Rebuking the False Dichotomy of Progress vs. Reaction

Vladimir Kontorovich and Eugene Kontorovich recently argue in the Wall Street Journal that America is going through a period of political “openness” regarding various deceptions that government, media, corporate, and education leaders have perpetrated for many years. America is entering its own period of glasnost. The authors remind us about the Russian glasnost that began in 1988 when Mikhail Gorbachev thought loosening control of information would satisfy peoples’ reform appetites while giving the regime more legitimacy. He bet wrong. The exposure of the Soviet regime’s official lies to a long-suffering Russian people was rapidly consumed by the public, with every new story detailing how they had been deceived for decades.

The truth that came to light during this period was strange and wonderful, a powerful indictment of the regime:

On one day, a journal might publish an article arguing that the rates of economic growth, an important point of pride for the regime, had been exaggerated. Another might argue for the superiority of the market over central planning, the mainstay of the Soviet system. Media coverage of official corruption and social problems, such as drug abuse, was given the green light. So too was the publication of literature banned during the previous 70 years.

The authors compare this period of Soviet openness with the American public's recent learning that their elites have engaged in various coverups and collusion against the truth. While conservatives had mostly pointed out these cabals and deceptions, the evidence is now impossible to ignore by any fair-minded person, regardless of their politics.

These revelations include the likelihood that COVID-19 came from a lab in China. In 2020, those who said that were mocked and targeted by the federal government for supposedly misrepresenting the virus’s origin. Similarly, those objecting to official COVID-19 treatment and shut-in protocols were silenced on social media channels with the strong encouragement of the federal government, a fact recently confirmed by a surprising new source, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

A few months ago, it became undeniable that President Biden was mentally impaired, as many had suspected and a few brave souls had said. His aides, including Vice President Kamala Harris, family members, and journalists, covered it up, undoubtedly endangering our country along the way. The question remains: Who is governing America?

The truth of the Biden mental incapacity scandal sheds stark contrasting light on the lies undergirding the investigations of President Trump in his first term (“the Russia hoax”), and the lawfare waged against him in multiple courts beginning in 2023. We were told that Trump was a Russian agent who needed to be investigated. But we now know that was begun in conspiracy, fueled by falsities, and perpetuated by what we must conclude is our version of the secret police. Further contrast is provided by the letter signed by dozens of former intelligence officials that Hunter Biden’s laptop “had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation,” while intelligence agencies at the time knew that the laptop was authentic. Those entrusted with tremendous investigatory and informational powers bore false witness. The entire discussion was shadow-banned by social media in the last days of the 2020 campaign, with important consequences for the electoral results. A sizeable portion of Americans say their vote would have changed if the truth were known.

The authors also note that Americans are learning about the Pakistani rape gangs in the United Kingdom who preyed on thousands and thousands of working-class white girls and who were protected by police and other local officials when their crimes were brought to them. The local governments cared more about insulating immigrant communities from criminal responsibility than prosecuting heinous crimes. Those who reported these crimes endured accusations of racism, officials worried about them were sent to diversity training sessions, or worse. With a few admirable exceptions, journalists who knew about it refused to report it. The overriding objective was to prevent any criticism of the reigning multicultural ideology preferred by the elites. We can now ask whether similar immoral calculations and coverups have happened in America and go where the evidence takes us.

A broad cross-section of Americans are rejecting the mutilation of children and adolescent bodies to help them “affirm” their “chosen” gender. We will increasingly learn how an industry of profit developed around “choice,” “gender affirmation,” and the fear of being called “transphobic” to the detriment of those whose lives are now ruined by irreversible surgeries performed on them when they were lacking the maturity to make any severe life-altering judgments. Trial lawyers have an important role to play in this most needed reckoning. Other ideological impositions and injustices need similar reckonings.

The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion racket now appears ever more repulsive to Americans as its aims and methods are fully revealed. Even Kamala Harris, whose 2020 presidential campaign utilized its rhetoric and slogans, emphasized different themes in her 2024 campaign. Corporations are eliminating or significantly reducing the DEI departments they so publicly created during the Summer of 2020. The final blow will be struck by the applications of our civil rights laws, which these programs have so brazenly violated in insisting on equal outcomes by race and gender (and ideological conformity).

