What Do Progressives Really Want?

By Lionel Shriver

Thursday, September 24, 2026

 

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Note: The following is an edited version of remarks delivered for The New Criterion’s eighth annual Circle Lecture on September 24, 2026.

 

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I’m afraid there’s a price to pay for asking a fiction writer to deliver a formal lecture. I plan to trade in freewheeling overgeneralization, unsupported inference, and sheer speculation. I’m a novelist. I make stuff up.

 

The question before us is this: what do progressives really want? It’s always worth attending to what people tell you they want and first to take that at face value—you know, diversity, equity, and inclusion, et cetera. But novelists like to look under the hood.

 

Now, if there are progressives in the audience, I’m hoping that hearing what alienated former Democrats like me think of you as a brand is at least informative. I also acknowledge the ease with which progressives can rattle off an even more lacerating and entirely convincing takedown of the Trumpist Right.

 

Progressivism is not only a set of positions but a mindset. A temperament, a disposition. A constellation of dominant emotions. A set of instincts, a personality profile. In my most recent novel, A Better Life, I tried to capture this characterological composite in my protagonist’s mother, Gloria Bonaventura—who invites an unvetted immigrant into her Brooklyn home, with tragic consequences. Gloria in her innocence risks seeming a stereotype; I prefer the word archetype. Given the nature of that archetype, which this city’s recent mayoral election indicated is commonplace, my portrait of Gloria was, if anything, too kind.

 

To the extent that I can speak with authority, it’s because I grew up in a household that was “progressive” before the tag became a thumbnail for the modern American Left. My parents were lifelong liberal Democrats. Moreover, my own baby-boomer generation is abundantly responsible for where the Democratic Party, the charity sector, the public sector, the churches, the universities, the arts world, and even many corporate boardrooms have ended up. In our naiveté, vanity, arrogance, historical ignorance, provincialism, psychological cluelessness, entitled prosperity, and political gullibility, my peers and I sowed the seeds for both “woke” and democratic socialism—the dsa being a seemingly separate case, but still of a piece. As a teenager, I wore beads and bell bottoms, I went to protests, and I dutifully deplored my own country. The state of the American Left is partly my fault.

 

So what is the nature of what detractors uncharitably slag off as the “prog-tard”? Despite their paying endless lip service to protecting the “vulnerable,” progressives’ driving emotions are negative. These people are striving less to realize a Shangri-la than to destroy what, and more particularly whom, they revile. Those hippie-era origins are embarrassing, but at least the Sixties’ love-not-war cliches, the era’s experimental sex and better living through chemistry, did project a credible glint of sunlit uplands. Late-stage radicalism has lost the paisley headbands, the Laugh-In goofery, the lazy Timothy Leary early retirement of “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” The last decade-plus of cancel-culture progressivism has proven vastly more vicious, more predatory, more punitive, and definitely more dangerous. It’s obsessed with the concept of power, and therefore obsessed with attaining it.

 

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So while progressives are often accused of credulous optimism about human nature, their rabbling in the streets sponsors little passing of the peace, few reedy renditions of Kumbaya. The texture of left-wing protests is typically hostile, resentful, vengeful, accusatory, aggressive if not murderous, vituperative, and furious. Organized anti-ice operations have entailed spitting and cursing at officers, the kicking of their vehicles, the burning of cars, the chucking of chunks of concrete, and the screaming of obscenities. Check out the transgender-activist placards targeting “trans exclusionary radical feminists”: The only good TERF is a hanged dead TERF; One TERF, one bullet; Save one trans, kill one TERF. Wearing T-shirts sporting homicidal hang gliders, pro-Palestine protesters chant “There is only one solution: intifada revolution,” “By any means necessary,” and “Death to Israel, Death to Zionists.” For this lot, more positive emotions such as cheerfulness, joy, and celebration only emerge after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the murder of a United Healthcare ceo, the slaughter of 1,200 Israelis and the kidnapping of 250 more, and attempts on the life of the U.S. president.

 

In positions of any authority, they also delight in pooping other people’s parties: taking away privileges, banning pleasures, controlling and immiserating their compatriots. Telling Americans they can’t take vacations, heat their homes, use gas stoves, drive their cars, or eat foie gras or even pork chops is these folks’ idea of fun. In the United States, self-appointed enforcers of covid restrictions were overwhelmingly Democrats. The pandemic was an exhilarating occasion for exercising the progressive appetite for tyranny—the more idiotic the rules the better, because making people obey petty, pointless regulations is especially entertaining. Among progressives, nuclear power is an unpopular solution to a retreat from fossil fuels because it promises energy abundance and therefore a great reduction in opportunities for party-poopery.

