Progressivism is politics as religion. Left-leaning progressivism strives to impose values on society every bit as aggressively as the Christian right pushing a moral agenda of 'family values.' Whether the supreme authority over individual liberty is a secular state or a religious one, the operative word is 'supreme.' Progressivism is ultimately about total control.

Progressivism is immune to restraint; it respects no constitutional limits on government. The progressive may prefer the near-sacramental word 'holistic' to describe the effort to create a better world, but, as National Review's Jonah Goldberg reminds us, Mussolini coined the word 'totalitarian' for the progressive vision � a society where everyone belongs, where everyone is taken care of, where everything is inside the state and nothing is outside the state, where there are no hard trade-offs.

Craig Westover in today's PioneerPress. I cannot stress enough the connection between Goldberg's (and Westover's) view and those expressed by Thomas Sowell, described by Kenneth Silber:

The "vision" of the anointed is a world view in which social problems exist because of the negligence or malevolence of the benighted and thus can be solved by imposing the views of the enlightened few on the rest of society via government action. To believe otherwise to view social conditions as largely outside of anyone's control and subject to innumerable trade-offs and constraints is repugnant to left-leaning political and intellectual elites, Sowell argues, because it robs them of the opportunity to display their superior concern and insight.

The "anointed" is the modern progressive.

Labels: economics