By Ian Tuttle
Wednesday, January 15, 2025
Progressivism is reeling from two disasters, of different
kinds. The first was the reelection of Donald Trump. The second is the ongoing
Los Angeles wildfires. Each, in its own way, has exposed the feeble condition
of progressive politics.
Contemporary progressivism has been attempting of late to
combine two competing projects, one quite old, one more recent. The older is
progressivism’s century-old commitment to administration: the impulse to
centralize and rationalize in the name of efficiency and transparency. The
impulse is as old as the Progressive Party and the “modernization” efforts of
Woodrow Wilson, and it has endured, more or less intact, for a hundred years,
albeit channeled and strained through the New Deal, the Great Society, and the
Reagan Revolution. Barack Obama was the apotheosis of the progressive vision of
technocratic management. His cadres of wonks promised to bring expertise into
every nook and cranny of government. Expert hands would carefully manage
everything from the nationwide health-care exchange to Iranian nuclear policy,
calibrating the machine of American administration with an unfailing touch.
When Joe Biden was reelected and staffed his White House with a host of Obama
alumni, the endless refrain, “the adults
are back in charge,” signaled progressive relief that expertise would again
guide American policymaking after the disastrous finger-painting years of
Trumpian populism.
The newer project, distinct from this, is the revisionist
social-justice movement that began rising in the early 2010s, crashed to shore in the
riotous summer of 2020, and has seeped into almost every aspect of American
institutional life, from universities to sports leagues to boardrooms to
government. The Woke movement has a different genealogy than the technocratic project:
It is a variation less of the Progressive movement of the early 20th century
than of the 1960s New Left. Wokeism revises both the racial and sexual politics
of the 1960s, replacing the color-blind civil rights vision of the 1964 Civil
Rights Act with the dogma of “anti-racism,” and sexual-revolution-era feminism
with conceptual frameworks such as intersectionality and gender identity.
Both of these projects are wobbling.
Wokeism was arguably on the wane already in 2024, but
Donald Trump’s victory in November has been interpreted as, among other things,
a definitive blow to its fortunes. That is certainly how prominent individuals
and organizations have responded. Jeff Bezos’s decision, in advance of the
election, to overhaul the Washington Post was a monitory sign of a
coming shift away from the feverish progressivism that had dominated its pages
since at least 2016. Likewise, Mark Zuckerberg’s recent announcement that
Facebook would be replacing its fact-checking apparatus with a “community notes”
system, modeled on Elon Musk’s X, is another data point attesting that the
regnant paradigm of the 2010s and early 2020s is collapsing.
If Trump’s victory upends, at least in certain respects,
the woke project, the Los Angeles wildfires call into question the other:
technocratic management. California is the essence of the “blue-state model.”
Over the past generation, blue states have adopted a high-tax regime with the
promise that revenues will fund expansive social services. The lavishly funded
state bureaucracy will be able to accomplish not only core government functions
but pet projects (such as, in California’s case, electric-vehicle mandates).
They will also be leaders on social justice questions, using state power to
enforce quotas, DEI initiatives, and the like. The gamble has been that
residents would trade higher taxes for this array of tangible and intangible
benefits.
It has not worked out that way, and California is a
laboratory-grade test case. (California has not had a Republican in a statewide
elected office since January 2011.) Despite their state’s crushing tax burden,
Californians have watched public services and quality of life steadily decline.
California now has some of the highest rates of homelessness, welfare
dependency, and adult illiteracy in the country. An artificial housing shortage
has sent home prices and rents skyward. Inflated water and energy costs have
made the basic cost of living unaffordable for vast swaths of residents,
especially lower-income and minority residents.
The Los Angeles wildfires might not be primarily a
product of bad policy — although it’s clear that essential fire-management
tasks went neglected for years — but the fires are definitively unmasking
California’s progressive project for what it is: a failure. As Noah Rothman observes, “boutique priorities” have
squeezed out the basics of good local and state governance. Witness the dazed
and befuddled response of Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass and the incoherence and bizarre levity of Governor Gavin Newsom: the wildfires have
made clear that California’s leadership class has been so degraded that it is
incapable of handling core governmental functions, like disaster management,
with anything like the requisite seriousness. The blue-state model was supposed
to establish a system of administration that would make the state more
efficient and more accountable. It was supposed to create states that would be
magnets, not repellents. Instead, it has yielded decayed cities, unfit leaders,
and, now, catastrophe.
The dual progressive projects limned here — rational
administration on one hand, and woke social-justice activism on the other — are
deeply entrenched, both institutionally and psychically. They will of course
stagger onward. But both projects have suffered monumental blows that will, and
should, shake their confidence.
It is of some interest, in light of the above, that many
young progressives are distinguishing themselves, against both of these
projects, as “socialists.” Some socialist progressives see their vision of
left-wing politics as a way forward that can navigate successfully between the
existing, dubious alternatives.
Where do progressive politics go from here? Conservatives
should watch carefully.
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