Watching The Progressive Project
Progressive theory takes the old model of economical socialism and moulds it into identity politics
How would you feel if everything that you know as real in the world had been erased, replaced or inverted? This is an idea that is underway, the preparations having been made at the end of the last century and into this start of our current one.
There has been an academic tradition for some time on the Left of politics for the promotion of cultural revolution, and that then ushering in its political iteration. A version has been tried on a grand scale once before, in the shape of communism in the USSR between 1917 and 1989. This was socialism - in its totalitarian (Stalinist) form communism - and was originally based on the end of personal ownership of property.
More than one hundred years on from the Russian Revolution, the progressive movement is deeply into a quiet takeover of the institutions. Progressive theory takes the old model of economical socialism and moulds it into identity politics, supported by the writings of identity theorists of the last fifty years. As opposed to a colour-blind and gender-blind society as promoted by the 20th century version of multiculturalism, the progressive movement brings these identity definitions to the foreground.
Where once liberal democracy promoted the concept of global migration and integration, the progressives highlight accountability and reparations. Where once feminism was about the long march towards equality of opportunity for both sexes, progressive fourth-wave feminism promotes sex-work and the effective minimisation of men's rights. Where once it may have been said 'things were different back then' or 'the past is a different country', the progressive movement supports the revision of historical works of art and literature, in order they be rewritten in a contemporaneously acceptable form.
Thus the passage of time itself offers no protection, as there is no statute of limitations in British law, and the moral barometer of now becomes more important than the cultural context of a work at the time it was made. So sensitivity readers, trigger warnings, autism-friendly performances (disability isn't forgotten by the progressive movement) and 'safe words' are all early flags for what has become known as cancel culture.
But it is not only in identity politics where the redesign is taking place. Fossil fuels have been under pressure for years now, replacing the long mass-marginalisation of smoking, which has led to that activity being relegated to hardy relaxation lovers shivering in outdoor smoking shelters. The push for electric cars, which contributed to making Elon Musk the world's richest man, has accompanied a relentless carnival of coordinated virtue-signalling in advertising and the media.
That there is not the infrastructure to get to 'Net Zero' anytime soon doesn't seem to deter the likes of pressure groups Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion. This is the consequence of insistent doom-saying by certain newspapers and academics; David Attenborough, Greta Thunberg and George Monbiot, catastrophising for a living since 2000 (a shorter timespan in young Thunberg's case). Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's wife Carrie pushed this to the top of agenda during her husband's three-year tenure, but the excesses of Net Zero's covert-leftist idealism was soon abandoned, in public anyway, by one of Johnson's successors Rishi Sunak.
Still, a look at the media messaging of any globalist organisation betrays a determined, almost hypnotised commitment to Net Zero, with absolutist green policies and transhumanism potentialities - gender transitioning, brain chips, and artificial intelligence. Leftists, ageing hippies and their CEO daughters at the tops of institutions have learned from Tony Blair's long march through the institutions ('modernisation') and have learnt where they need to get to quietly push the levers of power.
The feminisation of this approach is multilateral; there is an understanding that many different bases need to be covered for the progressive revolution to be effective and deep-rooted. Graduates thus emerge from gender studies courses at universities staffed by 95% progressive educationalists, then quietly import their revolutionary learning into career progression in their new companies or organisations. The language used is cheerful, affirmatory, and checked for loopholes on a rolling basis. The revolutionary image of the past – donkey jackets, dungarees, black t-shirts and Doctor Martens – replaced by smart business suits, expensive hairdos and a subtly deployed, affable conformity.
The marginalisation of individualism is a necessity, and works first by creating insider-bias. The demasculation of society is again useful here, as the collaborative agreeableness of women can be used to ensure anyone – of either sex – sticking their heads above the parapet gets it instantly blown off. Make lone voices of protest uncool, unfashionable, eccentric, weird, perverted or somehow deviant. Make the traditional directness of men punishable with 'hate speech', bullying or even sexual harassment laws, and let women know they're also liable for individual thought by throwing the occasional lawsuit their way. Then make all of the above unsayable in public.
Historically speaking Marx cooked it up, Lenin brought it on, Blair made it smile and now Starmer will make any deviation from it impossible if not illegal. Political feminism has seen a chance to grab influence, as rates of male suicide are but a distraction from the main putsch, which is power. Suspicions that the WEF and CIA are involved on a medical-intelligence level are confirmed by truth-seeking journalists on a weekly basis.
Suspicions that social media is too wild a terrain for society to continue are confirmed with Online Safety laws. Public obedience is tested by means of coordinated health scares such as AIDS, Bird Flu, Sars and Covid; leading eventually to economy and mental health-decimating international lockdowns and new laws banning the right to protest. The nation state is the individual on a regional/racial level, is seen as a mortal threat to progress, and any insistence on national identity is stamped down upon as fascism or racism.
Meat-eating is seen as environmentally and morally destructive as fossil fuels, if not more so due to the mere thought of animals being killed, so the push to outlaw that is portmanteaued into the progressive brief under globally-supported veganism. Crime will vanish as the parameters of what is societally acceptable expand, and the ability to step outside of society's guardrails becomes practically impossible to do.
A global population of slaves to the elite is unlikely to be the aim, since those elites are liberally educated enough to see little value in material things, however many billions they have in the bank. They think they're acting quietly and systematically towards the moral betterment of the Earth and all the creatures on it, beyond material concerns. How much value they give to the variegated wholeness of the human experience, joyful consumption and the recognition of darkness as well as light being an integral part of the full tapestry of life remains to be seen.
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