What Next for the Left?

Modern progressivism has driven much of American politics for the past seven years. It now fully owns the Democratic party. President Obama failed to achieve the general electoral realignment that many anticipated after 2008, but he succeeded in creating an ideological realignment within his own party. The result was attained by subtraction. Advocates of rival positions — New Democrats, “blue dogs,” pro-lifers — were either sacrificed or induced to sacrifice themselves. The Democratic party is now divided between a progressive wing and a more progressive wing, one that openly wears the label of socialist.

Modern progressivism is a combination of three components: theories inherited from the original progressives of the early 20th century; ideas introduced since the 1960s by the intellectual movements of the left (the New Left, multiculturalism, postmodernism); and the practices and patterns of behavior that have resulted from progressivism’s central role in shaping American politics and culture.

The Progressive Inheritance

The enormous debt modern progressives owe to the movement’s originators begins with a belief in the idea of progress, the notion that there is an intrinsic force within history pushing toward expanded prosperity, greater equality, and peace. Progressives took their bearings for the idea that history has its own will from the great 19th-century theoretical systems found in German idealism (Hegel), French sociology (Comte), and evolutionary biology (Darwin). Modern progressives have kicked away this philosophical ladder, preferring to be known as pragmatists. Their pragmatism comes fully prepackaged, however, with a residual faith in an arc of history. Progress may temporarily be slowed or derailed by those who cling to the past, but under the guidance of enlightened leaders history will inevitably resume its forward course.

Modern progressives take credit for expanding the scope of government and for forcing the spring on many social, religious, and lifestyle issues. Progressives also insist that they are on the right side of history in foreign affairs. Following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Secretary of State John Kerry let President Putin know in no uncertain terms, “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th-century fashion.” President Obama decreed that ISIS “has no place in the 21st century.” The administration counts this century as one of its staunchest allies and a leading contributor to the grand coalition. The original progressives possessed a similar confidence in the ameliorative powers of the 20th century, though many grew disillusioned when it produced barbarisms on an unparalleled scale. Modern progressives believe that things will be less bumpy this time around. Even the idea of progress progresses.

Modern progressives spend much of their time inveighing against the “one percent,” just as the old progressives assailed “the malefactors of great wealth.” For both, inequality is society’s greatest problem, threatening democracy by ceding real control to the trusts and the super rich. The charge today is that we have government of the one percent, by the one percent, and for the one percent. Inequality for progressives surpasses all concern about economic growth and enhanced opportunity, although progressive economists manage to bundle all these challenges together and attribute the root cause to inequality. President Obama subscribes to many economic nostrums of the original progressives, from his theory, revealed on the run in 2008 to Joe “The Plumber” Wurzelbacher, that “when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody,” to his thesis, shared with Elizabeth Warren, that “you didn’t build that,” a position that regards society’s wealth as being by right collectively owned, to be distributed by the government on the basis of social justice and utility.

Modern progressives have for the moment rallied around the idea of “leader democracy” that was introduced by the nation’s first progressive president, Woodrow Wilson. Wilson called for a concentration of political power in the presidency, arguing that it was both futile and inadvisable to attempt to restrain power by partitioning it among different institutions. “Leadership and control must be lodged somewhere,” he wrote. “No living thing can have its organs offset against each other as checks, and live.” Power would be restrained through presidential elections. Following a number of Republican presidencies after 1968, progressives seemed to abandon this view, sounding the alarm against “the imperial presidency.” Senator Obama in 2008 was an important voice for this position: “The biggest problems that we’re facing right now have to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all.” But second (or third) thoughts have brought most progressives closer to the original position. Few presidents have shown greater contempt for Congress, or seized more powers legislative in character, than Barack Obama. Government by decree is now being legitimized. Progressive intellectuals have been Obama’s enablers, advancing a theory of “dysfunctional government” that justifies presidential aggrandizement.

All political parties have yielded at one time or another to the temptation of constitutional opportunism and shifted their position on institutional arrangements to promote a partisan goal. Progressives are unique, however, in doing so without qualms, knowing that their opportunism has received absolution in advance from a higher source. Constitutional forms, by their account, always take a back seat to the imperative of promoting progress. No legal framework merits permanency. Stripped of the pretense of concern for constitutional theory, the progressive claim today is that a progressive president opposed by an unprogressive Congress rightfully acquires a vast new reservoir of authority. That authority could conceivably come to an end on January 20, 2017.

Modern progressives have the same confidence in national public administration as the original progressives, who spoke in broad and bold strokes in favor of “social engineering” and “social control.” Given the 20th-century experience with totalitarian governments, few dare to use this language today. Yet modern progressives do not hesitate to urge federal agencies to prod, nudge, and command in ever-increasing spheres of activity. National administration remains the progressives’ primary instrument for transforming American society.

