The reactionary left
Excellent essay in City Journal by Fred Siegel on how liberal progressives became nostalgic reactionaries when they discovered environmental pessimism in the 1970s:
Why, then, did American liberalism, starting in the early 1970s, undergo a historic metanoia, dismissing the idea of progress just as progress was being won? Multiple political and economic forces paved liberalism’s path away from its mid-century optimism and toward an aristocratic outlook reminiscent of the Tory Radicalism of nineteenth-century Britain; but one of the most powerful was the rise of the modern environmental movement and its recurrent hysterias.
I especially enjoyed his quotation from my late colleague Norman Macrae:
Touring American campuses in the mid-1970s, Norman Macrae of The Economist was shocked “to hear so many supposedly left-wing young Americans who still thought they were expressing an entirely new and progressive philosophy as they mouthed the same prejudices as Trollope’s 19th century Tory squires: attacking any further expansion of industry and commerce as impossibly vulgar, because ecologically unfair to their pheasants and wild ducks.”
It's time to reclaim the word `progressive' for those who welcome change and are optimistic about human potential.
Comments (12)
I'd like to reclaim liberal as well.
But some of the environmentalists are Tory squires.
At least part of my ire with J. Porritt is being told by an Old Etonian Baronet that I have to go be a peasant again, standing in a muddy field, while he sorts out the world for me.
It is an interesting article, but I would point out that although those who considered themselves environmentalists in the seventies would mostly have also considered themselves left wing, many of them were imbibing an ideology that was actually right wing there and then, not just historically.
For example, The Ecologist was easily the most popular environmental journal of the seventies and played a very substantial role in fear mongering with it's Blueprint for Survival and constant articles on environmental doom. It was supposedly left-wing, but go back and read those articles from that time again (they're available online) and you'll see how they were actually far-right ideology cloaked in the rhetoric of the day. 'Environmental' concerns are used to justify attacks on multi-culturalism and different ethnicities living together. Ethnic separatism is held up as 'nature's way' to human happiness.
It's all there for anyone to read. The language was new left / environmental, the ideology was old aristocracy / far right.
A new video now doing the climate blog rounds is The Green Swindle, courtesy of Hannity on Fox:
http://vodpod.com/watch/4325030-the-green-swindle-video-foxnews-com
Quite nice visual summary I think, giving a similar historical overview of the rise of the Greens ... but I'm not sure where Part 2 is?
The now sadly defunct classically liberal party in Ireland were called the Progressive Democrats, and there are a few such instances. I do think liberals should make a point of using the perfectly meaningful term social democrat to describe those often termed progressive or liberal.
I tend to think of myself as a liberal (progressive, eh whatever), but find myself at odds over environmental policy with (in the USA's case)democrats.
I certainly don't fit with republican conservatives who seem to prescribe tax cuts, governmental bloat, and corporate welfare.
Somewhere in the Rational Optimist, you say something along the lines of 'liberals like the outcome of trade but don't trust free enterprise and conservatives like trade and free enterprise but don't like the outcomes.' I've decided I like both which leaves me without a party.
Along with Patrick Moore (who helped found Greenpeace), I have to say I didn't leave the environmentalists, they left me.
You may have observed that you get the best fit to activist behavior if you assign a value of 4.0 to the emotional age of activists. The evolution of liberal activist attitudes described by Siegel can be entirely explained by the "Well I never really wanted that anyway!" response.
As Siegel notes, everything promised by the Left was being achieved, even over-achieved, by 1960. The problem was, it was being achieved without the Left's methods. We were coming off 8 years of Eisenhower and gray flannel suits, remember? So the Left either had to either admit that 1950s free enterprise and gray flannelism worked at least as well as Leftism, or declare "Well I never really wanted that anyway!"
They chose the latter course. Not for the last time either.
To make a long story short, 80 years ago, socialism was a moral imperative because it was the best way to create smoke-belching factories and deliver copious goods to the masses. 40 years ago, socialism was a moral imperative because it was the best way to prevent smoke-belching factories while still delivering copious goods to the masses. The Wall fell, and today socialism is a moral imperative because it's the best way to prevent smoke-belching factories and keep copious goods out of the piggish hands of the masses.
What concerns me about both "the left" and "the right" - however those happen to be branded at the moment by its malcontent intellectual leaders - is the persecution complex combined with a fascination of an apocalyptic future. Worse yet, in my opinion, is the tactic of making the false promise of utopia or the arrogant "saving the planet" but only if everyone complies with a standardized policy engineered for avoiding a mythical apocalypse.
Matt I really loved your video at TED, I agree 100%.
I have just one suggestion. Please don't use nor propagate the use of the word liberal for refering to the left. Specially for international users who use the word liberal for free trade, economic freedom & Adam Smith (it's classical meaning)
Liberal from its latin roots means freedom, unenforcement, so has nothing to do with rouge statism.
Please, when refering socialism, try to use accurate terms as socialism, statism, dirigism, intervencionism, unfree economy, repressed economy.
Thanks
"Progressive" is a logical opposite of "conservative." "Liberal" can be used to represent either progressives or classical conservatives.
Maybe "liberal" should refer to someone who's generous and open minded, regardless of which side of the aisle he/she sits on.
www.newsprism.com
I'm sorry, but there is nothing "progressive" about rejecting the peculiar Enlightenment rapprochement between religion and controlled observation we call the scientific method, or the system of blind peer review and consensus that arose with it.
The rejection of the hypothesis that climate change is happening and the hypothesis that human beings contribute to it may be optimistic positions, but they are not rational because converging lines of evidence and analyses of that evidence in blind peer reviewed journals support those hypotheses and the current consensus on climate change is based on that support.
I'm all for criticizing the romanticism that often overtakes environmentalism. But there is no necessary connection between rationality and either optimism or pessimism. There is a connection between rationality and logic, and there is a (relatively recent) fruitful relationship between rationality and experience. Rejecting the latter does not amount to a reclamation of some kind of mythical midcentury egalitarianism; it amounts to a reversion to medieval reliance on authority without regard for experience - ultimately, to heteronomy.