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Brock's avatar

I wonder whether the secularization of America has robbed the left of a critical mass of people like Jeff and me, who grew up in conservative religious households, and so have a learned distaste for hypocrisy and sanctimony.

The "In This House We Believe" yard signs generate in me the same queasy feeling I had about the "Heaven Bound" T-shirts my youth group wore to the annual Christian youth conference in Nashville.

(It's a somewhat different kind of queasy feeling than I the one I still get when I think about listening to Amy Grant and Stryper.)

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SZ's avatar

I take a different perspective on the liberal/progressive divide. Namely, modern "progressivism" has never been "liberal" in the classical sense, and instead has its roots in the movement of the same name from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This movement supported some good things (women's suffrage, treatment of juveniles as different from adults) and some bad things (prohibition, WWI, eugenics). Here I recommend: Thomas C. Leonard. (2016). Illiberal reformers: Race, eugenics, and American economics in the Progressive era. Princeton University Press.

I think it is too narrow to say that progressivism's "defining trait" is "distributing resources towards the disadvantaged." (Admittedly, helping the poor has always been one of their goals for reshaping society, beginning with their understandable horror at deplorable urban conditions in the late 19th century.) Progressivism's defining feature is more like "directing society toward 'utopia' through social reform [engineering] guided by 'science'." In contrast to liberals, progressives thought "individual rights" often got in the way of this mission. (In 1913, Dean of Harvard Law School Roscoe Pound argued that the Bill of Rights “were not needed in their own day, [and] they are not desired in our own"; later, (Progressive) President Woodrow Wilson would refer to inalienable rights as “nonsense" [Leonard, 2016, p. 25].) As Jeff points out, Progressivism has always been very "religious" as well: "The progressives’ urge to reform American sprang from an evangelical compulsion to set the world to rights, and they unabashedly described their purposes as a Christian mission to build a Kingdom of Heaven on earth” (Leonard, 2016, p. 12). So, 100 years ago Progressivism was actually religious. Today, it's the secular religion of the Left.

In terms of philosophical legacies, I think you see the roots of conservatism in Hobbes/Locke/Burke, the roots of liberalism in Locke/Hume/Smith/Mill, and the roots of Progressivism in Rousseau/Mill/Dewey. As noted there is overlap!

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