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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The idea of progress, one of the animating ideas of Western civilization, has now gone global. From Marxism and neoliberalism to today’s mutant identity politics, it offers a framework of knowledge and confidence: an assurance that things will get better and that history is on our side. However, in doing this it creates a form of authority that is simultaneously imaginary and dishonest, resting on confidence in a future that is really contingent and unknowable.
In The Progress Trap, Ben Cobley looks at this progressive mindset as a form of power, conferring a right to act and control others. ‘Change’, ‘transformation’ and the ‘new’ are the superior values, meaning destruction of the old: people, cultures and nature. It is a trap into which nearly all of us fall at times, so attractive are its stories and familiar its techniques.
Hard-hitting but thoughtful, the book is a meditation on the sinister consequences of the progressive way of being: for ourselves, for our democracy, for our art and for the pursuit of real knowledge.
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Seitenzahl: 453
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Notes
1. Introduction: From colonialism to decolonization
Progressive history
The role of identity
Decolonization: a new colonialism
Notes
Part One: How progressives win
2. Taking the place of God
An inherited temporality
George Floyd: twenty-first-century martyr
A un-Christian Christianity?
More appropriation than continuation
Deploying mystery
Notes
3. The uses of social science
The sociology of hate
A style made for media
Sociology as technique
Notes
4. Progressivism as promotion
BLM Inc.
The progressive alignment
The BBC as a promotional outfit
Effective technique
Notes
5. Eliminating opponents
Victory already secured
Transactivism: the limits of cancellation
Notes
6. The politics of expertise
The ‘independent expert’
Identity politics as expertise
The nature of expertise
The role of predictions
Notes
Part Two: The progressive society
7. From art to activism
Useful art
Transforming the nation
Notes
8. Progressive capitalism
How capitalism is progressive
Territorial colonization
Woke capitalism
Manufacturing the consumer
Notes
9. The technocratic state
The British Civil Service
The EU: a technocratic empire
Notes
10. Nationalisms, good and bad
Englishness as a disease
Ireland: a properly progressive nation
Notes
11. Playing Jesus: The activist as narcissist
Narcissism as culture
How identity politics encourages narcissism
The saviour complex
Notes
12. Conclusions: How should we respond?
The risks of progressivism
The politics
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Begin Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
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THE PROGRESS TRAP
The Modern Left and the False Authority of History
Ben Cobley
polity
Copyright © Ben Cobley 2025
The right of Ben Cobley to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.First published in 2025 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6763-8
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024948790
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Preface
Our world today sometimes feels like it is spinning out of control. The spread of radical political and religious ideologies – and the elevation of their ideologues by our institutions – feels inexorable. Panic seems to be everywhere. There is panic about the far right, racism, xenophobia, misogyny and Islamophobia; about Islamism, anti-Semitism, multiculturalism, diversity and unprecedented immigration feeding into each of them; about our housing crisis, Brexit, Trump, Elon Musk’s Twitter/X; Putin, Israel, Hamas, Iran, China and Russia; Western decline, climate catastrophe and the destruction of nature. Our political leaders and institutions either appear powerless and irrelevant, or are an active source of the problems we identify. Visions of a new dark age present themselves.
Yet at the same time corporations continue to sell us very different visions of a world redeemed by their products and technology. Economic growth remains the core measurement for how we are doing: and it continues, leading some to suggest that things are better than they ever were. We are told that ‘diversity is our strength’; mass immigration and multiculturalism are only beneficial. Communist China, Putin’s Russia and the Iran of the mullahs have serious issues of their own and will inevitably collapse. Islamism in the West and the anti-Semitism that accompanies it will die out as immigrants become more liberal and Western. The climate is not changing or it does not matter if it is, so we should continue on our path of maximal consumption.
These contrary accounts are inextricably linked. They emerge from the same world. They are concerned with the same things. And we sometimes hear them in turn from the same people. You may switch between them yourself: between pessimism and optimism, fear and faith, despair and hope. It is worth lingering for a moment on Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 American Presidential Election. This event has clearly delivered a massive jolt to the Western progressive consensus, making it doubt itself more than ever before. This book gives further grounding to that doubt, focusing in particular on the British context, where progressive hegemony in the institutions remains almost total but is now under sustained attack.
This book seeks to unravel how the narratives of Establishment progressives and their opponents are linked. Its subject matter is the notionally optimistic, progressive narratives that tell us how things are getting better, particularly those promoted from the liberal-left. As I see it, most people who we call ‘progressive’ do not embrace so much an idea of progress as the comforting illusion that things will inevitably get better so long as they and their allies are in control of things. This has various negative consequences when they do have control of things, not least the denial that, when things go awry, it has anything to do with them and their actions. We can see a similar thing with neoliberal, right-wing, progressives: they refuse outright to admit that their focus on economic growth alone has deleterious consequences on society and maybe on the economy itself in the longer term.
As George Orwell said, ‘To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.’ As I see it, the incapability, decline and discord we see all around us nowadays arises largely from a failure to do this: a failure to recognize what is going on in front of our noses. And I think this failure arises partly from the assumption that we are right and good and can only cause good to occur in the world, while our opponents can only cause bad.
