“… Progressivism Ain’t What It Used To Be”

Thomas Bray of the Detroit News has a very good column arguing, as his last phrase puts it, “progressivism ain’t what it used to be.” (HatTip to RealClearPolitics)

Bray’s examples are for the most part limited to the fact that in the old days liberals used to be for “the people” against “the interests.” Now, he points out, they’re spending a good deal of interest trying to prevent “the people” from being able to vote on matters of interest to them. This reversal is quite ironic inasmuch as it was progressives who invented the initiative and recall procedure for changing state law.

Indeed, the emerging strategy of the left is to prevent people from voting at all on many ballot proposals. In Montana this summer, left-wing critics persuaded a district judge to throw a TABOR proposal [Taxpayer Bill of Rights] — as well as a measure that would subject judges to the recall process — off the ballot because of a “pattern” of fraud by petition gatherers. (The decision is under appeal.) In Missouri a Democratic secretary of state refused to certify the TABOR and eminent domain proposals on the exceedingly fussy grounds the petitions weren’t properly numbered by county.

….

And judges in several states have junked proposals barring the taking of private property for the benefit of another private interest on grounds that the proposals violated the “single subject” requirement for ballot issues. The proposals also would have required state compensation for “regulatory takings” — an environmental rule, for example, placing limits on a property’s uses. Never mind that the measures had the single purpose of protecting property rights.

And then there’s my favorite:

In Michigan, opponents of Proposal 2 [the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative] ludicrously tried to argue – unsuccessfully as it turned out — that the federal Voting Rights Act required that there be no vote on a measure to ban racial preferences.

No doubt one of the reasons I like Bray’s column so much is that I’ve said similar things here on more than a few occasions. (See, especially, here, but also here and here.) Indeed, just the other day I sent the following email to a friend who identified herself as an independent, but with liberal leanings:

I have nothing against liberals … — indeed, not all that long ago I used to be one myself. But then a funny thing happened: liberals, a) who used to be all for free speech, suddenly starting proposing speech codes and bans on political advertising and criminalizing offensive speech, etc.; b) who used to be all for the separation of church and state, suddenly starting imposing burdens on religious groups but not on otherwise identical secular groups; c) who used to be all for the core value of treating people “without regard” to race, sex, or ethnicity, suddenly starting demanding preferences based on race and sex and ethnicity. And then they told me that I had changed and suddenly become conservative!

Of course liberals didn’t abandon all their old positions. Back in the 1960s, when I was in college and graduate school, liberals thought organized labor was “progressive” and tended to follow its lead. Thus they opposed illegal immigration and even legal “guest worker” programs, agreeing with Labor that such programs lowered the wages of domestic workers, especially poor blacks. Today liberals still follow Labor’s lead on immigration. Of course, Labor has now reversed itself and supports all the immigrants it can get as a source of new members….

Of course, one way of looking at these transformations is to say that over the past generation or so liberals have been remarkable consistent: they’ve reversed all of their former positions….