Administration, not Act.
I’m kind of not getting adaher’s principles here. I see how he’s claiming that a lot of progressive ideas don’t work initially, but often enough he’s willing to concede that they do work, after some tweaking, like the concept of welfare or the League of Nations/UN. But often when a new, progressive idea is proposed, its enemies will say “Never worked, never will work, here’s the problem:” and the progressives answer, "“Well, maybe, but if x or y or z actually proves to be a problem, we can tweak it.” So if y proves to be a problem, they fix it, and leave x and z, which were equally vehemently objected to, and adaher’s conclusion is “See? I told you y was bad! Fail!”
Yeah, but the history books don’t say how it ended, they leave that question open. It’s hard to not see bias there.
NRA was just scrapped. Some ideas from it survived in another form, such as letting businesses write the regulations their industries have to abide by, an actually sound progressive idea that is criticized out of ignorance today. Welfare was an abysmal failure until a center right coalition fixed it, so it’s hard to credit progressives for that. Central planning and eugenics have been thoroughly discredited. International organizations haven’t been tweaked, they still survive pretty much as the useless shells of an idea that they are. It’s just that many progressives refuse to acknowledge that there’s just nothing to these organizations other than to provide a forum for countries to complain about each other, something they did well enough before the League or the UN.
And progressives still don’t have any bright ideas for ensuring that the welfare state they set up continues to enjoy acceptance from the voters. It did fine as long as there were more workers than retirees. Progressives haven’t been able to solve that one in any nation where it’s a problem(as in pretty much all of them). So far, the only answer has been to borrow or cannibalize other parts of the government to keep the system going.
Central planning? You mean like in a federal government? That’s a big FAIL?
The UN is a pretty good example of what I’m talking about. For the first time ever, the nations of the world in the 20th century decided to form some sort of organization to discuss international conflicts among every civilized country on earth, and to try to resolve them, despite the ideological and cultural and religious and every other kind of difference they had, with the thought that discussing these things is probably better than not discussing them–world peace might be a long-range goal of all this in a few hundred centuries, perhaps, but while we’re becoming more civilized, maybe it can accomplish a few other smaller goals along the way. But you want to set up a phony goal, like everlasting agreement on pretty much everything, and by your standard, the UN is a FAIL. Is there any realistic or reasonable standard of measurement that you think the UN could succeed by?
Central planning as in trying to run the economy rather than rely on the market. Regulation is not central planning, it’s setting the rules of the road. Central planners didn’t just want to set the rules of the road, they wanted to drive the cars.
Progressives need to make up their mind just what the UN is. If it’s just a forum, then it’s a smashing success, but progressives also feel the UN is a legal body able to make and enforce laws. the UN does not prevent war nor does it stop genocide and it certainly doesn’t stand up for human rights.
Alternatively the UN can have aspirational goals, but progressives should acknowledge that these goals are aspirational and not try to portray the UN as something it isn’t. Nor should the UN be patted on the back when it tries to do things and fails. I can understand the UN patting itself on the back, all organizations like to feel relevant, but its supporters should be a little more frank, because the UN’s failures cost lives.
I don’t have any concrete examples, offhand, but it seems like progressive trends in education would be a gold mine for this thread—y’know, the exact intersection between “experimental concept” and “won’t somebody think of the chiiiildreeeenn!?” 
Who wants to take the first potshot at the New Math?
I almost thought of that, but then realized that liberals and conservatives actually agree on most education issues. The Democratic Party is subservient to the teachers’ unions though, so a lot doesn’t get done. Obama’s actually been a good President on education, but the problem is that no matter how much ambition the federal government might have to improve America’s schools, it will just never be a federal issue. Either the states and cities will fix it, or it won’t get fixed.
Give me a few examples, please, of anyone claiming that the UN is something it isn’t. Most of the things they try to do are very difficult–that’s why they can’t be resolved on a nation-to-nation basis–so I don’t see how you can reasonably demand a 100% success (or any success rate) without which the UN is itself a failure. How exactly do the UN’s failures cost lives? Cite a few examples here as well, please.
Srebrenica. NATO troops would never have allowed that to happen. Rwanda. The IAEA’s ability to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. The UN’s ability to promote human rights, period. Not that they actually try, they let the despots run the Human Rights Council.
Let’s stick with this one for a moment. Your typo aside (you mean “inability,” didn’t you?) this seems like an example of the UN trying to do something that’s very difficult, and having a hard time doing it. Is this another example of some project that you see NATO as being more effective at (bearing in mind that NATO has no conceivable jurisdiction in Iran or Korea or most of the places that the spread of nukes is currently at stake)? Who should oversee this, if not the UN? What would they do that’s obviously (key word) more effective?
Everything the UN does is difficult because it has no powers unless backed up by the international community nearly unanimously, or by the great powers with military force. Imagine if corporations in the US were governed by regulators who would report on their crimes but couldn’t take enforcement action? That would obviously be a failed regulatory scheme by design. Likewise, the IAEA and virtually everything else the UN does is designed to fail and there aren’t too many nations interested in changing that.
Do you realize that your complaint with the UN is that it’s too conservative, not too progresive, a body? They are deliberately imposing on themselves all sorts of checks and balances against too-swift, too-decisive action precisely because they are reluctant to act before testing diplomacy to its furthest and before they reach a clear consensus on the form that action will take while making sure that every minority voice is heard–this is conservatism in its extreme form, and that is what you are complaining about. They can only act after exhausting all the other possibilities, and even there they are inclined to act in restrained measures. If it were otherwise, and they were able to leap into sudden action with overwhelming physical force with great frequency, you would be shitting bricks and complaining viciously about this unelected fascistic force that neither you or anyone else ever voted into power, bbbyyy.