This is the progressive mindset in action. Variations of this mindset have pervaded Western culture in various guises for centuries – and they have now gone global. They confer confidence and hope. They encourage us to do things, to see ourselves in a good light, as capable of improving the world around us. As some say, the progressive mindset shows ‘a faith in humanity’.
In this way it can appear to be a blessing – and certainly many of us cling to it as a source of faith in ourselves and the world around us. Our current political, administrative and business elites seemingly cannot do without it, their airy, empty optimism grounded in a combination of faith and the exalted positions in which they find themselves. After all, since history has placed them at the top, it must be a good thing, surely?
But not all the evidence points this way. Following the equivocations of Western elites about Hamas’s murderous rampage in Israel in 2023, the Jewish-Canadian academic Gad Saad said:
I am unsure that the West can recover from its multifront civilizational suicide…. It will be a long and ultimately bloody demise and the West will be the first society in recorded history to fully self-implode due to its parasitic ideological rapture…. Your grandchildren will pay a very high price for your ‘progressive’ arrogance rooted in the pursuit of Unicornia that only exists in the recesses of deeply flawed parasitized minds.1
Well, quite. The arrogance Saad identifies is very real. However it is really nothing new. The imperialism of European nations used to display similar traits: assumptions of superiority not just in the technological domain, but in moral and political matters too, practically overriding objections from those outside the charmed circle of knowers. Nowadays the same spirit comes at us in the guise of ‘decolonization’, a new drive to re-educate the masses to submit to those with a superior morality grounded in historical knowledge. The arrogance of this – and the lies and distortions that come with it – have blossomed in societies that are meant to be guided by knowledge.
But how does this process work? And why is it so successful? Hopefully in this book we will find out; and maybe start to find a way out.
The book is divided into two parts, with an additional Introduction and a chapter of conclusions. The Introduction lays out the primary theme, ‘From colonialism to decolonization’, of how progressivism has given impetus to European colonialism and now gives ‘decolonization’ necessary authority. The final chapter of conclusions looks at how we should respond to progressivism – practically, politically and philosophically. In between, Part One looks at why progressivism is so successful and Part Two considers particular aspects of the progressive society today, from the arts, the economy and technocratic government to nationalisms and the behaviour of prominent activists.
The book might be best seen as a sequel to my first, The Tribe, broadening out the scope from the politics of identity to the nature and practice of particularly progressive ideology. My ambition in taking this on has posed difficulties, but it has also proved rewarding and I hope readers will find it so.
To get to this stage, I owe particular thanks to George Owers, who initially commissioned the book and paid rigorous attention to it, something rare from editors nowadays. As a typically insecure but self-regarding writer, I found George’s comments on my efforts at time brutal and intimidating. However they were valuable and necessary and have led to a much better final version. Thanks also to Polity for taking the book on and to Jane Fricker for spotting glitches and errors. Then there is my agent, Matthew Hamilton, who has offered calm, sound advice when called upon. Lastly, and most of all, I should thank my long-suffering family for just about sticking with me despite everything. This is what proper families do. Anyone who proposes to ‘abolish the family’, as some progressives want to, should not be trusted.
Notes
1.
Tweet: @GadSaad, 21 October 2023, 7.34pm.
1Introduction: From colonialism to decolonization
Progressive history
To open to civilization the only part of our globe which it has not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness which hangs over entire peoples, is, I dare say, a crusade worthy of this century of progress.1
With these words on 12 September 1876, King Leopold II of Belgium reached out to fellow Europeans with his project to capture the giant Congo region of West Africa. At a lavish Geographical Conference in his palace in Brussels, the king spoke of how ‘pacification bases’ would be set up in the Congo river region ‘as a means of abolishing the slave trade, establishing peace among the chiefs, and procuring them just and impartial arbitration’.2
To many of those who heard it, this clarion call sounded wonderful. Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French developer of the Suez Canal, suggested that Leopold’s venture was ‘the greatest humanitarian work of this time’.3 British attendees at the conference were greatly impressed and the positive feeling towards Leopold lingered for years. In 1884, the Daily Telegraph glowingly reported, with a nod to the British-American adventurer Henry Morton Stanley, how ‘Leopold II … has knit adventurers, traders and missionaries of many races into one band of men, under the most illustrious of modern travellers to carry into the interior of Africa new ideas of law, order, humanity, and protection of the natives’.4
By around 1890, much of the Congo Basin was under Leopold’s control. Local people were being killed, mutilated and taken hostage, their villages burned down and their crops destroyed in order to ensure deliveries of rubber and ivory to pay off the king’s investment and fund his extravagant lifestyle. The population of the Congo Free State area dropped by an estimated 10 million people between 1880 and the 1920s, due to a combination of mass murder, starvation, exhaustion and exposure to disease and the much reduced birth rate which resulted from these things.5 Leopold’s public assertions had sounded great to his audience, but the reality on the ground, once his representatives had got to work, was a nightmare of brutality and despair.
Leopold’s Congo is an extreme example of how Europeans and their descendants in America and elsewhere used ideas of progress and civilization to justify colonial expansion and control. Progress, as a belief in change, directed by its believers, remains the animating idea of Western civilization today, including among those movements that are trying to abolish it.