 

The content of the progressive platform is subsidiary to position—that is, the position of resistance. The movement has a collective case of oppositional-defiance disorder. Climate change has provided a glorious pretext for pushing people around and ruining their good time. Yet progressives segued seamlessly from hysteria about “global boiling” to hysteria about “Palestine” without missing a beat. The indignation, the self-righteousness, the intoxicating rage are the point, in the service of which cause is secondary if not irrelevant. You can be sure that when the supposed love for Palestinians burns out, another obsession will take its place, and the mob won’t even notice that their slogans have changed.

 

Progressives require an enemy (and, to an extent, maybe most of us do; witness this lecture). No word features more prominently in today’s left-wing lexicon than “hate.” The villains of the blm era—racists, climate deniers, and trans-homo-xeno-Islamo-phobes—have lately given way to a single be-all Beelzebub, Israel. To which nearly all these people have never been and about whose history nearly all these people know nothing, ignorance being a plus. Facts are thorny and obstinate; uninformed passion is infinitely adaptable, impervious to reason, and unfalsifiable.

 

For the most part, the minorities for whom white progressives claim to speak are pawns or props. I’m persuaded that American progressives do hate Israel, or certainly Jews; I’m less convinced they have any real interest in Palestinians. Now, my Virginian father was active in the original civil-rights movement—whose authentic righteousness younger progressives envy and seem determined to duplicate or top. I believe my father and his associates truly cared about the victims of segregation and discrimination. But in a time when the racial playing field has never been more level, if not tilted in the minority direction, too many white progressives have used black people as pretexts for self-promotional posturing—for kneeling in kente cloth on television.

 

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These days, we often accuse progressives of the psychologist Gad Saad’s concept of “suicidal empathy.” It’s a snappy expression. Yet the coinage gives its targets too much credit. It doesn’t look beneath the hood. Oh, I don’t contest the “suicidal” bit. But the typical American progressive is hardly tortured by a self-destructive excess of compassion. Other people are useful. But the point of being progressive is the fostering of an internal state: a sense of superiority, certainty, contempt for unbelievers, and moral vanity. And when you look at that list of emotions—again: a sense of superiority, certainty, contempt for unbelievers, and moral vanity—you understand why, despite glaring doctrinal differences, the contemporary far Left allies with radical Islam. Both Islamists and left-wing Democrats cultivate communal narcissism. They both cultivate a shunning of the infidel, a pietistic self-regard, and a conviction that as a group they alone enjoy enlightenment and access to a divine or de facto divine truth. “Queers for Palestine” may be anthropologically hilarious, but it makes perfect emotional sense.

 

Progressives do seem especially concerned for their own virtue. But I think the concern is more often for being seen as virtuous. Being good is a great deal harder than appearing to be good, if only because the course of real goodness is diabolically difficult to chart. Real goodness is often private and unacknowledged, because it’s not pursued for acknowledgment’s sake. Genuine virtue isn’t anything you might feel a need to signal.

 

Clearly, progressives are prone to competitive goodness with an eye to raising their status with one another. But to be fair, who doesn’t want status? Most of us of any political persuasion fancy admiration, recognition, and respect. Most of us enjoy feeling important. So the political distinction here is why we want to feel important—that is, what we seek recognition for. I registered long ago that I have little interest in plaudits for being good—but I’m thrilled to be recognized as being good at. I’m happy to be called a good writer. Yet I don’t covet a designation as “a good person,” which means that temperamentally I could never be other than a crap progressive. In late life, I’ve reluctantly accepted the label of conservative, if only because conservatives aren’t usually driven by this overweening desire for public saintliness. As a rule, progressives want to be seen as good, and conservatives want to be seen as right.

 

Naturally, outspoken people on either side of America’s political divide believe they’re right, or they’d keep their traps shut. I think I’m right. I’ve ring-fenced discrete topics in my head as subject to uncertainty: for many years, climate doctrine, though no longer; more recently, the war with Iran. But at any given time, like many of you I presume, I think I’m right about everything.