The old progressives wrote many of the seminal works on the theory of public administration. Remembered often as champions of civil service reform, which they were, their objectives went well beyond the late-19th-century reformers’ goal of eliminating patronage, corruption, and inefficiency. Nor did progressives find that much to admire in the British model of the civil service, with its senior corps of classically educated generalists known for their prudence, neutrality, and respect for the rule of law. The progressives’ more ambitious aim was to train and empower a new breed of policy expert educated in the social and technical sciences. Operating under the loose direction of the president, administrators were the vanguard of the progressive project who would promote the people’s best interests, earning the common man’s confidence over the long run. Modern progressives profess to follow the same model. Yet as with many elites, they have not been able to hide their arrogance towards those whom they are supposed to serve. The recent travails of two public servants — Professor Jonathan Gruber, the main architect of the Affordable Care Act, and Lois Lerner, the IRS’s zealous suppressor of unprogressive political activity — illustrate the problem. Both were highly acclaimed within the administration for their intelligence and dedication until their progressive virtues shone too brilliantly.

National public administration is the natural foe of civil society. In the classic conception of liberal democracy, two basic modes of governance share power: the visible source of legal authority (the “state”) and a less visible, informal process known as civil society. Civil society, the more difficult mode to grasp, consists of the network of private institutions and associations (families, churches, clubs, corporations, civic groups, and the like), as well as selected public bodies such as state universities, local public institutions, and, in relation to the national state, lower levels of government. Civil society’s significance lies in its function as a system of rule. Where civil society thrives, much of the nation’s life is indirectly governed by the activities and decisions of its many parts, whether acting individually or in concert. Coordination in civil society is decentralized, relying on the mechanisms of markets, contracts, voluntary undertakings, customary procedures, and informal agreements. The preservation of this system rests on a basic principle: the expectation of the parties involved that their choices and engagements are for the most part made freely, without interference from, or preemption by, a higher outside power. Weaken this expectation and the patterns of interaction and the habits on which civil society depends begin to wither.

A system of rule is most important for how it helps to shape human character and influence a way of life. By habituating people to take responsibility for handling a wide range of social and economic matters, civil society promotes enterprise, initiative, and independence. Those habitually engaged in managing affairs become jealous of their role in governing and seek to protect large spheres of activity from interference by distant administrative bodies. Civil society develops its own complex idea of liberty. It goes beyond the legalistic “state” model of a central government that protects individual rights to include a strong sense of obligation to participate in governing community activities.

Contemporary treatments often go astray by identifying civil society with the political activities of associations, foundations, and groups. In this account, civil society is characterized by these entities’ efforts to influence governmental decisions and affect election outcomes through such activities as lobbying, publishing policy studies, holding conferences, and fundraising. No one disputes the significance of political involvement for maintaining a free country. But if the main activity of groups boils down to arguing about the role of the federal government, whether for its expansion or its limitation, civil society no longer is engaged in its primary function of serving as a system of rule. It becomes a tiny satellite revolving around the main body of the state.

Progressives have contributed to political analysis by making visible some of the hidden workings of civil society. Their aim, however, has for the most part been to expose its deficiencies. Civil society in their description operates to shield business corporations as they exploit workers and gouge consumers, and to protect local governments as they favor the wealthy and deny basic rights. Even where the intentions are more benign, civil society is defective. It is a piecemeal and decentralized system that lacks the overall authority to provide economic security and to supply the equal entitlements of a modern welfare state. It is not rational. Only national public administration can assure uniformity and equality in the delivery of benefits and services. It may take a village to produce a good life, but it will be a village whose school curriculum is guided by the Department of Education, whose police force is under surveillance by the Department of Justice, whose zoning laws need approval by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and whose school lunch menu is planned by the first lady.

With the collapse in the 1960s of a public understanding of the limits of the federal government’s jurisdiction, national policy-making began to touch an ever-growing number of activities. Civil society lost one source of its legal protection. Fewer reminders of its importance were heard in public discourse. This change paved the way for the emergence and dominance of the policy-making mindset. Proposed measures in national politics are debated, under the best scenario, on the basis of the benefits and costs each brings to a particular area — education, health care, housing, etc.— without considering the effects of any single program, much less the accumulating impact of all programs, on the political structure and the place of civil society. Politics is no longer about modes of governance, this old question having been settled, but about policy. At universities, schools of public policy crowd out departments of political science, which once held a place in their curricula for the study of basic questions of rule. The administration of things has replaced the government of men.

