Center Cannot Hold

The Second Coming of Progressivism

[Ed. Note: As you might have noticed, the American essayist, Joan Didion, passed away this week, aged 87. In the following essay, we wonder aloud what Mrs. Didion would think of today’s curious cultural landscape, where up is down, right is wrong and the world is seen through the looking glass. 

If nothing else, we hope our words offer you ample fodder to engage in that most quintessential of holiday pastimes... friendly political debates over the Christmas table. Enjoy…

Joel Bowman, reckoning today from Buenos Aires, Argentina...

​​Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

~ From The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats

For a young Joan Didion, setting her inimitable mind to pen in the counterculture malaise of the 1960s, Yeats’s timeless words “reverberated in my inner ear as if surgically implanted there.”

They were her “point of reference, the only images against which much of what I was seeing and hearing and thinking seemed to make any pattern.” 

Scenes of chaos and uncertainty were not uncommon at the time, both abroad in Indochina, and closer to home, notably in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. 

Didion’s stunning collection “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (which draws its title from the final line of Yeats’ famous poem) derived in large part from her time steeped in that iconic Californian scene, breaking bread with an iris flourish of anti-war protestors, civil rights advocates, bedraggled hippies, would-be revolutionaries, second-wave feminists and long-haired beatniks alike. 

For Didion, and the millions who followed the quintessential American essayist’s journey as it unfolded across the pages of The Saturday Evening Post, this was a time when those on the New Left marched to the beat of a revolutionary drum. Their message, though often convoluted and vocalized through myriad competing factions of the same tidal phenomenon, coalesced broadly around notions of individual liberty. 

Indeed, many on the New Left (a term coined in a concerted effort to distance the movement from the old, progressive guard), saw themselves predominantly as left-libertarian. Confusion regarding matters of basic economics notwithstanding, the New Left’s quarrels were primarily with those who sought to impose, through force, curtailments on their individual freedoms, civil and political. 

As such, the New Left advocated for freedom of speech and bodily autonomy, especially when it came to personal decisions regarding drug use, recreational and otherwise. They were staunchly anti-war and anti-establishment, and deeply distrustful of what they viewed as the unholy, borderline fascistic alliance between The State and corporate America, in their eyes tantamount to the profiteering nexus of the Vietnam War. They were fiercely anti-segregation and pro-women’s liberation. They envisioned a world where “a man is not judged by the color of his skin, but the content of his character,” and in which women were free to attend colleges alongside men, in coeducational academies. 

Free... open... inclusive... anti-authoritarian... anti-segregationist... libertarian leaning...

That was then. Half a century and more has washed under the bridge since those heady, tie-dyed sunsets. One wonders what Mrs. Didion would see where she alive today, peering through her idiosyncratic lens, as the world turns upside down, things fall apart, and the center shakes and trembles. 

Spiritus Mundi

Surveying the political landscape left of center today, one could be forgiven for thinking the spooks in Orwell’s Ministry of Truth had snuck in under cover of darkness and performed a routine historical switch, changing out Eurasia for Eastasia (“Or was it the other way around?” wondered Winston). 

That is to say, when accounting for matters civil and political, modern day progressives are categorically antithetical to the liberal notions that animated the 1960s zeitgeist in practically every way that counts. Far from open-minded and inclusive, one senses instead a shrill and unflinching antagonism toward individual liberty and a dogma insuperably conjugated with collectivist, Identitarian politics. This apparent contradiction makes sense only when you realize that modern progressivism owes its origins not to civil rights era activism, which after all consciously broke from the markedly pro-establishment, progressive movement of the day, but to a far more sinister progenitor dating back to the dawn of the century. 

More on the grandfather of modern American progressivism below, but first, let us take the matters of primary concern - free speech; bodily autonomy; militarism; “establishmentism”; race and gender equality - in hand, one at a time... 

Concerning free speech, a pillar of classically liberal ideology, modern progressives appear ominously, righteously, even piously censorial. Witness the rolling “cancel culture” phenomenon flattening debate across the land, something akin to right-wing McCarthyism revived, reversed and projected back through Alice’s fantastical looking glass. 

