The Rise of Barbaric Progressivism
Antisemitism, racial hierarchy, violence, and an alliance with radical Islam have seized the commanding heights of the "progressive" movement.
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This is a guest essay written by Benjamin Kerstein of “No Delusions, No Despair.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Shortly before he died in the late 1930s, Sigmund Freud, by then a refugee from Nazism, wrote:
“We live in very remarkable times. We find with astonishment that progress has concluded an alliance with barbarism.”
He was referring to the rise of fascism and communism, and their combination of the most modern forms of science, technology, economic theory — and even aesthetics with the most horrific and savage forms of violence and sadism.
Freud was a man of the Enlightenment — perhaps the last man of the Enlightenment — and equated modernity with progress and civilization. Thus, to witness the degradation of modernity as it commingled with the kind of animalistic brutality that he saw as belonging to earlier and less enlightened stages of human history was shocking to him, as it was to many.
His obsession with this problem dated back to the carnage of World War One, in which the most “civilized” part of the world had turned itself into a technological charnel house that consumed millions of lives seemingly without reason. In the face of this, Freud eventually reached very dark conclusions about human nature and the nature of human civilization.
He concluded that, because civilizational progress required greater and greater repression of the most basic human drives, people are more and more repressed and unhappy the more they progress and the more civilized they become. Eventually, this repression cannot hold, and the savage energies built up beneath centuries of sublimation explode in periodic eruptions of horrendous violence and destruction.
Progress, in other words, leads inexorably toward barbarism.
Today, the most fervent believers in the power of progress in the United States are the members and supporters of the eponymous progressive movement. It is a bit difficult to fully define this movement, as it is easily confused with other movements of the Left like socialism, communism, and even anarchism. It is possible, however, to say that its view of progress is the polar opposite of Freud’s. By and large, it holds that:
Humanity can be made better and even perfected.
The history of humanity is the history of inexorable progress toward that perfection.
It is the duty of the individual and society to be on “the right side” of that history — that is, on the side of progress.
Humanity’s ultimate state of perfection will take the form of a blessed society in which suffering, poverty, and oppression have been overcome.
Anything that opposes or retards progress is a form of metaphysical evil.
All of these sound like fairly “civilized” goals. Moreover, the movement itself has always been one of the elite upper-middle class and its intelligentsia, meaning that, by all rights, progressives ought to be the most “civilized” people in the world. Yet large factions of today’s “progressive” movement are showing clear signs that Freud was quite correct in his diagnosis of progress and its discontents.
While today’s progressivism maintains its façade of upper-middle class rectitude, it barely conceals a quasi-totalitarian mentality that puts down any dissent or opposition without much compunction. At the same time, many “progressives” have engaged in considerable violence and allied themselves with forces that are not only violent themselves, but categorically reject the values and mores that progressives themselves claim to hold sacred.
Many progressives have gone so far as to adopt ideologies they claim to oppose passionately, such as racial hierarchy and antisemitism. The cost to the moral integrity of the movement has been immense, and there are no signs that the descent is slowing, let alone reversing itself.
The progressives’ turn to violence first appeared in the one institution over which progressivism exercises near-absolute rule: academia. Recent years have seen the emergence of a kind of progressive dictatorship of the professoriate, a totalitarian regime that denies its subjects the right not only to believe but even to hear ideas that might cast doubt on progressivism’s rectitude.
For some time, this was accomplished by administrative corruption and quiet censorship. Today, however, it is largely accomplished by mob violence. The professoriate’s shock troops shout down and assault speakers; disrupt events; attack opposing activists; engage in intimidation, harassment, and psychological abuse; and aggressively “deplatform” anyone with whom they disagree.
Thus, while freedom of thought and speech are not outright forbidden in the academy, they have become impossible to exercise, much as Islamic religious laws against depictions of Muhammad have been imposed on Western societies through the threat of terrorism.
This culture of progressive violence emerged in full during the events surrounding the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minnesota police. While the Black Lives Matter protests that followed were often peaceful, a very large number were not, and Left-wing groups like Antifa played a large role in the looting, burning, vandalism, property damage, and general anarchy that devastated several urban centers and led to a massive spike in crime as police withdrew for fear of further public execration.