Yet as the best progressive thinkers well know, the war between national administration and civil society is not over. As long as civil society has a grip on even part of the American populace, progressivism is not secure. Almost any measure, therefore, that extends federal administrative control, even if its benefits are dubious, garners support, just because it weakens civil society. Expanding the scope of national administration creates additional client groups, which improve the progressives’ prospects of consolidating control of the electorate. Practical progressive politics is all about creating dependencies. Poor policy can sometimes be good politics.

With all the attention paid to social justice, it is sometimes forgotten that progressivism has its own visions for shaping the right kind of human type. The original progressives followed the philosopher John Dewey in rejecting the independent spirit of the “old individualism” and calling instead for a “new individualism” to remake Americans into more “social,” “collective,” and “democratic” beings. Dewey’s point of entrance for this project was K-12 education. By transforming educational theory and schools of education, he sought to change what transpired daily in every classroom in the country. Modern progressives also have perfectionist projects — just look at what is going on in universities. They rely increasingly on national administration to promote their goals and use federal funding in an effort to build a parallel progressive civil society, supporting groups like ACORN and Planned Parenthood.

The expansion of national administration over the past seventy years, and notably over the past seven years, may be applauded or deplored. It cannot be denied. Even where institutions of civil society appear to be acting on their own, closer inspection reveals that they often make decisions in accord with existing regulations or, what is just as important, in anticipation of possible new regulations or with a view to preventing unwanted regulations. National administration is palpable, even when it is not acting. The outward forms of civil society remain, but its inner force is dwindling.

The methods national administration uses to control the parts of civil society that progressives have targeted for conquest are revealing of its enormous power. Agencies deploy their forces in the manner of an invading army tasked with pacifying new territory and eliminating resistance. Familiar tactics include punishing some while offering favors and temporary exemptions to others in order to create collaborators. Emboldened administrative chiefs do not hesitate to employ stealth and deception, especially in the management of information. Selective leaking, deliberate obfuscation, and outright falsification are now common practices. The misrepresentations are sometimes so blatant — think of the inflated figures initially given for Obamacare enrollees — that the purpose cannot merely be to deceive, but to intimidate. Flouting with impunity recognized standards is a way for administrators to signal that resistance to them would be futile. The same is true of the performances of high administrative officials before congressional committees, where contempt for lawmakers is now a deliberate strategy.

Contemporary critics of the administrative state deplore the aggrandizement of bureaucratic agencies and the atrophy of the rule of law. What should be of even greater concern to them are the effects on people’s thought processes and imagination. In the case of the growing number of personnel in our institutions whose job is to implement the burgeoning number of federal regulations, the administrative state has created a class of subjects who identify governance with the promulgation and enforcement of agency-created rules. No wonder, as this system is the source of their livelihood and the path to their career advancement. It is also the basis of their own petty despotism, allowing them to compel others within their institution to bend to their instructions. Then there is the rest of the population, who receive the diktats and comply. More and more of their time is spent filling out forms, taking online mandatory tests, and submitting to mandated training sessions. In an environment filled with a thicket of administrative constraints, fewer and fewer now rely on their own professional or independent judgment. Their horizon shrinks. They may find a tiny measure of satisfaction by complying with the letter of rules while managing to evade their substance. Such pitiful acts of resistance represent the last displays of freedom in a system of social control. The only question for the future is whether most will continue to submit or, summoning what remains of a spirit of independence, conclude that they have had enough.

The Intellectual Movements of the Left

Modern progressivism’s second dimension developed from a breach that opened on the left midway through the progressive century. In a movement known as the New Left, college students in the 1960s, their professors in tow, joined with antiwar activists in reaction against “the system,” the amorphous name given to society’s controlling ideas and dominant institutions. Falling into this last category for the New Left were not only the business corporations that were the targets of the old progressives’ ire, but also the universities, the media, and parts of the government, all of which had a large progressive presence. To their great dismay, progressives — known at the time as liberals — found themselves under attack from the left, mostly in the persons of their own offspring. Families were riven, and major institutions, including the Democratic party and many universities, temporarily came apart. Further challenges from the left followed in the ensuing decades, inspired by multiculturalism and postmodernism.

Words easily deceive, and too many commentators have fallen into the trap of viewing modern progressivism as the simple heir of its early-20th-century namesake. A quick look around belies this characterization. Modern progressivism combines in almost equal measure elements of original progressivism with themes drawn from these later leftist movements, including identity politics, personal expressivism, and antipathy toward Western values. That modern progressives have succeeded in recent years in bringing the two parts together can be seen from the positions of the candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination.

