Yeah, so far all I have read is variations of "You're just a, a, a, stupid!" Heady stuff.
Fine, I'm bored and can't think of anything better to do so what the hell...
I will lead with my conclusion, though, which is that is you buy into this, you fundamentally do not understand what the left is advocating. Either by ignorance or massive levels of stupidity, the writer and those who agree with him, have managed to construct a strawman version of leftism and then attacked it with word games. There is nothing thought provoking in your article, nothing insightful, just the usual preaching to the converted because nobody else could possibly buy into this proselytizing. They are telling you progressives are bad and since that makes you feel good you don't care how accurate what follows is or whether it is even internally coherent.
A full rebuttal follows the break.
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Thursday, January 30, 2014
Progressives Without Progress
Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 42 Comments
There isn't very much progress in the progressive movement. Progress is the expansion of possibilities. Progressives however have a Malthusian obsession with the scarcity of all things. They believe that we are about to run out of everything from energy to water to wealth and education and that like starving survivors on a lifeboat we have to redistribute everything.
These two propositions aren't mutually exclusive and so I fail to see why even bring them up. Being concerned that we are facing a shortfall, frequently as asserted by the left an artificial or avoidable one in no way restricts possibilities. Indeed, the very opposite is true in that the left is frequently concerned with ways to alleviate or avoid those shortfalls through policy changes. Examining a problem and looking for new solutions is the very definition of "expansion of possibilities".
You can of course argue with the viability of their proposed solutions, but how does a belief, that, to use their example, we will run out of clean water "limit possibilities"?
The progressive outlook predates the notion of progress. Its ideal is a static society, sustainable in its material practices and so utterly moral in its social attributes that it becomes immune to change. It is founded on the intertwining of the material and the moral through the insistence that the scarcity of material things makes their redistribution mandatory by an activist moral elite.
A few leftists believe in something similar to that though none in the way you describe it. The whole activist moral elite thing is a fiction no branch of the left of which I am aware supports. Many more just believe in a minimum standard of living or better regulations on the rules by which the capitalist game is played. It seems to me we are already starting from a straw man of the left position from which I expect your entire argument is going to be built. The idea that everyone must live in the exact same way within the society is fictitious.
There is nothing as reactionary as utopia and no group as reactionary as utopians. A perfect society is a place that is immune to change. The search for such a society is the quest for an absolute way of living. Both the quest and the way of living become as unchallengeable as any theological utopia founded not on bad economics and political parochialism, but on a deeply spiritual faith.
Perhaps, but if you put ten leftist in a room and ask them to give you their utopian world you would get ten different answers. If they were socialists and communists, you would get 11. In any case, this underlying reasoning comes with it a fundamental problem, in that it neglects to consider what happens in a state of maximum possibility. If, per the original contention, progress is the expansion of possibility, what happens in a society where all possibilities are achievable within the bounds of human understanding, ability, and the laws of physics? Are we then to argue to attempt to achieve such a society is not progressive because the end society could not then have any further progress because that seems to be the implication of the argument here - that the final society could not be progressed further and so the movement itself is not progressive. This is, of course, absurd.
The progress of progressives is not a rocket to the stars, but a slow elevator climbing up a constricted shaft to their ideal society. It's only progressive in the same sense that a television channel that moves from one show to the next within the confines of its programming is. It's programmed progress, not the progress of exploring infinitely expanding possibilities.
Per above, but on what basis do you assert possibilities can be expanded infinitely?
The left is actually deeply conservative. It is difficult for people in countries being contested by the left to see this because they observe the left as revolutionary and destructive. But every attempted conquest is accompanied by violent disruptions. The domestic left destroys everything it does not control as part of a cultural war; not because it seeks an open society of perpetual creative ferment.
Unsupported assertion at best. Many times leftist political parties have come into and gone out of power in democratic societies with no violent disruptions to speak of. What is more, leftist ideals frequently do the opposite of destroy what they cannot control, and indeed seek to expand it. A recent example would be the moves by Colorado and Washington to legalize marijuana or the gay rights movement in which dominantly leftist groups moved to make it more difficult for the state to control activities. The idea that the left wants to control everything is another straw in the straw man you have constructed.