Leopold himself was particularly influenced by the British example, having a personal copy of The Times brought across the Channel daily to keep him abreast of developments. He spoke of how he wanted Belgium to follow in the footsteps of Britain, taking her part in the great work of civilization. There was cynicism behind Leopold’s words. But they were well chosen. For these sentiments were held genuinely – if rather naively – by many in Britain and elsewhere. The hero-explorer Dr David Livingstone had moved many with his talk of a worldwide crusade to open up Africa, defeat the powerful Arab-Swahili slave trade and bring in the ‘3 cs’: Commerce, Christianity and Civilization. By that time, the humanitarian movement had become a major force in British public life. Already, in 1807, Britain had passed a law to ban trade in slaves followed by another in 1833 to ban slavery itself within its Empire, accompanied by pressure on others to do the same. It deployed squadrons of warships off the West and East coasts of Africa to intercept slavers, confiscate their ships and return captured slaves.
The push against slavery arose largely out of evangelical religion which merged into a much wider missionary zeal, ‘to save … Africa from itself’ as the historian Thomas Pakenham has put it.6 The religious impulse to save and convert Africans found itself aligned to a wider, secular notion of bringing civilization and progress to the continent, thereby saving its people from barbarous ways and oppressive rulers. This merging of Christian and progressive standpoints has endured, as has the Western idea of saving Africa and telling Africans how to behave. President Macron of France for example caused a storm in 2017 by referring to the problems the continent faces as ‘civilizational’ in character, evoking France’s colonial ‘civilizing mission’ on the continent. Previously, Tony Blair had offended many by linking his ‘passion for Africa’ to its status as an apparent ‘scar on the conscience of the world’. The writer Richard Dowden has said of Blair, ‘His messianic mission to save Africa was reminiscent of the nineteenth-century missionary zeal that set teeth on edge. It sounded like saving Africa from the Africans.’7 There is another similarity in the way many non-governmental organizations (NGOs), in Dowden’s words, ‘find themselves operating like mini-governments, responsible for everything from providing food aid to employing their own private armies’.8 Back where the NGOs are based and raise their money all the talk is of doing good and saving lives, but on the ground much more earthy political realities often prevail – a very similar dynamic to that of colonial times.
Dr Livingstone was followed by a host of other missionaries and explorers, many inspired more by dreams of wealth and glory than the ideals he passionately held. Pakenham says that the Brits who followed Livingstone ‘all conceived of the crusade in terms of romantic nationalism’.9 Their French counterparts shared a similar feeling about extending French civilization to the world. The explicit idea of progress had largely been a French invention: and colonialism was a way to spread it around the world.*
To gain necessary support in circles of power and in public opinion for colonial ventures, the idea that these European countries had an historical mission and destiny to export their superior ways was essential. Of the British experience, the historian Robert Tombs writes of how:
Ideas of Progress had burrowed to the centre of the Victorian world view. The Scottish Enlightenment had already elaborated the idea of successive stages of civilization: from the decline of savage and violent feudalism to the growth of peaceful and civilized ‘commercial society’, which England seemed to epitomize. Historians wrote a saga of Progress: the Great Men of history, seen by Carlyle as crucial, were to be judged by progressive criteria: ‘Were their faces set in the right or wrong direction? … Did they exert themselves to help onward the great movement of the human race, or to stop it?’ Central to the ‘great movement’ was the growth of freedom, associated in England with Protestantism and Parliament, and enshrined in the Whig interpretation of history by writers such as Macaulay.10
He adds:
It was strongly felt to be an obligation to provide leadership and assist the forces of progress, preferably by peaceful means, but by force if necessary against ‘barbarity’. The moralizing, missionary aspect of nineteenth-century politics should not be underestimated, despite Cecil Rhodes’ cynical quip that empire was philanthropy plus 5 per cent profit.11
Tombs talks of a ‘progressive colonialism’ which was meant not so much to conquer as to civilize foreign domains, with Christianity, free trade and ending slavery all part of the mix. One of the most prominent imperialists, Lord Curzon, wrote of how, ‘In the Empire, we have found not merely the key to glory and wealth, but the call to duty, and the means of service to mankind.’12 There was significant support for this vision of imperialism even on the left of politics, notably from the Fabian Society.
However, the actions and interests of settlers, traders and officials often stood in stark contrast to the noble ideals of pontificators thousands of miles away in Europe. Being on the spot, they were also able to mould the realities and exploit possibilities to impose their will. Rhodes made a fortune in the Kimberley diamond mines and came to dominate Cape Colony politics largely by balancing the interests of British settlers and the white majority Boers of mainly Dutch descent. Exploiting his wealth and power on the ground, Rhodes also succeeded in bending the untrusting British authorities to give him a Royal Charter to move into what is now Zimbabwe and Zambia, exploiting fear of German and Portuguese strategic threats in the area. For Rhodes and his colleagues, land and lucrative mineral concessions were there for the taking. The promise of free trade, which British Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone and others regarded as a sort of moral law, proved to be a mere abstraction and irrelevance when set against the interests of those on the spot. In practice, in Africa as elsewhere, progress and civilization often appeared as the assertion of power, backed up by modern weaponry.