This second dimension of modern progressivism comes from conflicting intellectual sources and contains tensions of its own. Confusion emerged at the outset from within the New Left itself, which was never known for its theoretical rigor. Yet what it lacked in intellectual firepower, it more than made up for in raw energy. The New Left’s vitality stemmed from its relentless opposition to almost everything in American life. Beginning on the political level by decrying the Vietnam war and racial injustice, the New Left moved quickly to focus on the trauma that American culture was said to inflict on people’s spirit or souls. The genuinely “human” was being stifled by bourgeois values, patriotic attitudes, station wagons, and grades. To overcome this repression, the New Left sought to change lifestyles by building up the “counterculture,” its most important legacy. The aim was to promote authentic self-expression, which would be achieved through such means as artistic experimentation, attendance at rock festivals, drug use, and sexual liberation. The only orthodoxy was an insistence on nonorthodoxy.

In its plan for reconstituting society, the New Left relied on the convenient premise that personal liberation would generate community (a favorite term) and a harmonious social order. America would contain a network of communes and smaller political units, each fully democratic. Direct participation was an essential element of self-expression. These units would enforce a robust idea of the common good while also assuring the autonomy of each self. The classic problem of resolving tensions between the collectivity and the individual was taken care of by a positive view of human nature. In the words of the movement’s programmatic Port Huron statement, “We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love.”

If human nature is so good, it remained to explain why the condition of modern life was so bad. For the original progressives, who wrestled with a similar problem, the source of corruption was the free market system and the business corporation. For the New Left, it lay in the triumph of a scientific mindset bent on domination and control. While technology had helped to satisfy many material needs, it brought “loneliness,” “estrangement,” “isolation,” a loss of “meaning in life that is personally authentic,” and “the depersonalization that reduces human beings to the status of things” — in a word, “alienation.”

There is an evident gap in outlook between the college youth of the 1960s and today’s millennial progressives. Their faces glued to their screens, millennials harbor few of the New Left’s suspicions about technology. Nor do millennials attribute their anxieties to a philosophical crisis in Western thought. They prefer instead to speak in therapeutic and medical terms, seeking out psychological counseling and medication. Yet for all these differences, millennials seem to admire New Left radicals, exemplars of which they probably encountered in their forays into the attic, where they chanced upon fading Kodak photos of Grandma with a flower in her hair and of step-grandfather in a tie-dyed T-shirt bearing the motto “make love not war.”

What survives from this old race is the counterculture’s first commandment to cultivate personal liberation and self-expression. Progressive millennials understand this commandment, however, in a new and special way. It applies to themselves, but not to others. Gone is the belief that the liberation of all leads spontaneously to social harmony. Just the opposite, they think, is the case. Removing restraints across the board can allow for the expression of hurtful opinions. More importantly, it produces criminality, violence, addiction, and dysfunctionality. Danger lurks everywhere. A few ideological purists may still insist that all social pathologies result from income inequality, but the privileged youth know in their hearts, and from what they see around them, that this isn’t so. Drug use may be “cool” among peers, but out there, beyond the gates, it produces disorder. A hippie today, far from being that charming vessel of untapped potential for “reason, freedom, and love,” is more likely to be a vagrant. Social justice for society’s down-and-outs is one thing, contact with them is something else. A main preoccupation of millennials is to figure out how to segregate themselves, a confession they make only to friends or on Facebook. This dance of duplicity draws on millennials’ own experience with the child-rearing strategies perfected by their parents, who hovered over them in order to make sure that the self-expression endorsed in theory was always safely circumscribed in practice.

This understanding of the counterculture shapes the environment governing student life at many of the nation’s universities. Millennials demand full personal liberty while expecting complete security. Security consists of protection not only from physical menace, but from psychological discomfort. Universities are asked to meet these demands, which they do by creating infrastructures of psychological counselors, sensitivity trainers, and police (the last often disguised under a euphemistic title). These mechanisms of control are justified initially on the “negative” grounds of providing security, but they soon expand to serve the “positive” purpose of changing the culture to promote progressive ends. National administration is a full partner in this bureaucratic expansion, most recently in the area of relations among the sexes. Beginning from a supposed security concern — a government-sponsored survey finding that “one in five women is sexually assaulted in college” — universities, with backing and encouragement from federal agencies, are implementing elaborate rules for courtship and controlling the approved stages of touching. The Department of Education has mandated the establishment of what amounts to a new national court system for college students to mete out punishments for sexual misconduct. In loco parentis was shown the front door at most universities in the 1960s, in loco administratis has been brought in the back door in the 2010s. For a generation that has canonized freedom and self-expression, the degree of surveillance that it countenances invites bewilderment. The progressive idea of liberty increasingly resembles life in The Truman Show.

