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Over the last thirty years, many people have noticed that all moral claims within the public policy sphere can be reduced to a few time periods. In the realm of foreign policy, it is always about 1938 and the events around that time. If it is a domestic issue in the United States, then it is always 1968. Perhaps the slow Progressives will try to make it about the 1980’s when their hero was president. For Americans, public policy is trapped in one of three historical frameworks.

On the foreign policy side, it is easy to see how this works. There have been so many new Hitlers on the stage, no one can keep count. Every foolish and destructive misadventure by Washington involves a Hitler figure. They are not just a generic bad guy in the propaganda sense of it, but they represent the re-emergence of the timeless enemy and the timeless struggle. Everything about American foreign policy since the Cold War is about preventing an imaginary past.

This cognitive defect has made its way across the ocean to Europe. Whenever there is a meeting of the local satraps of the American empire, they take turns looking worried in front of the cameras, talking about the possible reemergence of you know who and the danger of resembling Neville Chamberlain. This moral framework is so powerful that they were unable to notice the irony of the Ukrainians using German tanks to attack the Russians in the Kursk region.

In the United States, the other great moral framework is the Civil Rights movement, into which every local issue is jammed. Every black politician imagines herself as the you-go-girl version of Martin Luther King, which means even mundane issues like maintaining the roads is a civil rights issue. Every man in a dress not being called “ma’am” by the clerk is Rosa Parks. This framing has gone so far that nonwhites are routinely called white supremacists.

One of the features of those who have crossed the great divide is that they see the past as the past, not as an emotional support framework. Whatever lessons can be learned from the past in order to navigate the future are studied, but otherwise, the modern dissident accepts that tomorrow does not lie in yesterday. For those trapped in the 20th century, it is an endless singing of “Tomorrow Belongs To Me” and morality tales where they are the hero.

This irrational attachment to the past is ironic, in that the whole point of the Progressive ideology was to advance human society forward, with forward defined as an advanced state of moral existence. While Progressives of the past often focused on material improvement, the spring has always been eschatological. Better stuff was proof of better living and better living was always a normative issue. It is why they continue to see themselves as the Elect.

The thing about ideology is that it tries to replace something that the Christian West eventually took for granted. Within Christianity there is an assumed point to living within the bounds of Christian ethics. Live a Christian life and your reward is eternal life at the feet of God. Ideology cannot offer this because ideology rejects God as the moral authority, so there must be some other reason to follow the moral demands of the ideology, which becomes the project of the ideology.

Marx probably understood this when he described life in a socialist society as a world of men able “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner.” He was criticizing specialization and its dehumanizing qualities, but he was also describing a world where men were liberated from the human condition, free to be what they chose. Communism always imagined an end point that recreated heaven on earth.

At some point, every ideology must at least imply a vision of the future as a reason to continue to live within and fight for the moral claims of the ideology. If the point of the ideology is more of the same, then why bother? Therefore, central to every ideology is a point to the struggle, a destination that promises to liberate people from whatever vexes the ideology. Therein lies the reason why the modern Progressive remain trapped in and obsessed with past struggles.

Progressivism was always a weird hybrid of Protestantism and liberalism, so it could leave unsaid the promise of Christianity, while refashioning the ethics of Christianity around claims to universalism, egalitarianism and eventually the blank slate. At its peak, it was a restatement of Winthrop’s sermon “A Model of Christian Charity,” but stripped of all Scriptural references. It resonated with an audience that continued to be informed by the vestigial Christianity they inherited.

The implied destination of Progressivism no longer works on an audience lacking even a basic Christian frame of reference. This void has been filled with a circular version of history in which events of today are recast as versions of the old glorious struggles of the past, where the good guys won, and the bad guys were sent fleeing. The Elect in this arrangement are those who can imagine themselves wearing the white rose of resistance or riding a bus in the Jim Crow South.

In this regard, Progressivism has become a hive without a queen. The queen is the promised land, and the hive is the habits of mind that form the ideology. They are the Christian zealots with no conception of God and only a vague understanding of what lies after this moment in time. This void is filled with anger, which is why they have become so vicious in defense of the absurd. The source of their rage is their spiritual death, which they cannot comprehend.

This obsession over 1938 and 1968 is not just a way to solve the pointlessness of Progressivism, but also a way to escape present reality. Every Progressive, whether of the fast or slow variety, is a version of Blanche DuBois, saddling the next generations with themselves and their stories of the past. The rest of us are now struggling to figure out what to do with them. They are an unwanted and useless presence to the people of the present, trying to move into the future.

