Housing projects, like foreign aid, are one of those ideas that isn’t inherently bad, but got hijacked for so many other purposes that it ended up being less-than-great.
Public housing on it’s own works perfectly fine. Almost all of Singapore’s housing space is public, and it’s not an issue.
The problem was that public housing projects took a nice idea (“Let’s create better housing for poor people!”) to mask a less-than-nice idea (“Let’s get all those ‘undesirables’ out of the way so that we can put the land they’re using to more profitable use.” If the housing was built in the beginning with an eye towards integrating people into sustainable communities and providing paths to home ownership, we could have avoided that whole scenario.
Unfortunately, we are replicated the “slum clearance” model around the world, from Mumbai to Nairobi. Clearing the slums and parceling them out to developers is always a great way to make cash.
I don’t know if the project I grew up in was a left-wing one, but it wasn’t a hellhole. Rough around the edges, for sure. But it was a community in it’s own ways.
The one near me was rough. All you needed to say about someone was “He’s from the Marboro Projects,” and that was enough for me to avoid him. Odds were, he was a tough guy, accustomed to fighting at the drop of a–well, anything.
So anybody who isn’t a hard-left anarcho-syndicalist (although curiously you don’t seem to hate Stalin all that much who was one of the great enemies of anarchists) like you is a “reactionary”? The English Civil War had factions ranging from advocates of divine rights absolute monarchy to the Levellers who were basically Jeffersonian democrats a century and a half early.
How is Her Majesty Elizabeth II against the interests of the miners? As far as I can tell she hasn’t been partisan one way or the other and she far more than any politician represents all Britons.
There were some leftists who opposed the war (such as Communists until Barborossa) and lots of Progressive isolationists but then in this case it was the progressives who supported the idea of interning Japanese Americans.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” crapped out badly, as you mention in the OP. Sure, you can excuse Communism as the fault of those who tried it, but that’s the whole point: as crummy as Capitalism is, it beats whatever else is in second place.
I think Communism would work very well in a totally homogeneous society, but those are tough to find, especially in the modern world where groups of all sorts of abilities tend to get intermingled.
The idea that everyone gets to vote, and that we can vote ourselves current funds from a public coffer which uses future revenue from our children, is crapping out as we speak. I give it another 20-30 years at best.
Whatever it is you’re talking about, you and I will probably be dead by the time your thesis gets tested, so failing? Maybe? Definitively failed? Clearly not.
Speaking of this, it seems to be liberal or progressive measures that result in increased individual freedom (universal suffrage, abolition of slavery, civil rights, freedom of speech, laxening of censorship, repealing of laws regarding sex etc.) have generally succedeed while those that reduce freedom (such as gun control, drug laws, Prohibition, eugenics, many economic regulations) have failed.
I don’t know if it a progressive idea or just a general liberal one but political correctness has fallen out of favor albeit with some lasting legacy. I went to undergraduate school in the early 1990’s at the height of that trend. Our writing classes taught us how to write in gender neutral speech and avoid any references to the skin color unless it was essential and sometimes not even then. We had to do mental cartwheels to avoid the ‘forbidden’ topics. The idea was that changing language would also change fundamental thinking in society. It was laughable idea then and it still is.
There was also the idea that true racism could only be demonstrated by those in power with a full stop questioning of your motives if you had any counter-examples. Men were also demonized as potential sex offenders unless they gave into the general philosophy with little recognition that it is perfectly possible for women to be the offenders as well. The web has done a lot to clear that misconception up but it wasn’t something you could talk about then without someone calling for ‘Proof you asshole!’ and unfortunately little existed then because those things wren’t covered like they are now (see all the cases of female teachers sleeping with their students in the last few years; those didn’t exist in any significant numbers before the last 10 years).
It is much better these days because of more information flow but the 1990’s were not the best time to be a non-minority male. The progressive movement was not fair in their assumptions of the assumed victim-prey relationships of different groups and the numbers were wildly distorted to support their causes.
So if the idea isn’t far enough in the past you can’t say it’s failed, but if it’s too far in the past it doesn’t count because there be dragons.
And if we manage to hit that sweet spot of time, you’ll dismiss the idea as one thats stupid by today’s standards. Which it seems to me to be the entire point of the thread.
No, I’m sticking with Separate but Equal. It was radically progressive for its time and it was a terrible idea.
Depends on how you define “progressive”, but I’d like to add Spiritualism into the mix.
It was based on an optimistic understanding of new science.
Experiments with mesmerism, hypnotism and, later, electromagnetic waves and X-rays etc., all seemed to show that there were unseen forces in the universe which could be studied scientifically for the good of mankind. The spiritualists took this a step further, attempting to chat with ghosts, commune with angels, etc.
Its religious and moral views were generally extremely “progressive”.
A vast majority of Spiritualists came to believe that there was no such thing as eternal punishment; no one would have to burn in Hell for eternity, for a truly good God would not allow it.
Its social and political views were generally extremely “progressive”.
As mediums, women reached positions of power and authority often deemed unthinkable within mainstream Christianity. Furthermore, there were ties between leading Spiritualists and a wide range of progressive causes: Emma Hardinge Britten fought for women’s rights, as well as the abolition of slavery; as did Paschal Beverly Randolph, an African-American medium, who on President Lincoln’s suggestion founded and ran a school for African-Americans. Andrew Jackson Davis, too, a leading American Spiritualist, fought for the abolition of slavery, as well as education reform – and so on and so forth.
