Other people, though, have a catastrophic conception of history: The river flows but it may not be heading in the right direction. It might flow into a channel full of shoals or rocks, where a ship can run aground or be shattered. This, I think, is the picture of history that reactionaries have
..HUMANITIES: The reactionary belief that something beautiful has been lost to us can be as compelling to the political imagination as its opposite, the revolutionary idea that we might be able to leap out of the present and into a better and more just future. Why then, as you point out, have scholars neglected reaction and the reactionary, in favor of studying revolution and the revolutionary?
.. Because most Western intellectuals since the French Revolution have held some sort of progressive view of history. They have believed that over the course of time things just naturally improve; that was the illusion of the nineteenth century. Or they have believed that forces for good have seized control of history—the workers, the Third World wretched of the earth—and that, however dismal things may now appear, they will eventually triumph. That was the illusion of the twentieth century
.. Yet, throughout the nineteenth century, European nations were largely being governed by forces hostile to the revolutionary surge. They had their own thinkers and their own dystopian historical narratives. Now that we no longer have confidence in progressive history, or in the forces that claimed to be its avatars, we are finally free to notice and study those who did as much to shape the modern world as revolutionaries have.
.. The dispute between revolutionaries and reactionaries is not over human nature. It is, as I’ve been suggesting, over the nature and course of history.
.. conservatives and reactionaries are adversaries. The conservative believes that change should happen slowly, but that it is inevitable.
.. The reactionary thinks that history has changed human nature and that action in history can restore it to what it should be.
.. To become Muslim therefore means to become Muslim again, which means overthrowing the current rulers of ostensibly Muslim nations and reimposing sharia law, in the best circumstances under a new caliph.
The First Time Hillary Clinton Was President
What her Wellesley classmates remember about Hillary’s first term—in 1968.
.. She had just spent much of her summer in Washington, interning on Capitol Hill. At a historic juncture of acute anti-establishment fervor, she told them to trust the system. Progress at Wellesley, she explained, “often results through action taken by the Senate of the College Government Association.”
.. During a period of immense social upheaval, she was the most prominent intermediary between her increasingly radicalized fellow students and a change-resistant faculty and administration.
“Hillary tended always to be what I will call a consensus person,” classmate Connie Hoenk Shapiro told me.
.. centrist, cautious, respectful of authority, progressive but never at the expense of maintaining access to the seats of power.
.. “She knew how to temper things.”
.. The graduation speech offered a largely progressive message, but she delivered it in language that was far from incendiary, more of a manifesto of moderation than a revolutionary’s battle cry.
.. The thrust of the thesis was what Rodham viewed as the inherent limits of radical activism
.. by the spring of her freshman year, his daughter was the gung-ho head of Wellesley’s Young Republicans organization.
.. “If we get this going, maybe we’ll see a change before we graduate,” she announced, according to the next day’s Boston Globe—one of the first public signals of her patient, incrementalist disposition.
.. In a letter to a friend from high school, she said she was an “agnostic intellectual liberal” but “an emotional conservative.”
.. “Can one be a mind conservative and a heart liberal?”
.. Her platform, such as it was, characteristically leaned heavily on a faith in Robert’s Rules of Order.
.. Black students who had founded a civil rights group called Ethos threatened a hunger strike if the administration of the college wouldn’t agree to their demands for more black students and more black professors. All of them considered Rodham a friend.
“Hillary was always supportive of the African-American students,” Karen Williamson, one of the most active Ethos members, told me. “I know she signed the petitions.”
.. Rodham helped put together—she stood up to an economics professor who suggested students not going to class was “a know-nothing attitude” and not much of a sacrifice.
.. the typed-out minutes of the meetings Rodham ran as college government president show an interesting, unmistakable pattern: Rodham is mentioned actually relatively infrequently. She opens the meetings, and she usually closes them. The rest of the time, it’s almost always other people doing the talking.
.. She was a capable orator, many of them told me, but was much more comfortable as a listener.
.. she stressed that this wasn’t just a vehicle for student demands. “The committee,” she explained, “will include nine students, four faculty members and the president of the college …”
.. “Alinsky’s conclusion that the ‘ventilation’ of hostilities is healthy in certain situations is valid, but across-the-board ‘social catharsis’ cannot be prescribed,” she wrote. “Catharsis has a way of perpetuating itself so that it becomes an end in itself.”
Quasiprogressivity
Very few people would, I think, describe Arrangement B as “more progressive” than Arrangement A, because Arrangement B clearly screws the poor. The term “progressive” is garlanded with moral connotations about helping the poor, so this would not qualify. However, Arrangement B does include a transfer from the rich to the middle, and it reduces the inequality between the rich and the middle substantially. If your definition of progressive is “redistributes from richer to poorer”, you cannot definitively order one arrangement as more or less progressive than the other.
One might describe a proposal to go from Arrangement A to Arrangement B as “insider-outsider egalitarian”. It is not an irrelevant case. Although historical experience suggests they are mistaken, people who oppose unions frequently argue that they have precisely this effect. A better-off, unionized portion of the workforce, in this story, sees wages increases, at the expense of wealthy owners and managers (who have to pay unionized workers more), but also at the expense of the not-unionized (or not-employed) portion of the workforce, who see wages stagnate and prices rise.
.. But we might have averted a financial collapse with transfers to underwater homeowners, for example, or to be more fair, with helicopter money for everyone. Instead, we let middle-class homeowners collapse into negative equity and, too frequently, foreclosure, even as we provided generous support and regulatory forbearance to ensure that financial institutions and their creditors would be made whole. Most of the fiscal stimulus came not from Obama’s headline $800B program, but via automatic stabilizers that kick-in for the poor and unemployed. We rescue the rich. We congratulate ourselves for paying so much to help the stigmatized, traumatized poor. We tell the middle to suck it. That’s the quasiprogressive way, and it’s at the heart of American political economy.
Cruz, Rubio, and the Moral Bankruptcy of Progressive Identity Politics
Because white progressives have engineered a cultural system where black and Latino politicians deserve respect only if they get with the progressive program — the entire progressive program.
.. Just ask formerly pro-life Jesse Jackson. Not even marching with Martin Luther King Jr. could protect him from the intolerant demands of progressive sexual revolutionaries. He had to switch sides.