One would think that recent trends -- an outsizedly detached, uninformed electorate willing in its ignorance to entertain the very loopiest of right-wing humbugs, such as POTUS' birthplace or religion -- would at last cause progressives to rethink the attainability of their eponymous movement.
"Progressivism" -- our late-20th-century and somewhat craven retreat from conservative-stained "liberalism" -- originated in the earliest portion of that century from the idea that we could make, and hold on to, sociopolitical progress, chiefly through the exercise of human knowledge and reason, as exemplified in the new and exciting fields of psychology, sociology, economics, political science and professional history. America's fin de siècle would be the re-dawning of the Age of Enlightenment in the form of the Age of the Experts, to whom "the people," at once better informed through compulsory education and mass communications, and more affluent through the material upsides of industrialization, would listen.
Why, even democracy itself could be improved, or so it was thought by progressives, through fine-tunings of its mechanisms: popular referenda, the recall, secret ballots, that sort of thing.
"Progress" was open-ended -- and assured.
Then came the stupendous carnage of the Great War, before we had reason to start numbering global wars. Its progeny: the horrific, totalitarian oppressions and even vaster carnage of European fascism and Soviet communism. To be somewhat chronologically imprecise but close enough, these developments caused American progressivism to morph more modestly into liberalism -- the idea that liberty was chief among the left's goals, with true liberty at risk but nevertheless securable through international vigilance of foes and domestic regulation of rapacious corporate power.
The notion of "progress" as an assured, unbroken path for humanity -- and for sure, the utopian idea of man's perfectibility -- sustained fatal blows throughout the past century, all of which were academically canonized in the rather depressing emergence of the "post-modernist" school of thought.
Yet, here we are, still at the relative dawning of another century, fresh from the global barbarities of the last, still stumbling through ancient prejudices and tenacious ignorance and sectarian violence and totalitarian footholds, as well as locally suffering from pseudoconservatism's creepingly successful demand that America return to the 19th century's Gilded Age -- and what do the opponents of all this socioeconomic-political retrogression call themselves?
Let's face it: We're in a holding action, realistically attempting little more than the preservation of what progress we did make in the 20th century -- e.g. Social Security, Medicare, civil rights, the explosion of the middle class -- and waiting for demographic changes, if nothing else, to open the possibility of another Age of Progressivism.
We're just not there yet, and liberals might as well be honest about it.