Pano Kanelos, former president of the prestigious liberal arts school, St. John’s College in Annapolis, described the Great Silencing on campuses in a recent op-ed piece. Writes Mr. Kanelos:

The numbers tell the story as well as any anecdote you’ve read in the headlines or heard within your own circles. Nearly a quarter of American academics in the social sciences or humanities endorse ousting a colleague for having a wrong opinion about hot-button issues such as immigration or gender differences. Over a third of conservative academics and PhD students say they had been threatened with disciplinary action for their views. Four out of five American PhD students are willing to discriminate against right-leaning scholars, according to a report by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology.

The picture among undergraduates is even bleaker. In Heterodox Academy’s 2020 Campus Expression Survey, 62% of sampled college students agreed that the climate on their campus prevented students from saying things they believe. Nearly 70% of students favor reporting professors if the professor says something students find offensive, according to a Challey Institute for Global Innovation survey. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education reports at least 491 disinvitation campaigns since 2000. Roughly half were successful. 

Dear friends who plot themselves somewhere near the “sensible, center-left,” are left to wonder whatever happened to the spirit that energized the Free Speech Movement of 1964-65, when students at the University of California, Berkeley, staged the first mass act of civil disobedience on an American campus, demanding political freedoms and the right to engage in precisely the kind of open, unfettered dialogue that would send today’s petrified post-pubescents running for the squishy toys and the padded safe spaces. 

Mr. Kanelos, along with a host of other college presidents, professors, journalists, artists, philanthropists, researchers, and public intellectuals from across the political spectrum have marshaled resources to found the University of Austin, in Texas, in an attempt to counter this alarming, censorial trend. 

A Shape with Lion Body

If free speech stands as a sparkling edifice of individual liberty, then self ownership and, by extension, bodily autonomy, must surely constitute the bedrock upon which such rights are first and firmly established. (What use is a voice if you don’t own the body animating it?) Here, too, modern progressives have betrayed their charge in the most cowardly manner imaginable. 

Sidestepping the tarpit that is the pro-choice vs pro-life debate, we pause only to observe that, “My body, my choice” really only works as a slogan if it isn’t collocated with “your body, also my choice.” (This goes for all parties concerned, by the by.)

Those who marched under pithier (four word) placards in the ‘60s were at least able to meet the charge of hypocrisy when it came to the matter of personal drug use, recreational and medical (contraceptive). Having staked a claim around their own precious personages, advocates for women’s liberation had every right to decide what substances they would - and would not - allow into their own sacred temples. 

The very idea of The State colluding with Big Pharma to enforce medical mandates stands as positively anathema to any notion of individual liberty worthy of the definition. Even as the courts put a stay on Mr. Biden’s nationwide COVID-19 vaccine mandates, the administration proceeds headlong with its unconstitutional enforcement, much to the undisguised glee of bullying progressives the nation over. As it turns out, intra-governmental, cross branch administrative creep is another favorite plaything of the progressive left, something sensible centrists of both parties remain ever wary of. 

And here we break to save the frantic letter-writer some virtual ink: To assume that a claim on bodily autonomy is in any way synonymous with being anti-science or “anti-vaxx” is to miss entirely the point of what it means to be pro-choice in the first place. (Hint: the clue lies in the italicized noun.) It is possible, in other words, even consistent, to be pro-vaccine and also anti-mandate. Alas, when it comes to being pro-choice, modern progressives only support “choice” if it coincides with the “correct” (i.e. “their”) choice. 

Sands of the Desert

Shimmying from the civil to the political, it surely stands as something of a puzzlement to peace-loving, center-left pacifists that the past two presidential elections featured, in bright, bold letters atop the Democratic tickets, nominees who were hawkish advocates not only for the Iraq War, but no shortage of foreign militaristic undertakings both before and since. Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Biden boast a stripe of militaristic bona fides that make all but the most rabid neo-cons blush. Whatever happened to the “anti war left,” one wonders. “Make love, not war,” remember?

