Because of the attempt to view things through the filter of today’s political system of course. TR was a Republican, but also, by the standards of HIS time, a progressive. I find it ironic as hell, but admit MMV.
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I’ve always understood it to be both; not really that uncommon, especially before conservatism in the US became so narrow, rabid, and prone to “whatever you support, we support the opposite” thinking. The “progressives” supported it because they thought it would make society better, especially for women; the conservatives supported it because drinking was Sin.
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Sure, different people supported it for different reasons. But the ones who really got traction were the progressives, and it was because of that break with the status quo of the Victorian era. It was misguided in retrospect, but at the time it was at the forefront of progressive thinking.
Yeah, agreed…and also the OP specified he didn’t want to get into the whole Marxist thingy in any case (I personally don’t think that progressive ideas had much in common with communism, especially totalitarian communism in any case).
I have no problem crediting TR with some Progressive ideas.
It has been a while, though.
Mao was certainly at least as deserving of being called a progressive as Lenin, Stalin, and Che.
That said,
I think it’s been decades since the PRC could be said to be practicing Communism.
Yes, the party ruling China is called “communist” but the party ruling Nazi Germany was called “socialist” and that doesn’t mean they were.
True, which is why I don’t want to be pulled into a discussion of “Communism” failing in various countries–where it can be reasonably argued it’s never been tried.
Re-arranging that concept, one could say that 19th century Utopian communities failed, broadly speaking. In other words many (most?) didn’t persist and those that did are decidedly marginal, Kubbutz etc notwithstanding.
Okay, what ideas did they have that were progressive?
The War on Poverty.
Humanitarian and development aid has been a very mixed bag. We have seen HUGE improvements in human health and economic progress around the world, but this progress has been much slower and much more complex than your average “save-the-world” type would suspect and the key points of progress have been fairly surprising. In the 1960’s, we were sure that the new countries of Africa were just a decade or so away from joining the developed world. It hasn’t worked out like that, and growth has been stagnant or even retrograde in some areas.
While the aid industry ultimately does do a lot of good, it’s a very complex and often dysfunction world that creates a lot of internal contradictions and perverse incentives. There are plenty of reasons why this is true, from the realities of donor priorities to the triumph of simplistic thinking. But in the end, the return for the amount of money and effort spent has been disappointing.
Of course Teddy Roosevelt was a progressive. He’s one of the main progressive figures of his time. Everybody knows that.
The United Nations. They’re notoriously ineffective at solving problems and stopping conflicts, and they’re massively corrupt when it comes to handling money. These days, the UN is little more than a place for world leaders to make grandiose speeches about whatever country is Teh Eeeevil at that moment, knowing full well that nobody outside their own country is going to care one bit what they say.
I heard Joshua Goldstein arguing otherwise the other day on NPR. Whether you agree with him and Pinker on the decline of violence in the modern world, I found the discussion sort of interesting.
Opposition to nuclear power
Also, generally naive ideas about the Soviet Union and opposing Cold War containment policy (see Henry Wallace, although to be fairly Harry Truman probably should be classified as progressive)
I agree that the Volstead Act was a mistake and yes it was progressive, but it is arguable that prohibition did have a beneficial effect of lessening the consumption of alcohol.
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/16/opinion/actually-prohibition-was-a-success.html
Although I don’t have the book at hand, I read that when Prohibition was being pushed, America was one of the leading alcohol consumers by a wide margin. After prohibition America drinks much less alcohol.
i stopped reading when I realized the OP doesn’t know what Teleology means.
The root cause idea of crime prevention, No fault divorce laws, Medicaid, the War on Poverty, school busing, Head Start, public sector unions, minimum wage laws, foreign aid,
A good book about this is “The Dream and the Nightmare” by Myron Magnet.
I think some of these links illustrate not failure, necessarily, but unintended consequences. When society is manipulated through progressive movements, there are all kinds of consequences, and they tend to be complex and not all positive. So, rather than asking “which progressive ideas have not worked?” I would ask “which progressive ideas are a net good?” or “which progressive ideas have helped more than they have harmed the people they were designed to help?” These are much more complicated questions, though, and not easy to answer with a pass/fail.
The article about no-fault divorce laws is a complete non-sequitur. The whole thing is about how child and family support are improperly calculated, but concludes that no-fault divorce is a failure.
That’s like saying anti-smoking campaigns have failed because we haven’t cured cancer.
The one about busing completely ignores the limits on the practice imposed by courts.
The poverty rate dropped from 17.3% in 1963 to 11.1% in 1973. If you want to lump all poverty-reduction spending under the heading, that’s fine, but at least say so.
I suspect that has less to do with Prohibition than with the Great Reawakening.
Well, I do think it’s easy to ask the opposite question: “Which conservative policies have not worked?” Monarchy, racial segregation, slavery, unregulated capitalism, taxation without representation, child labor, voting restricted to property owners…the list is just about endless.
Very easy to answer with pass/fail.
The article about divorce has to do with the idea that child support payments can replace fathers. The data has shown that this has not happened and as a consequence there has been a feminization of poverty.
The limits to school busing have varied from jurisdiction to jurisdiction what remains consistent is there has been no academic improvement for the kids who were bused.
The proverty rate before the War on Poverty went from 32% in 1947 to 17.3% in 1963. The poverty rate fell almost 15% in 16 years. It then fell 6% during the initial part of the War on Poverty and has stayed about the same since.