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Most of the ideas that shaped 20th century America boiled up during the 19th century in the aftermath of the Civil War. Some arrived from the Old World before and during the war, things like nationalism and socialism, but most were homegrown ideas that arose out of American Protestantism and the struggle with secularization. Interestingly, the Progressive ideology that emerged was sparked by the populist forces at the time and is now threatened by the same populist forces.

The 19th century was a wild time in America. Prior to the Civil War, it became increasingly clear to the industrializing North that the Constitutional framework was not working for them. The Hartford Conventions, largely erased from the history books now, were a series of conferences in the North to debate leaving the Union. This process was short-circuited by the War of 1812, but the sentiment merely found a new home in abolitionism and finally flowered in the Civil War.

The post-Civil War period was no less tumultuous. Reconstruction was a failure, but a foreshadowing of what would be a feature of the progressive ideology. That is the belief that societies can be reordered in such a way that the people in those societies change how they think about themselves, their neighbors, and the state. The abolitionist fanatics did not abandon these beliefs after the failure of reconstruction. They continued to refine this belief as progressivism flowered in the 20th century.

Of course, progressivism itself is a 19th century phenomenon. It emerged out of American Protestantism as a belief that human society can only advance through relentless social reform. The same people who were sure they could reinvent society to accommodate the freed slaves as equals were now sure they could use the lessons from industrialization to reorder America and the world. Religious social reform became a secular political movement.

The engine that made progressivism possible was populism, which was not unique to America or even unique to the 19th century, but if you look at the populist movements of the 19th century, you see many of the features of what would later be the progressive movement and then progressivism. The populists were not angry mobs assembled outside of the homes of the rich, demanding redress of their grievances. They had an agenda that was mostly crafted by elites in waiting.

For example, the Ocala Demands were a platform of economic and political reforms that became the basis of the People’s Party. It was “produced” by the various farmer’s alliances that had sprung up as mutual aid societies following the Civil War. These groups were brought together in the Marion Opera House in Ocala, Florida, where they approved this list of demands. This was formally called the Ocala Demands and was adopted by the People’s Party.

When you read the demands, the first thing that is clear is that they were not written by a collection of dirt farmers in the South. It was not the work of the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union either. That was a real group that participated in the Ocala convention, along with the Southern Farmers’ Alliance. These were not people debating the abolishment of the futures markets, the regulation of the money supply or the imposition of a graduated income tax.

The platform was the work of intellectuals and reformers who saw an opportunity to ride the wave of populism to power and influence. They saw a grassroots movement of disaffected farmers as a vehicle for building a coalition in support of their reform ideas, so they attached themselves to it. It is not an accident that the populist agenda looked a lot like the progressive agenda that would emerge in the 20th century. Progressivism would not have been possible without populism.

It is why it is fair to wonder if what we are seeing and have been seeing for the last few decades is the death of the last remaining ideology, progressivism. Populism seems to be an end of cycle phenomenon. It is, after all, a disorganized revolt against the current order, which has reached its maturity and is entering decline. What follows a populist uprising is either a replacement of the old order, a reform that replaces the old elite or a reform effort by the elites themselves.

The assault on the Blob by the Trump administration, led by Elon Musk, is clearly an assault on the old managerial order. Elon Musk is the face of the new technological elite, so it is fitting that he is the point man for this task. Managerialism is the traveling partner of ideology. It was a feature of both fascism and communism. Its looming demise at the hands of the Trump administration, which was powered by a populist uprising against it, fits the historical pattern.

Progressivism has had a long run, but for most of the 20th century it served as a bulwark against fascism and then communism. Its social reforms stopped making any sense by the latter half of the 20th century and either disappeared from the agenda entirely or morphed into bizarre sexual fetishes. Its main reason to exist was to fight communism, but once communism was gone, it was left without a devil, so it has gone insane over the last decades in search of Old Scratch.

The populism that brought Trump to the White House in 2016, sustained him in his wilderness years and then returned him the White House was driven by the excesses and insanity of progressives. Populism is usually framed as the people versus elites, but in this case, it was normal people versus crazy people. The best way to describe the first weeks of the Trump administration is the return of normalcy, unless you are a member of the hive we call the left.

In the fullness of time, what this period may be known for is the death of the last ideology, knocked off by the same forces that spawned it. American populism has always been a check on the excesses of the elite, not as a physical or even political force, but as a cultural force. Ideology is always about changing culture, so it is ironic that the last ideology will be vanquished by a cultural phenomenon. The ghost of the People’s Party has finally called progressivism home.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!