were a legitimate response to conspiracy. Shaw was a fan of Stalin’s.
As for the idea that this was long in the past and progressives have ‘progressed’ past it…
George Galloway, ‘Progressive’ leader, British Member of Parliament, and fan of tyrannical regimes.
Have you seen the movie ‘Reds’, with Warren Beatty? It’s a sympathetic look at the Bolshevik revolution, told from the viewpoint of John Reed, a prominent American left-wing journalist who wrote “Ten Days That Shook the World” about the revolution. He was an unapologetic communist who emigrated to the Soviet Union and worked to spread revolutionary Communism in other countries. He eventually died in Moscow and was given a hero’s funeral and buried under the Kremlin wall.
Reed became a hero of the modern left. and Beatty was determined to make the movie because Reed was a personal hero of his. I remember when that movie came out, and it sparked a new round of Soviet admiration in Hollywood and among the left. Beatty was praised for his courage and so forth.
Helena Sheehan, Irish Member of Parliament, Professor of Philosophy and left-wing activist, writing her thoughts regarding the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989
One of my favorite quotes for its sheer bad timing:
Lester Thurow, writing about the robust strength of the Soviet Union - which was in the process of collapsing at the time.
The question of what conservatives throughout history have or have not done isn’t the issue. However, it’s one of the nastier habits of the intellectual Left to dump its sins as convenient. When the left turned against racism, they conveniently forgot their long and rather nasty racist past, down to pretending progressives with inconvenient histories were conservatives in some cases. I’ve even seen oddball split eprsonality scenarios: where people such as Ford are proto-progressives in one version of the tale (emphasizing worker pay, corporate responsibility, whatever) and hidebound conservative trogolodytes in another (emphasizing anti-Semitism, corporate tyranny, whatever).
The retroactive transformation of Southern Democrats into conservatives is a case in point. Woodrow Wilson was not an accident - he was part and parcel of the Conservative movement, and so were numerous Democrats from the South.
Damn right! I’m still pissed we all need to drive on the same side of the road. In a true private enterprise system i could have set up bleachers on the border between Ohio and Indiana and watched hilarity ensue. But be that as it may, the people in Rhode Island have vastly different healthcare requirements than they do in Connecticut. The circulatory systems are entirely different. What fun would it be if when I was transferred to a job in a different state I didn’t have to figure out what coverage my child with diabetes would get?
Woodrow Wilson most certainly was not seen as a conservative. He was seen as a progressive and a leader during a period commonly referred to as “the progressive era”.
I’ve known at least three people who inisted he was conservative. These were not ill-educated people. I’ve seen several more who either insisted he couldn’t have believed much of what he did or done what he did.
I’d accept that if I thought they had really changed. But there are still people on the left who apologize for the Soviets, and there are still plenty of people on the left who praise Communist states elsewhere, such as in Cuba and China, and many who defended the Communist state of Vietnam.
How is that in any way relevant?
Which unrestricted capitalism would that be? Where and when?
But you know, we don’t even have to go as extreme as Communism to see the failure of the Progressive model. We can see it today in the debt-ridden social democracies in Europe, in the failure of socialist governments in Central and South America, in the failures of the central plans of the Obama administration (remember the millions of green jobs that were supposed to have been created by now?).
Let’s take Chile, for example. Progressives supported Salvadore Allende, and Conservatives opposed him. Allende followed the socialist playbook. He announced fiscal stimulus packages, raised taxes on the rich, nationalized industry and the banking system, instituted new ‘worker rights’, etc. In the words of another famous leftist, his solution to Chile’s problem was to ‘spread the wealth around’, in the belief that putting more money in the hands of the workers would stimulate the economy through consumer spending. Sound familiar? He financed this with higher taxes and by increasing public spending and printing money to pay for it.
Conservatives said that if he did that, capital would leave, private investment would collapse, and the nationalized industries would be run inefficiently and be unable to compete. And that’s exactly what happened. Allende was a disaster for Chile and became highly unpopular, which paved the way for a military coup by Pinochet.
By 1990 Chile returned to democracy, and since that time it has moved steadily towards a capitalist economy. Today it’s ranked as the 7th most free nation in the world by the index of economic freedom (higher than the United States). It has the highest per-capita income in Latin America, and it is much better off than its neighbors in pretty much every measure of human productivity, health, and happiness. Even Chile’s recent putatively socialist governments largely kept their hands off the economy. Chile privatized its pension system (something conservatives support and progressives oppose), and the result is a high savings rate and high rates of domestic investment in the economy.