In 1883, the pioneer historian of the British Empire John Seeley concluded that imperial expansion was now the ‘goal of English history’ since constitutional liberty within Britain itself was ‘a completed development’. As Tombs points out, a variant of this view became part of the national myth of America,13 reflecting the many parallels between American expansion into the West and British imperial expansion. For a start, it was driven largely by desire for trade, land and valuable natural resources. However, it was also backed up by more abstract ideas about spreading ‘civilization’, commerce and religion to the ‘savage’ populations: so changing them into better people.
One Commissioner for Indian Affairs said the existing populations of North America were prevented from learning the benefits of civilization,
by their possession of too great an extent of country held in common, and the right to large money annuities; the one giving them ample scope for their indulgence in their unsettled and vagrant habits, and preventing their acquiring a knowledge of individuality in property and the advantage of settled homes; the other fostering idleness and want of thrift, and giving them means of gratifying their depraved tastes and appetites.14
As the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm put it with more than a little justification, ‘To deprive them of their lands by fraud, robbery and any other suitable kind of pressure was therefore as moral as it was profitable.’15 Even those who sympathized tended to share the same wider perspective. Artist George Catlin travelled among the Great Plains tribes in the 1830s. Despite noting how the native populations were in many ways more honourable and trustworthy than the whites who were pushing into their territories, he still saw it as a duty of whites to teach them civilization and justice. Of his favourite Mandan tribe, Catlin said, ‘he is capable of improvement’ and ‘his mind is a beautiful blank on which anything can be written if the proper means be taken’.16
The American Indian experience shows how progress in practice has always depended on the submission of the relatively powerless to the powerful, and the enforcement of power by the latter on the former. This has much wider ramifications. As the American educational writer Audrey Watters says, ‘The frontier … remains an important metaphor in the American conceptualization of the future. New places, new fields for exploration and conquest.’17 Tombs writes of how, ‘we have generally accepted the idealized vision of the American Revolution as a noble struggle for freedom and democracy. Here indeed is a case of history being written by the victors.’ Furthermore: ‘America’s flattering foundation myth is itself of immense historical importance.’18
In retrospect, we can see this in the words of John Adams, one of the founding fathers. ‘I always consider the settlement of America as the opening of a grand scheme and design in Providence’, Adams said, ‘for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.’19
That last phrase, ‘all over the earth’ is telling in view of what happened in time. Once there was no more land left to acquire on the continent itself, the striving, improving, pioneering spirit blessed by Providence had to find new outlets. Techniques for internal self-improvement and for external world improvement have both proliferated in this context. Here we can see a new version of European efforts to civilize the world, offering similar openings to the greedy, venal and ambitious, the warlike, the wannabe heroes, and the weapons makers and traders.
The Second World War offered a perfect stage for this spirit, with the Greatest Generation saving the world from tyranny and looking mighty good in doing it, embodying the spirit of the New World to tired Europeans. However, when vanity and overreach culminated in the disaster of Vietnam, the self-confident American zeitgeist struggled to deal with it. Philip Caputo, a Marine in Vietnam, notes how, ‘Our self-image as a progressive, virtuous, and triumphant people exempt from the burdens and tragedies of history came apart in Vietnam, and we had no way to integrate the war or its consequences into our collective and individual consciousness.’20 Journalist Neil Sheehan adds: ‘We thought we were the exceptions to history, we Americans. History didn’t apply to us. We could never fight a bad war. We could never represent the wrong cause. We were Americans.’21 The conservative former governor of Georgia George Wallace responded to the My Lai massacre of 1968 by refusing to believe how any American soldier could possibly shoot a civilian. ‘Any atrocities in this war were caused by the Communists’, he said.22
In the latter suggestion, we find a theory of causation which is inherently progressive, showing an almost touching faith in one’s own side, detached from the brutal realities of war, assuming moral superiority and superior knowledge. What we do causes good things to happen; bad things cannot result from our actions. It is a story we find in many settings.
The French Revolution took a lot of inspiration from the preceding American one. Ideas about the progress of knowledge had been gestating in the salons and writings of French intellectuals and early scientists for years. During the Revolutionary period they reached a full flowering in the social theory of Nicolas de Condorcet, who believed he and other men of the revolution were inaugurating a new and better reality for mankind. Another major influence was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who saw civilization as a corrupting force, justifying the overthrow of institutions. He invested goodness in the people, in their ‘general will’. As Hannah Arendt has written, ‘The outstanding quality of this popular will … was its unanimity, and when [Revolutionary leader] Robespierre constantly referred to “public opinion,” he meant by it the unanimity of the general will; he did not think of an opinion upon which many publicly were in agreement.’23 Rousseau legitimized the idea that there is a single righteousness within the people that is available in abstract form to the intellectual. This has been seized upon by progressives claiming possession of the general good ever since. The general will potentially legitimizes anyone who claims to represent the people, but with reference to his own superior knowledge rather than to the people themselves. And when such persons gain in power, this translates easily into a greater realization of the general will, meaning that things as a whole are getting better. And this is an historical process of change, progress, improvement.
