There’s a television commercial running in New York about Mondaire Jones, a candidate for Congress, having called for defunding the police. Then came a television commercial wherein Jones replies that he said this when he was young and dumb. Another television commercial was then broadcast saying that “young” was four years ago as he ran for Congress.
When it was said, it was the position of the progressive orthodoxy, and Jones chose to be an orthodox progressive. Was he really “young and dumb” back then? Perhaps, but then, is it really an excuse that he lacked the intelligence to realize it was a monumentally dumb idea or lacked the guts to reject the orthodoxy? Either way, he took a position that, today, would make him unelectable. What was he thinking back then? He wasn’t. And that’s true of a great many people who embraced the crazy when it was cool to be crazy and now need to wheedle their way out of their idiotic past positions.
But what the moral universe’s long arc really has is survivorship bias. Progressive causes that achieved success and bettered the nation, like the New Deal’s worker protections and the civil rights movement of the 1960s, are highly visible today and taught in history books as important inflection points. But for every success, there are also many failures — bold ideas that proved not ahead of their time but simply foolish. Having flickered only briefly in the national consciousness, they are easily forgotten.
For every success, there are many failures. Without doing a survey, I would contend that for every good progressive change, there are 100 dumb, untenable, and even counterproductive, ideas. And as Oren Cass warns, we tend to remember only the successes, and are quick to forget the great many failures, creating the mindset that any idea that pops into the orthodoxy must necessarily be fabulous, because look at all the fabulous successes that came before it.
Because they did not get far, we tend not to learn the lessons of their catastrophic potential. Few Americans may know about the early-20th-century push by progressives for eugenics, which flopped. The harm its entrenchment would have done is nowhere in the historical record. Zealous young activists, not unlike those now marching around campuses for decolonization, once made Marxist revolution their idealistic cause. American Communism didn’t get far, so it elicits mostly chuckles today, not contemplation of its horrible specter. Because it never took hold, the danger it posed became an antiquated curiosity that no one today must answer for.
And this is a burden that Kamala Harris brought upon herself by her courting the progressive vote by pretending to be all woke back in 2019.
In 2019 and 2020, confidently embracing the full progressive agenda of the day, she advocated decriminalizing illegal border crossings and praised the “defund the police” movement, promoted a fund to bail protesters in Minneapolis out of jail and called for “some form of reparations.” She wanted to ban fracking, effectively eliminate gas-powered vehicles and establish a “mandatory gun buyback program.”
How can this be explained?
Asked about her former advocacy for giving driver’s licenses, college tuition and free health care to undocumented immigrants, she replied, “Listen, that was five years ago.”
Does this mean that five years ago, as a United States Senator after having served as Frisco DA and Cali AG, she was just a kid, too dumb to grasp the idiocy of her positions? Or does this mean that five years ago she was either too weak or too unprincipled to reject the progressive orthodoxy? To say she’s learned since then is easy, but fails to explain why she didn’t learn enough as a DA, AG or Senator to not embrace such lunacy. Or it’s just a facile claim of evolving to avoid a harsher admission about her claimed support of nonsensical positions.
And if you desperately need to believe this is merely a progressive failing, bear in mind that for each success, there was a equal and opposite conservative failure.
When conservatives have resisted necessary change, though, history’s judgment is harsh. The Industrial Revolution consigned workers, including countless children, to exploitation and abominable living conditions. Conservatives mounted widespread resistance to government regulation of the workplace, protection for improving those standards and letting workers organize and maintained that resistance until the repeated and decisive political defeats of the New Deal. The emergence of the world’s largest and most prosperous middle class will forever validate that change; any remaining holdouts are just embarrassing. In these contexts, history’s two sides are plain to see: its brave progressives, the heroes, and its backward conservatives, the villains. Undoubtedly, on some issue where conservatives are fiercely resisting change today, the future consensus will be equally harsh.
Progress isn’t inherently good or bad. Fighting to maintain the status quo isn’t inherently good or bad either. But forgetting the failures, the stupid flotsam and jetsam of orthodoxy that far exceeds the few, but critically valuable, changes, prevents us from distinguishing between the good and bad, or more likely, the better or worse given that few things don’t involve trade-offs that are beneficial and detrimental.
That reality should engender some humility among progressive politicians and their supporters, so confident of how to bend the moral universe’s arc and so disdainful of anyone not on board. The Freedom Riders thought they were bending that arc toward justice, but so did the card-carrying Communists.
Most of the progressive orthodoxy today will end up in the trash heap of really stupid ideas. That doesn’t mean there aren’t things that are in desperate need of change, of improvement. It means that we need the humility to recognize which is which, and that few of the positions of the orthodoxy will ultimately prove anything other than stupid, untenable and embarrassing to those who either believe or pretend to believe.
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“That was back when it was on the right side of history.”