Multiculturalism was the next intellectual movement to appear on the left, beginning in the 1980s. Its influence on modern progressivism has been enormous. Under this theory, the New Left’s preoccupation with self-expression was forced to share the stage with the partly conflicting idea of cultural expression. Cultures were seen to be the natural unit of human belonging and the only genuine source of values and norms. No standards exist above or beyond the culture. Individuals are subordinated to the group and liable to sanction for exploring an identity apart from their culture, an experience well known to many African-American conservatives. Defining culture has never been easy, but multi-culturalists settled on tying it to the biological characteristics of race, ethnicity, and gender. Diversity today is defined in both law and practice by this criterion, with regulations requiring a certain percentage of African Americans, Hispanics, women, and so on. As for the purported “cultures” of nations based on beliefs rather than biology, like America, multiculturalists have downgraded them to the status of inauthentic entities, built to hide or destroy the real cultures.

An early version of American multiculturalism wore a kind and gentle face. It looked forward to a society of harmonious relations among the various cultures. People would delight in the experience of variety, from tasting the flavors of different cuisines to enjoying the sounds of distinct accents. Sensitivities and prejudices would become sufficiently relaxed to allow for good-natured intercultural raillery. Underlying this happy vision lay the notion, rarely articulated, of a common humanity.

A different and ultimately more influential understanding of multiculturalism was meanwhile growing among intellectuals, one that emphasized conflict of the kind exemplified in current college protesters’ demands that bearers of white privilege apologize. Multiculturalism in this sense is almost a misnomer, since the crux of this theory rests on a binary distinction between a single victimizer culture (white, of European origin, and male) and the many victimized cultures (blacks, Native Americans, Hispanics, women, and gays). The victimizer culture holds the upper hand, a position that includes the critical power to define terms and impose norms, which it sometimes proclaims to be “universal values” or “natural laws.” The victimized cultures are subjected to one or more of the “isms” of oppression (racism, colonialism, imperialism, and sexism). They have had their voices silenced and their values demeaned — hence their designation in multicultural speech as the “marginalized” or the “other.”

Multiculturalism is far more than a social scientific theory designed to analyze existing political conditions. It is a full ideology culminating in a project that seeks to reverse the existing cultural hierarchy and to give satisfaction to the victimized. The oppressor culture will need to be brought low and the victimized cultures elevated. This reversal applies to both domestic and international politics, which are now indissolubly connected. Multiculturalists wish to secure justice for both the marginalized in America and the oppressed peoples of the world. Oppression is the legacy bequeathed by white Europeans beginning with the Crusades, followed by the creation of colonial empires, and continuing today with the economic domination of the West. Multiculturalism can help the victimized cultures to become more conscious of their plight and build solidarity among them in a struggle against the West. The model is derivative of the Marxist theory of the worldwide revolution, with the oppressor culture taking the place of the bourgeoisie and the oppressed cultures the place of the proletariat. Victimized of the world unite! Variants of this view exercise a considerable influence on progressive ideas of foreign policy, reaching into the highest places in the academy and the government.

One of the multiculturalists’ chief weapons inside Western societies is “political correctness,” which refers to a campaign going on now for some four decades to influence speech, writing, artistic expression, and behavior for the purpose of upending the cultural hierarchy. In addition to seeking to change norms and practices, political correctness aims to shape psychological dispositions, placing the culturally privileged into a state of unease, fearful that what they say or do may offend, and the victimized into a condition of anger and suspicion, looking everywhere for slights. Political correctness initially proceeded by operating through the medium of ideas, mobilizing core activists, and winning over opinion within key sectors of society. These successes were converted into an informal system of sanctions and rewards, where transgressors could suffer a loss of reputation and employment, and supporters could win accolades and find new avenues of advancement. The campaign has now turned to employing more formal measures of enforcement through rules and supportive administrative regulations. Proponents will not rest until political correctness becomes the law of the land.

The full impact of political correctness extends beyond its specific measures to its symbolic impact. The more stylized and extravagant the rituals demanded, the greater the impression they make. The spectacle of a learned professor bending to the demand to issue “trigger warnings” to students in an introductory class is on a par with the feudal subject bowing to a superior and averting his gaze. Such displays of obeisance initially signal the emergence and later the consolidation of a new social order.

Political correctness has enjoyed enormous success in promoting the multiculturalist agenda in both Europe and the United States. Its progress was steady and seemingly irreversible. Yet it is now provoking a vast public reaction that threatens to alter the political landscape on both sides of the Atlantic. Opposition to p.c. is currently a main theme in the American presidential campaign.