A century later, Vladimir Lenin built on these ideas by giving the intelligentsia a crucial role in the preparation and instigation of revolution – and in any government that followed. The intellectuals were the knowers. They understood the progress of society and would make public affairs work in harmony with how things were moving. Soviet leaders constantly reached to intellectual authority to justify their power. Among the many titles Joseph Stalin took were, ‘Leader of Progressive Humanity’, ‘Great Genius of Marxism-Leninism’, ‘Builder of Socialism’, ‘Architect of Communism’, ‘Gardener of Human Happiness’ and ‘coryphaeus of learning’ (a ‘coryphaeus’ being a chorus-leader or spokesperson).
On the first ever visit of a Soviet premier to the United States in 1959, Nikita Khrushchev startled his hosts by lecturing them about how their superior productivity in agriculture would not last. As he told them, ‘you will have to jump onto the running board of the train of socialism, which is about to leave for the future. Otherwise you’ll be left far behind, and we will wave goodbye to you from the rear platform of the last carriage.’ Another time he told a group of Western ambassadors in Moscow that the triumph of Communism was inevitable. ‘Like it or not’, he said, ‘history is on our side. We will bury you.’24
For the Soviet state and its leaders, history appeared as a process in which Communism would inevitably triumph over capitalism; good triumphing over evil. The Soviets would also, eventually, get ahead technologically, thereby winning a sort of world-historical Great Game and burying their ideological opponents in the grave of history.
The Cold War was in this sense a clash of two forms of progressivism. As Martin Sixsmith writes, ‘It was a conflict in which the battleground was, to an unprecedented extent, the human mind: the aim was control not just of territory, resources and power, but of loyalties, belief and the nature of reality.’25 It pitted the supposedly open, liberal, democratic capitalist societies of the West, epitomized by the United States, against a closed, top-down, highly-controlled socialist kind of polity, exemplified by the Soviets and Maoist China. And these two forms of polity map on to two distinct versions of progressive theory.
J.B. Bury, in his defining tome The Idea of Progress, published in 1920, said:
Theories of Progress are … differentiating into two distinct types, corresponding to two radically opposed political theories and appealing to two antagonistic temperaments. The one type is that of constructive idealists and socialists, who can name all the streets and towers of ‘the city of gold,’ which they imagine as situated just round a promontory. The development of man is a closed system; its term is known and within reach. The other type is that of those who, surveying the gradual ascent of man, believe that by the same interplay of forces which have conducted him so far and by a further development of the liberty which he has fought to win, he will move slowly towards conditions of increasing harmony and happiness. Here the development is infinite; its term is unknown, and lies in the remote future. Individual liberty is the motive force, and the corresponding political theory is liberalism; whereas the first doctrine naturally leads to a symmetrical system in which the authority of the state is preponderant, and the intellectual has little more value than a cog in a well-oiled wheel: his place is assigned; it is not his right to go his own way.26
Sometimes, these two types get summed up as, respectively, ‘Progress as Power’ versus ‘Progress as Freedom’.27 Embodying the former is the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Historian Catherine Merridale points out that it portrayed human progress as a struggle between good and evil, proclaiming ‘strict morality, the virtue of the citizen who aligns himself with history, devoting his life to the creation of a better world’.28 By contrast, Western liberal societies have over time come to embrace lax morality, the elevation of the consumer over the citizen, while portraying progress in terms of individuals becoming more liberal, taking more and more control of their own lives without constraint from others or from the state. Here we can see the ‘closed system’ in which things are ‘known and within reach’ waged against a mindset which is open to the elements and happy to go wherever history takes it, having faith that it will be the right way.* It seems no coincidence that the latter version has found its fullest expression in places with a strong Protestant and Puritan background like the United States, where the dominant Christian churches upheld individual faith above centralized organization and ritual.
However, this open, liberal version of progressivism is not completely open and liberal. Its faith in history and openness to whatever the future will bring is itself a form of dogma. It is a form of core knowledge that cannot be stepped on. Robert Nisbet, author of another classic book on the idea of progress, is a staunch advocate of Progress as Freedom. He says that the concept of progress ‘is distinct and pivotal’ as a developmental context for other ideas like freedom, equality, popular sovereignty. Set in the context of the idea of progress, he says ‘each could seem not merely desirable but historically necessary, inevitable of eventual achievement’. And, ‘Clearly, any value that can be made to seem an integral part of historical necessity has a strategic superiority in the area of political and social action.’29
Now the notion of strategic superiority is a very different idea to truth. It is the perspective of the committed participant rather than the objective observer. This is the sense in which Nisbet sees the idea of progress itself as necessary – similar to how Marxists and other advocates of closed progressivism have. His fear is that, without the belief in progress, progress will come to an end. In this sense faith is instrumental and superstitious. He blames writers from Alexis de Tocqueville to Max Weber for causing us to have doubts about progress in the West, at a time when the East is embracing the concept and the sense of destiny it confers. Again, we might recognize a religious echo here: the need for belief in progress in order to receive the blessings of progress matches the Protestant need for faith in God in order to be saved by God.
