The Halfway House

I have a new piece up at Discourse addressing again the question of the “supply-side progressives” who want to go back to a pro-growth version of a leftist big-government approach.

Yet I note that historically progressivism originated precisely as a backlash against growth and wealth.

The progressive movement did not begin as a call for increased wealth and construction. It began as a backlash against an economy that was already producing rapid growth, abundant innovation, new construction and economic progress. The first great progressive president, Woodrow Wilson, described the movement that brought him to the presidency as a “sober second thought” to the “heedless” pursuit of “material greatness.”

More recently, the British historian Eric Hobsbawm, writing in The Guardian, described “the basis of progressive policy” as “not maximizing economic growth and personal incomes” but rather “redistributing private accumulation” and reining in the “bourgeois anarchism” of markets. He repeatedly dismissed the idea that “what a country needs is under all circumstances maximum economic growth.”

But like I say early in the article, “The cause of smaller government has few friends today, so I welcome any converts, no matter how grudging or belated.” So perhaps we should view the supply-side progressives as occupying a very reluctant halfway house for recovering statists.

My sense is that decades ago, people who now identify as supply-side progressives would have just moved to the right. They would have followed the path of people like Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, who started as big-government liberals—or, as in Kristol’s case, socialists—and then gradually migrated to become “neoconservatives.”

But it seems that such a migration is harder to pull off today, perhaps because the rise of Trumpism has made the right seem toxic, and certainly because of the extreme tribalism of our current politics. The old neoconservatives and other refugees from left-wing orthodoxy may have made a lot of enemies among the left-wing intelligentsia, but their views were more welcome in the broad mainstream of American media and academia. Today, when those fields have become more ideologically uniform—in the case of the media, fragmented into opposing islands, each ideologically uniform within itself—such a transition may seem less inviting. So they have to come up with an approach that maintains a socially respectable veneer of progressivism.

Yet the cost for the would-be supply-side progressives is that they are limited by a set of thoughts they can’t mention.

This is yet another reason to break down the existing categories of “left” versus “right” and “progressive” versus “conservative” and reclaim “liberalism” in its proper sense.

Read the whole thing.