The Progressive Formula
13th May 2025
ZMan brings the heat.
American progressivism in its current form can be summarized as an ideology that claims, “we must do A or B will happen.” The A in this formula can be just about anything and often flips from positive to negative. There are times when doing A reverses and the warning is to stop doing it. On the other hand, the B factor is always a negative consequence of the first term. Usually, it is a vague suggestion that it is not just bad but the end of civilization as we know it.
The obvious example is the weather. On the grand scale, the first term will be something like driving cars or heating our homes, while the second term is climate change, which means climate disaster. If we keep driving cars the climate will change in such a way that earth dies. They never make that second term explicit, but the extinction stuff is assumed. After all, climate changes all the time and has often been to our benefit, but that just muddies the waters.
That gets to the other aspect of this formulation. The person or people involved assume that their normative evaluation of both terms is correct. They may be justifying their prejudice against A on the grounds that it leads to B, but they always assume that B is a bad thing that moral people should seek to avoid. You see this with climate change, which is recast as a moral condition, rather than an observation. It is a bad thing not a simple observation of earth’s behavior.