Progressivism as a framework for political action is quite new and immature. It is time for it to grow up, and quickly.
The Progressivism I mean here is the strand on the Left that focuses on gender and race inequities rather than class. This is a shift: the liberalism of the Democratic party was forged to a large extent by class divides, with a strong foundation in the labor movement. The progressive wing is often in tension with that tradition and represents a major cultural development.
The basic impulse at its core is a feeling that it is good to widen the scope of inclusion, to engage with people who are different. That’s a very radical idea. Human civilizations for almost all of their ten thousand years or so have survived by demanding that members abide by a code of right and wrong based on shared traditions; outsiders could join, at best, only if they were willing to learn the code. Progressives passionately reject that idea: they feel that any such society suppresses creativity and individuality and perpetuates injustices of power and privilege.
The notion that blacks, and muslims, and women, and gays, and all the varieties of gender identity should be fully included in society – that they should feel comfortable in expressing their distinct identities – is a powerful wizardry, with the hope and promise of transforming society from its age-old hierarchy of privilege into an equal community of respectful interaction.
But this progressive ideology is also very one-dimensional and incomplete. It rejects wholesale the order of the past and demands a radical break. Since straight white males have been the highest-status group in the past, it would strip them of legitimacy. Anything the marginalized groups say carries the truth of oppression. Those of higher status can only keep out of the way, show respect, “check their privilege,” in order to create room for the marginalized to develop their power and pride.
Like all developing ideologies, this runs into all kinds of problems in practice – and not just because of resistance from the straight white males. It leads into mazes in trying to define right and wrong. Most obvious are the various tensions among the many marginalized social-identity groups. What do we as progressives make of the frequent homophobia among black men? Or the common norms of treatment of women in Muslim cultures that seem to us demeaning? Does the feminist critique of toxic masculinity extend to black men as well as white ones?
These kinds of questions, in my experience, make progressives – especially the white male subset – extremely uncomfortable. No one wants to talk about them. We feel there are traps wherever we turn – someone will be mad, or hurt; someone will guilt-trip us. And these problems have grown only more difficult as the moral claim of the status-oppressed has been raised by increasing numbers of groups, such as multiplying sexual identities.
Then there is the problem about where to draw the moral boundaries. Many of the issues raised by Black Lives Matter are uncontroversial: virtually, Right or Left, everyone thinks that police shootings of unarmed black children are wrong, and most accept that there is good reason for a sense of outrage. But Black Lives Matter has also focused on much more contested and dubious issues. When a few activists argued that a painting of Emmett Till’s coffin should be removed from an exhibit and destroyed, merely because it was painted by a white woman, I and many of my friends felt this was going too far. When #MeToo went after Aziz Ansari for being sexually pushy with a woman who had pursued him and gone back to his apartment with him, the Left was similarly divided. Those more to the Right, meanwhile, may be horrified by police shootings of unarmed people and by Harvey Weinstein'a predatory sexuality -- but they think that the frenzy over cases like Ansari are ludicrous. It undermines their support for the broader issues.
We progressives have not yet worked these things through. I find it heartening that there has been real debate among progressives on the Ansari case, but all too often those who disagree with the more extreme claims of the activists are silent because they cannot articulate a clear view that challenges the moral claims of marginalized people without disrespecting them.
Finally, there are problems and injustices that are about issues other than status inequality and marginalization. The narrow progressive ideology has trouble dealing with them -- especially with the issue of class. Economic inequality is unquestionably a major threat to our future. But the problem is that many straight white males are also poor. They are at the bottom of society; they feel excluded from opportunities; some 40% of them have spent time in jail; they feel deeply uncomfortable in elite settings of universities and the halls of power. Yet in the progressive ideology, they are defined as the oppressor. Somehow, they are blamed for racism far more than liberal rich whites – even though the rich whites I know live in almost exclusively white neighborhoods and send their children to heavily white schools. All of this blurs the problem of economic inequality when seen through a progressive lens. As ideologies tend to do, this has begun to provoke schisms within the left: Bernie, who represents the older form of liberalism, is seen by many Progressives as insufficiently “woke”.
Or climate change. One can see a racial dimension in the climate issue, but it is surely not mainly about that. We all suffer from it, all our children will suffer more. If any issue should be able to draw together peoples and nations, this is it. But emphasizing the racial dimension undermines this unity and weakens the movement.
In other words, the simplicity of the progressive ideology – the ideology of turning the status hierarchy on its head, so the last become first – makes many moral judgments all but impossible, blinds us to many important issues, and fragments what should be a dominant movement. The moral certitude of this view makes it effective in mobilizing passions, but ineffective for building sustained action.
We need a more complex frame. Such frames develop through practice and reflection – through patient debate and dialogue about experience. The process requires more humility than we progressives typically show. We do not know all the answers. We are very uncertain about what the good society might look like in many aspects. And we have no idea how to get from here to our goal of a fully inclusive society. We are divided among ourselves, and we often drive away potential allies – those who may be on the same road but not at the same point. Like many radical movements of the past, we are too often stuck on ideals; we fail to incorporate the demands of practice into a complete framework of progressive thought.
A small group of young people I know have formed a group to discuss the discomforts and dilemmas of the Left. They call themselves “Apostates” – meaning that they don’t subscribe to orthodoxies. They share the basic impulse of inclusion, but they reject the constrictions of ideological purity. They begin by airing views that are unpopular: some are gun owners, some find the aspects of Black Lives Matter movement are wrong, some think “political correctness” is a real phenomenon that suppresses free speech. Some are, believe it or not, progressive Republicans – that’s actually still a thing. They create, to use a current term, a safe space to voice and debate these unorthodoxies.
The left needs many Apostates, and many serious internal discussions. We should discuss difficult cases, like Ansari or transgender bathrooms or gun regulation. We should bring in potential allies – people who share our inclusive impulse, who do not seek to return to an imagined past of homogeneous and stable communities with blacks and women who knew their place. We should try to understand their hesitations; we should see what practices help gain their support, while being humble enough to accept that we might change our own minds occasionally.
If we do that, I think we will find that the vast majority of Americans share our basic impulse to broaden inclusion. And in time, we can build a frame for progressivism that is complex enough, broad enough, and practical enough for a new society.