 

Nevertheless, this absurd sense of assurance, which is a human foible and not a factional one, has a different touch and feel among progressives than among conservatives. It’s a truism now that progressives think their opponents are evil; well, conservatives think their opponents are stupid. Accordingly, the Left is prone to sanctimony; the Right is prone to derision.

 

Yet habitual sanctimony would seem to be at odds with the progressive chorus of self-declared “white guilt” in the deranged aftermath of George Floyd. This is one left-wing emotion that we shouldn’t take at face value.

 

First off, what did any of these people ever do to their black compatriots about which they might feel so terrible? Slavery ended in 1865. Few people alive today would have been accountable adults during the era of Jim Crow. Too casually, the blm movement has invalidated the core Christian precept that the sins of the father are not visited upon the sons. If we are all answerable for every atrocity our forebears committed going back to the year dot, we should probably stage a simultaneous, species-wide self-immolation.

 

Instead, let’s get real. The claims of “white guilt” by Robin DiAngelo’s exploitable honky book buyers were forms of moral display—occasions of public preening, like fan dances in burlesque. Consider for a moment the searing and unbearable nature of deeply felt shame—most recently manifested in the fabulist Cambridge academic Jason Arday. Did he flaunt his disgrace? No, he killed himself. Because real guilt makes you want to curl up in a ball and disappear. It’s nothing you advertise. During the post-Floyd delirium, did white progressives feel ashamed? No, they felt proud of themselves for claiming to feel ashamed. They broadcast their guilt expressly to exempt themselves from it. None of these folks felt personally culpable for the supposedly congenital sins of their own race. If you proclaimed you were guilty, then you weren’t.

 

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The same logic, or lack thereof, pertains to the demonization of the West generally and of the United States in particular—by people who are themselves Westerners and themselves Americans. This eager vilification is intended to exempt critics from their own criticism. If you trash your own country and your own compatriots, you implicitly step outside your country and remove yourself from the company of your compatriots. Thus what sounds like self-criticism is anything but. What’s often mislabeled “self-loathing” serves as a sly, expedient opt out. It’s an assumption of an identity that hovers above the tawdry nationality into which those other disgusting Americans were immutably born.

 

I deployed this technique when I was younger and traveling through and later living in Europe. I imagined that the more harshly I judged “fellow” Americans and apologized for “our” failings—how crass we were, how loud, how ignorant, naive, uncultured, and fat—the more I would surely mark myself as the antithesis of this typecasting. I thought I was playing the get-out-of-being-American-free card. Of course, I succeeded in doing nothing of the sort. Pooh-poohing Americans was the most quintessentially American thing I could have ever done. Frankly, onlookers find folks who deprecate their own people unattractive and even pathetic. I don’t do that anymore.

 

This opting-out impulse also extends to progressive policies. Although big on dei, these people do not want their own children rejected from selective universities, any more than those children themselves want to be rejected to make way for more black and Latino students. None of these people resign from well-paid positions and become unemployed, the better for a minority candidate to take their place. To the contrary, white elites noisily support racial preferences under the arguably misguided assumption that being so laudably right-on will protect them from being personally sidelined by diversity hires.

 

For that matter, progressives have no desire to live with the consequences of nearly all the policies they advocate. They love their land acknowledgments, but I’ve never read about any of them so wracked with this mythical white guilt that they pass title to their five-bedroom act of “settler colonialism” to the indigenous. The singer Billie Eilish famously declared at the Grammys that “no one is illegal on stolen land”; the Tongva Tribe noted thereafter that they were still waiting for the singer to return voluntarily the ancestral land beneath her three-million-dollar mansion. Rooting for defunding the police is cheap. No one calling for the disbandment of local law enforcement truly expects that this suicidal lack of empathy will ever succeed—especially since the primary brunt of a subsequent free-for-all of violence would be borne by the very “black lives” progressives pretend to care so much about.

