The sadness of progressives (with a small p)
The change we need, we needed yesterday. The pace at which we’re able to achieve it is glacial and weighed down with compromise and sacrifice.
In my last post I disagreed with a pundit who attempted to explain the findings of a recent study that found young and progressive Americans are unhappy or at least don’t feel like they’re thriving. I suggested that’s because the world is a mess right now and people feel overwhelmed and maybe even hopeless.
Today I’d like to suggest that some of that unhappiness is self-inflicted. Progressives (both with a small p and, in Vermont, with a capital P) are strong on empathy, but often we hold people to a moral standard that’s almost impossible to meet. In a world of rampant and increasing polarization, finding more ways to judge others is counterproductive.
When I was in my twenties, everything was so black and white. It was easy to take a strong moral stand on something because at that age I didn’t really appreciate or understand nuance—in my youthful arrogance I just judged it as a lack of moral clarity. Older me now sees that same arrogance in progressives of all ages.
Moral clarity, when it’s based in arrogance like that, can be really insufferable. But moral clarity is also what drives many people to protest, showing the importance of keeping our morals at the center of our actions. Young people may see things as black and white, but they also take action. What’s happening in the world clashes with their morality and values and causes them to act—an example more of us should follow, and not just on No Kings Day.
Progressives in general seem to take a strong moral stance on most pressing issues—climate change, Gaza, homelessness, you name it. They fall to the left of more moderate liberals who, like them, have a strong sense of right and wrong but who take a more nuanced approach, seeing issues as more gray than black and white.
Many progressives’ patience for nuance and measured approaches is thin. Some hold onto their moral beliefs so tightly that they begin to use them as a standard against which they judge others. Moral certainty becomes a metric for moral purity. When progressive leaning people start judging others because they are not moral enough, conflict, including among progressives, is inevitable.
It’s tempting to characterize someone as not a good person if they don’t support what feels like an obvious moral choice. I mean, why in the world should I have to get along with someone who harms my trans friends with their blatant transphobia? How can I possibly be expected to take seriously someone who actively works to prevent my and my daughters’ right to bodily autonomy? What is wrong with someone who sees a mass shooting but doesn’t think we need better gun safety laws?
It’s easy to see how we can let our personal moral positions dictate our relationships. If someone doesn’t conform to our own moral code, it’s much easier to write them off. But that’s just walking away from doing the hard work of listening, learning, and compromising. Holding the moral high ground doesn’t make you effective—it makes you difficult to work with. Plus, judging every person you meet by your own values and beliefs—a purity test pretty much everyone is guaranteed to fail—sets yourself up for constant disappointment. No wonder progressives are so unhappy.
This is especially true in politics. I’ve often joked that for me, the difference between Progressives and Democrats is that while we agree on issues, we disagree on timing. Progressives want everything yesterday while Democrats would rather form a study committee and write a report. Funny/not funny.
The urge to hold everyone to a certain moral standard gets in the way of getting things done. There is nothing more frustrating than to be working something out and have one party walk away because things aren’t going exactly their way. There are countless examples of good policies and programs that—while not great or perfect—could have made a difference if only everyone at the table could have compromised a little, or maybe even a lot. Whether it’s Congress or the Vermont Legislature or the Burlington City Council, letting the perfect be the enemy of the good can make you feel morally superior, but in the end it just hurts everyone you were trying to help. You end up with nothing, instead of with something.
The alternative, incremental change, is an outcome many progressives sneer at. But given the choice between practicality and idealism, I’d rather make at least some progress than scrap a plan that’s less than ideal. I think it’s better to have created agreement and an outcome that can be improved over time than to walk away and not address the problem at all.
Our government is basically composed of enormous, dysfunctional, complex systems that are the result of decades of incremental changes. I understand the urge to burn it all down and start over. But often, the folks who want to burn it all down have few or no plans to replace it. They just know that the way it is now isn’t working.
This conundrum is especially hard to swallow when we’re talking about racism, sexism, homophobia, poverty, and the systems that perpetuate them, like our criminal justice system and our tattered social safety net. But drastic acts aimed at breaking an unjust system rarely work, can appear performative, and can often cause real damage. What does work is political will, trust, strong leadership, persistence, honesty, and patience—all of which are in rapidly decreasing supply these days.
Taking an ax to a complex system is generally far more harmful than pulling a few levers to make fewer, but (hopefully) more meaningful changes over time. To me, this is both depressing and hopeful. The change we need, we needed yesterday. The pace at which we’re able to achieve it is glacial and weighed down with compromise and sacrifice. On the one hand, it’s a way forward and it can be done. On the other hand, it enables harm to continue. The moral grief this conundrum causes is substantial.
This means that progressives—and I count myself among them—must swallow our grief somehow and avoid holding others to impossible moral standards if we want to have any hope of making the change we so desperately want. We must demonstrate political commitment to the long game even when it involves only incremental changes at first. We may not feel like we’re thriving, but for the most part I believe we’re on the right side of history. And that’s worth working towards, no matter how long it takes.