Understanding the ever-shifting shibboleths of modern progressivism

Local political watchers can get whiplash from trying to keep pace with the changing mores and dicta of local progressive activists. Attacking the police is just. Except when it isn't. Questioning election legitimacy is ethical. Except when it's not. Political art should be banished. Except when we like its message. Bradley Wilson explains this curious intellectual state in “Progressivism: The Strange History of a Radical Idea,” reviewed by Allen Guelzo in the Claremont Review of Books.

The Progressive idea, simply put, is that the principled American constitutionalism of fixed natural rights and limited and dispersed powers must be overturned and replaced by an organic, evolutionary model of the Constitution that facilitates the authority of experts dedicated to the expansion of the public sphere and political control, especially at the national level.

This fundamental idea opened into five major applications:

1. There are no fixed or eternal principles that govern.

2. The state and its component parts are organic and involved in a struggle for never-ending growth.

3. Democratic openness and experimentalism are the fertilizer of the organic state.

4. The state and its components exist only in History.

5. Some individuals stand outside this process, an elite class, possessed of intelligence as a method who provide the messianic leadership needed to move the process smoothly along.

Read the whole thing here.

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Image by Joe van Petten