Setting aside the well-documented bellicosity of the former Secretary of State (“Fighting for Us”), let us turn instead to the current Commander in Chief, a man who leaned heavily on progressive support for his victory in the 2020 General Election, but who since packed his cabinet with pro-war hawks. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, back in 2002, Mr. Biden was at the very spearhead of the debate over the appropriate course of action regarding Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s now-infamously elusive “weapons of mass destruction.” Allying himself with Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, McCain, Clinton, et. al, Mr. Biden voted in a way no peace-loving, anti-war liberal possibly could: To let loose the dogs. 

Although he has since repeatedly claimed he turned against that decision the moment the bombs began raining down on Baghdad during the appalling Shock and Awe campaign, the record clearly shows otherwise. Either as senator or vice president, Mr. Biden also supported costly military misadventures in Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) as well as in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Syria, Libya and Honduras. 

The President did, of course, make a haphazard withdrawal from Afghanistan this year, a messy and seemingly impromptu bellum interruptus, if you will, but this came only after progressive hawks roundly criticized the previous administration for announcing plans to do the very same thing but one year earlier. Democrats, working hand-in-glove with Liz Cheney, also sounded off against similar decisions to draw down troop numbers in Germany, where the US has maintained a permanent military presence since WWII. (Most Germans, in case anyone thought to ask, proved rather sanguine at the prospect of military disengagement.)

That many on the left turn out to be not only willing but orgiastic bedfellows of the Military Industrial Complex is no great surprise. It was, after all, the grandfather of American progressivism who swindled the Republic into the great quagmire that was World War I. (Again, more about our anti-hero in a moment.) Ever since, belligerent rascals from both sides of the political aisle have spilled plenty of vicarious blood, American and foreign, in pursuit of gains and glory on battlefields they hope never to have to personally visit. 

Whatever one’s view on such foreign entanglements, it is difficult to imagine a pro-war slogan (“All in Iraq!” “Bombs over Baghdad!”) scrawled across a protest sign under “no nukes” or “save the whales.” 

The Widening Gyre

Returning full circle, perhaps the most alarming point of departure vis-à-vis modern progressives and their tenuous, largely fictitious claim to ‘60s-era, New Left libertarianism, lies in the realm of civil rights. 

The recent gubernatorial election in Virginia provides a fascinating example of just such centrifugal energy in motion, where the core and uniting goal of achieving a post-racial, “colorblind” society was abandoned by progressives in favor of neo-segregationist tribalism. A regression, in other words, and a shameful one at that. The results do not portend well for Democrats. 

In a state that Mr. Biden carried by over 10 points less than a year ago, many were shocked to learn that the upright citizens of Old Dominion should flip so decidedly for a Republican candidate in the form of Glen Youngkin, and that in doing so, they would oust long time beltway operative and Clinton acolyte, Terence Richard McAuliffe. According to the Washington Post’s own breakdown, McAuliffe’s “margins shrank significantly in cities, suburbs and exurbs that Joe Biden had carried handily just a year before.”

In the flurry of confused postmortems that sought to explain the results, it was the least plausible hypothesis that earned the highest decibel coverage from the frantic, illiberal media: The Mother of Presidents had succumbed to the rhapsodic and prevailing spell of white supremacy. 

To swallow this nonsensical narrative, one has to believe that a whole swath of voters, who were nominally Team Biden but twelve short months ago, suddenly developed an acute and collective case of Rapid Onset White Supremacy, or ROWS. (Google it. It’s not a thing...yet). Furthermore, one would have to believe that the very same platoon of newly-radicalized, bigoted soccer moms also cheered on the first ever black woman to hold a statewide office, Mrs. Winsome E. Sears, as their new lieutenant governor. (Both Republican and Democrat tickets featured women of color for the position - Democrat candidate Hala Ayala is a Latina of mixed heritage - giving some indication as to the purely imagined saturation of race and gender bigotry circulating among the good people of Virginia.)