Multiculturalism today exerts considerable influence on the administrative agencies involved with issues of race and gender. It is well to recall, however, that the origin of the civil rights movement predated the rise of multiculturalism, going back to the 1960s or even to the 1860s, and was born of a different spirit. Civil rights legislation developed not out of an abstract ideology, but from an effort to deal with the problems stemming from America’s “original sin” of race slavery and its aftermaths. Its aim was to end legal segregation and discrimination and make good on the liberal democratic principle of equal treatment of all individuals. Its theoretical foundation was the principle of natural rights, with added support from biblical teachings. As multiculturalism began to colonize the intellectual left, it also penetrated the civil rights movement, altering its focus. Its agenda today includes boycotts on products from Israel, calls for gender and ethnic studies programs at universities, and plans to establish a national curriculum in American history favorable to a multiculturalist narrative. The spirit behind multiculturalism is captured in the building excitement over the moment in 2045 when, according to census projections, “white people” become a minority of the American population. This demographic shift is already being hailed as a landmark in American history, above all by those who elevate their own racial self-contempt to the status of a high moral virtue. The civil rights movement may have expanded its coalition, but it has lost its soul.

Modern progressivism is suspended somewhere between acquiescence to and approval of multiculturalism. The hesitations come from contradictions that have emerged within multiculturalism in response to its confrontation with real events. The genocide in Rwanda and the chaos that followed the Arab Spring exposed the fiction of solidarity among the oppressed and showed that fanaticism can be constituent of an authentic culture. The most severe regimes of oppression against women and gays are perpetrated by victimized cultures. Progressives in extreme cases have concluded that certain oppressed cultures may need to be condemned or policed. The problem has been to find a justification. Happily for progressives, the quandary is always resolved by the arrival, just in the nick of time, of Puff the Magic Value. Overnight America, the oppressor nation, is magically transformed from being the carrier of the “white man’s burden” to becoming the defender, in President Obama’s words, of “human dignity” and “universal values.” Alas, Puff does not linger, but slips back into his cave in Honalee. The trance over, multiculturalists return to their more comfortable posture of assailing Western privilege.

Postmodernism is the last of the developments on the intellectual left that has influenced modern progressivism. Less directly connected to politics than the New Left or multiculturalism, it entered American thought from the academy. Its main premise is that there are no real or true theoretical foundations or philosophically grounded values. The Declaration of Independence’s laws of nature and the theoretical idea of progress, not to mention Nature’s God and God’s providence, are fictions. In philosophy classes, this premise might be subsumed under the formula that “nothing is by nature, and everything is by convention.” Expressed in a more popularized version, as one might hear it today in any course in cultural studies, it is that “everything is socially constructed.” Exported from the classroom to the quad, this slogan is deployed to call into question any custom or institution that the left is currently targeting for extinction.

Postmodernism became the leading school in humanistic thought in higher education in the 1980s. In combination with multiculturalism, it helped create new disciplines and programs within the humanities and the social sciences. Thousands of its acolytes entered the professoriate, where they proceeded to spawn generations of postmodern scholars, taking great care to secure their advancement. This clerisy now plays a role in running many universities and is assured of doing so until well into the 21st century. Talk of being on the right side of history!

Postmodernism’s influence beyond the academy is considerable but, being indirect, difficult to trace. No major political figure in America boasts of acting under the aegis of postmodernism in the way that many of the Founders affirmed an attachment to natural rights philosophy or many progressive leaders an affinity with Darwinism. With philosophy now occupying a much lesser role in general education than in the past, most in the political class seem to have managed to receive their degrees without having experienced a serious encounter with postmodernism. President Obama, who was long an academic himself, stands out as one of the rare exceptions.

There is a voluminous literature, it is true, connecting Bill Clinton with postmodernism. A pairing of these two terms in a Google search brings up an astounding 270,000 hits. Observers have fastened on the former president’s casual relation to what had previously been regarded as moral truths, and on his uncanny ability to evade sanctions that once attached to certain transgressions. All this suggested that Clinton played a seminal role in exposing Americans to a lightheartedness about the deeper strata of things, an outlook that was nicely captured in the phrase “moving on,” which made its grand debut in reference to the Clinton scandals. This impression was strengthened by Clinton’s unprecedented step of introducing the ontological question into American politics when speculating on what the meaning of is is. Yet to be precise about Clinton’s role, the link observers posited between Clinton and postmodernism was based on what they ascribed to this situation. No one alleged that Clinton was postmodern by design, but only that he was so by being there. Postmodernism may have first appeared in the White House with the Clintons, but it only achieved consciousness with Barack Obama.

Postmodernism’s impact on politics was initially more tactical than theoretical. Intellectuals, already on the left before they ever became postmodern, discovered in postmodernism a useful weapon to advance their goals. Denying the truth of foundations served to undermine important parts of the tradition, from the claim of natural rights that underlay American exceptionalism to the religious tenets that supported older morality and customs. If all things are socially constructed, there is no reason not to discard any one of them and replace it with something else, it being self-evident that all social constructions are created equal. Progressives employed this tactic selectively, deconstructing only the ideas and practices they disapproved of. Yet since much of the culture at this point still rested on traditional beliefs, it made sense for progressives to embrace the general postmodern doctrine of nonfoundationalism, or what they called “pragmatism.” The claim of social construction proved attractive to progressives in one other respect. It encouraged the view that everything is malleable. Reality is what we make it. This liberating notion gave impetus to creating new norms, lifestyles, and genders, with each breakthrough becoming an occasion for celebrating yet another festival of a first.

