Let’s not forget that progressives also widely supported eugenics, China’s one-child per family policy, Communist and socialist revolutions around the world, laws restricting how and where women could work (to prevent them from being ‘exploited’ by men), ‘sweat shop’ laws that seek to further impoverish people in 3rd world nations, fad mental treatments like lobotomies, etc.
The modern inner-city blight is largely a result of progressive projects that sought to build large-scale housing for the poor. This had the perverse effect of isolating poor people, causing children to grow up without good role models, and condemning generations to dependency and despair. The progressive-inspired Community Reinvestment Act helped bring about the real estate crash in 2008.
Today’s progressives appear to hold values contrary to western enlightenment values such as free speech and the right to property. If modern campus progressives are any guide to current progressive thought, they appear to also be for segregating races and cultures through opposition to ‘cultural appropriation’, ‘cultural imperialism’, and the imposition of ‘safe zones’ where only people of certain sexes or ethnicities may enter and where speech they don’t like is tightly controlled.
Progressives today are attempting to embark on a globalist, ‘no borders’ campaign that allows or even encourages the free flow of immigrants into any country, which is an incredibly dangerous idea that could easily lead to civil wars and a breakdown of the modern welfare state. Progressives have no appreciation for emergent order, the power of markets, and the complexity of the human ecosystem. They believe that ‘enlightened’ people can take control of and steer economies and cultures in the direction they think is ‘best’, with no regard for unintended consequences or the wishes of the people they are controlling. The same people who think it would be madness to ‘improve’ an ecosystem by moving different animal species around the world to ‘improve diversity’ also seem to think that you can drop several million humans into a very different culture and it will all work out they way they want.
Another problem with progressives is that they have no limiting principles. They act on whatever the impulse of the day is. There is never a point at which they will say, “Hey, society is good enough. Let’s let things stabilize for a while.” There is always another crusade, another big change that needs to be made. And all their changes seem to be in the direction of less freedom, more centralized control, more collective responsibility and less individual responsibility. They seem to greatly dislike free, open democracies and have a special affinity for socialist dictatorships and horrible monsters like Mao Tse-Tung and Che Guevera. They were fans of Stalin in the 1930’s, supported Mussolini, and even joined in the love for Hitler during the brief tenure of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact. Modern progressives like Thomas Friedman think it would be just great if America became a one-party state like China.
So I am not sharing the love for progressives. That the Democratic party has been moved from elightenment liberal positions to illiberal progressivism is a terrible thing, and the antics of progressives on campus and elsewhere probably had a lot to do with the rise of Trump.