If The Rule You Followed Brought You To This, Of What Use Was The Rule? The Demise Of Progressivism

Bob Muzelle had been a lifelong progressive who got the bug from his grandparents who had been early followers of Brandeis, Debs, and Lafollette; and from his parents who had fought for Adlai Stevenson and 'the little man' against Eisenhower.  They had been unionists, socialists, and communalists and had  instructed young Bob in the ways of justice and equality.

 

At Yale Bob had been a devotee of the Reverend Frawley Adams, scion of the New England Adams family, heir to a storied family legacy but a turncoat - a windy pastor who rejected American originalism and turned to the secular idealism of the Sixties.  He was all for the black man and would die for him, and so went proudly into the angry white mobs of Selma and Montgomery, took his licks from Bull Connor and his attack dogs, but returned to campus a happy man. 

'I am one with the African', he told a packed congregation at Woolsey Hall, preferring this categorization of former slaves. 'I am a black man', and with that he and his acolyte Bob raised awareness on the campus of the plight of the racially downtrodden. 

Adams was an insufferable bore, a pompous, self-righteous ass who felt that noblesse oblige, Mayflower origins, and Puritan ancestry would get him nowhere; and that a modern, timely volte face was what would give him notice, public acclaim, and honor.

Bob as the pastor's acolyte adopted the same persona - an infected young man who could not help but lecture his classmates. 'Look around you', he shouted to everyone within earshot. 'Do you see any black men on campus?  Of course you don't. They are mired in ghettos and slums, living in tarpaper shacks, poor, destitute and put upon.  No Yale recruiter has ever set foot in Anacostia, East St. Louis, or West Baltimore, happy to hobnob with the Cabots and Lodges, eat pheasant and foie gras, dance at cotillions where privileged white girls came out...'

 

At this point, no one was listening.  The whole campus had had quite enough of this asshole; but Bob never let up and by the time he graduated, he had become even more 'round the bend, a Yale man into whose brain nothing of that institution's classical education had sunk.  Not one poetical exegesis of Harold Bloom, not one soaring metaphor of Vincent Scully, not one iota of Paul Weiss' metaphysics. He, after four years, was nothing but a demented street corner preacher. 

After college it was graduate school in Moral Philosophy, for Bob felt he needed some intellectual grounding for his emotional progressivism, and so it was that the Duke faculty and graduate school student body had to put up with what Yale students had endured for four years.  Bob whinged on about the premier nature of the black man, his rightful place atop the human pyramid, and the insidious racism of the white race.  This time he couched his venomous attacks in Biblical allusions, citing John, Paul, and Jesus. He was more insufferable than ever before. 

Somehow he got his doctorate but only because the Duke academic review committee all considered themselves to be arbiters of moral authority when it came to the black man, and approved Bob's dissertation, In The Lee Of Moral Justice - The Plight Of The Black Man, little more than a liberal screed with a priori assumptions and circular conclusions but enough along the lines of the liberal canon to be approved. 

 

So, Dr. Muzelle went out in the world and subjected it to his cant and canonical presumptions. He hammered, whacked, and banged away at white audiences for their moral turpitude and bland indifference to the black man until he was carted off. Not even the most rabid black-loving progressives could stand this deformed psychotic. 

Now, after decades of passionate commitment to the black man, and years of ignoring the dysfunctionality of the inner city, the persistent lagging of the black population in any measure of academic or professional competence, and the disproportionate number of murders, rapes, and assaults by black men, Bob was undaunted, unmoved, and unintimidated. 

Then came the hammer blow, the sharp blade of the guillotine dropped.  A new President in office and one without sympathy for the black man and only adulation for the white one and the European civilizations from which he had come. With his first statements and executive orders removing any trace of the discredited, fictitious notions of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI), damning the corruption and manipulative arrogance of Black Lives Matter, and withdrawing financial support for all ineffective, politically-driven 'social welfare' programs, the lionization of the black man was seen for what it was - political chicanery and liberal cant. 

 

Immediately individuals and institutions who had long labored under this progressive penumbra, shouted hooray! The political chimera was over, reality would reign once again. 

Bob however was gobsmacked, unbelieving that progressives had so summarily been tossed out of power and worse consigned to the political gutter. If the Trump juggernaut continued - and it most certainly would go on far beyond his term in office - and if progressivism did indeed died a miserable death, then of what use had it been?

As Anton Shugur said to Carson Wells in the movie No Country for Old Men, 'If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?'.  If decades of communitarianism, socialism, and identity idolatry were now history, tossed aside and forgotten, dismissed as political folly and fevered imagination, what had his life in the progressive trenches been worth?

'Don't worry, Bob' said his wife of many years. 'You have done yeoman's work and you will be remembered'; but privately she was just as sick and tired of his banging and hammering as the millions of Trump supporters and was glad that at least for now her husband would simply shut up. 

Of course Bob didn't do as his wife hoped, but simply faded away.  No one wanted to hear what he had to say any more.  He was redundant, supernumerary, and insignificant - not unlike the political philosophy he espoused. 

This rejection was the last straw, a blow from which no one recovered, an existential kick in the pants, molasses in the fuel line, electric shock to the nervous system, a final short-circuiting of his brain synapses.  He was a goner, and all that was left was a chaise lounge in Sarasota where at least he aged in the company of likeminded, tired out old liberals.