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    Senior Member AirborneSapper7's Avatar
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    Progressivism Is Not Progress It Is Regression

    Progressivism Is Not Progress It Is Regression

    Thursday, January 9, 2014

    Source: Investor_com

    Going Backward: The political left is celebrating last week's inauguration of "progressive" New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and believes a new era of American progressivism has arrived. If it's right, the country is in trouble.

    Politicker reported Wednesday from City Hall that de Blasio "was feted" at the inauguration "as the sudden hero of progressives and good-government advocates across the city."

    On the same day, Washington Post opinion writer E.J. Dionne predicted "the re-emergence of a Democratic left will be one of the major stories of 2014" in a column headlined "The Resurgent Progressives."

    Dionne suggested that Democratic moderates "should be cheering them on."

    Gavin Newsom, former San Francisco mayor and current California lieutenant governor, said last week that de Blasio "has a remarkable opportunity to make real many progressive policies and prove their merit," adding that "a lot of us are counting on his success."

    Progressivism. It sounds positive and uncontroversial. After all, we all want to progress, don't we?
    But progressivism isn't what its advocates want everyone to think it is. It is not a road to progress or any attempt to make progress. It is a return to a tribal existence in which groups fight among each other for government-distributed resources.

    Progressivism dates back to the late 19th century. Its animating objective is to use the power of government to design, order, mold and control society.
    Under this idea, professional politicians and master bureaucrats identify what they believe to be societal flaws and use government to "fix" them. It results in the practice of unlimited government and the supremacy of the state, which has the duty, according to progressive political scientist John Burgess, to perfect humanity.

    Burgess, who rose to influence in the late 19th century, also believed the state should have "original, absolute, unlimited, universal power over the individual subject, and all associations of subjects."

    To realize their goal, progressives must reject the Constitution, the Founders, individualism, God-given freedom and, in fact, God himself.
    Also out as impediments to a progressive paradise are private property — except for whatever property the progressives can get their hands on — capitalism and markets free of state intervention.

    To progressives, these are troublesome notions that must be discarded to make way for "progress." They would replace them with wealth redistribution, government management of production and commerce, regulation, price controls and autocratic central planning.
    As a progressive, de Blasio, who has an ugly history of sympathizing with Soviet Communists, the Castros and Nicaragua's Sandinistas, believes his biggest task is to end New York's "tale of two cities."

    "We are called to put an end to economic and social inequalities that threaten to unravel the city we love," he said when sworn in on New Year's Day. "And so today, we commit to a new progressive direction in New York."

    While not taxing the rich to solve the inequality he's obessed with, de Blasio will push public schools at the expense of successful charter schools, agitate for affordable housing and universal pre-K, ditch his predecessors' welfare reforms, increase the dole and bully businesses.
    In case there was some confusion, the new mayor clearly signaled his intentions in November, when he declared "I believe in the heavy hand of government."

    But what about those who aren't progressives? Why should they be required by government force — which is required to employ progressivism — to participate?

    The divide between progressivism and the march toward free people and markets could hardly be wider. One is a system of compulsion and threats, the other an order of voluntary associations in which individuals decide how much they want to participate.

    Read more at Investor_com

    http://ameripac.org/articles/progres...-is-regression

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  3. #3
    Senior Member AirborneSapper7's Avatar
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    Human Events

    The progressive agenda demands that you trust the state to control economic outcomes — not a popular idea among Americans.

