The end of Progress

I always find it funny when Liberals shy away from that term, proudly calling themselves "Progressive".  I mean, who is opposed to progress?  Alas, there's a difference between progress and Progress (at least as defined by Progressives).

Expect a new re-branding from them, because Progress has screeched to a halt:

It’s a very familiar landscape of ideas to anyone who knows modern history.  Abolition of private property?  Check.  Constant intrusive surveillance?  Check.  Everyone’s personal lives dependent on the actions of cadres of apparatchiks?  Check.  Fawning propaganda about how wonderful life is in the worker’s paradise?  Check. That is to say, when the World Economic Forum set out to imagine a new, exciting, cutting-edge future as a goal for humanity, the very best that they and their pet Danish politician could do is reinvent the Soviet Union.

That colossal failure of imagination, in turn, marks a historical inflection point of immense importance.

Over the decade and a half since I first started posting essays on the internet, one subject I’ve discussed repeatedly is the civil religion of progress:  the belief system, as passionately held as any more obviously theological faith, that newer always means better and change is always good, that the ideas of the past have been disproved and the practices of the past rendered obsolete by the mere passage of time, and that history follows an inevitable trajectory from the ignorant squalor of the past to a shining gizmocentric future somewhere out there among the stars. That belief is the established religion of our society.  Those who have the indepence of mind to reject it can count on facing the same sort of baffled rage you’ll reliably get by asking true believers hard questions about any other variety of blind faith.

What makes that baffled rage so pervasive these days is that progress hasn’t exactly lived up to its billing in recent decades.

This is a long but very important post by the blogger who used to post as the Archdruid.  Here, he shows just how pathetically out of gas the Left's propaganda is.  Highly, highly recommended.  And his summing up is 100% spot on:

The Great Reset is being marketed by a gallimaufry of politicians, plutocrats, and tame intellectuals:  some of the most cosseted people on earth, sheltered in a cozy bubble of privilege that keeps them safe from any untoward encounter with the harsh realities of life.  Not for them the world the rest of us have to deal with—the bleak and violent urban neighborhoods, the grinding poverty of the countryside, the cracked and crumbling highways and bridges, the stealth inflation of shrinking product sizes and plummeting product quality!  Flitting from gated residential communities or high-end condos to office towers to exclusive vacation resorts, they aren’t the Lenins of today’s world—they’re the Brezhnevs, the Andropovs, and the Chernenkos.  They represent the end of an era, not its beginning.

The broad public reaction to the Great Reset, in turn, is a good measure of just how tone-deaf today’s corporate aristocracy has become. Across the political spectrum from far right to center to far left, people are regarding the prospect of being dependent on the vagaries of a vast and unaccountable corporate technostructure for their next change of underwear and their next day’s meals with the anger and mockery that it so richly deserves.

This brings some perspective to the election that the Left is trying to steal.  It's these same people - the ones who are on the Wrong Side of History, who are trying to reset the propaganda clocks by 100 years - these are the people who think they can ram this down our throats?  It is to laugh.  They may be successful in the short term, but in the long term they will end up on the ash heap of history.

Quite frankly, that's the best case they can hope for.