Once the left achieves its dream of absolute power in a nation, that nation becomes socially backward, technologically backward and culturally backward. There is a reason that the USSR, Cuba and North Korea were not producing compelling new cultural products for export the way that their sympathizers in Hollywood did and do. It's the same reason that they don't keep having revolutions.
This shows a lack of understanding of history. Firstly, the USSR went from a socially and culturally backward nation that was still under a monarchy to one of two world superpowers within a few decades. They had a power to rival America or did you forget that whole cold war thing? What is more, a case could be made that while those named nations used leftist rhetoric to ferment their revolutions and describe themselves, on a political level, they were anything but. Further still, Tetris. More than this, nobody is producing cultural exports the way Hollywood is, even other supposedly free, capitalist countries. I would say Japan might be in there with the exports of video games having produced a fair number of iconic to the west figures or Britain having a couple, but all in all, cultural barriers don't come down easily, in particular where there is a language barrier.
Ironically, of course, is so many on the right claim Hollywood is leftist so I really don't know what they are trying to get at here.
The creative energies harnessed by the left are a revolutionary tool for achieving an ideal society. Once that miserably ideal society is achieved, everything is regimented and unplanned change is locked out of the equation because reactionary progressive utopias have to be relentlessly planned. Science and culture are forcibly slowed down. Individuality is discouraged. Conformity produces mediocrity in all fields. Time slows down and utopia sinks into its own progressive muck.
Unless you want to claim the left achieved what it envisioned as its perfect society at some point, and speaking on behalf of the entire left everywhere, I can tell you we haven't, you won't be able to provide historical evidence of this and I can tell you this is the exact opposite of what the left actually advocates, so, yeah, more empty scaremongering and straw-manning. Once again, you invent a fictitious version of the left to parade around showing everyone you either have no idea what you are talking about or just don't care because facts would get in the way of your ideology.
Americans had trouble believing that the left of the counterculture had much in common with the conformist cultural factory of the USSR until the flower children became professional activists and politicians and ran a system of stale conformity interspersed with tedious displays of traditionally transgressive arts. The very slogan, Keep Berkeley Weird, is not revolutionary. It's traditionalist.
The fuck? How many hippies are in Washington exactly? You know the majority of politicians come out of business and law, not Volkswagen buses, right? Here's a clue, the flower children don't now and never did run things and so this whole argument is based on a faulty premise.
At this point I am starting to think the author is just taking the piss to see who will agree with him as "Keep Berkeley Weird" is an appeal to celebrate the unique, the unconventional, the nontraditional and to allow nonconformity in the future.
Nothing is more conservative than keeping things the way that they used to be.
Used to be where exactly? This is important because the point of the slogan of which you are bitching is trying to differentiate how things have been in one place vs. most other places.
Fuck me, are you actually buying this Boomerang? Are you actually buying this hollow rhetoric that in the end renders progressive and conservative meaningless terms because once progress has been made to a point that people are happy with it what was a progressive idea is now a conservative one and so it was really a conservative one all along?
On the opposite coast, the old radical artists and poets complain that the East Village isn't what it used to be and landmark everything in sight. Men and women who once did mountains of cocaine fight every bar liquor license with the outraged spleen of suburbanites threatened with a landfill.
And?
The paradox of keeping weird things weird is that weird then just becomes another tradition and another proprietarian cultural impulse to avert a changing world by clinging to the way things used to be when you were young and everything made sense. It's not really keeping things weird, it's keeping the weird things that come from a changing outside world, out.
Meaningless doublespeak. If this were true, then what was traditional would no longer be weird, it would be familiar, thereby keeping things familiar thus not keeping things weird the motto would not have been upheld. To keep things weird, one must constantly adopt new and unfamiliar and uncomfortable and disrupt the old ways. The entire argument comes down to that if things always are changing then things haven't changed because they were in a state of change before and they are in a state of change after. Hollow rhetorical masturbation by the author, nothing to see here.
