Progressivism

The Ken Burns' documentary "The Roosevelt's" has spent considerable time on Teddy Roosevelt's progressive reforms (trust busting, pure food and drugs, civil service hiring, land conservation, etc.) ... most of which are universally lauded today.  And T.R. has had his likeness carved on Mount Rushmore as a consequence.

This has got me musing ... there is one fundamental flaw with the progressive agenda ... and that is ... after the most obvious beneficial reforms have been enacted, many "progressives" think that any change is still necessarily good. Thus change becomes an objective in and of itself … with little thought to the possible consequences. If the progressive movement was right in Teddy Roosevelt’s time, then it must still be the bright path to lasting political fame.

Once most or all of the low-hanging progressive fruit has been plucked, then progressives find sillier and sillier things that must be reformed ... many of which begin to erode the very fabric of our society. Many of these inane progressive fixes have more to do with changing social norms rather than fixing structural economic problems. Here are a few:

- Poverty is a primary target of the progressive movement … with transfer payments of all types now totaling hundreds of billions of dollars annually. The result? This country now has a huge indolent class which is now totally dependent on these government handouts … and unwilling to seek gainful employment. Yet they are still indigent because “poverty” keeps being defined upwards and most of those transfer payment are not included in such measurements. And this growing unproductive population then requires millions of immigrants to take their places at an additional economic and socially-disruptive cost. And this is called progress …

- Progressives have now determined that the government cannot now intrude into the bedroom to define deviant and often destructive moral conduct ... yet it can and must intercede to pay for the consequences of such questionable morality ... contraceptives, an AIDs cure, abortions, redefining marriage, sex-change operations, etc. So far pedophilia, bestiality, incest, and polygamy have escaped such social "progress" but, if such progressive trends continue ...

- Progressives have also decided, on very dubious “scientific" evidence, that carbon dioxide, a gas that is the basis of all life on earth, is a pollutant and must be regulated with punitive economic policies. This would be the equivalent to Teddy Roosevelt, because of the then unsanitary slaughterhouse practices, outlawing meat.

- Gender and sexual-orientation equality has morphed in the progressive mind to gender and sexual-orientation equivalence. Women are now encouraged to serve in military combat roles. Men who think of themselves as women must be allowed to intermingle with women in all their erstwhile segregated places ... and visa versa. Did Teddy, the archetypical progressive have women serving with him in the Rough Riders?

Has ‘progressivism” now devolved into something bad instead of something good? To me it has …