    One reason among many as to why America isn't destined to be more liberal:

    http://www.humanevents.com/2014/01/2...-more-liberal/
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    Senior Member AirborneSapper7's Avatar
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    AMERICA ISN’T DESTINED TO BE MORE LIBERAL



    By:
    David Harsanyi
    1/24/2014 10:38 AM


    In a recent Washington Post op-ed, left-wing activist Steve Rosenthal sounds a lot like other wishful thinkers arriving at a comfortable partisan conclusion. America, he writes, is only a few years from a full-blown progressive electorate. “A close examination of U.S. attitudes in the past decade-plus,” Rosenthal contends, “reveals that the United States is steadily becoming more progressive.”
    It seems to be widely accepted by the media that demographics, GOP ineptitude and internal division, and a generational shift on social issues place the American voter on an enduring leftward course. Is this inevitable? Well, about as inevitable as Karl Rove’s durable Republican majority.
    You don’t have to be a stickler for academic rigor to appreciate that an 825-word column with a few links to some Gallup polls is not really a “close examination” of anything. But you don’t have to be a historian to understand that the electorate, though hardly immune to terrible ideas, is, in the end, stubbornly moderate with little use for philosophical consistency. Which is to say, no one knows what the future will look like.
    Voters not only have conflicting ideological views but also change their minds on those issues all the time — and oftentimes for no good reason at all. We are irrational. We are mercurial. We’re irresponsible. And when we’re not, events that “change everything” (9/11 and the Great Recession come to mind) tend to blow up these alleged electoral trajectories we’re on anyway. And let’s not forget voter backlashes, religious awakenings, economic booms and busts, political scandals, charismatic leaders, and technological advances, all of which can disrupt lines on the graph.
    That’s just broadly speaking, of course. Even if we accepted Rosenthal’s facts in the short term, a person could use his piece to make a rather compelling case that the nation is trending more libertarian than it is progressive.
    A cultural shift is not always an ideological one — or at least not always the one you imagine. Our norms are always evolving. Immigration, pot legalization, same-sex marriage and “big business” are the issues that Rosenthal claims portend progressivism’s triumph. Yet most of these are only incidentally progressive. Marijuana legalization or support for same-sex marriage is far more likely caused by a growing “live and let live” mindset than it is any burst of leftist idealism. And if the “live and let live” mindset starts bleeding into other areas of American life — say, education, health care and religious freedom — the left is in trouble.
    In the end, the progressive agenda demands that you trust the state to control economic outcomes — an idea that is yet to be proved especially popular among Americans.
    Will it be? Who knows? But right now, what does seem to be growing is skepticism toward government, especially among the young. When Gallup asks about what people “think the most important problem facing this country today is,” it doesn’t bode well for the left that a plurality of people — independents, Republicans and Democrats — say it’s government. Fifty-three percent of Americans claim to believe government does “too many things.” (Forty percent think its powers should be expanded.) Add to this the fact that according to Gallup, a record number of Americans (42 percent) are rejecting partisan labels and identifying as political independents. Sounds as if there’s a growing number of voters with a libertarian disposition — though most would never articulate it that way.
    And right now, the unpopularity and struggles of Obamacare — the most notable political accomplishment associated with the progressive left — make it tough to imagine any electorate signing off on another national technocratic adventure in the foreseeable future. The Obamacare debate has made it nearly impossible to do anything in Washington (a triumph for libertarian governance). Judging from the polls, the voters Rosenthal claims are turning hard left seem to be more amenable to supporting reforms that loosen, rather than expand, federal control over health care. What makes anyone believe a more progressive alternative would be popular?
    But like many folks on the left, Rosenthal is forced to make a big leap. He contends that a shift on social issues and the electoral success of (a now-unpopular) Barack Obama prove that the entire progressive buffet is destined for widespread approval. Guess what. It doesn’t work that way. Support for gay marriage does not mean support for unions. (Unions, one of the backbones of political progressivism, have never been less popular in practice.) Pot legalization does not mean we’re ready to nationalize energy policy. And support for immigration reform doesn’t mean people are prepared to “make everything owned by everybody” as a writer in Rolling Stone suggests. And though I certainly don’t believe we’re about to privatize Social Security, to believe that the philosophy of the electorate is on a fixed leftward arc — which seems to be conventional wisdom these days — is premature.
    David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter @davidharsanyi.

    http://www.humanevents.com/2014/01/2...-more-liberal/

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    Senior Member AirborneSapper7's Avatar
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