Along with this, and not only in the United States, a campaign of iconoclasm took place that saw statues pulled down and monuments destroyed and defaced, including a statue of Winston Churchill and the Cenotaph in London. Even statues of decidedly non-racist figures like Theodore Roosevelt and Ulysses S. Grant were allowed to be pulled down for fear of further mayhem. Many progressives who did not themselves participate in these brutal campaigns of intimidation and violence either excused or supported them.
Particularly disturbing is that a large number of progressives — perhaps a majority — have adopted two of the most egregious ideologies they purport to oppose: antisemitism and racism. It has often been said that all totalitarian ideologies eventually end in the Elders of Zion, and the examples of Hitler and Stalin appear to bear this out.
Indeed, as it has become more totalitarian, progressivism has also become more antisemitic. It tends to couch this antisemitism in the language of “anti-Zionism” and criticism of Israel, but its rhetoric is so vitriolic and hateful, its violence against Jews and Zionists so intense, and its support for the most horrendous antisemitic atrocities so open and palpable, that no other conclusions can be drawn.
Progressive antisemitism is both a very old and a very new form of antisemitism. Its basis is as ancient as the Elders of Zion: the belief that the Jews are a corrupt, evil, and omnipotent plutocracy. But progressivism has recast this in the language of its own ideology, claiming that, in the form of Israel, the Jews victimize not only Palestinians but also people of color, the LGBTQ+ community, and other fetishized groups.
Jews are seen as the ultimate manifestation and beneficiaries of “White privilege” — an amorphous and situational term at best — and this “privilege” must be smashed for justice to prevail. In effect, the Jews are cast as the enemies of progress itself. Thus, they are a metaphysical evil that must be scythed by the arc of history.
This antisemitism is intimately connected to the issue of race. It is, in fact, difficult to overstate the extent to which progressivism is now defined by racial politics and the idea of racial hierarchy. In effect, progressivism sees the world as a pyramid with Jews and “White people” at the top, and everyone else in a descending progression downward, with people of color and Palestinians at the bottom.
Unlike in the past, however, today’s progressivism no longer wants to do away with this hierarchy, it simply wants to reverse it. It adopts the admonition of the Gospel of Matthew that “the last shall be first, and the first last.”
While perhaps admirable at first glance, the problem with this is obvious: Even if the last becomes first and vice versa, there is still a first and a last. That is, the ostensibly unjust hierarchy remains, it has simply been turned on its head. There is still oppressor and oppressed, superior and inferior, destroyer and destroyed. Nothing has been solved, nothing has been improved, and no one has been liberated. Nothing, in other words, has progressed.
Even more disturbing, perhaps, is a prevailing belief among progressives that was perhaps most succinctly put in a reported statement by a New York Times staffer: “I just feel like racism is in everything.”1 It is safe to say that this is the hegemonic view among progressives today, and the implications are extremely disturbing. While such comparisons are usually facile and by definition inaccurate, it is not an exaggeration to say that this is Nazism.
That is, the basis and foundation of Nazism was that racism is in everything. It viewed race as the sole active metaphysical force in existence, permeating every aspect of human and indeed animal life, and racism as the only means of understanding and harnessing it.
That many of today’s progressives now more or less agree both explains a great deal and bodes very ill for the future of the movement and Western societies it seeks to radically change.
All of these pathologies seem to have coalesced around what critics call the “Red-Green Alliance” — a term that refers to a political axis composed of progressives and Islamic radicals. This seemingly bizarre phenomenon, which the philosopher John Gray calls “Islamo-Leninism,” has been developing for a long time, but it emerged in full during the ugly mob events that followed the October 7th Hamas-led massacres and kidnappings in Israel.
In a well-coordinated and well-funded attempt to prevent Israeli retaliation, celebrate the massacre, and express solidarity with the genocidal organization, thousands took to the streets of major Western cities shouting antisemitic slogans and calling for Israel’s destruction. These mobs were composed almost entirely of progressive activists and radical Muslims. The same was true of those who harassed, intimidated, and physically attacked Jewish students in the streets and on college campuses.
Anyone wearing recognizably Jewish clothing and symbols, or was simply known to be Jewish, became a target. In one case, a Muslim academic beat a Jewish man to death with a megaphone. The wave of racism and violence so shocked the American Jewish community that a protest march held in Washington, D.C. drew 300,000 people.
The sight of radical feminists marching side by side with those to whom patriarchy is a sacrament, LGBTQ+ people standing shoulder to shoulder with those who would gladly murder them in another context, socialists expressing solidarity with advocates of genocidal theocracy, and alleged human rights activists embracing supporters of religious apartheid and terrorism was incomprehensible to many, but it was not unprecedented.