 

See, I’m giving credit to progressives here for being normal human beings. In real life, they want someone who breaks into their homes or defrauds them of their savings to be arrested. They talk up “decarceration.” But if one of their family members—assuming they’re still speaking to any family members—were hacked to pieces by a recently released repeat offender, they’d surely be just as devastated as any ordinary Republican would be. Take the New York congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier. The self-declared “prison abolitionist” refused to concede that convicted murderers should be locked up, even when asked point-blank by the New York Editorial Board four different times. Well, it’s a fair psychological bet that once the said murderer is not an abstraction but the ruthless butcher of someone she holds dear, the young woman will prefer that the culprit be detained. Progressives support racial preferences in theory. Yet they’re no more eager than anyone to be treated by an oncologist who skated through medical school by merit of skin color alone. Younger progressives decry property ownership but still want to be able to crash at the house their parents imagine they still own. When passing through chaotic, predatory urban landscapes that radical left-wing policies have created—with state- and ngo-abetted homeless encampments, open-air drug taking, and the unnerving rants of untreated “neurodivergents”—progressives also experience distaste, aversion, and fearfulness. I bet they grow just as consternated as the rest of us when stepping in human excrement on the way to their cars. They get just as annoyed as any other customer when having repeatedly to press a button for assistance in cvs, because, due to unpunished shoplifting at scale, every product worth more than a packet of mints is under lock and key. I’m simply saying that, though their positions suggest otherwise, most progressives, once you scratch the surface, are regular folks—with regular-folk hypocrisy.

 

Progressives decry capitalism but want to enjoy its fruits. We’ve hardly seen millions of Democrats pitching their phones in the Hudson because a pocket computer is the result of centuries of capitalistic invention and capitalist financial incentives. They’d be aggrieved if these wicked corporations suddenly ceased to send them security updates and all their data fell prey to hackers or was held to ransom by criminals in Kazakhstan. Progressives would be crushed by the closure of Trader Joe’s. Amid all this talk of revolution, I sense no real appetite for the life-threatening disorder and dog-eat-dog Darwinism into which heavily populated districts descend about five minutes after the lights go out or the local grocer will no longer accept your worthless dollars in exchange for a pound of hamburger. (For what I hope is a vivid book-length portrayal of the fall of American capitalism, check out my 2016 novel The Mandibles.)

 

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The point is this: these people are not serious. They’re playacting. They gesture toward a future they have no desire to inhabit. The fringes of this movement openly wish to tear down the very civilization on which they personally rely and on which their own lives are entirely built. Yes, this brings us to the democratic socialists, some of whose advocates are wealthy and aglitter with designer froufrou. Let’s pretend to consider their platform in earnest for a moment. No jails, no police. Housing as a human right. National defense reduced to veritably zero. State usurpation of major industries. Citizenship for all illegal immigrants, presumably including the many visitors who’ve yet to arrive. Cozying up to North Korea.

 

It goes without saying that the socialists want everything free: free housing, free healthcare, free childcare, free pre-K; at the least, below-cost groceries. All this freeness will be paid for by “the rich.” Alas, there seems to be no plan for what happens when the money spigot runs dry because you’ve just confiscated all the assets of the people who made your society tick over. Repeated back-of-the-envelope demonstrations that “the rich” don’t have the wherewithal to pay for everything even if you suck up their last sou never faze these people. No, if only the “oligarchs” stopped picking everyone’s pockets, we’d all live on easy street. “Medicare for all” is also appealingly catchy. Yet Medicare reimbursement rates for hospitals average 10 percent below the break-even point; without overpayment by private insurers, the entire U.S. health system would collapse. Progressives aren’t big on math. Conservatives care about what works; leftists care about what should work.

 

This stuff is socialist same old, same old. More intriguing for me is the dsa’s proposition to eliminate the U.S. Senate, the presidency, and the Electoral College; axing ice is a mere kicker. Such a drastic revision of the Constitution would require an incalculable number of amendments, all approved by two-thirds of the House of Representatives and two-thirds of a Senate that would be voting for its own demise, as well as three-quarters of state legislatures to ratify them all. Really? In truth, the proposal is to rip up the Constitution, a prospect that would presently require nothing less than an armed popular uprising, perhaps a war between the New Mamdani Army and the federal government. Not that these folks are taking responsibility for promoting such a thing. After all, nearly every revolution other than the rather civilized American one has ended in catastrophe.

 

Yet these are also people who, despite rabble-rousing rhetoric, don’t really enjoy conflict. Ask any conservative podcaster how difficult, even impossible, it is to entice progressives to participate in a conversation with someone who actually disagrees with them. Trans activists reliably back out of media opportunities that would involve confronting their terfy critics face-to-face. Progressive views—on climate change, Palestine, dei, reparations, no-bail laws, men in women’s sports, abortion, welfare, and immigration—are a set menu. Individual leftists almost never deviate from this ideological rubber chicken. So progressives don’t only avoid conflict with their antagonists; they also avoid conflict with each other.

