@ CBDenver:
There wasn't a strict dividing line between Populists and Progressives. On a national level, William Jennings Bryan was a leading figure in both movements, for example, and Women's Suffrage figured prominently in progressive ideas about democratic reform - as well as in the platform of the Progressive Party under TR. As for which factors were most important in bringing the idea to fruition, your analysis may be correct regarding the states - I don't know - but I don't think there's really much controversy around the conventional designation of Women's Suffrage as a typical Progressive Era movement. Progressives like Jane Addams - the first woman to give an American presidential nominating speech - embraced the notion that greater empowerment and involvement of women in politics would help advance the progressive agenda, and the evidence (women tending to vote for the welfare state and against the military) suggests that Addams and her friends, for good or ill, may have been right about that.
@ narciso:
agreed, but it's an intellectual error - also known as paranoia, sometimes just reasoning from the converse - to assume a counter-principle in any superficial similarity of effects. That the Dems made fools of themselves at the HCR summit doesn't mean that you or I could have survived conditions in many American cities in the late 19th Century for a day. It doesn't even mean that they're wrong that the current health care system wouldn't benefit from government action. Tort reform, for instance, the near universal and consensual demand of Republicans and most conservatives, would clearly require positive government action, however conceived and implemented, even if it could be strictly in the language of repeal and de-regulation (I doubt it, but I guess anything's possible).
The question still remains what type of action would really represent positive "progress" from where we are now.
...and Lindbergh and Hearst found excuses for the Nazis, to say nothing of all of the right, centrists, and merely pro-German apologists all around the world. Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul busily search for reasons that we should have stayed out of WW2 altogether. You yourself attacked Judge Napolitano the other day for blaming the Civil War on Lincoln. We could go on and on with this game.
It's well-known that the Western intelligentsia and sub-intelligentsia is full of ludicrous blowhards and useful idiots - always has been, always will be.
I began with Upton Sinclair. Do you doubt that his depictions of the lives of immigrant workers and conditions at American factories had some truth to them? What's the point of bringing his and others' poor judgment on other subjects into the discussion?
@ narciso:
Good thing all the people free of error exist on the right, and that no one associated with the American right ever had a good thing to say about any of history's great villains.
Really, this kind of 20/20 hindsight attack is suggestive up to a point, but quickly turns into the obliteration of all distinctions and a poor substitute for thinking.
Progressivism is nothing if not the natural consequence of outsized prosperity.
It's unfortunate that AG can't be taken on a tour of a late 19th Century tenement or meat-packing plant. The closest we can come is to read THE JUNGLE and forget for a moment that the author is a hero to the "bad guys."
There's a certain condescending cynicism in such cliche observations as the one you cite that AG would almost certainly reject if applied to one of his favored causes. It goes without saying that all human actions and passions can be explained according to some combination of materialism and self-interest. I think it was Nietzsche, while declaring that "pity lames the soul," who argued most insistently that all spiritual attainments were the product of luxury.
It's undeniably a luxury to care at all about people - or to compose symphonies or post to a blog. Concern about your next meal tends to focus the attention elsewhere.
I am curious how you can call women’s suffrage progressive. It doesn’t meet the definition in any form. How is the granting of voting privileges either progressive or non-progressive. It isn’t an expansion of the states powers, it was a legal change to voting rules.
What's curious is that you would continue to make this weirdly ahistorical argument.
...progressivism was not a single movement but a collection of coalitions agitating for changes that often seemed to contradict each other. For instance, many progressive reforms aimed to increase democracy in America. These included women's suffrage, the direct election of senators, the availability of the referendum, and the right to recall representatives whose behavior in office did not satisfy their constituents. On the other hand, many progressives hoped to increase efficiency in government and believed that they could do so by diminishing the power of elected officials and installing "experts" in their stead. This impulse found expression, for example, in progressive campaigns to hire city managers in the place of elected mayors or city councils. Government by un elected "experts," of course, undermined democracy and thus set one set of progressive reforms at odds with another.
You're the one who equates progressivism with "expansion of the state's powers." Many of the original progressives were quite willing to expand or empower the state, but not as an end in itself. They supported Women's Suffrage and numerous other democratic reforms because they believed in democracy and supported the participation of women in politics, for a whole raft of reasons - some holding greater importance for some progressives than for others.
@ JEM:
As generally, you seem to use a highly flexible defintion of "progressive" - narrow when it comes to denying credit to the real progressives for anything neutral to positive (while minimizing whatever accomplishments or good intentions), incredibly expansive when it comes to implicating them in events with which no one or hardly anyone who ever called himself progressive ever had anything to do. Progressivism is not the same as leftism. It's certainly not the same as nationalism. There was something of a progressive attitude outside the United States, associated with the rise of science and industry, but you seem to be using of such a broad definition that you can no longer distinguish between anyone who favored any kind of advance on any front from a progressive.
