Enjoying the view from Limbo
Ideas and Reflections / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published June 15, 2024 · Last modified June 17, 2024
A student recently told me about a book she had just read, Annie Ernaux’s classic of anti-motherhood indignation, La Femme Gelée. She said the book, which describes Ernaux’s life as a housewife and mother, made her feel as though she were “in prison,” and as though such a repetitive life of caring for babies, cooking meals, shopping, doing house chores, sleeping with her...
On Pain “No pain, no gain,” as we so commonly say. That is probably true, but one must never forget that most pains deliver no gains at all. Pain is a necessary condition for gain, but it is far from being a sufficient condition. On the contrary, apart from simple physical pain caused by unavoidable injury or illness, most suffering is the result...
If democracy, in its essence, is reducible to the principle of one man, one vote, which is to say if, in its purest, most unadulterated instantiations, democracy amounts to some form of simple majority rule, then there is almost no limit to the horrors that might be perpetrated and perpetuated under the auspices of democratic self-government. Furthermore, the special danger of such democratic...
Whatever one thinks of the ultimate validity or political importance of the right to free speech, there is an ironclad condition that must be understood as essential to the concept, and no free speech defense which ignores or seeks to limit this condition can amount to anything but a self-contradiction.
Kafka’s burden — the bureaucrat of practical necessity suffocated by life in the bureau — embodies in its tortured anxieties the modern diminution of the raging Heracles: Why must I, a soul full of passion, strength, and cravings for eternity, succumb to these expectations of others, to these odious priorities of daily life, to the duties of my lot, my status, my family,...
Perfect equality of opportunity would require everyone to be born in precisely identical circumstances — not merely in homes of identical material wealth, but rather in circumstances entirely without differentiating conditions that might slant life ever so slightly in favor of this or that individual. Those truly equal in opportunity must necessarily be born among the same number of siblings, and in precisely...
Socialism mistakes productivity for greed. Capitalism concedes the point, and proceeds to mistake greed for virtue. Socialism believes there can be no freedom as long as there is private property ownership. Capitalism believes the legal right to hold material goods in one’s own name is a sufficient condition of freedom. Socialism asserts that it is wrong to judge men as better or worse...
No one intuits the basic moral tenor of an age more clearly than those with a vested professional interest in accommodating themselves to that tenor for personal gain, such as advertisers and other pitchmen. If you want to understand the moral condition and collective priorities of your social environment, spend a day analyzing the advertising techniques and campaigns most pervasive in the mass...
In a classic example of the way progressivism, like all aggressive irrationalism, devours itself, we have the spectacle of the ubiquitous and increasingly literal policing of politically incorrect attitudes, a social deformity which has now grown into its final (in the sense of fatal) shape: today’s infantile world of safe spaces and public shaming. For generations, progressives attacked so-called social conservatives for their...
We now know that the FBI’s dereliction of duty regarding Hillary Clinton’s e-mail malfeasance is complete. Not only did Director James Comey have the gall to explain her guilt in the very statement in which he announced that he (against the better judgment of some agents) would not recommend charges against her, but the FBI actually agreed to destroy laptops containing relevant evidence,...
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