In the 1960s, for example, the radical Left strongly supported Algeria’s terrorist Front De Liberation Nationale, which was influenced by political Islam to a far greater degree than many then and now have been prepared to acknowledge. In the 1979 Iranian revolution, leftists of all stripes helped Islamic radicals overthrow the Shah, only to have the theocrats slaughter them as soon as they had the power to do so. After 9/11, leftist sympathy for Osama bin Laden was not universal, but it was considerable and sparked a notable backlash.
Today, progressives stand with, work with, and actively defend Islamic radicals in almost all aspects of life, especially political activism and most of all in anti-Israel incitement and violence.
The progressive movement’s total corruption of its own creed in the name of this alliance has not been a dignified spectacle, but it is not as incomprehensible as it seems. One of its causes is progressivism’s increasing antisemitism, which naturally leads it to align with fellow antisemites.
Statistics have consistently shown that the Muslim nations are the most antisemitic in the world. That progressive antisemites find themselves in sympathy with radical Islam is natural under such circumstances.
Progressives share more with radical Islam than hatred of Jews, however. For example, both movements have an essentially messianic worldview. Islam has its final day of judgment and the progressives their blessed society. The two groups are also obsessed with the same alleged evils, such as imperialism, American foreign policy, and Western civilization in general.
The alliance further plays to progressives’ obsession with race, as they have convinced themselves that all Muslims are “people of color” (they are not) and therefore oppressed by “White people” (they are not).
Despite the Muslim world’s considerable trade in Black African slaves, which continues to this day in various forms, progressives have decided that radical Islam is simply pursuing the shared task of overturning the global racial hierarchy and defeating “White supremacism.” That the Islamic radicals seek to replace it with Muslim supremacism does not perturb the progressives, as they likely consider it just revenge for centuries of depredation.
Most important of all, however, is that most of today’s progressives and all radical Muslims are against freedom. In the case of radical Islam, this is obvious, since they make no pretense of valuing freedom, and the movements and regimes they have built are, without exception, brutally oppressive, violent, terroristic, and totalitarian. In the case of progressives, the issue is less clear-cut, since they publicly proclaim that they value freedom, particularly for oppressed groups.
But if we examine progressive actions rather than rhetoric, a different picture emerges.
It is notable, for example, that the institutions ruled by Western progressives, particularly academia, are by and large the least free institutions in Western societies. They place a great deal of value on ideological conformity and almost none on fundamental liberties like free speech and assembly.
Basic legal rights do not exist in the academic disciplinary system. Those who wish to avoid being fired or expelled for alleged transgressions must often submit to humiliating Maoist-style reeducation and struggle sessions during which they are forced to confess and repent their sins in a wretched public spectacle.
As a result, progressive rule suffocates independent thought and silences criticism, thus destroying two of freedom’s greatest benefits. Similar circumstances prevail in those areas of corporate culture, the arts, the media, and even sports that are dominated or ruled by progressives.
Taken together, the aforementioned seems to indicate the emergence of a kind of barbaric progressivism. A progressivism that, while it advocates progress in certain areas, is also quite comfortable with supporting some of the most barbaric ideas imaginable, such as antisemitism, totalitarianism, religious fanaticism, theocracy, patriarchy, racism, anti-democratic politics, terrorism, rule by a designated minority, suppression of heretical ideas, and opposition to human freedom itself.
The question, then, is what Westerners who have no desire to live under this kind of progressivism should do. Certainly, there are political and legal measures that could be taken, but the most important form of resistance must come from within the movement itself.
Many good people in the progressive movement sincerely believe in its principles and do not want to see it collapse into barbarism. They need not exit the movement. Instead, they should stay and fight for a better progressivism, one that is at least vaguely worthy of the name.
There are signs that this difficult and unhappy resistance is already underway. Whether or not it can succeed confronts the rest of us with one of the more ominous questions of our present moment.
“The New York Times Has Abandoned Liberalism for Activism.” New York Magazine.
 | A guest post by
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The woke left is inherently anti Semitic
The rot in academia, especially at so-called elite universities, is a growing cancer in the US. A generation of radical professors are indoctrinating the next generation, which seems to be even more extreme and malevolent. The progressive movement, as the modern incarnation of Leninist and Maoist Marxism, is inherently illiberal.