The events of 2020 proved disruptive to the worldviews of a substantial fraction of the American public.  Constitutional protections that seemed foundational to the country’s identity were discarded with widespread alacrity, and with nary a whimper from what was at least a plurality of the public.

The implications of the 2020 Crisis for the Progressive Left were particularly astonishing.  During the Obama Years, the left abandoned its antiwar plank for crude political expediency, but it was still difficult to process the left abandoning any shred of commitment to bodily autonomy, to free speech, and to the prosperity of the working class as they were dispossessed mercilessly through a series of unconstitutional lockdowns and later through riotous pillaging.

The political whiplash from these Ribbentrop-tier reversals arises from the fact that ultimately, Progressivism adheres not to any stable set of principles, but rather to a particular Conception of the Ethical.  The Progressive conceives of ethics as a process of emancipation from tradition.  He rejects any appeal to any particular tradition as grounds for enforceable normative claims in furtherance of a determinate vision of the good society.  The Progressive proposition is to eliminate the purview of tradition upon state-enforced value claims and bring forth a polity of morally autonomous beings, whose relations among themselves are governed not by publicly binding moral codes — which are allegedly archaic and oppressive — but by universally feasible dictates of Reason, and Compassion, which, by virtue of their demonstrability (among “reasonable and compassionate” individuals, of course) can be codified into law.  In the meantime, normative claims that are not determinately demonstrable through pure reason are left to private conscience. 

The flaws in the Progressive proposition manifest clearly in real questions of politics, where actors are presented with choices between conflicting goods.  Progressive discourse is notorious for its tendency toward Manichean grandstanding, presenting political conflict as contests between unmitigated Good and Evil.  This is not so much due to the sanctimony of its individual adherents (though there’s no shortage of that) as to the impossibility within the Progressive framework of dealing with moral tradeoffs between conflicting values.

Successfully navigating a moral tradeoff requires access to a moral hierarchy that establishes a coherent structure to what are otherwise a chaotic panoply of competing value claims.  Such structure is required to generate distinctions between higher- and lower-order values, beginning with matters of prudence, through the righteous, and culminating with the sacred.  Such a hierarchy manifests only through a determinate vision of the good.  The classic tradeoffs between liberty and equality, the tension between independence and security, and the proper distribution of social responsibility among the individual, family, community, and state, cannot be settled merely by appeal to uninstructed, culturally neutered “Reason and Compassion,” as the proposed solutions would encompass every conceivable combination of human preference.

Such conflicts can be arbitrated coherently only within a broad consensus within such a collective consciousness — call it an ethos — not so much as to the exact solution points of these dilemmas as to where the reasonable limits of such discourses lie.  One can dispute whether a burglar should receive two years in prison or twenty, but when the alternatives range from offering said burglar reparations (for being deprived to the extent that he would even consider such rash action) to chopping off his hand, there is no longer an arena for fruitful rational discourse.  The competing values at stake — justice, mercy, moral responsibility, the rejection vs. sanctioning vs. sanctity of private property, retribution, and public safety — are simply structured irreconcilably in different ethical frames.

What the COVID response demonstrated was the extremities raw human preference could reach when our deracinated, culturally neutered faculties of “Reason and Compassion” are beset with a relentless campaign of saturation propaganda.   More than any other faction, Progressives advocated for harsh restrictions, family separation,  authoritarian lockdowns, information censorship, and mandated therapies, in direct violation of their once-vaunted commitments to principles of bodily autonomy, free speech, and due process.  

This is the inevitable consequence of “emancipation” from a prescriptive public ethos.  Absent a determinate vision of the good society, Progressives default to vague Utopian delusions, seeking a world of perfect safety, perfect liberty, perfect equality, and so forth, all at the same time.  Further, the Progressive disavowal of the sacred frees Progressives from any obligation to sustain any moral commitment through any kind of adverse circumstance.  The absence of foundational strictures that must be upheld or at least remembered in all circumstances, regardless of the cost, renders all values negotiable, contingent, and ultimately relative.  In practice, these two dynamics reinforce each other to engender a sort of Borderline Ideology Disorder, wherein Progressives lurch from one absolutist phantasm to another, minimizing their degradation of competing values as “breaking a few eggs” — an arch-Leninist phrase that translates, in Covidian, to “forsaking haircuts.” 

This pattern was vividly on display when Progressives, mere months after thoughtlessly discarding foundational American principles in a fanatical pursuit of perfect insulation from risk, discarded their obsession with safety just as thoughtlessly upon encountering a media-sanctioned Covidian outdoor activity.  Without recourse to a determinate moral vision, one that could harmonize and structure competing values, Progressives had no recourse by which to resolve the conflicts between their commitments to Civil Rights “advocacy” and public health “awareness” and were thus forced to resort to claiming an absurd ad hoc exception to their previous hysteria to indulge their latest one. 

The borderline pattern of itinerantly exalting and degrading any given ethical stricture comes from the need to protect the fundamental Progressive proposition.  If “Reason and Compassion” alone is sufficient to generate all enforceable normative claims, then rival normative claims must be presented as unreasonable and malevolent.  To concede any validity to any rival claim would be to undermine the Progressives’ one sacred postulate: that which privileges their particular claims — even as they change from day to day — by identifying them with “Reason and Compassion,” or, in short, with Progress itself.

It was up to the Non-Progressives to think through how the tradeoffs between liberty and safety should be managed in the prevailing circumstances, to consider what checks the Executive Branch should be subject to when unilaterally arrogating powers not constitutionally invested in itself; to determine to what degree the young should be made to bear burdens to protect the old; to decide what risks should be reasonably incurred so that American society did not collapse into a totalitarian sinkhole.

Non-Progressives, what we might call civic Americans, could do this by virtue of their collective respect for the articulated hierarchy of values embodied in the tradition of civic Americanism.  Echoes, however faint, of Ben Franklin’s “those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety” lingered in their collective subconscious, as did perhaps Hamilton’s “the nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master and deserves one,” and a thousand other cultural signposts indicating that this was far more than a technical controversy best left to the discretion of a class of “experts.”  Rather, there were sacred matters at stake.

Image: zenjazzygeek via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.