Category: Porgressivism

*It’s the unstated point in Jeffrey Anderson’s “The Masking of America: Faceless people make compliant subjects, not good citizens” in the Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2021.

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Hillary Clinton in a 2015 Anderson Cooper interview on CNN: “I’m a progressive, but I’m a progressive that likes to get things done.”  Well, what is it that she claims to be in order to “get things done”?  However defined, she isn’t alone.  Today’s Democratic Party is almost the exclusive home base of it.

Progressivism should not be confused with “progress”.  Progress is a trend of improvement.  Progressivism is an ideology, a belief system similar to a religion but without the supernatural.  Call it a secular religion – and thusly an oxymoron – but that hasn’t stopped it from having its moment in the sun, which it still enjoys.  The glow won’t last forever.  At a certain point, it’s botches are too glaring to ignore.  Is the trucker protest a sign of the dethronement?

Call it prog-thought.  Many hear of it but few can describe it.  Don’t expect to be enlightened by the schools.  The schools give it curt treatment because emphasis is given to actions and historical personages, all of which they approve because they are caught up in prog-thought.

What you won’t get from the instructor is the fact that the ideological edifice is built upon Hegel’s idea of history as a chronology of improvements, one piling on top of the others over time.  Improvement is defined as the heightened status of rationality in decision making, and rationality is best embodied in people like him, Hegel (professor at Heidelberg and Berlin Universities) – credentialed, degreed, many years of formal schooling.  The purported efficiencies of the post-Napoleonic bureaucracies of his native Prussia were his ideal, which would blossom after his death under Bismarck and the Kaisers.  Notice the absence of popular sovereignty in the scheme.  The perspective’s early acolytes included 19th century Americans trained in German universities.  It’s the beginning of the movement to train the apostles of the administrative state in the home of specialized PhD’s (college) who would infiltrate the subsequent and growing alphabet soup of unaccountable agencies.

Today, we are governed by the alphabet soup more than our elected representatives.  Agency letter groups proliferated in the 20th century’s new and expanding field of public health in the FDA, CDC, NIH, NIMH, NIAID, etc., and the proliferation of state and local entities.  The field of public health came to be the province of advanced-degreed specialists – the specialist possessing governmental power in the service of their specialty.  The narrowness of perspective of the specialist is sharpened by a work life in the unique social eco-system in this expanding bureaucracy.

A climb up the greasy pole (in Churchill’s words) of career advancement places a premium on risk-aversion.  The routine for career advancement remains the same throughout: don’t stand out, except as a compliant, ingratiating subordinate while avoiding black marks on evaluations.  Steering clear of risks to one’s institutional reputation and the blinkered view of life spent in a specialty shapes a constrained, risk-averse personality for decision making.  It showed during the Covid scare.

At the onset of the pandemic, instead of admitting ignorance of the virus, Fauci and others flip-flop on masks until resting on masking-forever, sometimes triple-layered.  He must be seen as doing something and the default position is obsessive risk avoidance.  It reaches absurd lengths, and a complete lack of common sense.  Take a look at this gem of guidance for children from the WHO: “Before putting on the mask, children should clean their hands…at least 40 seconds if using soap and water…. Children should not touch the front of the mask [or] pull it under the chin…. After taking off their mask, they should store it in a bag or container and clean their hands.”  Riiiiight!  Picture that!

Fact is, the mitigations of mandatory-everything – lockdowns, church and school closings, masking, social distancing, vaccinations, deserted central business districts, the Zooming of life, etc. – is unprecedented.  According to the historian Niall Ferguson, it wasn’t done in 1918 (Spanish flu), 1957 (Asian flu), or 1968 (Hong Kong flu).  Back then, more people were cognizant of life’s risk calculus.  Risk accompanies everything we do.  As for diseases, they came and went with the suffering that is the flip side of life.  The only difference is that today we have raised a population on the belief in a faux phalanx of “experts” to shield us from life’s vagaries.

To no surprise, we have bred a mass of neurotics: people wearing masks while worshipping at the feet of tunnel-visioned experts and believing their pronouncements to be “the science”.  You’ll see them everywhere in the Covid era from the masked while driving alone to the lonely outside jogger with labored breathing enveloped in the thing.  A time traveler from the 1950’s, while viewing the scene, could be excused for thinking that the doomsday movies of his time were akin to biblical prophesies.

The heralded “science” becomes less the search for truth and more the reflection of the more immediate needs of bureaucrats and their progressive patrons.  Absent, or in spite of, the gold standard of randomized clinical trials, they reach for observational studies.  The difference between the two is profound.  The latter can have difficulty in determining causation.  That won’t stop interested parties – bureaucrats and politicians – from manipulating and interpreting the observed findings.

We saw the corrupted practice during the pandemic.  For example, New York under lockdown had fewer cases than wide open Florida at a certain moment.  But New York’s results are due to unrelated factors peculiar to the state, and, given enough time, theirs jumps ahead of Florida.  Averaged over the two-year lifespan of the pandemic, the experiences of the two are roughly the same — only Floridians are happier.  During the interim, in the risk-averse blue bubbles, the populace became guinea pigs to placate the biases of politicized and narrowly-informed specialists.

In spite of it all, you can’t say that the actions of the hyper-active state worked.  The virus continued to afflict more than the unvaccinated.  It mutated and still spread.  The guidance went from 15 days to stop the spread, to lockdowns to bend the curve, to school closures for up to two years, to mandatory mask-wearing and vaccination, to an end to fellowship in worship, to a retarded work ethic, to a crippling of small business, to the debilitating alternative reality of Zoom (or Skype).

What did we get for it?  Looking across the immediate history, we got a summer of riots (2020), an emerging police state to squash resistance to the administrative state and party in power, inflation, empty store shelves, an unwillingness to return to work, loosey-goosey elections, and a loss of at least one academic year of educational achievement for kids in homes below the median income.  It is a catastrophe for which we may have difficulty recovering.

We should not be surprised that the expertocracy led us to this impasse.  These administrative functionaries are people with a very pinched background living a secluded life, and, as it turns out, residing in selective and exclusive locations as well.  Fauci, Walensky, and the others hobnob in the blue bubble.  Their social circumstances, and educational backgrounds, are as limited as their range of understanding.  It’s an exclusive club populated by progressives.  The club’s perimeters are policed by the high costs and exclusive zoning that require an ample income to afford the 5 or 6 Benjamins to take the family to a Senators game.  For your information, Fauci’s annual take from the federal treasury is only $16,000 less ($384,000) than Biden’s ($400,000), and that doesn’t include his abundant investment portfolios from years of unstated influence peddling.

I don’t think that there’s a chance that we’ll see Fauci enjoying beer and chips with an Akron plumber, or any plumber for that matter, for the Superbowl.  He and the rest of them live a world apart, and the world beyond the blue bubble is beginning to be weary of the expertocracy.  Its reputation has taken a hit in polls and surveys.  The CDC’s esteem in one survey fell from 60% in March 2020 to 41% in December 2021.  The public’s opinion of the federal government flipped from a high of 70% in 1972 to 39% in 2021 in one Gallup poll.  Pew put it at 73% in 1957 and 24% in 2021. The results are richly deserved.

Is a peasant revolt brewing?  Truckers have had it.  Moms and dads have had it.  The only remaining question is this: Does the average person understand the connection between our current predicament and the reigning orthodoxy of progressivism as promulgated by an expertocratic priesthood?  The root of all evil in the modern era is not mammon, but is more likely to be found in a blind faith in apparatchiks.  It’s the one thing that eugenics, communism, socialism, fascism, and progressivism have in common.

RogerG