To call yourself progressive is to claim the future as your permanent address and to assign everyone who disagrees with you a seat somewhere in the moral lowlands. It is an annexation of time itself, performed before the argument begins. But a claim that large invites an obvious test.
Take the movement’s central commitments one at a time and ask of each whether it carries us further from the arrangements that humanity spent centuries and oceans of blood escaping, or back toward them. Run that test honestly, and the results are close to uniform. Nearly everything the contemporary left says is regressive in its essence. Not merely mistaken, not merely excessive. Regressive.
