Maybe He Never Was a Progressive

I think that Michael Shellenberger’s post, “Why I Am Not a Progressive”, is important. I don’t just mean important to him. I think he’s making a larger point although I’m not sure he and I would agree on what that is. I find it hard to except meaningfully but I’ll sample a few snippets for you:

When President Barack Obama ran for office in 2008, it seemed fitting to me that he chose the slogan, “Yes we can!”

But now, on all the major issues of the day, the message from progressives is “No, you can’t.”

or here:

The reason progressives believe that “No one is safe,” when it comes to climate change, and that the drug death “homelessness” crisis is unsolvable, is because they are in the grip of a victim ideology characterized by safetyism, learned helplessness, and disempowerment.

or here:

On climate change, drug deaths, and cultural issues like racism, the message from progressives is that we are doomed unless we dismantle the institutions responsible for our oppressive, racist system.

and, coincidentally, responsible for our prosperity, self-determination, and freedom.

Or here:

After World War II, it was progressives, not conservatives, who led the charge to replace mental hospitals with community-based care. After the community-based care system fell apart, and severely mentally ill people ended up living on the street, addicted to drugs and alcohol, progressives blamed Reagan and Republicans for cutting the budget. But progressive California today spends more than any other state, per capita, on mental health, and yet the number of homeless, many of whom are mentally ill and suffering addiction, increased by 31% in California since 2010 even as they declined by 18 percent in the rest of the US.

Among the reasons I think the post is important is that he’s putting reasonably well-documented flesh on the bones of a point I have made here repeatedly: progressives are not liberals. It is liberals who believe in equality and empowerment. Progressives are Whigs. They are the heirs of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, radicals. Convinced they are in the vanguard of history they are insistent on overthrowing the institutions they detest, essentially all of them, in favor of what? Whatever it is, surely it will be better. They reject the very notion of human nature, that people respond to incentives, or that physical principles can possibly be any barrier to their vision of the future.

The “will to apocalypse” to which he refers is not a liberal trope; it is radical. They need an apocalypse to provide a pretext for overthrowing the existing order. This:

A major report by the National Academies of Science in 1982 concluded that abundant natural gas, along with nuclear power, would substitute for coal, and prevent temperatures from rising high enough to threaten civilization. But progressives responded by demonizing the authors of the study and insisting that anybody who disagreed that climate change was apocalyptic was secretly on the take from the fossil fuel industry.

and this:

People are shocked when I explain to them that the reason California still lacks enough homeless shelters is because progressives have opposed building them. Indeed, it was Governor Newsom, when he was Mayor of San Francisco, who led the charge opposing the construction of sufficient homeless shelters in favor of instead building single unit apartments for anybody who said they wanted one. While there are financial motivations for such a policy, the main motivation was ideological. Newsom and other progressives believe that simply sheltering people is immoral. The good is the enemy of the perfect.

That’s the very definition of radicalism and it’s a typical example of flawed progressive thinking.

I would suggest that, contrary to Mr. Shellenberger’s belief, he may never have been a progressive. Maybe he has actually been a liberal which is to say an apostate all along.