I'm a germ-o-phobe. I also love liberty. Enjoy the confluence.
Progress and the status quo are primarily antithetical of one another. Primarily because the goal at which one wishes to inch along society might well be something worth preserving or, put another way, not progressing away from.
Example: C.S. Lewis reminds us that washing the bacteria from our hands is a way of maintaining a very important status quo, the status quo of clean hands that predate dirty hands. Every time we wash our hands we are retarding the progress of bacterial growth, hoping to regress toward the clean hands we had at one point in time before we had to interact with all those other germ-toting agents of disease we call other people in the petri dish we call society.
But regressing bacteria on one's hands and, consequently, one's community is a very progressive thing to do to. Only a regenerate, uncouth, backwards-looking reprobate would knowingly build up and spread around bacteria in society. Taken to an extreme, such a person could be considered a purveyor of biological warfare.
That would definitely be regressive.
(Side note: For the love of Pete please wash your hands after using the restroom, blowing your nose, or touching anything you would not put directly into your own mouth. If you think it is none of my business to request so much, think how many other people will have to touch the same door knobs and dollar bills that you grace with your disgusting fingers. Come on, it's not 1802 anymore. Don't let Louis Pasteur's life's work be in vain...)
As Thomas Sowell points out in Intellectuals and Society
, everyone believes they are progressive. We all have an ideal for society we think best. For self-described "progressives" that ideal is a society whose organization is primarily controlled--that is, regulated--by the decisions and planning of an elite few. The crescendo of such command-and-control of society in the United States occurred during the New Deal of the 1930s. The extent to which elites in government controlled everything from the price of pressing suits to how many hogs would be slaughtered while millions wallowed in hunger is what was new about the New Deal. These drastic power grabs were certainly a break from the status quo of a primarily free market and concomitantly American free society. And we have never washed our hands of the overreaching legacies of the New Deal.
Taking the long (and sad) view of freedom in world history, however, we need to ask: Just how progressive was the New Deal? In this light, is such government control of society ever really a step forward?
"Progressive" for liberty-minded conservatives, libertarians, and constitutionalists is a progressing away from the New Deal center of politics whereby state-control of the direction of the economy and society is the default setting for government policy. Free and responsible people cooperating peacefully is the best way to organize society. It's work every time it has been tried. As Milton Friendman remarked, distrust of the "private sector" or "the market" is nothing less than a distrust of freedom itself, and a distrust of people to be trusted with freedom. That's terribly patronizing and elitist, in addition to being regressive.
Considering how America has always been the world's freest society (the New Deal notwithstanding) diminishing liberty was a terribly regressive policy, then and now. And since the redistributive, bureaucratic model has had its tentacles in D.C. for over seventy years, at this point in time it would be very progressive to move beyond its premises and (re)embrace freedom.
To return to Lewis' analogy, if we are going to wash our cultural and political hands we have a great deal of government bacteria to wash off. Ever since the New Deal, such infringement of liberty has been caking up like so many layers of germs eating away at liberty. Clean hands would be nice, but at this point I'd be happy with cleaner hands.
Now go was your hands, America, both literally and figuratively.
