Understanding the Progressive Mind

David Horowitz authored this essay on the progressive mind. Too many conservatives fail to appreciate the radical evil that lies at the heart of progressivism by, e.g., giving progressives credit for good intentions and assuming that the disasters caused by their policies are inadvertent. David disagrees:

Everyone in Washington understands the basic causes of inflation. If you print more money than you have real assets like gold to back it up, you devalue your currency and make everything cost more. If you declare war on fossil fuels, shut down pipelines, close vast oil fields like ANWR, and don’t approve drilling licenses generally, you cause the price of everything to go up, because virtually everything requires energy to produce. If you spend vast amounts of government money inducing individuals not to work, employers will raise wages to entice them to work, and that, too, will cause prices to go up. It’s not rocket science.

Despite understanding these consequences, the Biden administration has instituted all these inflationary measures, and avoided taking responsibility for them and the suffering they cause. They did this to advance their progressive agenda, which is really a reactionary socialist agenda that has not changed its fundamental premises since 1848, when Marx published what is and has always been the progressive agenda. The Biden reactionaries denied their responsibility for the costly and dangerous inflation their policies have created in the way they normally cover up their assaults on the public – with two obvious lies. First by claiming that the inflation was “transitory,” and then by blaming it on Vladimir Putin – calling it “Putin’s price hike.” The brazen character of these lies and the fact that Biden has kept repeating them in the face of devastating refutations reflects the fact that the Democrats know full well what they are doing, which is stoking the fires of a volatile inflation which is causing profound hardship to the very constituencies they pretend to care about – people on the lower rungs of the economic ladder.

There is another consideration to take into account. Runaway inflation has the power to destroy societies. Money is a social glue. It provides incentives to work and to be law-abiding. It is a bargaining chip that can deflect and avoid social violence. When you destroy the value of money you destroy an indispensable social bond. That is what happened to the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, and what led to the election of Adolf Hitler in 1933.

What, then, could the Democrats be thinking in pouring fuel on the fires of inflation? The Biden Democrats who have poured trillions of dollars into an already heated economy look on the United States Treasury as a bank, which can be robbed. As progressives, they feel licensed to rob the nation’s bank by the nobility of their mission, which is to save the planet. In their eyes, the money represents the fruits of exploitation made possible by a “white supremacist” capitalist system. In such a system, money is not earned but is extracted by socially sanctioned power. This is a system which they are pledged to destroy.

The money progressives rob from the nation’s bank will be redistributed according to the dictates of “social justice” – a measure based on their social whims. In the name of social justice, for example, the Biden regime has allocated $7.5 billion to put a black female astronaut on the moon because she is black and female. This is a preposterous virtue signal that violates the very spirit of America’s color- and gender-blind Constitution. But a government that has no respect for the Constitution or the nation’s laws needn’t be bothered by that.

Unfortunately, Republicans, and conservatives generally, are too polite, and therefore ill-equipped to confront the criminal nature of the Democrat Party and its government in Washington. It’s as though Republicans don’t want to embarrass thieves caught in the act and hurt their feelings. The harshest words Republicans will use to describe the Democrats’ campaign to free hundreds of thousands of violent criminals and stimulate a national crime wave is that they are “soft on crime.” Democrats – progressives – are not soft on crime, they are pro-crime. They regard it as “social justice.” Mobs of mainly black predators looting department stores in broad daylight is to them “reparations” – a socialist redistribution of income that provides “equity” to a group allegedly – but never specifically — oppressed.

Some years ago the Communist historian Eric Hobsbawm, wrote a book, widely praised on the left, called Primitive Rebels, about criminal gangs in Sicily whom he saw as Marxists avant la lettre. In other words, their criminality would be seen as social justice if they had draped their activities in the language of progressives like himself. Hobsbawm, by the way, was showered with academic honors notwithstanding that he had no regrets about the 100 million victims that his comrades slaughtered on their way to the new world. To Hobsbawm the promise of a socialist paradise was so great, that it was worth the risk that another 100 million innocents might be slaughtered to achieve it the next time. Leftism – progressivism – is a criminal mentality.

All self-styled revolutionaries are criminals in the making. What makes them revolutionaries is their rejection of the system itself, its institutions and laws. If not for this rejection, they would be reformers not revolutionaries. The rationale justifying the criminality of today’s progressives is Critical Race Theory. Critical Race Theory maintains that the Constitution is a “white supremacist” document – even though the words “white” and “black” don’t appear in its text. Because it is allegedly a white supremacist document designed to create a white supremacist society, “anti-racist” social justice warriors are bound not to respect either the Constitution or the laws within its framework.

How far have progressive criminals succeeded in subverting our system? Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is about to become a Supreme Court Justice, is a believer in and promoter of Critical Race Theory, which means she considers the Constitution a Supreme Court justice is supposed to defend a “white supremacist” document that social justice warriors like her are bound not to respect. And the entire Democrat Party thinks that’s okay and is ready to support her.

She also says she has no position on whether people have natural rights, which puts her at odds with the Declaration of Independence as well as the Constitution.