I’ve decided what I’m going to be for Halloween: a Progressive! I’ll scare…well, I probably won’t scare anyone. In fact, it would probably help me blend in a great deal more than I usually do. For Halloween purposes, I’d do better going as myself, at least if your average college student will be there. Oh, no! It’s a professor who expects me to think for myself! To earn grades! RUN!
I’ll have to save the ruminations on these kids today, and on how inflation does the same thing for self-esteem and grades that it does for currency (and the difference between inflation and appreciation) for another day. Makes me feel like I ought to be wearing my pants up around my armpits, and I just don’t feel up to the concomitant wedgie right now.
The point is, Progressives ought to scare us a great deal more than they do.

For those too young (or too sleepy in history class) to remember, the Progressive movement was big around the turn of the last century. Whereas our founders believed that government, like fire, was a dangerous servant and a fearful master (something George Washington is supposed to have said—historians suppose he didn’t), the Progressives believed that government was a tool for the improvement of mankind. Not only could it allow us to live peacefully together, it could make us better people: more caring, more compassionate, more temperate.
At least, it could if it were run by the right people. Smart people who knew what was right could use government to make the rest of us stand up straight (it’s better for your spine), eat healthy and nutritious foods (it’s good for your digestion), and quit drinking and smoking (you’ll be more productive at work, and that nasty cough!). Take, for example, one of Progressivism’s biggest successes: Prohibition. Smart people knew that alcohol was bad for you, so they had the right—no, the duty—to help the human race achieve its highest potential by keeping the nasty stuff from people who weren’t smart enough to see how it harmed them.
Now, I’m a life-long teetotaler, as was my father before me. But alcohol doesn’t kill people—people kill people by misusing alcohol. There are two possible reactions to that fact: hold people accountable for their bad decisions, or assume that they’re too dumb or weak to learn, and that you must therefore keep it away from them. Notice the first approach is how we (used to) treat adults; the second is how we treat children.
And that is how Progressives saw the rest of us, as children: loveable, but misguided, not yet possessed of the intellectual maturity to make important decisions for ourselves, nor able to bear the consequences of them. None of us like bearing the consequences of our actions. Being human, we make mistakes, and those have unpleasant consequences. Wouldn’t it be much better if someone else could shield us from those consequences?
Those of you who have read Tocqueville or Dostoevskii will begin to recognize this as exactly the tyranny which democracy has to fear. We begin by feeling clever for having dodged the reckoning for our mistakes. We are relieved, but resolved to learn from our mistakes. Government is a good servant, saving us the trouble of dealing with unpleasantness. But soon the next mistake comes along, and then the next, and soon we have conditioned ourselves to dependence on our fearful master.
Children do not simply become adults, at least not in any sense other than the trivial. We all require education, from our parents, our teachers, our friends, even the heartless and ruthless invisible hand before we learn to exercise appropriate caution in our decisions, to weigh and accept risks. The trouble with Progressives is that they want to keep us as children, to deny us the education that life brings with its consequences. Obviously, Progressives speak in terms of educating us about what is good for us, but they mean instead that we must come to recognize their right to tell us what to think. Like infant industries, we will never grow old.
But as any number of literary examples attests, beginning with Peter Pan, too many of us do not wish to grow old. Perhaps the scariest thing about Progressives is that they may be making a correct assumption about us, or at the very least, an assumption we want desperately to be true. Can we blame them for offering us what we want, or should we blame ourselves for wanting it?
Alas, the answer must wait ‘til next week, when we will consider in more depth why exactly the most frightening costume this fall is Progressive!