I've been trying to avoid getting into this discussion, but there's also something downright weird about assigning the word "progressive" to a political movement that replaced Christmas with the more ancient rite of solstice celebration, because that's what Siegfried and Wotan would have liked, and who attacked and outlawed "decadent" (modern) art, and replaced it with tributes to ancient Aryan virtue rigorously pruned of any "cosmopolitan" (and of course Jewish) elements.
Nazism combined numerous heterogeneous, often contradictory elements. Attributing political-philosophical coherence to their ideas gives them credit for intellectual operations well beyond their capacities or, for the most part, their interests. They were madmen, thugs, cranks, occultists, and obscurantists who happened to take over a technically advanced society. They adopted some progressive-looking measures and adopted some progressive-sounding justifications for them, and fundamentally rejected others - or would have if they had even been interested in them.
albeit progressive thought was implicit in creating the conditions for both of them
That's a real stretch, especially considering the prominence of pacifists and war resisters in the ranks of the 1st wave progressives. Part of the idealism of the age was the notion that science and reason would cure humanity of war. It's easy to forget also that Wilson was re-elected on a "he kept us out of war" peace platform, and he reverted to a version of the same idealism as soon the war was over. Anti-war idealism was also one of the progressives' justifications for extending the franchise to women - they would vote against war... I don't see much of this as being particularly in the progressives' favor, but I really wonder what you have in mind when you blame them for somehow setting up WWI. I think your argument for WWII is flawed in other ways, but WWI? Is there any bad thing progressives aren't responsible for?
I don’t accept woman’s suffrage as progressive or not – it was a decision to confer voting rights on another class of citizens who before that had none. To suggest that it is somewhat progressive or not is false.
See my response on the other thread. I think that position is untenable - ahistorical, and also reflective of an overall approach to the discussion that tilts the board arbitrarily.
I really don't get why you persist in this argument that Women's Suffrage was some kind of trivial matter that just happened to be taking place offstage somewhere during the Progressive Era. It was one of the major, typical political struggles of the age.
@ JEM:
Darn, that's getting pretty close to agreement at least in the broad outlines. You feeling ok?
Though I don't think it's essential that "activist conservatives" ("activist" has been a naughty word at various time as well) refer to themselves as progressive, I do like the idea of throwing the term "progressive" back at the "progressives." Think of it as a (fair) Alinsky-ism, making them try to live up to their own standards, in the confidence that they can't succeed.
When you consider also all of the good press that the Progressive Era has gotten, and also how deeply embedded many features of progressivism are in American politics and society, overturning it completely and turning "progressive" into a dirty word - like Beck is trying to do - is a bridge too far and a formula for confusion and division. (Viewing Beck's show and his distasteful tactics today, I honestly believe he's going to wreck himself if he doesn't check himself.) If the discussion ever gets serious, you'll be left trying to explain why you hate women's suffrage and love the robber barons. Why not instead concede that the Progressive Era represented something that any American can profit from studying, for both the good and the bad of it, and for an understanding of where it went wrong?
In addition to pre-empting and disarming the PINOs, I think such a stance has the further advantage of being accurate - and of being sane.
@ CBDenver:
There wasn't a strict dividing line between Populists and Progressives. On a national level, William Jennings Bryan was a leading figure in both movements, for example, and Women's Suffrage figured prominently in progressive ideas about democratic reform - as well as in the platform of the Progressive Party under TR. As for which factors were most important in bringing the idea to fruition, your analysis may be correct regarding the states - I don't know - but I don't think there's really much controversy around the conventional designation of Women's Suffrage as a typical Progressive Era movement. Progressives like Jane Addams - the first woman to give an American presidential nominating speech - embraced the notion that greater empowerment and involvement of women in politics would help advance the progressive agenda, and the evidence (women tending to vote for the welfare state and against the military) suggests that Addams and her friends, for good or ill, may have been right about that.
@ narciso:
agreed, but it's an intellectual error - also known as paranoia, sometimes just reasoning from the converse - to assume a counter-principle in any superficial similarity of effects. That the Dems made fools of themselves at the HCR summit doesn't mean that you or I could have survived conditions in many American cities in the late 19th Century for a day. It doesn't even mean that they're wrong that the current health care system wouldn't benefit from government action. Tort reform, for instance, the near universal and consensual demand of Republicans and most conservatives, would clearly require positive government action, however conceived and implemented, even if it could be strictly in the language of repeal and de-regulation (I doubt it, but I guess anything's possible).
The question still remains what type of action would really represent positive "progress" from where we are now.
...and Lindbergh and Hearst found excuses for the Nazis, to say nothing of all of the right, centrists, and merely pro-German apologists all around the world. Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul busily search for reasons that we should have stayed out of WW2 altogether. You yourself attacked Judge Napolitano the other day for blaming the Civil War on Lincoln. We could go on and on with this game.
It's well-known that the Western intelligentsia and sub-intelligentsia is full of ludicrous blowhards and useful idiots - always has been, always will be.
I began with Upton Sinclair. Do you doubt that his depictions of the lives of immigrant workers and conditions at American factories had some truth to them? What's the point of bringing his and others' poor judgment on other subjects into the discussion?
