How Should We Understand the Left?

How Should We Understand the Left? May 25, 2017

The progressive project is pure utopianism. You won’t understand anything or anyone on the left until you grasp this.

photo-1454702762838-a6df8cc3517f_optThe progressive worldview centers on the idea of inevitable moral evolution toward an ever-receding mirage of a perfect world where transcendent constraints are gone and human will reigns supreme. This is why appeals to tradition, history, revealed truth, biology, and even logic fall on deaf ears, because these are precisely the constraints we must overcome! This is why “it’s 2017!” is considered a valid and compelling argument. And this is why positions progressives commonly held when my four-year-old daughter was born are now treated like medieval barbarism. The progressive eschaton will be so perfect, we don’t even possess the categories yet to comprehend its perfection. So every year, we must elevate our moral consciousness to a new level.

Conservatives often fail to understand progressives, because they think of them as their opposites. They’re not. Progressives aren’t trying to bring our society into closer alignment with an unchanging moral standard that merely differs from the conservative moral standard. They are actively changing the moral standard itself from day to day. And as long as there are constraints holding the human will back from complete conquest over nature, there will be an endless supply of new causes du jour to take up and advance under the cry that no one except a barbarian from last year would oppose them.

Edit: Thanks to Ben Carmack for this outstanding comment:

“It was the late great Joe Sobran who used to ask liberals–rhetorically–“In what kind of society would you be a conservative, one contented with the status quo?” The question was rhetorical because there was no answer to it. Liberals don’t know when the progress will stop. They don’t know what kind of society would make them conservatives.

They only want more and more, and it will never be enough.”


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