Tactical postmodernism left open the question of whether this philosophy would continue to serve the cause of progressivism. As progressivism succeeds in wiping out old verities, the culture becomes a product not of tradition, but of the left’s making. If postmodernism is an equal-opportunity destroyer, it is the left’s creations that may be exposed and subject to hostile makeovers. Wary of this possibility, some leftist thinkers have endeavored to prove that postmodernism is inherently supportive of progressivism. By this account, once pragmatism comes to dominate within the leading segments of society, the result will be a political order, eventually perhaps a world order, of tolerance and democracy. When all give up brandishing their truth claims, which are the source of conflict, people will grow more relaxed and gentle. Relativism chimes with progressivism. This extraordinary view formed the intellectual underpinning of the European Union in the first decade of this century, leading many of Europe’s thinkers to laud their new postfoundational democratic order and to contrast it with Americans’ primitive insistence on theoretical foundations. The settlement of the world’s problems would only come by rejecting the American model and following the European approach. American progressives readily joined in this view.

Reality is now demonstrating the shallowness of this argument, which is collapsing of its own accord. Deeper postmodern thinkers made known in any case that this position had never been intended as anything more than pabulum designed to reassure casual postmoderns of a progressive bent — in other words, most intellectuals — that everyone in the end would think much as they did. Real postmodernism, these thinkers revealed, could offer no support for any particular form of government. Its relativist starting point might just as easily end in a choice to embrace an authoritarian government as a progressive democratic one. What postmodernism can supply is insight for how to prevail in the political world. Postmodernism is ultimately a philosophy of will. After freeing the mind of illusions, it instructs the few, meaning the few who understand, in how to go about imposing their vision on society. Mastery is obtained by shaping the public narrative, that most favored of postmodern words. Narrativicians are the legislators of the world.

Postmodernism’s elitist and top-down conception of politics may help account for the progressives’ indifference today to the republican dimension of regular citizen participation, especially in state and local politics. Progressives speak of democracy, but it is conceived in terms of an outcome — social justice and liberation — not a process of governing. The only democratic procedure that counts is the mobilization of a national majority for the presidential contest. Postmodern elitism finds its ultimate expression in the technique of linguistic management, a point on which President Obama has shown his true postmodern colors. The administration’s strange avoidance of ordinary language— words such as terrorism, war on terrorism, Islamic — in favor of euphemisms and new expressions is a sure sign of a grand strategy of narrative-shaping to further the progressive vision. Even some of the president’s prevarications have a strangely postmodern ring, appearing less as ordinary lies meant to hide or get away with something than as attempts to construct a favorable reality. If, as postmodernists like to repeat, “language is the house of being,” the president has taken on the task of being its chief building contractor.

This strategy of linguistic manipulation has enjoyed some success in progressive circles, but outside it has fallen well short of what was hoped for. Human perceptions in the face of real conditions may be less susceptible to narrative-shaping than postmodernism has taught. The world is not a field of dreams. The most noteworthy effect of the president’s language games has been the emergence of a strong public reaction, arguably stronger than the reaction to the president’s policies themselves. Its source is the deep anger of those who sense that they have been treated like unwilling subjects in a laboratory experiment in psychological coercion. It remains now to be seen if this reaction, which parallels the reaction against political correctness, will lead to a curtailment of these methods or, as seems more likely, to the rise of cruder distortions of traditional political discourse.

Progressivism In Practice

The third component that constitutes modern progressivism is made up not of ideas or theories, but of what progressivism has meant in the realm of practice — for life outcomes, mores, and the workings of institutions. Historians and commentators commonly emphasize the realm of practice when offering an overall sketch of progressivism’s rival, liberal capitalism. Yet rarely, and then only selectively, do they begin by analyzing progressivism in these terms.

There is a partial historical explanation for this imbalance. Progressivism emerged when liberal capitalism — roughly the Constitution and a free market economy — was in place as the “system.” Progressivism was the youthful challenger, not yet part of the system, that aimed to replace the established rival. Viewing progressivism in this light, which initially accorded with reality, became a habit of thinking. It was one that progressives, for political reasons of their own, had reason to encourage. Even as progressivism’s actual influence expanded to cover more and more aspects of American life, progressives continued to disclaim responsibility for any of the ills that plagued society. These were all the fault of the system. Like Peter Pan, progressivism will not grow up. By its own self-conception, it cannot.