Utopians always carry that narrow-minded fragility with them. Their perfect society is always doomed by the rising tide of morality in the affairs of men. The more they try to hold on to it, the more it breaks apart right in front of their eyes. The left only believes in change when it moves in their direction. But once change has been achieved, then their ideal is a static changeless society.
The first three sentences as best I can tell don't actually mean anything. They use words in a grammatically correct structure but carry with then no information or meaning. The fourth is obvious and true of everyone, nobody wants change in a direction they don't agree with, if you wanted the change you would agree with it. This seems like a tautology but somehow it seems to need to have been said. Here is the thing, a whole is distinct from its parts.
Suppose, to simplify a point, the leftist ideal society is the maximum of personal liberty and freedom. On the one hand, you could claim that yes, the society is static and unchanging in that the leftist would not want to embrace action to limit personal liberty or freedom. On the other hand though, from an individual level, such a society would be in constant flux as new culture, new technology, new philosophies would emerge and propagate over time. It seems to me we have a failure on the part of the author to distinguish change at the micro level from change at the macro level and thus the erroneous jump from the societal framework not changing to the society not changing.
Progress is confidence in human capabilities. The progressive movement however is tragic. It depends on the egocentric tantrums of individuals for its philosophy, its art and its activism; but it firmly believes that only the collective can make society work. And only the collective can lock it in.
More empty noise. Progressiveness is, at its core, about empowering the individual by giving them the maximum of freedom and choice. It isn't a collectivist philosophy, at least not in the way you are using the term.
Progressive utopians project their sense of fragility onto all material things. Fuel, water and even the atmosphere are all on the verge of running out. Everything must be safeguarded, counted and put in a locked box where qualified personnel will only distribute it at need. And that includes any and all human activities which might cause the warming of the planet.
Again, this is not accurate. No leftist has ever suggested anything like this and that some on the right fail to recognize this shows how out of touch with reality some people are.
Socially they are just as bad. Not only is wealth finite (except when they're spending it) but so is everything from education to employment.
While education is not finite, the other two most obviously are. If nothing else, the needs and wants of humanity are finite by the law of diminishing returns and so it follows that if there is a finite set of human demands, there must be a similarly limited amount of supply the market can support. As human productivity increases faster than demand, the need for labor decreases which limits employment opportunity. As for wealth, well, ask any economist if the value of everything in the possession of all the humans and human organizations in the world is infinite or if it has a specific value. There is a difference between finite and unchanging and while everyone knows that value can change, that does not make it unlimited.
The left doesn't think in terms of making more, but of redistributing what is available. Its goal is a static society in which everything is "fair", rather than a rapidly progressing society society that is unfairly distributed, but that focuses on creating, rather than sharing, and produces more for all.
The left frequently thinks in terms of both. You are committing a false dichotomy fallacy, that is the implied supposition that one can either think about making more or rearranging what is already there when in fact you can do both. As for a static society where everything is fair, that is at best true of a small portion of the left, but is a hasty generalization fallacy.
Progressives equate progress to redistribution. They view the planet and every microcosmic society within it as a lifeboat with a finite amount of supplies to pass around for survival's sake. Their idea of progress is achieved when the redistribution achieves their ideal of fairness and no further bouts of redistribution are needed. Since that day will never come, utopia becomes an economic police state.
So let me get this straight, progressives are actually conservative because once they get to their ideal state they will want to defend defend what is then the status quo it will become tradition and thus fall in line with conservatism in that it wants to keep things as they already are/were but they will never actually get to that state and so they will keep pushing towards that goal with a police state (which of course to this point you've never supported but since when has that stopped you?) they will continue to change the system indefinitely. So which is it? Are they going to end up as defenders of the status quo once they achieve their ideal system or are they permanent revolutionaries forever pushing for their ideal system? Christ, the doublethink is strong with you.
The progressive idea of progress is a sack race with a hundred feet in one sack. Progress must be communal. It must meet the needs of all stakeholders. It must comply with every detail of the plan. And so it is no wonder that we hardly build big things anymore or dream great dreams. Vision is individual and it's deeply disruptive. It changes the way that everyone lives.
