Progressive Conservatism

[Chris]

Progressive Conservatism is a review of F.H. Buckley’s new book by that title.

It makes sense in terms of the old parties back at the beginning of the Progressive Era, not so much today, and not at all in terms of political philosophies.

...Not so long ago, it meant Enlightenment principles and left-wing economic policies such as Medicare for all, but today’s progressive has reverted to the premodern identity politics of tribe against tribe, race against race, that is destructive of democratic dialogue.

Old-fashioned Democrats would have been horrified at this. They were patriots who supported free markets and fought to expel communists from their party. With progressive Republicans they helped heal their country’s racism and sexism. Unlike todays leftists, they defended Western civilization and weren’t cultural barbarians. They stood up for what was right, did great things, and their errors (the Great Society) were mistakes of the mind and not the heart.

...In truth, there was no one progressive movement but a variety of them. Some were recognizably left of center, such as that of Herbert Croly (1869–1930) with his mistrust of “extreme individualism” and faith in centralized government and scientific planning by a body of experts. Others, especially the western agrarians, were conservative and individualistic and more Jeffersonian than the Hamiltonian Croly. What they wanted, and what every conservative wants today, was a mobile society where everyone who puts in the effort can get ahead.

The conservative strain in progressivism arose in the west, the land of free soil and free labor where the Republican Party was born, and found its champion in the first great progressive historian, Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932). What made Turner both a conservative and a progressive was his celebration of democracy and freedom, which he said were the gifts of the frontier. Our history was forged not in Jamestown or Boston but in Stephen Vincent Benét’s Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat and the way in which America had constantly reinvented itself in its restless movement westward, even as the dude became Mark Hanna’s “damn cowboy” when Theodore Roosevelt bought a ranch in the North Dakota badlands.

American history has been cast as a struggle over race, between North and South. By contrast, progressive conservatism asks us to reimagine our history as a contest between eastern and western states....

...Progressive conservatism is a well-understood term in our sister democracies. There it means a conservatism that is alive to changed circumstances that call for reform and that is unwilling to let the party of the Left become the sole agent of progress.

Edmund Burke was the founder of modern conservatism, but that didn’t make him a reactionary. Like his fellow Whigs, he supported the post-1689 British constitution, urged conciliation when American Patriots were on the verge of revolt, and backed Catholic Emancipation in Ireland. It’s not enough to look backward, he thought, and society must incorporate a principle of progress. “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.” And like all progressives, Burke loathed corruption in government and prosecuted Warren Hastings, the governor of Bengal, for exploiting his office. But if he wasn’t a reactionary, neither was he a modern progressive who scorns the past. Wise policy, he said, always looks back to our heritage in charting a course for the future. “People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.”

That was a progressive conservative....

What unites progressives of different eras and politics is a disdain for the past and a striving for a reasoned but imagined future utopian world (not unlike the Marxian vision of communism).

F.H. Buckley cites Burke as a progressive conservative simply because Burke recognized an obligation of the present, guided by the past, to future generations. There is little of the progressive in that. Edmund Burke on Social Contract Theory was concerned with a generational contract between those living, with those who came before, and those yet unborn.

[Chuck]

It was a term used a lot differently back in the late 19th and early 20th century, used to signify a technocratic view of govt. Herbert Hoover was a 'Progressive', for instance. Now it is another term for Communists and/or deviancy.

[Chris]

It was a term used a lot differently back in the late 19th and early 20th century, used to signify a technocratic view of govt. Herbert Hoover was a 'Progressive', for instance. Now it is another term for Communists and/or deviancy.

Yea, I still have trouble using Progressive for only the far left. To me all Democrats are Progressives.