The statute of limitations on this intellectual anachronism should by all rights have expired long ago. Progressivism has been around now for well over a century and can no longer plausibly present itself as new or young. All of its wrinkles — huge and inefficient bureaucracies, ponderous regulations, and endemic violations of the rule of law — are showing through its makeup. Nor is progressivism the innocent outsider or wayfarer begging at the door for admittance to the system. Progressivism is the system, at least as much as, if not more than, liberal capitalism. And with its vast interests to defend and its clients to sustain, progressivism is also every bit as much constitutive of the status quo. Just as liberal capitalism has bred pathologies like crony capitalism, progressivism has created its dysfunction of crony progressivism.

The vastness and porousness of these two categories make it impossible to parse exactly their relative influence. But much is discernible. In governance, the Constitution still supplies the basic outline of the national government. Yet none would deny that it has been overlaid and modified in practice by the progressive constitution that calls for unlimited federal jurisdiction, a huge administrative apparatus, an expansive domestic presidency, and a jurisprudence of living interpretation. As for which force has run this machine, the contestants have been in constant struggle, often finding themselves in deadlock. But in the three breakthrough political moments since the Depression when one side has held something approaching full political power (the New Deal, the Great Society, and the Obama majority in 2009-2010), it was progressives who were in charge. The closest partisans of liberal capitalism have come to achieving this status was a limited coalitional majority during the Reagan revolution of 1981-82.

Outside the boundaries of government, within the commanding centers of power that shape society and control the manufacture of consent, progressives now fare very well. Higher education, despite the source of much of its private funding, is a bastion of progressivism; the dominant news media, despite corporate ownership, lean decisively to the left; the entertainment industry .  .  . just watch an Academy Awards show. The moral codes have all been rewritten under progressive guidance, while the influence of religion is declining.

Still playing Peter Pan, progressives conveniently ignore the power of these command centers and insist that decisive control in society lies with the moneyed interests that necessarily support liberal capitalism. The claim is exaggerated. Money can surely buy much, but if it were as powerful as progressives allege, its investments in all of the other social institutions should have netted a much better return. The truth is — just as the progressives’ intellectual idol Antonio Gramsci showed — these different sources of command enjoy a substantial degree of independence with the power among them more dispersed than is supposed. Few progressives like to consider the possibility, but it may well be that the upper one percent of the intelligentsia exercises as much overall influence as the upper one percent of the wealthy. And to the great advantage of the left, the members of the intelligentsia are far more homogeneously progressive than the wealthy are liberal capitalist. Wealth in fact is distributed widely between the two contending parties. It can be stipulated that the supporters of liberal capitalism maintain full control over the nation’s country clubs, and they no doubt also hold the advantage on Wall Street. Yet a quick look at the largest personal fortunes in America shows that progressives are just as well placed as defenders of capitalism, while in the arena of philanthropic foundations, progressives hold the edge, even without counting the Clinton Foundation.

A major change taking place within the populace today about what constitutes the “system” provides a key for understanding our politics. For a long time, longer than the facts warranted, there was rough agreement between liberal capitalists (known as conservatives) and progressives on what the system was, though not, obviously, on what should be done. Both sides considered the Constitution to be the governing instrument of the political order and the market and free enterprise to be the ordering principle of the economy. Progressives were dissatisfied with this arrangement and wanted it to be changed, while conservatives wanted it to be maintained. Yet both were in basic accord on what the system was.

No longer is this the case. Conservatives look out at the political world today and see it as being run by a progressive establishment. The old system is teetering or gone. Progressives, though surely aware of their enhanced status, elect for obvious reasons to claim that the decisive power lies, much as it did in the past, with the big interests and a capitalist economic elite. Leaving the ideological dimension of the term aside, supporters of which side now think of themselves as “conservative” in the literal sense of being conservers or defenders of the prevailing order? It is not now conservatives, and not yet progressives.

The general public sees problems all around — a loss of opportunity, a low-growth economy, stagnant wages in the middle class, mounting debt, and lingering poverty. Yet who or what is accountable? For progressives the fault continues to lie with liberal capitalism. For conservatives it lies in the new system, progressivism, that was built supposedly to resolve these problems.

Where then is the left today? Gone is the pixie dust that Barack Obama sprinkled over American politics in 2008 that led so many, for a moment, to imagine a new dimension to American politics. The left today is all about the ideology of progressivism. It is fated to blame all ills on the shrinking part of the political order and society it does not yet fully control and to demand more measures to shrink it still further. Progressivism is on a treadmill, running either at a fast clip toward huge new piecemeal changes or at a faster clip toward a change to socialism. The direction is the same.

James W. Ceaser is professor of politics at the University of Virginia and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His “The Roots of Obama Worship” appeared in our issue of January 25, 2010.