Steering away from speaking about radical proposals at election time doesn’t necessarily mean the candidates have abandoned them. I don’t think voters have any real sense of what some of these candidates actually intend if elected. It’s not like any of them are bound to what they have said during campaigns. Maybe they will “unify” their supporters and the garbage, but maybe not. Maybe they will just refrain from calling the garbage “enemies,” so there will be a garbage list rather than an enemies list. Maybe they will crack their eggs at the small end. I’m on pins and needles waiting to see what happens.
Humm, do I smell a bit of buyers remorse in the air?
Some people have the ability to be critical of things that deserve criticism, because bad things don’t improve if they’re ignored, regardless of which side they’re on. Not many people, but some.
it’s equal opportunity bullshitting. A few years ago, Representative Henry Hyde (of “amendment” fame) tried to dodge charges about an extramarital affair in his 40s by saying, “The statute of limitations has long since passed on my youthful indiscretions”
in the case of Mondaire Jones and Kamala Harris, what they were really saying is, “I support the current thing”, or in the words of Rob Reiner’s mom, “I’ll have what she’s having.” The main distinction to draw between Jones and Harris is that a president sets the agenda–defines the “current thing” –whereas a congressperson can just ride with the herd.
“Does this mean that five years ago, as a United States Senator after having served as Frisco DA and Cali AG, she was just a kid, too dumb to grasp the idiocy of her positions? Or does this mean that five years ago she was either too weak or too unprincipled to reject the progressive orthodoxy? To say she’s learned since then is easy, but fails to explain why she didn’t learn enough as a DA, AG or Senator to not embrace such lunacy. Or it’s just a facile claim of evolving to avoid a harsher admission about her claimed support of nonsensical positions.”
Yet you voted for her. Claiming Trump would be worse is a weak excuse.
Depends on how much lifting “worse” is doing. She sounds pretty typical. The alternative to typical can always be worse.
When the choice is bad and worse, reasonable people choose bad.
But keep in mind that what’s “bad” for one is not necessarily “bad” for another, and reasonable people can differ on just what is “bad” as well.
And as our Benevolent Host points out, what’s considered “good” today may well become “bad” tomorrow. Hindsight is usually 20/20, after all.
Or look beyond the “choice” that is being offered and try to determine whose ox is really being gored and why.
Adam Smith wrote about justice in his book ‘On the Theory of Moral Sentiments’. In particular, it wasn’t simple but significantly swayed by fashion. Some people follow fashion more closely than they ought.
It might be forgivable if it were accompanied by some self-awareness and apologies. They were so righteous and smug when they advocated for defunding the police, asserting that a lab leak was impossible and that inflation wasn’t an issue and that it was transitory. They called their opponents Nazis and conspiracy theorists.
Now they have moved on from those positions with barely any acknowledgment but they are still righteously smug and yell even louder that their opponents are Nazis and conspiracy theorists.
The term “conspiracy theory” was invented by the CIA to disparage those who doubted that JFK was killed by a lone nut with a magic bullet. Today’s conspiracy theory is tomorrow’s common knowledge.
You, of all people, ought to recognize the absurd irony of your comment.
I’m not sure I follow. [Ed. Note: Balance deleted. Clearly, I gave you too much credit. Never mind.]
The views that Harris espoused in a different political climate 4 years ago have become unfashionable, so she now refuses to say what she believes, and when pressed will disavow those formerly useful beliefs. Some say that this indicates that she has no beliefs, and that she will say anything to get elected. To say that is to say that she is a politician.
Some say that Harris is an idiot, but I disagree. She reads her teleprompter very competently, and when the situation calls for dodging questions (as it frequently does during an election), she dodges them very skillfully. Her failure to espouse any sort of belief in anything is a calculated strategy developed by a team of highly paid advisors, and she executes that policy reasonably well.
Her advisors have a difficult task. They have to sell a candidate who, as vice-president, is blamed for unpopular policies that had disastrous results, and who, if we can believe her, will not be doing anything different during her presidency. Her “hide in the basement” strategy may look bad to those who believe that the president runs the country and has a responsibility to tell us their plans before the election, but it is probably the best possible strategy for her under the circumstances.
The Road to Nowhere, Talking Heads. Listen up people!
You forgot to mention the 18th Amendment, aka Prohibition. It may have seemed like a welll-intentoned idea at the time, but turned out to be a really, Really Bad Idea. Liquor producers, delivery people, sellers and drinkers who rely on them all have rights too.
I think better when I drink, but please don’t tell anyone. There’s a bar in a town I know where some lawyers and at least one judge patronize during lunch hour. Actually, it’s more like one and a half hours, occasionally two. The damn courthouse can wait!
There’s no end to bad ideas We’re on board with Defund the Police. Not completely of course. But rolling back some of the excessive funding that has turned some departments into virtual armies where collateral damage is huge.
You have to crack eggs to make an omelet. You have to crack heads to make a Prison-Industrial Complex.