Absurdly, race-baiting members of the progressive chattering class went so far as to besmirch the new lieutenant governor - A Jamaican-born immigrant whose father arrived in the country with $1.75 in his pocket and whose curriculum vitae includes running a homeless shelter and serving as vice president of the Virginia Board of Education - as little more than a “black mouth” parroting “white supremacist” messaging. Yes. Really. 

“The problem is, here, they want white supremacy by ventriloquist effect,” one particularly odious professor explained to a nodding MSNBC host. “There is a black mouth moving but a white idea running on the runway of the tongue of a figure who justifies and legitimates the white supremacist practices.” 

The irony, which swing voters understood ahead of the election, is that it is precisely this kind of flagrant race hustling that inspired them to vote the way they did in the first place. Decent, liberal-minded citizens are sick of being lectured about how racist and sexist they are, especially by people who insist on reducing every aspect of complex society to a matter of gonads and melanin content. Moreover, they’re doubly outraged that their children are being funneled through the CRT “victim vs. oppressor” programming, taught to confine their thinking to a superficial and simplistic black vs. white paradigm. (We warned such divisive dogma was going to become a problem more than a year ago.)

According to a Washington Post-Schar School poll, education was by a wide margin the single most important issue for voters going into the race. As NPR observed: “Parents who wanted more voice in schools broke for Youngkin by a large margin in exit polls.”

If progressives wanted to know what was on parents’ minds, they had only to stop lecturing them about their collective guilt and ask the question. As it turns out, the answer was the very same thing at the forefront of any decent parent’s mind, regardless of race: their children. 

Instead, neo-segregationists like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo stoke the embers of ugly race wars by insisting that school children be divided by skin color, made to acknowledge their privilege and collective, inherited guilt (white kids) or to accept the notion that they are the permanent and helpless victims of a systemically racist society (non-whites) bent (either consciously or unconsciously) on forever oppressing them. All this, in the most racially diverse country in the history of the planet. 

Such an overtly race-obsessed environment, in which progressives now routinely preface statements with not only their preferred gender pronouns but also their racial group (see Microsoft’s cringey intro video), would have been considered utterly dystopian for those ‘60s souls, who sought to relegate mere skin color to the realm of near-irrelevancies, somewhere between hair color and eye color. And yet, in the upside-down modern world, it is those who call themselves “anti-racists” who can’t help but see race everywhere. 

Of course, pathological projection is not at all uncommon or unusual in the political realm. Indeed, if the most hysterical cries from the progressive left are in any way accurate in their assessment of the modern age, we live in an era positively beset by black white supremacists, transgender TERFs and Jewish nazis. 

When Larry Elder, a black, libertarian businessman who grew up in the impoverished city of Compton, in southern Los Angeles County, dared run as a moderate Republican in the 2021 California gubernatorial recall election, the Los Angeles Times promptly labeled him the “Black Face of White Supremacy.”

When prominent American feminist, social critic, celebrated professor and lifelong transgender rights activist, Camille Paglia, chanced to voice her skepticism of the current transgender movement, about which she is a published expert, she was reflexively branded a Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist (TERF). A petition demanding Paglia’s immediate dismissal from the University of the Arts in Pennsylvania, where she has taught since 1984 was, somewhat remarkably, unsuccessful. 

Meanwhile, politically conservative Jews, like Ben Shapiro and Bari Weiss, are routinely called Nazis, racists, bigots and fascists, especially by those who consider themselves members of the enlightened, woke, progressive class. 

Such a discombobulating maelstrom of Newspeak has left many liberal voters scratching their heads and seeking desperately for a point of reference, for some basic orientation, a way to make sense of a party that looks increasingly to them like everything their nominally left-wing parents fought against. 

And now we get down to the dark heart of the matter...

