Grandma Made Pie, People Died

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About: We find the hottest items of the day, so you don't have to - Parcbench EditorsSee Authors Posts (7) on February 5, 2010

by Bogie

The problem with progressives is that they start with hope, advocate change and wind up banning your grandmother’s apple pie.  Why do progressive politics always seem to end this way?

Fundamentally, being for progress is like being for time.  But to be forward-looking is a posture, not a political philosophy.  Undeniably, the optimistic ring of progressive rhetoric resonates with many Americans.  But life is like riding in the back of a pickup truck; we watch the past recede and the present rushing by, but we cannot see into the future.  So the progressive promise is empty, even dangerous, unless they tell us where they propose to go and how to get there.  You are moving forward, after all, when you drive off a cliff.

But while yesterday’s liberals campaigned forthrightly on New Deal and Great Society policy platforms, today’s progressives cannot win with New Age statism and thus resort to euphemisms sung to a centrist tune.  Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, the apotheosis of progressive politics, was all hope and change with few specifics.  The economy, health care, energy security, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, sea levels, international and race relations – all would improve in a gauzy future, never mind the details.

But the pathology of progressive politics goes beyond empty rhetoric.  Unable to articulate an unpopular agenda, progressives are left with negative arguments.  Like swimmers at the end of a lap, they need something from which to push off.  So they sell a progressive future by denouncing yesterday as rotten, today as corrupt.  This is why President Obama is constantly demonizing someone or something — George Bush, bankers, insurance companies, doctors, profits, people with Bibles and guns.  The irony, and the fatal flaw, of progressivism is this compulsive, backward-looking rejection of all that came before.

Progressives are forever telling us that the Founders were slavers, we persecuted the Indians, the Civil War was just about money, capitalism exploited people and destroyed the land, the 1950s were icky, Reagan was greedy, Bush lied and people died.  Individual rights are belittled, business and profit are reviled.  They question the very foundation of our system of government.  Barack Obama has chafed at the Constitution as a “charter of negative liberties” that unduly limits what government can do.

Progressives lose most of the rest of us because they are unable or unwilling to recognize the worthy traditions and the sound consensus we have inherited as Americans.  Most of us believe that, while there is plenty to criticize, including some of what progressives decry, our country is fundamentally good.  Indeed, many Americans believe that ours is the best form of government on earth.  Sooner or later, we realize that progressives are leading us away from the shining city on the hill, back into a wilderness we escaped at great cost.  Even if one takes a less exalted view of America — as the least of all governing evils – progressives are marching from bad to worse.   Quite likely to something that is much worse.

This concern is fueled by the manifold contradictions of progressive politics at work.  Setting out to save the economy, they balloon the deficit and drain the capital markets to fund billions in pork.  They rescue the auto industry by nationalizing the companies and handing them over to unions.  They reform health care by creating panels of bureaucrats who get between patients and doctors to dictate what care we will receive.  To protect the environment, they saddle American businesses with crushing costs and regulations.  They wage war on terror by trying to close Guantanamo and buying terrorists a posse of lawyers for US show trials.  And they go around the world apologizing for America.

That brings us back to the trouble with your grandmother’s apple pie.  Progressives are mightily concerned about the state of our health and, well, sugar and processed foods like those pie crusts are bad for you.  Grandma’s pies lead to higher healthcare costs and victimize the kids with obesity or worse.  Thus, the inexorable logic of progressive politics is that grandma must be stopped before she bakes again.  That’s how they end up attacking what we cherish and desire, even things that are as American as apple pie.