Modern Progressivism: The Salad Mix from Hell
Modern progressivism presents itself as the enlightened endpoint of history, compassionate, evidence-based, and always on the side of the future. Strip away the branding and the new vocabulary, and what remains is older material: a loosely assembled mixture of twentieth-century collectivist instincts, none of which have been cleanly reconciled with the others or with the liberal traditions they claim to supersede. The result is less a coherent philosophy than an unstable salad of authoritarian habits, redistributionist economics, and moral certainty, held together by institutional power and the language of care.
Michael Savage's blunt description captures the texture: a sausage of fascist, communist, and socialist ideas ground together yet still retaining the flavour of each. The fascist note appears in the preference for enforced conformity, speech codes, institutional capture of corporations and universities, and social engineering that treats dissent as a public-health or safety problem. The communist and socialist notes appear in the drive toward economic dependency: expansive redistribution, regulatory sprawl that concentrates decision-making, and a steady expansion of the state's role in housing, energy, education, and employment. The common thread is deference to distant authority, justified not by competence demonstrated in results but by the claim that ordinary people are insufficiently enlightened to manage their own lives. Mandates, expert panels, and "equity" frameworks function as the practical instruments of that premise.
This package is sold as novelty, yet its centralising impulse is continuous with earlier European collectivism. The Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society already expanded the federal role under the banner of scientific administration and social uplift. What has changed is the rhetorical framing and the coalition. Class is now joined by identity categories; economic planning is joined by cultural management of language, education, and private association. The incoherence shows in the contradictions. Equality is demanded while differential treatment by group is institutionalised. Openness is celebrated, while certain questions are treated as beyond debate. "Science" is invoked to settle contested policy, while dissenting data or researchers are sidelined. Markets are blamed for inequality even as the largest corporate actors are enlisted as partners in enforcement. The mixture does not resolve into a stable doctrine; it coheres mainly in its direction: more central power, less space for independent action.
The project also rests on a temporary historical condition that no longer holds. Historian H.W. Brands noted that American willingness to defer to expansive federal government was not a permanent shift in national character but a Cold War phenomenon. Facing a nuclear-armed adversary, the public set aside its traditional suspicion of centralised power. That confidence underwrote Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Vietnam and Watergate deflated the balloon. Trust drained, and expectations of government returned to lower levels. Even Al Gore, campaigning in 2000, felt obliged to distance himself from the big-government label. The contemporary progressive reliance on unlimited federal capacity is therefore a hangover from an era that ended decades ago, not the natural evolution of democratic practice.
Personality research has added an awkward complication to the self-image of calm rationality. A widely cited study that had been used to pathologise conservatives for authoritarian and rigid traits was later found to have reversed its coding; the corrected results pointed the other way. Broader Big Five findings associate higher average neuroticism and lower conscientiousness with Left-leaning respondents, and neuroticism correlates with support for larger state economic programs. General Social Survey patterns have long shown self-described conservatives reporting higher happiness and better mental health, with the gap widest at the far Left. These are averages, not destinies, and they do not prove policy error. They do undercut the claim that progressive politics is simply the expression of superior emotional stability or clearer thinking.
The practical outcome is a governing style that manages rather than persuades. When results lag, on housing costs, education outcomes, public order, or fiscal sustainability, the response is more regulation, more spending, more restriction on speech or association, and more attribution of failure to residual prejudice or insufficient commitment. The older collectivist ingredients reassert themselves under updated branding. The "salad from hell" is not a single poisonous ideology but the cumulative effect of mismatched older tools applied to new problems without the self-correcting habits of limited government or open debate. Personal responsibility and constitutional limits are not relics; they remain the practical alternative to a politics that keeps recycling centralisation while insisting the latest iteration is progress.
