There Is Nothing Progressive About Progressives |
There Is Nothing Progressive About Progressives
Today’s so-called Progressive Movement is the greatest force for regression this world has ever seen
Daniel Winston | November 2, 2026
To call yourself progressive is to claim the future as your permanent address and to assign everyone who disagrees with you a seat somewhere in the moral lowlands. It is an annexation of time itself, performed before the argument begins. But a claim that large invites an obvious test.
Take the movement’s central commitments one at a time and ask of each whether it carries us further from the arrangements that humanity spent centuries and oceans of blood escaping, or back toward them. Run that test honestly, and the results are close to uniform. Nearly everything the contemporary left says is regressive in its essence. Not merely mistaken, not merely excessive. Regressive.
Sir Henry Maine wrote in 1861 that the movement of progressive societies had been a movement from status to contract, from a world in which your position was fixed at birth by blood and caste to a world in which you were judged by what you did. That sentence contains much of what the modern world achieved through actual progress.
Now consider a hiring regime that sorts applicants by ancestry, a university that admits by lineage-adjusted formula, a conference that assigns speaking authority by pigmentation. That is not the frontier of human freedom but a caste system with a diversity officer, installed by people who loudly imagine themselves the heirs of the abolitionists.
Consider what has happened to speech. Every free society had to fight its way out from under blasphemy law. Progressives have rebuilt the ancient apparatus and renamed the parts.
There is a body of doctrine that may not be questioned. There is a category of statement punished not because........