I don’t think I’m missing your point at all. I’m agreeing with you that contemporary political labels (Democrat, in this instance) don’t apply very well at all once we get more than 40 or 60 years removed from the present. I don’t doubt that I would have been a Republican in Lincoln’s time, but that says nothing about my current affliliations. I’m totally unclear which side I would have supported in the War of the Roses, though I’m sure that one side might have seemed more progressive if I looked closely enough. But there have always been progressive and conservative values, and it seems to me that the progressive positions will win out, either slowly or quickly, for better or worse. IOW, clinging to the past for its own sake (which seems to me a nasty way of stating the conservative position) only prevails for so long, and we’re the better for that truism.
Yes, I’m aware some white people felt that black people weren’t fit to sleep with the hogs, while others felt they were perfectly suited to sleep with the hogs. Not sure which is the more progressive position there.
Problem is of course that most great social ideas are only known as successes or failures in hindsight.
By the time hindsight comes around, it is less than clear as to how to categorize the ideas, given that times and parties have changed and what was once “progressive” is not anymore, and parties that would have thought of themselves as highly “progressive” are no longer thought of that way - or at least, not all of their ideas are “progressive”.
However, enough of generalities, here’s a specific example. In the Canadian context, one would be hard-pressed to find an early 20th century figure more “progressive” than Judge Emily Murphy - the first female judge in Canada. She was at the centre of the defining moment of the progressive movement in Canada, the famous “Persons” case - one of the “Valiant Five” or “Famous Five” who launched a constitutional challenge that women could be Canadian senators because the constitution said qualified “persons” could be senators (they won!).
However, she was also the woman who wrote a famous book, “The Black Candle”, based on her experience as a judge, which formed a major part of the popular basis for criminalization of recreational drugs in this country. This too was positioned as part of the “progressive” campaign to elevate society, and in particular, to protect the status of women.
She was also very active in the eugenics movement, and seemingly a proponent of “scientific” racism - all “progressive” ideas at the time. For example, she supported the compulsory sterelization of the “mentally deficient”.
In short, her career pretty well encapsulates both good and bad sides to being “progressive” in her era. Her position on the status of women was obviously correct - no-one today would have the gall to claim women were not “persons”. But equally, very few really think the government ought to decide who gets sterilized.
What is good and bad about our era, will probably not be totally obvious untill many years have passed (though I’m willing to bet right now that stuff like gay marriage will be as obvious to our descendants as the “persons” case is now.)
You are missing the point. Progressive does not equal Democrats…or Republicans, at least not as it’s commonly understood. It has a specific meaning. The labels aren’t and never were interchangeable, whether we are talking about today or in the past. To put it a different way, some Democrats are and have been progressives (some Republicans have as well), or agreed with progressive ideas or thinking…but not all progressives are Democrats, and the Democratic party isn’t the Progressive Party. And never has or will be. It’s the nature of our big tent political system.
Progressive thinking and progressives have a separate history from the political parties, though they often worked within specific parties to achieve their ends, so when you ask about progressive ideas that have or haven’t worked you have to look at what, historically, was actually a progressive idea. If you want to know what ideas from the Democratic Party have been progressive, that’s a different question…and a subset of all progressive ideas. If you want to know what ideas DEMOCRATS have had that have been unsuccessful, well, that’s yet another question. And if you want to compare and contrast Progressive ideas verse Conservative ideas, well, that’s yet another question…and one that is even more a can of worms than this one.
So, I guess you really need to focus this discussion on what, exactly, you DO want to discuss, because from my perspective anyway it’s all over the place. You might want to start with your definition of what a ‘progressive idea’ actually IS, because I think your idea is a lot different than my own…and than several other people in this threads.
ETA: Or, what Malthus said, since that’s a much better explanation of what I was trying to get at.
Duh? If you’re not using hindsight to judge a great social idea, then by definition you’re judging it before the evidence is in.
Go back too far, though, and you risk inspecting a swamp of muddy and tangled positions: as I recall, the Third Reich was a big proponent of eugenics, yet I would hesitate to label Dr. Mengele as a progressive thinker of his time. If he and Judge Murphy agreed on eugenics, as you suggest they did, we need to tangle who owned that concept at the time–I suspect we’ll come away saying that it was hard to attribute properly.
But to take my earlier example, I think it’s pretty clear that it was an uncontestably progressive position to advocate for communal households in the 1960s, and that that position pretty clearly failed.
Some of these things are easy to decide, others not.
I’m taking this as a given, no need to preach to the choir.
Hence the problem: that by the time one is in a position to judge the matter, it is no longer clear what parties are “progressive”, if you are using today’s standards to judge what “progressive” is.
The fact that evil people believed in an idea does not make it “not progressive”. Hitler was a vegitarian. Does that make vegitarianism a bad thing?
In the case of eugenics, it clearly has the hallmarks of a “progressive” idea. In my opinion, those are as follows, at their most basic:
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Based on scientific evidence
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Goes against established traditions and notions of morality and hence repugnant to small-c conservatives
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genuinely seeks the betterment of humanity and society generally through government action
The eugenics practiced by the Mengeles of this world differ from that earnestly proposed by Judge Murphy in the last category in particular: the Nazis had no intention of bettering humanity or society, only in promoting their own “race”. Judge Murphy I would say was sincere (if wrong).