And this is absolute bullshit. First, leftists don't really control things and so if we aren't building big things anymore, you might look closer to home. Second, while the left does recognize we are all in this together to an extent, it also recognizes the bulk of human activity is personal in that it impacts few to no other humans in a significant degree. If I sit down to play Minecraft or read the delusional rantings of ignorant assholes on the internet in my leisure time, it has not changed the direction of humanity one iota. On the big questions that do impact the direction of humanity, such as, to again return to the example, nuclear waste in drinking water y/n? should the people impacted by that decision not have a say? Third, as I mentioned above, there is no grand plan for the leftist society. We are, after all, notoriously sectarian to the point of a running joke in most leftist circles. Finally, as to whether vision is disruptive, it certainly can be, and certainly people should be free to accept or reject that vision. Unless, of course, you think everyone should fall in line behind Karl Marx just because he had a vision.
Visions lead to utopias, but once utopia is achieved, there is no more room for vision. Visions, like viruses, are competitive creatures. When a Vision achieves a static order by killing all other visions, then vision dies, but that Vision remains with its dead hand on the wheel of history.
But you just said that utopia could never be achieved, and thus everything in this paragraph doesn't actually matter because it relies on conditions you said cannot exist.
The vision of the left is a dead utopia, a tradition of weirdness and a hoarder's obsession with storing everything from the economy to the atmosphere in one lockbox before the sky falls. The utopian is really a cynic, certain that individualism will unleash everyone's worst impulses, and offering instead the iron order of his vision.
Again, I need evidence of the left wanting to intervene in personal action rather than interpersonal action. You really are just talking out your ass about a version of the left that never has and never will exist anywhere outside the demented rantings of the ignorant conservative.
Utopia believes the worst of everyone and everything. It fears its own mortality and scents the taste of death on everything. It is convinced that the sky will fall, that everyone will starve and that the utter undoing of humanity is only a land use resolution or unrecycled plastic bottle away.
Blah, blah, blah. See above.
Progressives lock everyone into their narrow regimented and regulated idea of progress because they distrust people and they even distrust the universe. They are children certain that everything they love is about to be taken away from them and closet fascists obsessed with their moment of heroism when they rush out of the phone booth, biodegradable cape blowing in the wind, and save humanity from itself through a benevolent police state that extends into absolutely every area of human activity.
Well, aside from everything you've said you are completely right.
There is no progress in progressivism. There is instead a deep fear of progress. Utopians fear the unregulated and unplanned and they replace the true expansive progress of the human spirit with the false progress of social controls. Human genius is sold on the block in exchange for bureaucracy.
I really don't have anymore to add here. You are just repeating the same inane strawman over and over again which serves to demonstrate that you've never bothered to actually understand what the left is advocating.
Progressives view every element of the world, from the grand vistas of oceans and skies to the minute intersections of human society as too fragile and limited for unregulated progress. Under their rule, progress in this country, once its secular faith, has slowed to a crawl outside of a few select industries that are able to move faster than the speed of progressive regulations.
For example? Please demonstrate where and how progressive rule, if such a thing has ever existed in the history of this country, has slowed the rate of research or progress of anything. Show what specific breakthroughs are being held back or what specific research is being blocked. Given how far off base you've been with everything else in this asinine rant, I won't hold my breath.
The only way to resume progress is to fight the progressive movement.
Except if progressives are conservative and conservatives are conservatives then there is no such thing as progress and you are full of shit.
The too long, didn't read version of this is the author is making a two thrusted argument. First, that because progressives are rigidly dogmatic utopians, they are really conservatives defending that status quo, even though the author goes on to state that the utopia will never be reached and so the status quo would never be defended thus defeating his own argument. The second is basically that leftists slow human progress because he says so and then provides exactly zero examples of how or where this has occurred. In short, it is just another long winded strawman argument against a version of the left that doesn't exist outside of the fantasies of the Republican Faithful and that you buy into it means you either are too stupid to learn what your political opponents actually think or that you don't care to.
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