Progressivism is reeling from two disasters, of different kinds. The first was the reelection of Donald Trump. The second is the ongoing Los Angeles wildfires. Each, in its own way, has exposed the feeble condition of progressive politics.
Contemporary progressivism has been attempting of late to combine two competing projects, one quite old, one more recent. The older is progressivism’s century-old commitment to administration: the impulse to centralize and rationalize in the name of efficiency and transparency. The impulse is as old as the Progressive Party and the “modernization” efforts of Woodrow Wilson, and it has endured, more or less intact, for a hundred years, albeit channeled and strained through the New Deal, the Great Society, and the Reagan Revolution. Barack Obama was the apotheosis of the progressive vision of technocratic management. His cadres of wonks promised to bring expertise into every nook and cranny of government. Expert hands would carefully manage everything from the nationwide health-care exchange to Iranian nuclear policy, calibrating the machine of American administration with an unfailing touch. When Joe Biden was reelected and staffed his White House with a host of Obama alumni, the endless refrain, “the adults are back in charge,” signaled progressive relief that expertise would again guide American policymaking after the disastrous finger-painting years of Trumpian populism.
The newer project, distinct from this, is the revisionist social-justice movement that began rising in the early 2010s, crashed to shore in the riotous summer of 2020, and has seeped into almost every aspect of American institutional life, from universities to sports leagues to boardrooms to government. The Woke movement has a different genealogy than the technocratic project: It is a variation less of the Progressive movement of the early 20th century than of the 1960s New Left. Wokeism revises both the racial and sexual politics of the 1960s, replacing the color-blind civil rights vision of the 1964 Civil Rights Act with the dogma of “anti-racism,” and sexual-revolution-era feminism with conceptual frameworks such as intersectionality and gender identity.
Both of these projects are wobbling.
Wokeism was arguably on the wane already in 2024, but Donald Trump’s victory in November has been interpreted as, among other things, a definitive blow to its fortunes. That is certainly how prominent individuals and organizations have responded. Jeff Bezos’s decision, in advance of the election, to overhaul the Washington Post was a monitory sign of a coming shift away from the feverish progressivism that had dominated its pages since at least 2016. Likewise, Mark Zuckerberg’s recent announcement that Facebook would be replacing its fact-checking apparatus with a “community notes” system, modeled on Elon Musk’s X, is another data point attesting that the regnant paradigm of the 2010s and early 2020s is collapsing.
If Trump’s victory upends, at least in certain respects, the woke project, the Los Angeles wildfires call into question the other: technocratic management. California is the essence of the “blue-state model.” Over the past generation, blue states have adopted a high-tax regime with the promise that revenues will fund expansive social services. The lavishly funded state bureaucracy will be able to accomplish not only core government functions but pet projects (such as, in California’s case, electric-vehicle mandates). They will also be leaders on social justice questions, using state power to enforce quotas, DEI initiatives, and the like. The gamble has been that residents would trade higher taxes for this array of tangible and intangible benefits.
It has not worked out that way, and California is a laboratory-grade test case. (California has not had a Republican in a statewide elected office since January 2011.) Despite their state’s crushing tax burden, Californians have watched public services and quality of life steadily decline. California now has some of the highest rates of homelessness, welfare dependency, and adult illiteracy in the country. An artificial housing shortage has sent home prices and rents skyward. Inflated water and energy costs have made the basic cost of living unaffordable for vast swaths of residents, especially lower-income and minority residents.
The Los Angeles wildfires might not be primarily a product of bad policy — although it’s clear that essential fire-management tasks went neglected for years — but the fires are definitively unmasking California’s progressive project for what it is: a failure. As Noah Rothman observes, “boutique priorities” have squeezed out the basics of good local and state governance. Witness the dazed and befuddled response of Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass and the incoherence and bizarre levity of Governor Gavin Newsom: the wildfires have made clear that California’s leadership class has been so degraded that it is incapable of handling core governmental functions, like disaster management, with anything like the requisite seriousness. The blue-state model was supposed to establish a system of administration that would make the state more efficient and more accountable. It was supposed to create states that would be magnets, not repellents. Instead, it has yielded decayed cities, unfit leaders, and, now, catastrophe.
The dual progressive projects limned here — rational administration on one hand, and woke social-justice activism on the other — are deeply entrenched, both institutionally and psychically. They will of course stagger onward. But both projects have suffered monumental blows that will, and should, shake their confidence.
It is of some interest, in light of the above, that many young progressives are distinguishing themselves, against both of these projects, as “socialists.” Some socialist progressives see their vision of left-wing politics as a way forward that can navigate successfully between the existing, dubious alternatives.
Where do progressive politics go from here? Conservatives should watch carefully.
Reprinted with permission from the National Review by Ian Tuttle.
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