The political label “progressive,” the connotation of which places its adherents somewhere on the conventional political spectrum between liberals and leftists, has become a peculiar, slippery, and problematic ideological placeholder in the age of Obama. Those who identify with the term seem unwilling or unable to honestly address its historical lineage from the early 20^th century, which from an authentic, class-based leftist perspective is inseparable from “corporate liberalism” and aggressive foreign policies of the past 120 years.

 

Instead, progressives claim to identify with the “good Obama” of the campaign trail, such as he appeared in the vague and manipulative rhetoric of that giddy period, raising expectations for somewhat less violence overseas and relatively more compassion at home. From these illusions and 21 months of grudging, resistant realization has followed a self-serving progressive narrative of betrayal or weakness, rather than a realistic assessment of what Obama has clearly been—a skillfully-marketed and decidedly mainstream corporate politician, craven with the best of them.

 

It is quite consistent with the history of formal Progressivism in this country that current progressives promote themselves as sensible reformists and rational meliorists, supporting the “politically possible” as distinct from those “unrealistic” and ideologically-driven leftists and radicals. Meanwhile, current progressives oppose “reactionary” rightists and religious fundamentalists, characterized of course by the Tea Party, who are seen as afflicted by “populism” and other related conditions. The pejorative connotations of the latter political label also incorporate a vague and distorted view of both formal Populism (originally challenged by the Progressive movement as part of what can fairly be called class struggle in the late 19^th century), and its desiccated and race-based historical legacy—always irresistible fodder for progressive, class-based, elitist condescension.

 

The evasions of progressives as we have come to know them during the era of Obama were interestingly displayed in a recent New York Times “Room for Debate” forum. The header asks:

 

“Glenn Beck has popularized conservative condemnation of the 28th president. Why Wilson and not, say, one of the Roosevelts?”

 

From a leftist perspective, this question should be acknowledged as a fair one, albeit calculatedly naïve. It should remind us of the vital and cogent leftist and revisionist critiques of the Progressive Era that were produced during the 1960s and 70s in the midst of the Civil Rights and antiwar movements. The “progress” of the Progressive Era was thoroughly and convincingly described by historians William Appleman Williams, James Weinstein, Gabriel Kolko, and many others, who revealed the problematic relationships among the dramatic concentrations of economic power, the growth of the federal government and its regulatory apparatus, and an aggressive and ruthlessly materialistic internationalist agenda—all inseparable from capital accumulation and class struggle.

 

In contrast, those who now identify as progressives seem to want us to forget two things: the Progressive Era itself as it actually was in terms of clear (and class-based) winners and losers; and the revisionist critiques of the 1960s and 70s (and since) that revealed what this era was about, and incorporated the clarity and cogency of their analyses into the leftist, antiwar, anti-racist, and social justice movements of the day. The Progressive Era needs to be unequivocally understood as an important root of the statist and imperialist political evil that defines our current predicament. Current progressives who view themselves as the epitomes of liberal enlightenment must be challenged to justify their choice of political identification in light of revisionist histories and current, class-based realities.

 

Unsurprisingly, however, the Times’ framing of the question and the constitution of its panel reveals more about the agenda of its primarily liberal and progressive respondents than it does about Beck and his followers. By and large, these “debaters” marshal typical liberal/progressive ideological and rhetorical tactics that exploit elitist and class-biased stereotypes of populism, religious fundamentalism, and “anti-government” attitudes.

 

Respondent Jill Lepore of Harvard petulantly writes of Beck: “Populism looks to a past thought to be better than the present; it therefore needs a “before”; its argument will always go like this: before X, all was well; since X, everything’s gone to hell. If X weren’t Wilson, X would simply be someone else.”

 

Lepore’s approach reflects Beck’s trivialization of history, and avoids addressing either the anti-authoritarian roots of Populist movements of the 19^th century, or the repressive legacy of the Progressive Era. She charges Beck with turning the word “progressive” into an “insult.” She, of course, as a good liberal, does the same for “populism.” She adopts an evasive, mixed-bag approach in the absence of a serious and coherent historical evaluation that might lead to damning conclusions, with powerful implications for understanding our current predicament—not to mention the pervasive and historically-continuous elitism of those who identify themselves as progressive, which she blatantly displays.

 

Similarly, Mark Atwood Lawrence of the University of Texas writes: “The problem with the conservative view of Wilson is not that it is entirely wrong but that it is grossly incomplete. It makes almost no effort to view Wilson within the context of an era when most Americans eagerly welcomed the growth of government power.” Again, this is transparently evasive. How does Atwood know what Americans “eagerly welcomed” during the Wilson era? And what would a more complete perspective on Wilson’s political philosophy look like?

 

Historian R. Jeffrey Lustig has long since incisively addressed this question. In his indispensable 1982 book Corporate Liberalism: The Origins of Modern American Political Theory, 1890-1920,Lustig describes Wilson’s view of government as rooted in the biological and organic (and arguably Social Darwinian) perspectives of the Progressive Era.

 

Lustig characterizes these views as follows: First, “social change was natural and not the product of political choice;” second, social change as defined in this manner “predisposed politics and reform toward further centralization;” third, Wilson’s view of social change subordinated public debate to the “requirements of efficient leadership.”

