What's Wrong with Being a Progressive?

When I was growing up oh so long ago, we have liberals and conservatives. The liberals wanted to see a fairer world and the conservatives were primarily a party that favored the rich and those who wanted to be rich, that is, pro-business. But both sides were civil, there were interesting debates on the issues facing our society and I always thought most people had a relatively open mind. Back then no one would shun you because you were a self-professed progressive. Those days are long gone. But what is wrong with being a progressive now?

Conservative has taken a much more hard-edged meaning over what I remember. I never met a conservative growing up who didn't believe in a better and different future from what we knew. We were putting men on the moon, there were new inventions every week, everyone seemed to want to be an American and join our parade to the future. Now conservatives not only want to stop all change forward, they want to actually go backwards on many issues. I am really shocked at the amount of money and effort groups are putting into resisting things like the Obama healthcare plan, gay marriage and mosques. Their attitude now seems to be that majority rules until we are the majority and then we'll work to reverse every change the other side made when they had the majority. This is not progress, this is even worse than stagnation. This is just treading water until we run out of energy to stay afloat.

How did we get here? I do not doubt the sincerity of the positions held by the tea party folks. They truly believe in a small government and self-sufficiency. But it is as if they read Ayn Rand and never got beyond fiction. While she makes a compelling plea for a libertarian form of government, she never had an ailing, widowed grandmother, or a worker who lost a limb in an industrial accident as a main character. No, they are not worthy of her praise since they cannot aspire to the Nietzsche superman. You don't need to have much imagination to understand that such pure ideology just doesn't work in the real world. What you create in embracing this idealism is a return to the jungle and the worst human treatment found in the gilded era. This is not something that I aspire to and most of the people who espouse this ideal would not want it either if they really had a chance to experience it.

I think that the main driver for this kind of reactionary position is a response to the extraordinary changes the US has experienced in the past 40 years. We went from envisioning a future so different from the present that would bring prosperity and fulfillment to everyone to fearing that our children will have shorter, less healthy lives than we did, a belief that our stagnating economy will not create the jobs needed to achieve full employment, and social changes that are at direct odds with the strict judeo-christian laws inculcated into society during the post war boom. In looking for the cause, people do not look into the mirror, they look at what has changed and blame that for their deteriorating status.

Chicago was a predominantly white city before WWII. The 1950s brought a flood of southern blacks to the city all looking for a better life in the north. What the white population saw was this black wave over the city and they were not ready to embrace integration. Even the rumor of a sale of a home to a new black owner would cause home prices to tumble as everyone scrambled to sell their house before prices fell. The speed with which this would happen was staggering. Entire neighborhoods would be converted from exclusively white to exclusively black in the span of a couple months. The fear was palpable. Of course this type of extreme reaction could not be sustained and eventually market forces worked their magic and integration, painful as it was for many, eventually began. There was prosperity for all and we all went forward together.

But things began to change under Reagan. While there is always a good argument that government can do harm as well as good, and in some cases do more harm than good, but the reaction to all of the new government regulation of the 70s began to be challenged, if not rolled back. The first to go were many of the limits on financial institutions. This release a great deal of good as many of the Glass-Stegal rules were for a different time and no longer applied to a world-integrated, almost internet financial world. Lowering tax rates became a holy quest and the right still worships at that altar even though most of them have no understanding of the dynamics that made some of those changes necessary or reasonable. It was good then, it is good now and it will be good in the future. Things became watered down to sound bites for the congregation that worshiped at the church of Reagan.

Along with all the other changes in the world, the war-ravaged nations of Europe entered the world markets in the late 70s. Bankers would queue up to lend them money and at first everyone had a good time. Americans saw a flood of new products enter their markets; quality cars, cheaper clothing, innovative appliances. But the downside of all this was to expose the weak underbelly of american manufacturing which had gone soft in the easy days of selling to those war-ravaged countries who had no one else to turn to for heavy manufacturing and capital investment. Instead of investing the profits from those halcyon days in the 60s into innovative (progressive) techniques and more efficient processes, the money went to management salaries, worker salaries and shareholder dividends. Then when faced with stiff competition from the new factories and able workforces around the world, american business could not always compete. (yes, there were unfair trade practices but on the whole I don't believe this changed the outcome). Now instead of enjoying the better value of the new appliances and cars, they found the less expensive clothing and other values of the imported good from China helpful for being able to maintain their lifestyle in the face of a stalled american economic engine.

No one really saw this erosion of the american supremacy as everyone was fixated with the internet and all the other get-rich-quick schemes that seemed to flow endlessly out of New York. With the controls off the markets, they were free to soar to unbelievable highs but now were also go into free fall with staggering losses of wealth that hadn't been seen in a generation or more. It was like cowboy economics compared to the church bingo of the past.

Together with the sexual revolution and women's lib, the right decided that it was all just too much to bear. The problem is all caused because Washington just gets in the way of business and if they just kill that beast everything will be great. So now every change of the past several generations is being questioned and an earlier time that never existed is being held up as some sort of paragon of the "America" that can again be the beacon to the world. The concept that American does not mean financial success, necessarily, but freedom, fairness, and equality don't seem to be enough anymore. Now they don't seem happy unless they kill all the progressives and by that I mean anyone that doesn't fit into their vision of what that fictional past looks like in their mind. I just hope there is someone there that looks a little like me and I fear for us all.