“Communal households” was not really a mainstream progressive idea in any era, but a fringe notion - at least, in North America.
Unlike (say) women’s rights, eugenics or drug prohibition, it was never made into legislation here.
Well, look, we’re awash in all sorts of partly semantic, partly political, partly temporal issues, but I think that there’s a topic contained here that is still worthy of discussion. I learned about Judge Murphy here, and you considered the “communal households” argument long enough at least to dismiss it on grounds of insubstantiality. I might argue that it was seriously proposed but was so unworkable that it very quickly (within a decade) failed. If that doesn’t meet your definition of “substantiability,” then you have a very narrow window, by my judgment. If it fails too quickly, it was never a serious possibility; if it lingers on in a nebulous state for too long, the landscape has changed too much to discuss it in a consistent way. If you want to adopt “legislation” as your earmark of seriousness, I’d consider that: could you tell me what major laws were passed mandating eugenics in practice, and when?
What about high-rise housing projects built all over the country from about the 1950’s - 1970’s? The initial goals were certainly progressive. Build the poor (usually minority) people free or very low-cost housing and let them form a community. It sounds straightforward but the actual outcomes were an almost universal failure. It usually turned into a hell on earth very quickly.
Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis went from new construction to completely uninhabitable in just a few years and eventually to be destroyed. It serves as model of how not to handle the housing issue. The 70’s TV show Good Times is based on this same theme. Everyone knows today that you can’t just build housing for societaly challenged groups and expect it to work out well for anyone especially if they reach a critical density. High-rise, high-density housing projects were torn down all across the country after the 1970’s as spectacular social experiment failures. Current housing programs try to spread out the challenged so that they don’t reach critical mass and melt down into anarchy and crime.
Left-wing housing projects certainly don’t stand up to scrutiny very well. They’re pretty much hellholes.
In my own former field, I’d call the Pennsylvania and the Elmira penal systems progressives ideas that have failed.
/aside
All I can think of is that for some reason prr took my comment as being critical of progressive policies, when in fact it wasn’t meant to be at all. In fact, I was trying to do just the opposite, which is look at the “failures” puddleglum cited with a bit more nuance. But, whatever…prr obviously doesn’t want to have a discussion as much as he wants to play some weird gotcha game with supposedly conservative policies circa 1850. Have at it, pal.
Pacifism and appeasement towards Nazi Germany didn’t work all that well. Experimenting with drugs in the 60s and 70s left many addicted to heroin and other nasty stuff.
Prison reform–there’s an area where progressive thought has at the very least hit a few snags. People seeking a more humane environment have advocated changes that haven’t exactly resulted in one. Why not? Bill James has a few comments on prison reform in his new crime book that address this subject–I think I lent my copy to someone.
I’d argue that what didn’t work with the Nazis was isolationism, which is a pretty conservative value. Very few of the pre-WWII isolationists were very pacificistic.
Pacifism and appeasement were two different things. In the case of appeasement, Neville Chamberlain, the Conservative British Prime Minister, wanted to turn Hitler’s attention eastward, to attack and destroy the Soviet Union. Let’s remember, the Allies were happy to go to war during the Russian Civil War, in order to support the White armies.
Moscow desperately wanted to have some kind of alliance with the Western powers against Hitler, but they were so coy, Stalin gave up and asked Molotov to go ahead with a non-aggression pact with Hitler in order to buy some time.
There’s lots more to the story. Michael Parenti explains it here:
and here:
Not sure that heroin addiction was ever a progressive idea.
My personal opinion is that the problem with prison reform is the prisoners.
Okay, that sounds flippant but it really is a key factor. You can’t have a society full of criminals and realistically expect them to behave like saints. You give them a loose environment and they’re going to use that freedom to abuse each other.
I could split the complaints I had into two roughly equal groups. Half of the complaints were prisoners unhappy about the rules being enforced on them. And the other half were prisoners unhappy that we weren’t enforcing the rules strictly enough on other prisoners.
Problem is, you’ve got the prisoners–that’s a given. So if you take the conservative position–don’t change nothing, they’re scum anyway, and they don’t let you run a benign system no matter what you do–you end up with a hell-hole. If you try new things, you end up with a hell-hole that costs a little more, and frustrates the shit out of you. Is that about it? I guess I still want to try out new ideas.
Progressives are not communists, progressives are the center left while communists are the hard left.
If anything I have heard communists disdain and hate progressives, liberals and social democrats because they are promoting “crumbs” to appease the proletariat (universal health care, universal education, environmental laws) which delays the transition to pure communism.
So I don’t think you can compare progressives to communists.
As far as progressive failures, racial integration is still deeply troubled. But it is better than it was 60 years ago, so that is still something of an improvement.
Internationalism to the point where you don’t recognize legitimate national security threats is another failure. But I don’t think anyone progressive enough has had the power in the US to do that.