Finally, the California fires still raging and claiming lives, homes, and property on a horrific scale could deprive the climate change agenda of moral authority, one of the most potent Progressive weapons of the last two decades. No state in America has done more to hitch itself to stop “climate change” through a ‘whole of government’ approach than the Golden State, and no state has more dramatically failed its people, neglecting the basic work of modern civilization maintenance. The refusal to build and fill reservoirs with water (even when required by voters in a state referendum), to build roads, to engage in controlled burns, to expand and protect energy transmission lines, and to have resources readily available to contain wildfires, are impossible to understand apart from an ideological “degrowth” decision to halt the advance of industrial civilization in favor of reducing the so-called carbon footprint. This can only be achieved by making life more expensive and precarious on a wide scale.

What unites all these issues is progressives' considered decision to use their power for policies authorized by “the future” that they, and they alone, can foresee. This is the Progressive “mandate of heaven”: their authority is given them by their more acute understanding of the future and what it demands of us – and in turn, they of us. Their “vision” of the future justifies bringing the rest of us along willy-nilly with a combination of carrots and coercions. It is true that Progressive “leadership” has typically consisted of using various devices like “compassion” and “social justice” to induce us into accepting more extensive programs of social and economic rights, a bargain that has come at the expense of our liberties.

Barack Obama knew that Americans no longer accepted the old Progressive notions of Woodrow Wilson, i.e., history would inevitably be more just, equal, peaceful, etc. if we only adjusted to it. But they could accept that together, we shape our history and make the future glorious. This thin scaffolding stood up Obama’s “Hope” and “Change.” The legitimacy of the vision turned on the belief that we could shape this future with state power that would eliminate racism, cruelty, and pollution. Those opposed to it were reactionaries, “clinging to their guns and their religion,” Obama famously declared to funders in 2008. As Kamala Harris said during the recent campaign, “We aren’t going back. Ours is a fight for freedom.”

Such repetitive Obama-ism by Harris clearly means the past is immoral. But it is not only the past that needs to be jettisoned. Progressive thinking has always meant replacing the soul, conscience, and its requirements for virtue with the binary categories of Progress and Reaction, together with a so-called science of history. In this view, Progressive history is morally charged with enlightenment, liberation, happiness, and perfect equality. It replaces God, freedom, virtue, and the limitations inherent to human nature. Reactionaries, therefore, become the enemies of humanity, resisting the glorious future that awaits us. They reveal themselves as puppets of nefarious and dark interests. Progressivism is ultimately the belief that the distance between man and God can be virtually eliminated.

But this way of thinking and the results it unleashes are now in question as Progressive policies and agendas are increasingly crashing into reality. As Gorbachev gave glasnost a push, the defeat of Kamala Harris and the Democratic party and how it occurred with virtually every voter category moving right-ward gave America a new opportunity for transparency and reflection. We will need to deliberate well if this moment is to prove more than fleeting.

Progressive politics originally insisted that government is the work of enlightenment, rational planning, centralized power guided by science, and compassion. By reducing us to just beings with government-prescribed rights, they make us less than citizens. On one side, we are fitted with all individual rights; on the other, every desire for relief must lead to a government program. This transformation in American life occurred precisely because natural rights no longer fixed the ends of government.  We, as a people, were “freed from” what had been our first principles of constitutional government. In this way, we see that Progressive constitutionalism is not about liberty and good government but is a series of economic and social rights programs, milestones that ascend to an improved period of political and social existence.

The improved part is impossible to accept today and calls for a reorientation of our politics and ourselves. This should lead us back to the core work of politics, which our Constitution states in the Preamble and structures in its several Articles. To become citizens again, participants in the great adventure of self-government will require that we and our elected representatives engage our problems with awareness of how the Constitution guides and limits power and, equally important, is based on a belief in human liberty. Doing so is impossible without recalling the cardinal virtues: courage, prudence, temperance, and justice. These timeless virtues should guide us in deliberating our political ends, and the available means we have to achieve them.

Richard M. Reinsch II is the editor-in-chief of Civitas Outlook.