 

Whatever the extent of governmental growth that Americans—then or now—may welcome, it is obviously unfair to attribute to them such blatantly anti-democratic ideas. During the Progressive Era, on the other hand, such views were indeed commonplace among elites and justified in the names of scientific and social progress. Certainly, the “anti-government” rhetoric of current right-wing and opportunist critics is simplistic and cynical; but so too is the more salient and unquestioned identification of increasing governmental centralization and authority with social progress by those who call themselves liberal and progressive. The authentic left should more often more confidently challenge the cynicism of “anti-anti-government” rhetoric coming from those who in essence are defenders of the status quo, which includes their own privileged positions.

 

Another respondent, eminent Wilson scholar John Milton Cooper of the University of Wisconsin, instructs Beck and his religious supporters that “a crucial difference separated (Wilson) from today's Christian right. As a learned and orthodox Christian, Wilson believed that no person could ever presume to know God's will or could avoid sin.”

 

But to be reminded that Wilson’s religious views perversely foreshadow those of liberal Protestant Cold Warrior Reinhold Niebuhr is painfully ironic, and devastates Cooper’s (and Wilson’s) claim to humility. Given our entrance into World War I and its legacy, it would be understandable if anyone of a serious moral persuasion, including Christian fundamentalists, claimed that it couldn’t have hurt if Wilson had instead seriously entertained a knowledge of God’s will and a related avoidance of sin, regardless of the pitfalls of religious belief, if these beliefs might have resulted in Wilson's placing a higher value on human life.

 

Leftists must remind themselves of one of many revealing and perhaps ironic historical juxtapositions;  for example the case of  William Jennings Bryan, former populist and candidate for President, future opponent on religious grounds of the teaching of evolution, who resigned as Wilson’s Secretary of State in protest to the entrance of the United States into World War I. To make the moral point simply and straightforwardly: Bryan resigned because he knew that he (and the country) had been blatantly and consciously lied into a war (and a war completely lacking in valid claims of moral righteousness on the part of either coalition) by the skeptical and scientific scholar and president.

 

It is consistent with this liberal ideological exercise in the New York Times that the one commenter who defines himself as conservative is essentially the only one who has something sensible to say.

 

George H. Nash writes that “conservatives see in the Obama administration another great leap in the working out of an unconstrained, Wilsonian vision of government-from-above. … In place of a regime of carefully limited government, the Progressives initiated one of potentially unlimited government guided by bureaucrats and experts increasingly insulated from popular consent. In place of the traditional understanding of our rights as natural and unalienable, the Progressives claimed that our rights were derived from government — the state — and could be created or abridged as the custodians of the state deemed expedient, in the light of modern conditions and the perceived imperatives of progress.”

 

Nash might have added, of course, that such arguably true conservatives have never been seriously represented by the (historically Hamiltonian, business-driven, and economically centralizing) Republican Party, from Lincoln to the present. To be consistent, not only is it “unfair” to single out Wilson from either of the Roosevelts, it is also unfair to single out either major party as unique in its representation of elite, ownership class-based economic interests before, during, and since the Progressive Era, as the interests of their primary donors have variously and messily determined—but all consistently to the detriment of the rights of the working classes.

 

In this light, elites in both major parties obviously are invested in Americans not being provided with the texts that are so indispensable for an understanding of the Progressive Era and its legacy. Nevertheless, serious leftist critics have this rich legacy on which to relay. In 1988, for example Martin J. Sklar published The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1926: The Market, the Law, and Politics. As concisely reviewed by Spencer C. Olin in 1991,

 

“Sklar presents a more complicated story in which almost no one preferred the free market option, especially the large capitalists. Instead, three alternatives were the object of spirited debate. A minority, including Theodore Roosevelt, viewed corporations essentially as public utilities subject to strict regulation by the federal government (a left-wing statist position). A second alternative was the right-of-center property-rights liberalism of William Howard Taft, who sought ‘a minimalist-regulatory corporate liberalism’ with very limited government control through modified antitrust laws. Finally, a left-of-center and non-statist-regulatory corporate liberalism aimed at blending the other two alternatives was espoused by Woodrow Wilson. It permitted more control of specific corporate activity than did Taft's program but without the statist features of Theodore Roosevelt's. According to Sklar, Wilson's alternative ultimately won the day, providing the basis for a new American economic consensus that has defined American politics to this day. ‘Just as the Open Door policy may be said to have ended the debate between imperialists and anti-imperialists’ he concludes, ‘so the Wilson legislation ended the debate over the legitimacy of the large corporation.’”

 

Finally, in seriously engaging such scholarly and class-informed historical analysis and its implications for responses to our current material and ideological predicaments, the authentic and proudly “non-progressive” and (perhaps even) “anti-progressive” left can debunk the notion that at a global, theoretically sound, and morally coherent level there is or ever has been anything profoundly enlightened about progressivism—past or present, small p or Large P. At this critical historical juncture, those who choose to label themselves in this manner cannot seriously claim to be advocating fundamental resistance and transformation in response to the ruthless class struggle that defines our politics. Instead, they condemn themselves to the sterile, self-serving, elitist, and limited rhetorical region that exists between Glenn Beck and the New York Times. Our rich tradition of leftist historical critique and its relation to social movements ought not to be consigned—with either inevitable morbid irony or dire consequences—to the dustbin of history.

 

 

David Green ([email protected]) lives in Champaign, IL.

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