Essay: Old progressives, new "right"

This essay is an original work by LT. Please comment only on the talk page.

One of the remarkable, or rather unremarkable political transformations within less than the past decade was the shift of mainstream "right-wing politics" away from classical liberalism, individualism, freedom, and towards hedonistic government activism. At one point caricatured as the stooge of big business unconcerned with the "common people," the right soon competed with the left for the image of populism against the elites, bringing about the destruction of its old, traditional, or shall we say conservative principles in whoring after the wondrous secular civil power.

It doesn't take watching more than several segments of the House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing against TikTok's CEO to see what the Republican Party has become: a sack of cloaked progressives in silly hoods. The supposed "concerns" are abused to perpetrate a naked witch hunt and provide a basis for statist repression of individual freedom, insulting citizens as idiots who must heed the advice of enlightened politicians who purportedly look out after their best interest.

Perhaps some view the government battle against TikTok as akin to the anti-Communist crusades of McCarthyism. I would argue this as a false equivalence, as cultural problems are outside the concern of the federal government. Had the State Department or U.S. Army legitimately been infiltrated by Communists, federal action would be swiftly warranted. However, the problem of societal moral decay rests solely on the incompetence of parents to protect their own children. By transferring priority responsibilities of protection to the government, parents are mocked as incapable of shielding their own children.

Historical connections

The modern-day GOP under populism is paralleling the Progressive Movement a century ago. Read for yourself what Ohio History Central says about old Progressives:

“	While Progressives enacted numerous positive reforms, some of their goals were questionable. While they did seek to make the United States government more democratic and to protect U.S. workers, they also sought to force their social and political beliefs on others. Progressives opposed immigration and enacted several immigration restrictions during the 1920s. Progressives also tried to force immigrants to adopt Progressive moral beliefs. One way they tried to accomplish this was through settlement houses. Settlement houses existed in most major cities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were places where immigrants could go to receive free food, clothing, job training, and educational classes. While all of these items greatly helped immigrants, Progressives also used the settlement houses to convince immigrants to adopt Progressive beliefs, causing the foreigners to forsake their own culture. During the 1920s, many Progressives also joined the Ku Klux Klan, a self-proclaimed religious group that was to enforce morality, based on Progressive beliefs, on other people.	”
—Ohio History Central article on the Progressive Movement

Protecting U.S. workers against foreign competition... immigration restriction... sound familiar? It's all the same blather, whether it's the old Progressives or the insurgent "right-wing populists." Also noteworthy, as pointed out by National Review, was the heaping praise fringe "right-wing" populists gave for... Huey Long, the leading left-wing rabble-rouser of the early 1930s. Anyone researching the dark rabbit hole of their media shouldn't find it hard to see their praise for Theodore Roosevelt, a leading progressive of his time who quarreled with the semi-reactionary Platt Machine ran by conservative Stalwart Republican Thomas C. Platt. In fact, there's an entire "right-wing populist" organization calling itself the Bull Moose Project; how telling!

At one point, the Republican Party stood up for freedom and liberty, which became tarnished by supposed "anti-Communism." When the Sedition Act was passed during the Woodrow Wilson, at the height of the Progressive Movement amidst rampant wartime xenophobia and fervent nationalism, the primary opponents were Republicans, one of which was Henry Cabot Lodge, an archreactionary Boston Brahmin of his time who railed against progressive "reforms." During this time period, various socialist, Communist, anarchist, and syndicalist groups alike posed national security threats, which were seized upon by Progressives to repress freedom. The instigator and namesake of the Palmer Raids, A. Mitchell Palmer, a chief Woodrow Administration member working for the president who sought "young, militant, progressive and fearless" individuals. Mitchell unsuccessfully vied for U.S. Senate in 1914 against right-wing GOP senator Boies Penrose, and regarded by numerous sources as a noted progressive leader, is remembered in history textbooks as the same supposed reactionary against leftists, yet was on the left himself!