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.
Receive all my latest posts straight to your inbox. simply subscribe below:
[*] denotes a required field