Revelation is at Hand

Here we see our political orphan, she of the “sensible, center-left,” beginning to feel the ground giving way beneath her feet, as things fall apart, and mere anarchy is loosed upon her world. Terrified by what she perceives on the right, she glances to her left for support, but there finds only more lunatics, authoritarians, race hustlers and worse. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a more grotesque amalgamation embodying the fears and horrors confronting the 1960’s, New Left mentality, than a censorial, militaristic neo-segregationist, with one sweaty palm in Big Pharma’s lap and the other brandishing a cudgel wrapped in a state medical mandate. 

This vexing nightmare, to pilfer another phrase from Yeats, only begins to make sense when you realize that modern progressives are not, as they like to believe in their tyrannical little hearts, spiritual, intellectual or political descendants of those ‘60s New Left civil libertarians. They are, rather, malformed changelings deposited on the 21st Century’s doorstep, the far flung offspring of none other than the grandfather of American progressivism himself, Thomas Woodrow Wilson. 

Students of economic history will perhaps recognize Mr. Wilson as the president who shamelessly saddled the American people with the twin evils of the Revenue Act of 1913, which ushered in the very first federal income tax in the nation, and, in the very same year no less, the Federal Reserve Act, paving the way for the inevitable corruption of the national currency. (The US dollar has lost some 96% of its purchasing power in the 108 years since the Fed came into existence.) 

Wilson was also, with the assistance of pioneering propagandist Eddie Bernays, the man who sold World War I to the American people under the manufactured marketing slogan, “Making the world safe for democracy.” A hawk, in other words, who subscribed to his own brand of “liberal internationalism,” known as Wilsonianism, which favored collective security in place of traditional, American non-interventionism. A stark contrast, in other words, to one of Thomas Jefferson’s “essential principles of our government;” that of “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”

Save for a brief inter-war spell, the U.S. military has been on the march in foreign lands ever since.  

But Wilson was more than just a wretched meddler, a warmonger and a tireless steward of administrative mission creep. The 28th American president was also the first to attack, “root and branch,” the Founding principles of the nation, rejecting the Madisonian architecture that had until then served to guide the nation through the first century and a quarter of its existence. 

Like his modern progressive descendants, who revile the nation’s founding as an irredeemable stain on world history, Wilson believed firmly that human nature is a fictionalized entity, a cultural artifact of sorts, a “social construct,” to mobilize the fashionable, post-modernist parlance of our day. As such, he viewed political control and guidance of the national conscience as not only a worthy goal, but necessarily a primary one, too. Rejecting the natural, inalienable rights posited by the Founders, Wilson took the view that rights derived from, and therefore ought to be granted by, government. The state’s role was not to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” as the Founders observed in the very first sentence of the Constitution of the United States of America, but as a civilizing agent charged with conferring such privileges on the witless savages. [Emphasis mine.]

Once properly understood, once contextualized, the motivations of progressives - then as now - become abundantly clear. To civilize savage man...or not, as the case may be. 

Consider, for instance, that other progressive giant of the early 20th century, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose immortal words are emblazoned on the lucre-basted crust of the IRS Building, down on (ironically enough) Constitution Avenue: “Taxation is the Price We Pay for Civilization.” Like Wilson, Holmes viewed rights as contingent, not inalienable, and certainly not universal. (Holmes was a card carrying eugenicist, who crudely betrayed his view on who, in his mind, deserves basic rights and who does not, when he wrote the majority opinion in Buck v. Bell, a case that upheld the Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924 and the forced sterilization of Carrie Buck. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” declared Holmes.)

It will come as no surprise, then, in this context, to learn that Wilson himself was also a well-known racist. (As in, an actual racist.) In his role as the President of Princeton University, he was an outspoken apologist for slavery and a supporter of the Southern Redemption Movement. He also leveraged his administrative power to actively discourage the admission of African-American students. Little, if anything, changed in his attitude when he assumed the United States presidency in 1912.

Unlike the good people of Virginia, who were only too happy to elect an accomplished, black woman as their state’s lieutenant governor, President Wilson favored racial segregation across the federal bureaucracy and in the military, going so far as to stack his own cabinet with proud and unapologetic white supremacists. Such members included Postmaster General Albert P. Burleson, a devoted segregationist, Attorney General James Clark McReynolds, a notorious bigot, and Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, a violent white supremacist counted among the foremost leaders behind the Wilmington Massacre. Wilson defended his segregation of the federal offices on “scientific grounds,” claiming that segregation removed “friction” between the races. 

