‘Progressivism Is as Progressivism Does’

It’s an interesting trope—and it shouldn’t get the pass it usually does. A pithy line of Irving Kristol’s from a few decades back is especially helpful: “Socialism is as socialism does.”

Before the Velvet Revolutions of the late 20th century, unapologetic Marxists and socialists ran free in all the best places, everywhere strutting their supposed moral authority. They claimed to hold the high ground against democratic capitalism. They insisted that their ideas would better help the poor—indeed, that they were the only ones who even cared about the poor. They professed their own purity of motive. And of course they reiterated ad nauseam that history and justice were on their side.

And like Samuel Johnson kicking a stone to refute Bishop Berkeley’s immaterialism, Irving Kristol demolished Marxism’s moral claims thus: “Socialism is as socialism does.” Don’t look at what socialism says of itself; look at what socialism does in the world.

In similar spirit, after two terms of President Obama and team, a standard for measuring his movement’s moral record springs to mind: “Progressivism is as progressivism does.” This is particularly true of today’s newer and much evolved variant of progressivism: the kind dominant in Washington since 2009, as well as in academia and Hollywood and many courts; the kind that takes its marching orders from the sexual revolution, rather than from the biblical understanding of justice and its demands; the kind that liberal thinkers of yesterday, like Christopher Lasch and Martin Luther King Jr., would disown.

Like yesterday’s Marxism, this new so-called progressivism claims—and claims, and claims—that it stands on the side of the marginalized and needy. But by the standard of what its activists do, as opposed to what they say, what does the record show?

We know, first, that this new progressivism is no friend of religious liberty. We know this because in and out of government, it has interfered with and even undercut religious liberty itself. We also know the Obama administration has steadily replaced the phrase “freedom of religion” in key documents with the far more constricting “freedom of worship.” “Freedom of worship” sounds like something you can do in your closet. Freedom of religion is one freedom that doesn’t require money to exercise; that can be shared equally by rich and poor alike. How does constricting that help brothers and sisters in need?

The ledger also shows that this new progressivism will run roughshod over humbler souls. Consult for starters the Little Sisters of the Poor, who live with and care for dying people whom everyone else has thrown out. What did today’s neo-progressivism have to say to these saintly nuns? It dangled handcuffs at them. It threatened them with crippling fines, all to make them knuckle under to what the sexual revolution now demands.

That is a rousing example of the dictum “progressivism is as progressivism does.” What kind of ideology goes after people like the Little Sisters in the first place? What kind of activism calls the harassing of selfless religious women a day well spent?

We know, third, that in the name of this new progressivism, other initiatives are afoot that will also hurt the poor. Christian education, for example, is under attack on numerous fronts. Home-schooling is a perpetual bête noire of progressive thinking, opposed by the National Education Association and other institutions of the left. Atheist Richard Dawkins and others have even called religious home-schooling the equivalent of child abuse.

Then there are attempts to undermine the very transmission of Christian ideas in higher reaches. At least two prominent colleges of Protestant evangelicalism, the King’s College in New York and Gordon College in Massachusetts, have undergone accreditation battles in the last ten years. Anyone who thinks that Catholic schools will somehow escape the same is blind to the signs of the times. One 2014 essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education by a professor at the University of Pennsylvania argued that no Christian college should be accredited.

Of course the secularist mission of disrupting Christian education hurts the poor. Many parents home-school for the simple reason that they don’t want their children in mediocre government schools. Both President Obama and President Clinton sent their children to elite private schools rather than to the District of Columbia’s public ones. What about parents who also don’t want their kids in mediocre schools, but who don’t have the means of American presidents?

Similarly, religious education, and the Catholic school system above all, has been an irreplaceable engine of social and intellectual mobility for generations now. It’s lifted millions of Catholics and non-Catholics alike to a better life, thereby rendering them able to help others in turn. Neo-progressivism shrugs at that record, too.

Here is a fourth fact about today’s dominant variant of progressivism as it pertains to the poor. In any contest between the perceived mandates of the sexual revolution on the one hand and the competing needs of anybody else, the revolution trumps. And a long line of litigation in addition to that of the Little Sisters can be summoned to prove it.

The U.S. Catholic bishops, for example, who resettle some 25 percent of the refugees in this country, are sued by abortion rights groups. Why? Because their refugee work at the southern border of the United States does not include contraception and abortion. Catholic hospitals are sued by the same antagonists for the same reason. Christian adoption agencies have been shuttered in Boston and elsewhere, for refusing to recant Christian teaching about the family. Emergency pregnancy centers around the country are sued and harassed by burdensome, ideologically driven ordinances. These are places where mothers-to-be go for help ranging from sonograms to diapers, because they want babies rather than abortions. Inexplicably, grim activists work to make their “choice” for life more onerous.

How is any of this neo-progressive legal activism in the interests of real, live people—pregnant women looking for help, refugees desperate for a lifeline, babies and children looking for loving homes?

In sum, and in dark contrast to lofty talk of being “that good Samaritan,” as the president also once declared, today’s dominant strain of progressivism includes interfering with good works, menacing voluntary organizations that help the poor, and torpedoing Christian resources via ideologically fueled litigation.

These are toxic fruits. And the soil in which they flourish does not come from moral high ground.

Neither, finally, do today’s sorties against religious liberty. The poor, the destitute, the dying, the unwanted, the hungry, the imprisoned: All have exactly the same right to freedom as everyone else. Destitution and hardship are often the crucibles out of which steely faith emerges in the first place. People who find God in the midst of chaos and misery should never be told—as so many neo-progressives would tell them—that they’re on the wrong side of history.

Robert George gave a speech a couple of years ago which included the refrain, “The days of acceptable Christianity are over. The days of comfortable Catholicism are past.” Something else is becoming clearer by the day as well. After a decade of progressive ascendency, the distance between what that movement says about the castoff and forlorn and what it does to those same people has become measurable. It’s time to hold that record up to the light. The day when comfortable neo-progressivism is over will be a better day for those who need help from the rest of us.

Mary Eberstadt is author of It’s Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies (HarperCollins). This essay is adapted from a talk given at the American Enterprise Institute conference in June on “Catholic Thought and Human Flourishing.”