Progressivism’s Bleak Winter

By Rich Lowry

Wednesday, January 15, 2025

 

It’s been a very bad several months for progressivism. In fact, it’s hard to imagine how it could have been much worse.

 

On top of a stinging loss to Donald Trump, progressives have seen their DEI project continue to suffer reverses, gotten a stark demonstration of the declining influence of the legacy media, and lost Meta.

 

Now comes a cataclysm in the country’s foremost blue state that is traceable, in part, to irrational progressive priorities and may prove a millstone around the neck of one of the foremost talents on the Democratic bench, California governor Gavin Newsom.

 

Nothing is permanent in politics, and a Democratic comeback may be just a midterm election away. Yet, the progressive setback in recent months goes much deeper than a national election bouncing the wrong way.

 

This was a loss to a Donald Trump who was portrayed as an existential threat to democracy. A multi-faced campaign of lawfare was launched against him. The media were unremittingly hostile — and hysterical. The Democrats pulled the plug on their incumbent president in their desperation to beat him. Massive resources were expended and every possible celebrity mustered in the effort.

 

And, still, they lost, and lost convincingly.

 

The catastrophist case for Trump was that if he lost to “the machine” in a political environment defined by President Biden’s failures, there’d never be any hope of beating it ever again. On the other hand, progressives have to grapple with the possibility that if the machine couldn’t defeat Trump despite all the tools that were used against him over the last year, the whole apparatus may be less effective than assumed.

 

This is the subtext of progressives pining after “their own Joe Rogan” — they wouldn’t need one if CNN and the Washington Post carried the weight they once did.

 

The downstream cultural effects of Trump’s victory have already been significant. The election was an explicit factor in Meta’s X-like policy turn, heralding the end of the company’s progressive captivity and perhaps the end of the entire project to control a swath of the public debate through policing “disinformation.”

 

Meta also is eliminating its DEI programs, joining a cavalcade of other companies that have spurned what once seemed an unstoppable ideological force. The period of fear and fanaticism that arose in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd has steadily receded, while the worthlessness of DEI programs — and legal risks attendant to discriminatory practices — have become clearer. It all means that the path of least resistance is no longer giving in to the Left’s race and gender obsessions.

 

This is a major progressive defeat, and we are yet to see its full effect.

 

Then, there are the L.A. fires that have exposed the misgovernance of a state and a locality that have long been beholden to pet progressive causes and interest groups, and thus have neglected the policies — brush-clearing, controlled burns, sensible water management — that might have mitigated the ongoing cataclysm.

 

Perhaps all of this isn’t as disastrous as the hammer blows that the pre-Trump Right suffered in George W. Bush’s second term that culminated in the financial crisis, but for the Left, it’s been a horrible, terrible, no good, very bad several months.