After courting support from leaders of the African-American community in the run up to the election, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Wilson promptly reneged on many of his campaign promises, including support for civil rights reform and the passage of the Anti-Lynching Bill. (The Bill, sponsored by representative Leonidas C. Dyer, a Republican from Missouri, was intended to establish lynching as a federal crime.) Furious at the president’s betrayal, Du Bois eventually denounced Wilson in a biting editorial, one worth reading for every aspiring, modern progressive.

As a man dedicated to the notion of contingent - i.e. state granted - rights, it makes perfect sense that Wilson would also be hostile to the nettlesome guarantees enumerated in the First Amendment to the Constitution, particularly as regards freedom of speech and “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

It was Wilson who signed into law the Sedition Act of 1918, in an effort to quash mounting public criticism of his war efforts. The Act forbade the use of "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" directed at the United States government, its flag, or its armed forces. Thousands of political dissidents, pacifists and conscientious objectors were indicted under the Act. As constitutional scholars, Melvin Urofsky and Paul Finkelman, note, “The war to make the world safe for democracy [see Eddie Bernays’s Big Lie] triggered the worst invasion of civil liberties...in the nation’s history.” 

A fitting testament for a man who held such precious liberties in such low regard. 

The Second Coming

Of the 150 or so guests whom Thomas Woodrow Wilson welcomed to his inauguration as president of Princeton University in 1902, only one, Booker Taliaferro Washington, was black. Though the prominent author, educator, orator and adviser to several United States presidents was permitted to attend the ceremony itself, he was not invited to either of the two dinners Wilson and his wife hosted after the event. In fact, Wilson refused to allow Mr. Washington to be housed on campus at all, an accommodation that was extended exclusively to white guests visiting from out of town.  

During Wilson’s eight years as president of Princeton University, not a single African-American was hired as a member of faculty or admitted into the undergraduate student body. When he did receive a letter from a young black man, seeking admission, Wilson had his secretary respond that it was, “altogether inadvisable for a colored man to enter Princeton.” The university had, in fact, graduated black students in the past, but Wilson worked to have those records expunged. The segregationist’s legacy would long persist. Princeton did not admit another black student until 1947, becoming the very last Ivy League school to officially integrate.

This year, another Ivy League school, Columbia University, drew criticism for its decision to host multiple graduation ceremonies based on students’ race and identity. The university’s website details virtual ceremonies for students who wish to participate in a Black Graduation, Asian Graduation, Latinx Graduation, Native Graduation, and a Lavender Graduation for the LGBTQIA+ community.

“Complementing our school and University-wide ceremonies, these events provide a more intimate setting for students and guests to gather, incorporate meaningful cultural traditions and celebrate the specific contributions and achievements of their communities,” the page adds.

According to the National Association of Scholars, more than 75 colleges around the country now host racially segregated graduation ceremonies. Remember what Wilson said about “reducing friction” between the races? Never mind “judging a man by the content of his character.” This is what it means to come full circle. 

A century after the sun set on Wilson’s tenure at Princeton and in the White House, the world is witnessing the recrudescence of Wilsonian progressivism. It is evident in the censorial impulses of the cancel mob, in the arrogance of one-size-fits-all medical mandates, in the neo-segregationist ideologies of divisive race hustlers like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, and in the greatest hubris of them all, that which is required to mobilize an army, to march across the world, and to there lay waste to millions of unknown souls.

Modern progressives would do well to disabuse themselves of the false and romantic notion that they are somehow the spiritual descendants of the New Left, Haight-Ashbury crowd. Operating under the long, dark shadow of their 28th president, neo-Wilsonians stand for everything those people fought against, and worse. 

Merry Christmas,

Joel Bowman
December, 2021 ~ Buenos Aires, Argentina