Vaping is a great example of humanity’s failure to live up to its own hype. We’ve swapped an addiction we knew was dangerous for another that could well be. Sometimes progress is an illusion. The idea of progress can be an illusion in politics too, especially if you are a “progressive”, the biggest misnomer since the German Democratic Republic.
With a looming Labour election victory, the Left desperately needs coherence and instead it is anxious and atomised. Progressive politics is increasingly meaningless by name and meaningless by nature.
Healthy politics depends on a healthy Left, but in its current form progressive politics in the West — that is, various groupings preoccupied with identity, grievance and vague claims to an ahistorical Marxism — can never live up to its own hype. It doesn’t stand for anything tangible, so can never promise to deliver anything tangible. In Britain we’ve have 14 years of Tory government and in the US a second Donald Trump presidency is likely. There are Right-wing governments in Italy, Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, Greece and Finland with potential for one in France. Back here, the Labour Party is proceeding on the basis that its success is dependent on avoiding public associations with progressive dogma. Why so toxic?
Progressive politics falsely assumes its own moral superiority. It also assumes that what it defines as progress is always just over the horizon. If you’re anticipating the rapture, then you’re bound to feel contempt for Keir Starmer and the “Tory-lite” (as progressives call it) Labour government-in-waiting. More time is spent circling the plugholes of the culture war than on housing or education.
Healthy politics depends on a healthy Left, but in the West progressive politics can never live up to its own hype
In the past few years, real progress has been made on social justice issues, especially racism and homophobia, but this was under way thanks to the work of countless individuals, groups and, yes, sometimes governments, long before what we would today label progressives existed. It’s argued by trans activists that they are replicating the campaigns for gay rights from decades past. But their insistence that the trans debate is not up for debate ignores the fact that the people they call now heretics would have, until recently, been called progressive themselves. As usual, the Left — unable to cope with doubt — eats itself while the structures it opposes survive unscathed.
These are serious issues and to paraphrase Logan Roy, a lot of progressives are not serious people. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” was a phrase borrowed by Barack Obama to suggest an inevitable liberal victory. But the future is contingent on our actions, not on an expectation that a prescribed version of goodness will win out. Today’s progressives appear oblivious to a moral vacuum, as shown by the disturbing responses of the presidents of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania to Congressional hearings on antisemitism and freedom of speech. Just as telling was their failure to accept responsibility for their own downfall. Also in the US, progressives are turning their backs on Joe Biden over his support for Israel, making it easier for Trump to take power.
Progressive ideology is a trojan horse for the capitalism it is supposed to be fighting: it’s individualistic, divisive and avoids the awkward subject of class. Meanwhile, the Right knows identity politics can be co-opted without any threat to them. To bring about change you need the mandate of a broad consensus — something progressives will not seek, let alone win. Instead, they are too often fuelled by conflict. This leads to taking sides with some very nasty authoritarians and — in a horrible paradox — undermines the liberal democracy they rely on for their freedoms and privilege.
Labour once stood for bringing communities together, shared responsibility and a belief in the achievable — a chasm away from the progressive emphasis on the exceptionalism of communities, denunciations and demands for the impossible. For Britain, the pandemic was as if a family had been scraping by without house insurance until the bathroom flooded and the living room ceiling caved in. Progressive politics offers little to address the mundane but overdue work essential in almost every sector of public life.
The illiberal tendencies of progressives will induce little beyond a backlash from anyone to the Right of Gary Lineker. Starmer has identified the distrust voters feel for the hectoring of the new Left — now he needs some vision to sprinkle stardust on his steady-as-she-goes narrative. Progressive politics is false advertising — it should go the way of cigarettes. Like cigarettes, lots of us crave an alternative to what we have, but it won’t be simple, harmless or guilt-free. What looks like progress often turns out to be another bad habit.