 

At least uncanny political uniformity signifies the progressive’s one sincerely positive motive force: a yearning for that much-abused word “community.” Fair enough, they want companionship—solidarity, kinship, collegiality. And up to a point, don’t most of us? These fraught past few years, I myself have found some relief in the discovery of like-minded friends and colleagues. Conservatives also seek fellow travelers. But the aching to join a club seems especially intense on the left. Alas, this healthy social impulse to commune with your brethren comes at the price of independent thought. See: any major American university campus for the last fifteen years, even the last fifty.

 

Do progressives sincerely want a utopia, in the same way that the Islamic world looks forward to a caliphate? Are they continually putting the finishing touches on a radiant vision of comity, fairness, racial harmony, and equality for all? A better world of ease, mutual understanding, universal wellness, and brotherly love, in which all needs are fulfilled, all frustrations soothed, all animosity neutralized?

 

I won’t speak for the Islamists, but I’m not convinced that most progressives nurture fantasies of a sunny Valhalla, where hot tubs run on wind turbines and congenial citizens strum lyres and pop grapes. I’m afraid the progressive mind is a darker place. It’s repeatedly struck me, for example, that climate-change fanatics don’t expect that even party-pooping restrictions on air travel or universal veganism would genuinely staunch a rising average temperature of the planet. The attraction of the apocalyptic fireball they conjure for our future is too immense. They don’t truly believe their deindustrializing, bankrupting policies will work on their own terms. Why, the very ineffectuality of electric-vehicle mandates and oil-pipeline cancellations is part of their appeal. Meanwhile, imminent disaster relieves younger people of responsibility for adulthoods that will purportedly never happen, reprieving them from the inconveniences of pursuing a career and having children. Older progressives can content themselves that when they die they’ll take the rest of their civilization with them. On some level, people who constantly evoke visions of the end of the world are looking forward to the show.

 

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So here, finally, is my thesis: I believe that what progressives want most of all is to fail. They are most comfortable being against things. They are most comfortable campaigning for purposes that will never come to fruition. They are so dependent on the perpetuation of social ills like racism that in a pinch they will invent “microaggressions” undetectable to the naked eye; starved of racism, they will make the racism up. For progressives, a proper utopia, with nothing and no one left to denounce, would be hell.

 

More, the last thing they want is to be put in positions of authority that test the viability of their dumb ideas. They can most persuasively promote these dumb ideas in opposition. Once in charge, they’re obliged to put their inane policies into practice. Picture, then, a United  States of America with no police, no prisons, and no national borders, where everything is free yet where anyone who might credibly produce all the free stuff is robbed, vilified, and impoverished; where half your inhabitants have swapped sexes with the other half, with the minor downside that the entire population is sterile. Obviously, any across-the-board progressive success would be too awful to contemplate: rampant violence and looting, third-world cities overrun with criminals and transactional immigrants ransacking whatever they can get their hands on, a collapsed economy and thus the end of niceties like the internet, running water, electricity, supermarkets, and functional governments—and progressives would have no one to blame but themselves!

 

Imagine, too, having to accept that it’s your fault the state of Israel is no more, which you’d thought you might have quite fancied, but which you now find a tad queasy-making. Because it turns out that wiping Israel off the map is not an exclusively cartographical exercise. After you’ve been wanging on about “genocide” for years, Hamas and Hezbollah have beheaded, eviscerated, raped, and defiled the bodies of more than seven million Jews—and not a few Arabs, because you know these rampages can get messy—if only to show all you useful-idiot boosters what a respectable “genocide” really looks like.

 

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How much better to remain in harmless impotence on the sidelines and jump up and down like little children, before playtime is over and it’s time for a snack. For armchair revolutionaries, being eternally thwarted is a blessing, because they get to keep their resentment, their fury, their purity unsullied by contact with reality, and their sense of purpose that’s never ruined by getting what they claim to want. Real political power in far-left hands has already proven catastrophic not just in Cuba and Venezuela but in this country, which is a big reason Americans are pouring from blue to red states. Progressives are far happier people when they are stopped. So it would be only decent of conservatives and the few remaining moderate Democrats to oblige them.