In practice, the controlled openness of the liberal perspective defers to power, by giving way to whatever forces happen to be powerful at the moment: normally economic power. But at the same time liberal openness relies on power to survive. The historian John Lewis Gaddis wrote in 2005, ‘No one today worries about a new global war, or a total triumph of dictators, or the prospect that civilization itself might end.’ For him, the Cold War ‘was a necessary contest that settled fundamental issues once and for all’.30 Now, such a perspective seems naive and premature, mistaking a fleeting victory for eternity, drawing an historical arc into the future based on a limited number of events in the recent past. According to this liberal triumphalism, the game had been won and liberal progress could now proceed uninterrupted.
The complacency of this perspective combined with its dogmatic openness allowed the opponents of liberalism to thrive. Progress as Freedom contained inside it the seeds of Progress as Power, both in its theory and in its politics. It acknowledged the need to control opinion, to intervene and maintain faith in progress, thereby stepping on freedom. Its openness was really an openness to power within a liberal society that it thought guaranteed freedom. So when its antagonists started to rise up from within that society, it happily gave way to them. In practice, to be fully open to the future meant being open to becoming closed; and to being consigned to the dustbin of history yourself. Clever, politically-motivated antagonists exploited progressive liberal openness in order to establish themselves in places like universities and the media before using their inside power to remove and exclude those who had let them in. This has been happening for a while now in the upper reaches of Western society.
The second coming of Donald Trump looks like the first major challenge to this state of affairs. Mainstream progressives have popularized a view that the brash and uncouth President and his new confrères like Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance are far-right reactionaries and fascists. Labour’s London Mayor Sadiq Khan released a statement about the election to console Londoners, saying: ‘The lesson of today is that progress is not inevitable. But asserting our progressive values is more important than ever – re-committing to building a world where racism and hatred is rejected, the fundamental rights of women and girls are upheld, and where we continue to tackle the crisis of climate change head on.’31
Trump has also made economic liberals despair with his pledges to bring in a raft of tariff protections for the American economy. With Trump’s victory, it seems, the world is at risk of returning to the dark ages.
But this is not someone in whom the spirit of progress is absent. Claire Lehmann, the Australian founder of Quillette, wrote of meeting Trump supporters on election night in New York:
This tension between achievement and resentment explains much about our current moment. The young men I met that night in Manhattan weren’t just voting for policies. They were voting for a different view of history and human nature. In their world, individual greatness matters. Male ambition serves a purpose. Risk-taking and defiance create progress.32
She added: ‘They saw in Trump not just a candidate, but a challenge to a psychosocial orthodoxy that has dominated American institutions for a generation. Their votes marked not just a political preference, but a cultural correction.’33 The historian Niall Ferguson highlighted the presence of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, in Trump’s inner circle. As he said, Trump’s win ‘was a victory for SpaceX, for Starlink, for Polymarket, for Bitcoin, for Anduril, for Palantir’ and others; ‘in short, for the new generation of builders whose autistic-virile qualities Musk exemplifies’.34
These are not people who reject progress. Rather, they want to return to an older, more productive form of it that the hegemonic version has threatened to destroy. Trump’s big slogan is Make America Great Again (shortened to the acronym MAGA), which points to how he is targeting a restoration of sorts. Trump is seeking to reimpose American hegemony through a twenty-first-century version of the frontier spirit, deploying a powerful, apparently ‘authoritarian’ state to support individual freedom and uphold merit. New technology will be allowed to rip through the economy, just as long as it is not controlled by hostile outsiders. His politics is a progressivism of a different kind, with limits and limitlessness in different places to those versions that we have got used to in the last few decades.
The closed, idealistic and hegemonic version of progressivism that Trump is trying to destroy takes its knowledge of society and historical change from the twin disciplines of sociology and history. Indeed, it accords an exalted status to the sociologist and historian, seeing them as important participants in the historical process that help to push progress onwards.* They are objective, not because they collate facts from society and the past, but because they understand the bigger picture: the historical movement from past to present and future and how the latter is an improvement on the former. They are committed to rejecting the past in favour of the future, to embracing social trends and the power that is driving them. Indeed, they are part of that power, part of its driving force.†
E.H. Carr, one of the most influential theorists of the historian’s role, explained how this process works in practice.
Educators at all levels are nowadays more and more consciously concerned to make their contribution to the shaping of society in a particular mould, and to inculcate in the rising generation the attitudes, loyalties, and opinions appropriate to that type of society.35
Carr had a Hegelian-Marxist perspective, seeing modern history as the development of humans’ consciousness of themselves, progressively uniting subjective perspective with objective reality. We can see this perspective in the idea that educators at all levels are getting more and more motivated towards shaping society based on knowledge of that society that is by definition correct: it sees a continual, inexorable improvement in consciousness uniting theory and practice. And the historian has a special place in this schema. As Carr writes, ‘It is only today that it has become possible for the first time even to imagine a whole world consisting of peoples who have in the fullest sense entered into history and become the concern, no longer of the colonial administrator or of the anthropologist, but of the historian.’36
In this conception, the historian presides and oversees, replacing the colonial administrator and anthropologist. They are someone who knows and dictates what should be done. They are superior to their forebears for having an overarching historical knowledge, giving them a full view of society and history. They are effectively an expert in the whole of human existence. In a following passage Carr presents this ‘widening horizon’ of historical practice as a contrast to the ‘history of elites’, but in reality it is just a new version of it, with historians like himself appearing in the elite role, their knowledge existing on a higher level than that of previous elites.