In the meantime, Chile’s regional neighbors continued to flirt with command economies and communism, with progressives cheering them on. The most recent example is Venezuela, and there have been many debates on this board with progressives defending the Chavez regime again criticism from conservatives. Under Chavez, and despite massive new oil finds and large increases in the price of oil, Venezuela’s economy is cratering and it has the highest inflation in the region. It may also be headed for sovereign default.
And yet we had this conversation before, you did not thought so before when pressed on your insistence that most of the left thought the same regarding communism.
I can not help but noticed that you forgot to mention the support Pinochet got from conservatives.
Once again I can not talk for others that are shallow, but in my case I’m on the record of only defending Chavez because the alternative was to once again seeing the specter of the United States once again supporting the subversion of democracy with a coup, now as the opponent of Chavez is on the record of keeping some of the Changes that do benefit the people it is clear to me that the opposition has finally learned what progress means, it does not means that we should forcibly return to all the old ways.
The listing of progressive misdemeanours (which are undeniable) is not disclaiming any misdemeanours on the part of conservatives. Both sides have messed up. But some people here seem determined to claim progressives are pure as the driven snow. For example:
I for one acknowledge that support. That doesn’t exonerate the progressives for support to tyrants that they gave.
Agreed. However, it must also be said that conservatism has one thing going for it - lower risk. If conservatives get their way and they’re wrong, well, the the status quo just continues a little longer. But Progressives demand sweeping changes to society, and if they get it wrong, the result can be economic disaster, revolution, and bloodshed.
That’s the conservative attitude in a nutshell - be very careful about making big changes to society, because you might just be wrong.
Quite so, Sam Stone. There’s also an assumption that conservatism means opposition to all change, which is deeply unfair and a dehumanising claim. Conservatives are cautious about change. In some places, they might seek to turn back the clock on some things, yes; but the same could be said about progressives in certain aspects.
It’s equally unfair to claim all progressives are foam-at-the-mouth revolutionaries who want to smash windows and create an anarchist paradise.
But that’s not the issue at hand here. Read the thread title: it claims conservatives have been on the wrong side of history most often. Your yourself agree that the leftists who supported the USSR are discredited. So essentially, those leftists were on the wrong side of history.
What’s more, we’re not concerned with present day; there’s nothing to say that some leftists in the future will readily support another tyrant - or that conservatives will back Space Pinochet in the year 2067.
All I ask is that the possibility that it’s perfectly possible (except maybe the Space Pinochet bit) for both sides to mess up, before, now and in the future, be recognised.
One has to notice that currently there is the virtual lockstep opposition to sensible things like heath care reform and controls on global warming, this opposition goes for **all **aspects of that change, even past recent conservative takes on what to do are dismissed, in the case of health care reform even mandates that were considered appropriate are opposed tooth and nail by conservatives now, and on the global warming front, cap and trade that was a mechanism to get private enterprise into the control of emissions is dismissed now even by the same ones that proposed it.
Point being that I see that cautiousness by conservatives as only a ruse. When the time comes and progressives nowadays compromise and adopt most of the solutions proposed by conservatives the current crop of conservatives even deny their most recent history and oppose even their own solutions, I do not see any cautiousness on that.
As you say, It’s equally unfair to claim all progressives are foam-at-the-mouth revolutionaries who want to smash windows and create an anarchist paradise. And I do think is because most progressives I see nowadays do understand how dumb was for several progressives to support dictatorships and they are more open to compromise as that is what supporting democracy is, but it is also unfair to dismiss what recent history is showing about the recent crop of conservatives.
That is why I mentioned what made a difference then, progressives back then virtually had just “good” thoughts directed at the Soviet Union, Emperors of the day (the conservatives then) put Lenin on a train and even gave him intelligence support and weapons.
So I do point out that back then also the conservatives were, more actively, on the wrong side of history.
As the case of the recent and current leftist governments in Latin America shows, republicans like Demint and most of them actively supported the coup in Honduras, I can tell you that most progressives I know on this board do not have praises for Zelaya or Chavez, but they do understand what was the alternative: regimes that would have made Pinochet look like a kindergartener. You have to let the people of those nations to learn for themselves what works, not to impose the will of the powerful on them even if one thinks that they are on the right side.
Done already, I only ask to take into account that the evidence does show that progressives do change, even to the point of going against China.
As I pointed before, I’m not stuck on following ideology first, for me evidence is what guides me first and then ideology second.