@ narciso:
I wasn't aware that Upton Sinclair made any comments at all about the Cultural Revolution.
@ narciso:
Good thing all the people free of error exist on the right, and that no one associated with the American right ever had a good thing to say about any of history's great villains.
Really, this kind of 20/20 hindsight attack is suggestive up to a point, but quickly turns into the obliteration of all distinctions and a poor substitute for thinking.
It's unfortunate that AG can't be taken on a tour of a late 19th Century tenement or meat-packing plant. The closest we can come is to read THE JUNGLE and forget for a moment that the author is a hero to the "bad guys."
There's a certain condescending cynicism in such cliche observations as the one you cite that AG would almost certainly reject if applied to one of his favored causes. It goes without saying that all human actions and passions can be explained according to some combination of materialism and self-interest. I think it was Nietzsche, while declaring that "pity lames the soul," who argued most insistently that all spiritual attainments were the product of luxury.
It's undeniably a luxury to care at all about people - or to compose symphonies or post to a blog. Concern about your next meal tends to focus the attention elsewhere.
What's curious is that you would continue to make this weirdly ahistorical argument.
Women in the Progressive Era
You're the one who equates progressivism with "expansion of the state's powers." Many of the original progressives were quite willing to expand or empower the state, but not as an end in itself. They supported Women's Suffrage and numerous other democratic reforms because they believed in democracy and supported the participation of women in politics, for a whole raft of reasons - some holding greater importance for some progressives than for others.
@ JEM:
As generally, you seem to use a highly flexible defintion of "progressive" - narrow when it comes to denying credit to the real progressives for anything neutral to positive (while minimizing whatever accomplishments or good intentions), incredibly expansive when it comes to implicating them in events with which no one or hardly anyone who ever called himself progressive ever had anything to do. Progressivism is not the same as leftism. It's certainly not the same as nationalism. There was something of a progressive attitude outside the United States, associated with the rise of science and industry, but you seem to be using of such a broad definition that you can no longer distinguish between anyone who favored any kind of advance on any front from a progressive.
I've been trying to avoid getting into this discussion, but there's also something downright weird about assigning the word "progressive" to a political movement that replaced Christmas with the more ancient rite of solstice celebration, because that's what Siegfried and Wotan would have liked, and who attacked and outlawed "decadent" (modern) art, and replaced it with tributes to ancient Aryan virtue rigorously pruned of any "cosmopolitan" (and of course Jewish) elements.
Nazism combined numerous heterogeneous, often contradictory elements. Attributing political-philosophical coherence to their ideas gives them credit for intellectual operations well beyond their capacities or, for the most part, their interests. They were madmen, thugs, cranks, occultists, and obscurantists who happened to take over a technically advanced society. They adopted some progressive-looking measures and adopted some progressive-sounding justifications for them, and fundamentally rejected others - or would have if they had even been interested in them.
That's a real stretch, especially considering the prominence of pacifists and war resisters in the ranks of the 1st wave progressives. Part of the idealism of the age was the notion that science and reason would cure humanity of war. It's easy to forget also that Wilson was re-elected on a "he kept us out of war" peace platform, and he reverted to a version of the same idealism as soon the war was over. Anti-war idealism was also one of the progressives' justifications for extending the franchise to women - they would vote against war... I don't see much of this as being particularly in the progressives' favor, but I really wonder what you have in mind when you blame them for somehow setting up WWI. I think your argument for WWII is flawed in other ways, but WWI? Is there any bad thing progressives aren't responsible for?
See my response on the other thread. I think that position is untenable - ahistorical, and also reflective of an overall approach to the discussion that tilts the board arbitrarily.
I really don't get why you persist in this argument that Women's Suffrage was some kind of trivial matter that just happened to be taking place offstage somewhere during the Progressive Era. It was one of the major, typical political struggles of the age.
@ JEM:
Darn, that's getting pretty close to agreement at least in the broad outlines. You feeling ok?
Though I don't think it's essential that "activist conservatives" ("activist" has been a naughty word at various time as well) refer to themselves as progressive, I do like the idea of throwing the term "progressive" back at the "progressives." Think of it as a (fair) Alinsky-ism, making them try to live up to their own standards, in the confidence that they can't succeed.
When you consider also all of the good press that the Progressive Era has gotten, and also how deeply embedded many features of progressivism are in American politics and society, overturning it completely and turning "progressive" into a dirty word - like Beck is trying to do - is a bridge too far and a formula for confusion and division. (Viewing Beck's show and his distasteful tactics today, I honestly believe he's going to wreck himself if he doesn't check himself.) If the discussion ever gets serious, you'll be left trying to explain why you hate women's suffrage and love the robber barons. Why not instead concede that the Progressive Era represented something that any American can profit from studying, for both the good and the bad of it, and for an understanding of where it went wrong?
In addition to pre-empting and disarming the PINOs, I think such a stance has the further advantage of being accurate - and of being sane.