While Carr’s perspective operates at the exalted level of world-history, the jobbing sociologist’s role in our present society is very much that of the cog in the wheel: to keep tabs on the population, using monitoring and surveillance to identify threats to progress in order for them to be stamped out; rather similar to how colonial administrators and anthropologists sought to understand the ‘native’ populations they presided over.
While Nisbet frets about non-Western parts of the world embracing progress and their historical destiny just as the West has been abandoning it, Carr says that progress needs to embrace those parts of the world and those people, to acknowledge that their rise is right and just. The historian and sociologist should therefore side with Russians, Asians and Africans as representatives of historical improvement: a broad-sweep politics based on a broad-sweep idea of historical progress. And we find this perspective now applied widely not just in looking abroad from Western societies, but within those societies, as a way of relating different racial, ethnic and other identity groups to each other: favouring some over others as of the future and not the past.
Understandably, non-Western leaders are keen to seize on the authority this perspective can confer on them. Chinese and Russian leaders in particular are naturally well versed in this sort of theory, having grown up under Communism. Both Vladimir Putin in Russia and current Chinese premier Xi Jinping regularly invoke a sense of historical destiny as they seek to grow their own and their countries’ power. Xi himself is a stern advocate of Marxist progressivism, telling the Moscow State Institute of International Relations in 2013:
History always moves forward according to its own laws despite twists and turns, and no force can hold back its rolling wheels. The tide of the world is surging forward. Those who submit to it will prosper, and those who resist will perish.37
Here we find again how in this closed system of progressivism, the individual’s role is to submit, firstly in order to prosper, but actually also to just survive. By submitting to the theory, you submit to the leader’s own authority and power. By presenting his theory as incontrovertible, Xi’s power likewise appears as necessarily absolute.
The role of identity
The strength and power of this theory is its relation to ordinary people. For those with ethnic origins in places that were formerly colonized or intervened upon by Western powers, it provides a simple and potentially attractive framework in which to understand their lives, one in which they are moving from victim-status to that of power. Progress is a form of power. But identity politics makes it into a superpower: fissile and dangerous.
This treatment of people peppers the history of progressive politics, giving it meaning and purpose way beyond the ranks of ideologues with their theories and claims to authority. Identity groups take on roles as heroes and villains of history who either need to be rewarded with the fruits of progress or punished as enemies of it. In the French Revolution, the sans-culottes took on the former role. The Marxists similarly embraced the proletariat or working class. Race, ethnicity, religion, sex/gender and sexuality have all cropped up at different points, in different places.
In fact identity is intrinsic to the progressive story. Valuing the new over the old, ‘change’ and ‘the future’ naturally leads to valuing younger people as better than older, which is a form of identity politics. And when brought into contact with reality, this natural logic to value younger people more than older triggers other forms of valuation. In Britain and the wider West at the moment, the greater ethnic diversity and more international origins of younger generations naturally suggest that progressives should confer a higher value based on skin colour, ethnicity and national background. For Britain it means valuing people with non-white skin colour and non-English, non-British identities, associating them with a better, progressive future. Meanwhile people with white skin and what might be called English or British identity appear associated with the tainted past and are to be accorded lower status and lower value.
These negative associations are especially powerful when put into the context of a past consisting of British Empire and power around the world. However this is something that earlier versions of the progressive story treated as positive. For progressives of the past, white skin, Britishness and British power carried progress into backward parts of the world where they were new, making change happen in today’s jargon. Nowadays these things appear very much as of the negative past, except for the continuing Whig tendency which expresses itself primarily through free market ideology.
There is a sort of remorseless existential logic to how the identity politics works. The association of Britain, British power and British assertion with imperialism in turn associates any positive expression of Britishness with the past as something negative, regressive and oppressive. The fact that British imperial rule was conducted with white-skinned people at the top of the hierarchy and that Britain was an overwhelmingly white population during this time makes another easy association of this negative past with ‘whiteness’.
This progressive narrative played a major part in the political convulsions around Brexit, clashing heavily with the assertion of continuing British identity (‘Take Back Control’). Relatively new European and cosmopolitan globalist identities gathered around the European Union as a sort of totem of progress, but the EU has also drawn in Scottish and Irish nationalist identities given their opposition to British national identity. In fact, Brexit developed into something of a perfect storm of identity politics, made worse by anti-British, anti-English and anti-Brexit expressions appearing in the idiom of knowledge, as apparently incontestable assertions grounded in history and the authority of professional expertise. As Jonathan Rutherford says: ‘A war of position over defining Brexit was prosecuted and a story was established on the progressive left that Brexit was a consequence of the authoritarian personalities of Leave voters who were unable to cope with change.’38
Some of the assertions coming out of this war of position were quite remarkable in their vehemence and spread like wildfire. The imperial association was a constant theme. Another was the concentration of negativity onto specifically English people and English identity, so dividing them from other parts of Britain. The Cambridge University Professor of German and British Academy Fellow Nicholas Boyle for example said that,
Brexit is the result of an English delusion, a crisis of identity resulting from a failure to come to terms with the loss of empire and the end of its own exceptionalism.39
Boyle called the vote ‘an outgrowth of English narcissism’, adding, ‘Like resentful ruffians uprooting the new trees in the park and trashing the new play area, 17 million English, the lager louts of Europe, voted for Brexit in an act of geopolitical vandalism.’40 Elsewhere he has referred to Brexit as, ‘a collective English mental breakdown … English people living on dreams of empire never learned to see others as equals’.41
In Professor Boyle’s account, English people and Englishness are malign forces, obstructing historical progress through their very existence. In its simplicity, internal unity and racial overtones, his interpretation follows a pattern of ideology, finding in human identity its distinction between good and evil.
The Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole has written extensively along similar lines, calling Brexit ‘imperial England’s last stand’ in the tradition of British ‘heroic failure’, from the Charge of the Light Brigade and Isandlwana to the Somme and Dunkirk. ‘The English are no longer dominant and powerful’, he has said. ‘They are a mid-sized, fairly average western European nation.’42 Ideas of ‘post-imperial delusion’ and ‘the pathology of Brexit’ continue to get thrown around with abandon.43
These assertions present aspects of the current moment (the Brexit vote, England and the English people, the existence of the United Kingdom) as leftovers of a negative past (imperial times, failures in battles and world wars) that are threatening what is new and better (new trees in the park, the new play area). In O’Toole’s framing, they appear as a last stand before history inevitably rubs them out.
This theme of ending and weakness also appeared in association with skin colour. In a campaign email before the Brexit vote, Ricken Patel, the founder of online activist network Avaaz, referred to Leave voters as ‘xenophobes’, ‘small minded’ and ‘backward’, adding that, if choosing Leave, Britain ‘can turn away from Great Britain to become little England: small, weak, and white’.44* Here Englishness appears associated with white skin colour, despite England being much more ethnically diverse than the other UK nations. However, like in O’Toole’s version it also appears alongside notions of weakness, as diminutive and lacking power. The bigotry, stupidity and also crucially backwardness of this diseased identity of Englishness mean that a negative past continues to hold on in the present.
These narratives typically invoke ideas of causation. ‘Brexit is exacerbating underlying problems in our society’, the Labour MP and leadership challenger Owen Smith said; ‘it is a racist, xenophobic, right-wing reactionary project.’45 After returning home from a stint at The Guardian in London, the Dutch progressive Joris Luyendijk wrote, in an article entitled ‘How I learnt to loathe England’, that ‘the Brexit vote should … be seen as the logical and overdue outcome of a set of English pathologies’.46
There is a relatively simple and reasonably consistent narrative going on here, whereby an unfavoured identity and the people who hold it are serving as a source of negativity. They are effectively holding back historical destiny and those who stand on the right side of history, preventing everyone from moving into the sunny uplands of progress. It is simple cause and effect, spoken in the argot of calm, mature spectators rather than political participants who are invested in the matter. Political opponents, rather than merely having a different perspective, are in fact deficient in their knowledge and understanding, are morally and rationally defective, even mentally ill. The historian Robert Saunders, himself a committed Remain voter, had some choice words about this perspective, saying that, ‘when it comes to Brexit, too many of us treat it as a mental disorder that is beyond the category of rational analysis. We march around like quack doctors in a psychiatric ward, diagnosing “imperial nostalgia”, “xenophobia”, “postcolonial melancholia” & other pathologies.’47
This may be so. However the doctor’s role is a powerful and appealing one, not least when broadened out to cover the whole of social reality and history. The writer Yascha Mounk, formerly executive director of Tony Blair’s Institute for Global Change, invoked it when talking of populism as a virus: ‘By fighting off the current infection’, he said, ‘we might just build up the necessary antibodies to remain immune against new bouts of the populist disease for decades to come.’48 This kind of doctor-expert diagnoses social sickness, identifies its origin and prescribes solutions to get rid of it. The doctor’s role confers natural authority, having generally high trust, grounded largely in traditions of discipline, rigour and evidence. It points towards how progressivism tends to act as a parasite on other things like language, institutions, identities and social roles. Because it knows best, it can deploy these things as it pleases for its own ends, for the greater good.
As a result, during the Brexit spats and Trump’s campaigns, various identity groups found themselves being politicized as props to support the right side and oppose the bad people. A couple of years after the Brexit vote, the feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez told us how, ‘Women no longer want to leave the European Union. The failure to listen to their voices is a national scandal and it stops now.’49 The Labour MP Rosie Duffield, who has since given up the party whip over gender issues, said: ‘make no mistake: Brexit is a feminist issue. It has been negotiated by and for white men, yet it will be economically worse off women, ethnic minorities, and LGBT+ communities who will be hit the hardest.’50 Alastair Campbell’s daughter Grace added: ‘If Brexit had a face, it would be that of a man. It would look a lot like Voldemort.’51
At one point Sky News even led its bulletins with football anti-racist organization Kick It Out claiming that Brexit was causing Islamophobic attacks in football, albeit it provided no evidence for this link and did not even attempt to explain it.52