I don’t see what’s so crazy about the concept that far enough back and “progressive/conservative” gets hazy while other things are still in progress and it isn’t clear if they’ve failed yet–seems pretty straightforward and obvious that both will be true.
Slavery is a very weird subject, in that we are all literally Keynesians–sorry, I mean “Abolitionists”–now while in its time (only 150 years back) that was the extreme radical position held by a small minority. So “separate but equal” may have been radically progressive in its time, I don’t know, but if the other choice is “separate and unequal” and no one was prepared to accept the possibility of an integrated society, I don’t know where to place “separated but equal” on the spectrum of progressive/conservative.
You’re right, that one of the limitations of this question, that I’m just grappling with now, is that we can only discuss this in a way that means much to me with issues raised in the 20th century that have been settled, and maybe not all of them.
Not to hijack my own thread prematurely, but as this develops, it seems that several of the nominees here (I’m thinking “separate but equal,” “prison reform,” “housing projects,” “eugenics,” and a few others) may warrant discussion in their own threads, as the questions of whether they are truly progressive-owned ideas and whether they’ve completely failed may be worth their debates.
Thanks. Have we discussed eugenics generally on the SD before? Maybe I’ll look for links and see if a new discussion is needed. One of my first thoughts is that this is close on one extreme to being a “pro-life” issue, where the state may have an interest in educating low-information parents about the risks of bearing a severely-impaired fetus–not sure if that concept is discredited as a failed progressive idea. If that’s what’s going on in some of these cases, I’m not rushing to put this in the failed pile.
Hmmm. Searching for “eugenics” in GD, I came across this thread which basically asked the question as the OP here, only from the other end of the political spectrum and it got trainwrecked into a discussion of slavery, Nazism, terminology and a few dozen other hijacks. (I was surprised to find myself one of the early posters to this thread, which was only from this summer, so I really could have remembered it.) I guess I’m feeling at this point that we need to start separating these tangled into their own discrete threads in the hope of actually having a focused debate.
Here’s the thing, “progressive” has to be related to the time period upon which the idea originated. It just has to. You can look at the success or failure of the idea through modern eyes, but not about whether the concept itself is *currently *progressive. Otherwise, it’s easy to dismiss any and everything that’s failed as not being progressive, like you’re doing.
Let me put it in technological terms. The boombox was, by any standard, a huge technological leap forward. It was the first time that radio could be recorded onto cassette tapes without cables or microphones that previous stand-alone cassette tape recorders needed. It caused cultural shifts and changed both buying and listening habits.
Now, you look at the boombox today and you say “that bulky thing? 10 pounds to play one tape of really poor quality? What a piece of junk.” Sure, and that’s why it ultimately failed (or, to some degree, shifted and adapted). And if you’re asking if it was a huge technological leap forward, you’re not comparing it to today where, duh, no, it’s not even close. That’s just unfair. No, you’re comparing it to when the concept was introduced.
Same thing with any “progressive” idea. It has to be compared to what the status quo was at the time of its introduction, NOT to today’s society. To do otherwise is just unfair.
But your point is well taken, and it’s exactly why the current system will fail. As long as current voters can vote themselves funds from tomorrow’s payers, the hope will be that current beneficiaries will be dead before the consequences crap out.
The progressive idea here is not a system of taxation per se; it’s the notion that you get to vote for spending funds derived from the common coffer even if you are a net beneficiary. In the US today, that’s most of us, and that’s why the system will crap out.
Gun control has been cited a couple times as a failed progressive idea but it has not universally been considered a failure in in different times and places. I’d also say that gun control isn’t necessarily a progressive idea, but a position currently most popular in American politics with liberals.
In the UK the 1920 Firearms Act was a response to fears of working class unrest and the 1937 Firearms Act was based on recommendations from a committee chaired by Sir Archibald Bodkin, who was, among other things, notoriously pro-censorship, which was not a progressive position, even accounting for time and place. In the Australian model, the Prime Minister who shaped the current gun laws was John Howard, a conservative.
I’d also say that the idea that “current voters can vote themselves funds from tomorrow’s payers” is not particularly progressive or even one I identify with American liberals. Conservative US presidents, at least in my lifetime, have been the ones who most notably ratchet up the national debt, thus passing on tax burdens to posterity.
Do you hear that? I do. Its the sound of me putting my fingers in my ears and going ‘lalalalalallalaalalalalalla’.
Yeah, take that 15 year old on the internet, I’ll show you how adults debate. Where’s the ridicule? Where are the straw man arguments?
On the subject of internment, I have heard that Italian and German nationals in places like NYC who were openly supportive of fascism were left alone while Japanese who never did anything like that were rounded up. So there was an element of racism there.
I guess for me I associate the progressive movement with concepts like egalitarianism and conservatism with xenophobia and nationalism. And racial double standards like that (allowing white Italians and Germans to be openly pro-Fascist while rounding up apolitical Japanese) strike me as more the behavior of conservative mindsets. But that could just be a logical fallacy on my part (attributing things I don’t like to groups w/o being objective, I’m pretty biased politically). At the end of the day FDR signed the executive order.
There is also the fact that despite FDR was a liberal, his congressional coalition was built in part on southern whites, who are generally very conservative. So you can’t say for sure if his administration was purely progressive or not. FDR seems progressive, but he didn’t push anti-lynching legislation because his coalition was built in part on southern whites.
