The Roots of American Progressivism
19th April 2024
It’s widely assumed, both by Jews and by anti-Semites, that the roots of American progressivism are heavily Jewish.
Yet, Jews had relatively little impact on the crucial first century of the American republic, from the Declaration of Independence through the end of Reconstruction. Yet progressivism that is ideologically ancestral to contemporary “In this house we believe” wokeness was already ascendant during the second quarter of the 19th Century in New England and its cultural satellites upstate New York, and northern Ohio, and triumphed nationally in the 1860s, if only briefly, from say 1862-1868.
For example, one of the first incidents in which I became aware of the Great Awokening was during the winter of 2013 when students at traditionally leftist Oberlin College in northern Ohio had one of their freakouts over the KKK running amok on campus (it turned out, evidently, to be a lady, perhaps homeless, walking around on a cold night with a white blanket draped around her).