This all makes sense I think but its hard for me I guess to actually see what the substantial content of the progressive "myth" would be if you insist on completely separating it from liberalism/its late-capitalism context. It just feels a little neutered by your rendering: that progressivism is simply all that it says it is, that its detachable from its historical context, that it exists as simply "bad" culture.. It just sounds like the stuff of the Art critic or the cultural opinion piece. How can we separate the parent's shock or revelation about their child's education from their broader economic insecurities or feelings of powerlessness otherwise? Especially in the moment of covid. Or how can we separate deport-them-all-nationalism from such kinds of insecurity? It doesn't seem, to say the least, true to history as we know it to isolate out a superstructural cultural moment like this from the state and economy where it emerged, and try to reason about it, say that it is anything at all but a certain refraction or consequence of all that is going on underneath. I guess in this I do reject that culture is downstream.

Like if we can both agree on the ultimate arbitrariness of the myth, of the myth as a function, it seems dissonant to take it so seriously on its face, to see something distinctively dangerous or not about it. Ultimately these kinds of concerns about wokeism or whatever is precisely the same absurd impulse from the other end that celebrates the fact of more queer prison guards or whatever.

Just to say, I would wager however successful Trump is with his stuff, the people who are worried about their kid's education are probably going to stay worried, even if they are worried about something else. As good capitalists like to say, there is no free lunch, and the country's debt crisis and waning global hegemony will continue to push austerity, insecurity, and sacrifice onto the people that deserve it the least. Its hard for me to see anything else add up here, even if, yes, he is successful in "dismantling" (read, consolidating) the empire. Apple pie pull-up-your-bootstraps optimism is dead, its not coming back. No one but the elderly even want it. We all broadlt, have no real opportunity or access to know what we really want. Much less what we need.

While I am personally grabbing my popcorn for more catastrophic failure that has nothing to do with people's feelings, its an amusing thought to me that maybe Trump will ultimately teach a lesson to his followers that leftists (not progressives) have already learned over and over again: disappointment. If anything, there is a maybe going to be an elegant kind of karma to it all...

Otherwise, fascinating to hear this viewpoint, thank you.

I think of Progressivism as being independent of Liberalism because I see progressivism as being about "things getting better" (Whig history) while liberalism is about "maximizing human liberation".

I personally don't think there is enough agreement about an ordering of values to take "getting better" at face value. Rather, I see Progressivism as presupposing quite a lot of unspoken values that it assumes all reasonable people share. When people turn out not to share that order of values, Progressives don't have any mechanism of reconciling that except to dismiss such people as simply invalid and atavistic. They believe right-thinking people are progressives, by definition. Evidence contrary to human perfectibility are merely obstacles to be overcome. Just progress harder!

I do not agree that myths are arbitrary. They must be adaptive or the people that hold them will not survive. I believe the recent rejection of progressive politics "at the polls" was akin to an immune response by the American people rejecting a non-adaptive myth (egalitarian identity politics) that was intuited to be suicidal.

I don't completely separate Progressivism from Liberalism. I see substantial overlap to the point they could be described as converging on a point from two separate directions. Progressivism requires a standard to measure progress. Progressivism is essentially egalitarian or horizontally oriented. It wants to level everything and deny that anything is inherently better than anything else except egalitarianism itself. The levels of bad faith entailed in the Progressive mindset are not worth mentioning in this context. The principal tool to achieve this leveling is something akin to deconstruction (Derrida) or generally suspicion of any hierarchy of values. All identities are of equal value. (Just think of horizontal vs vertical systems of value. They are almost metaphysically opposed.) This deconstructive instinct can't exist as a purely negative force. There must also be some measure of improvement (because things get better). But these measures can't be based on quality (that would be hierarchical). They must be based on quantity. The OP in this thread exemplified this with the framing of the question in terms of various hedonic measures in an accounting ledger. Because a dollar is a unit of measure divorced from and changeable to any good, costs are a natural metric for a Progressive. It is a utilitarian calculus. To the Progressive, only a lunatic would ask whether a benefit is good. It is good by definition. More services for more people. The greatest good to the greatest number. (Just don't dwell for long upon who decides what those goods are and how they are measured.)

The way this converges with Liberalism is interesting. Classical Liberalism (what people now call Conservatism) was a series of liberalizing reforms that released the individual from obligations and duties that were historically centered in kinship bonds and fealty oaths, and then in a very stratified quasi-caste-based social order. If you were the son of a peasant or artisan, you were likely to die as such. Formal privileges calcified over time and offered few opportunities for ambitious youth to advance. The rise of a dynamic commercial class, yada yada yada, you know the story I'm sure. The logic of liberalism is the breaking of bonds on the individual. At first these were legal or broadly social, but over time the logic of liberation politics seeks out new bonds to break. The teleology of liberalism is complete liberation of the individual from anything outside the self's free choices ("the only thing forbidden is to forbid"). Again, the many bad faiths of such a position need not be dug into here. Long story short, liberalism to the left is the continuation of liberation politics to their logical conclusion. Conservatism (classical liberalism) is just left liberalism with the breaks on. (Libertarianism is Anarchy with the breaks on.)

Both Progressivism and Liberalism converge on the "atomized individual". Liberalism does so because it rejects any constraint that could create obligations on individual within a group that is involuntary. All actions/decisions redound to a choice, and the choice is an expression of the will of the individual. Hence the individual can never be truly "bound" but is like a noble gas, completely free. Progressivism also produces atomized individuals, but by a different method. Within Progressivism, all identities are equal. If everything is equal and nothing is better than anything else, then by what means can we choose one or another except by personal taste or affinity (my "identity" from the Latin "idem" meaning "the same" or what I consider "the same as me")? Progressives resort to a utilitarian ethics (most good for the most people) but constrained by the essential need to not elevate anyone above anyone else. If one person or group gets some goods and another doesn't then that first group is "made better" by the benefit (originally beneficium: a privilege granted). But that cannot be allowed. It doesn't make sense, but it feels good to some people.

I sense you consider yourself a "leftist" (perhaps in the worker's cooperatives sense, like Mondragon). While I think it is natural to want these social/political efforts to work, I personally reject their viability completely. I believe leftism has no non-totalitarian or anarchic outcome. Forced collectivization is inhumane. Anarchy never works in practice. There will always be leadership in larger organizations and the interests of leadership will diverge from the non-leaders. Some have called this the Iron Law of Oligarchy. Anarchy is simply a transitional stage between non-anarchic social orders. True anarchy would be simply horrific to most people involved. It wouldn't last very long before serious people simply took power and put things back in order.

It may be there is no return to optimism. I try to be dispassionate about The Great Wheel. Empires rise and fall. But I'm still a citizen and love this country. I want to see it prosper. If the US loses its hegemonic ability to project power globally, that may mean life as we know it changes. It may mean a much less stable world. If China+Russia becomes a true global competitor to the US in the next 20-50 years, Americans may lose some of the privileges we've enjoyed to date. We can probably survive the debt crisis if we maintain the dollar as the global reserve currency. I believe people on HN are not doing their intelligence justice to have such childish ideas about Trump. People want to frame him as some kind of PT Barnum huckster. Go back and look at the political cartoons of Lincoln or Reagan and try to read them as anything other than the resentment and buffoonery of enemies. It's a mistake to think that the personal merits or faults of the man are the determinants of his value. He is clearly a man of destiny. What that destiny is, we will have to wait to see, but when a man of destiny appears on the world stage, a "world-historical figure", I'm absolutely here for it.