Enough Already! - One By One, The Last Bits Of Progressive Fancy Are Scattered To The Four Winds

Bob Muzelle was disconsolate.  Everything he had worked so hard for was being dismantled, disavowed, and discarded.  The progressive agenda was in pieces and in eight short months was nothing but a relic. 

Not only is transgenderism finished as policy imperative, it is being exposed as the mental disorder it always has been.  The Left's aggressive promotion of transgender individuals in all phases of American social life - a burlesque show of basso profundo kindergarten teachers and storytellers, civil servants, and Hollywood characters - is finally over and done with.

After years of hectoring, intimidation, and bullying, progressives are leaving Washington with nothing to show for the Biden years - an influx of unwanted immigrants on the pretense of 'diversity'; environmentalism with little proof and much hysteria; the lionization of the black man despite the persistently crime-ridden, socially dysfunctional inner cities; the punitive taxes and legislation inhibiting America's most productive individuals and slowing growth and prosperity; and much, much more. 

The fact that Donald Trump has been able to reverse all of these anti-social, anti-growth trends, eliminate the corrosive and damaging DEI programs, begin to settle a number of devastating international conflicts, and return the country to a respected geopolitical power is a tribute to him, but the folly of the Left's agenda. If this agenda had been based on anything of substance, historical validity, or reasonable promise, it would not have been so easily torn up and discarded.  Four years of febrile, animistic, faux-Utopian idealism. 

Where were progressives to turn now that the new President had uprooted, discarded, and discredited each and every one of their most cherished and hallowed programs and principles? Who would want them except for mayoral holdouts who have insisted that sanctuary cities are necessary, moral, and right; that police are racist thugs and murderers; and that the inner city suffers only from white racism and post-colonial black hatred. 

 

Perhaps the liberal Washington diaspora can find a home in Chicago, Los Angeles, or San Francisco - a new wave of Barack Obama, Paolo Freire, Saul Alinsky neo-socialist community organization; or in the dispersed gay populations of the Castro and Dupont Circle who need more coalition, more solidarity, and more political visibility.  

Or perhaps not as voters in these cities are tired of the non-productive, anti-social programs of the past. Inner city families are tired of being shot up and left for dead from drive-bys, victims of uncontrolled gang violence, rape, and assault, dupes of the entitled black political establishment which howls racism and white supremacy but lets the ghetto fester in its own backward incivility.  White families who have chosen to stay in the city are tired of being sucked dry by corrupt, race-baiting council members and venal mayors.  Businesses want nothing to do with cities disassembling and destroying themselves. 

The whole kit-and-kaboodle is over and done with. The nation has said, Basta! and despite the hawking, and harping of the Old Guard the cackling of The Squad, and the intermittent popping up of an old-school socialist firebrand, the progressive movement is finished.  It has had its day and a long one at that.  There were the original progressives like Brandeis, Lafollette, Debs, and Gompers who were men of principle and faith in the worker; the neo-progressives like FDR who applied neo-socialism, unionism, and labor to address the Depression; and latter-day liberals like LBJ whose Great Society was an attempt to level the socio-economic playing field.   All movements with some foundation, rationale, and intellectual interest. 

 

Today's progressives have devolved into a side show - a band of touts, snake oil salesmen, and carny barkers with nothing but scam and promise to sell.  A Hate Trump one-man band, a Johnny One Note, a thumping bore of a political party at heart with frilly window dressing, intellectual pimps and ambulance chasers, and power wannabes. 

Bob saw it all tumbling down before his eyes, this institution, this marvelous, righteous building for all men and women, this land of promise, this...

His eyes teared as he contemplated the loss and the imminent demise of his political life.  Worst of all was to watch the coming of the New, the blonde, blue-eyed, lithe, sensuous young women who were replacing the progressive pantheon.  Diversity and the championing of the Other, the disabled, the removed, the black, the alternatively gendered was already history.  The formerly damned and excoriated white majority was back in numbers and in style. 

Versailles, the Sun King, empire, palaces, the juggernaut of the Christian Crusades were restored to their former revered place in European American history.  Africa was an afterthought, a blighted place of corruption, poverty, and bloody mismanagement. White was back. 

Bob looked out over a gathering of 'Progressives for Social Justice', the non-profit advocacy group that he had founded and managed for years now without funding and social support. The contrast to the young, bright, enthusiastic Trump supporters now seen walking up and down Pennsylvania Avenue, all flip hairdos, high heels, Armani, and Cartier was striking.  The social justice group was an untidy, unkempt, messy lot, not a stunner among them, not one woman that caught your attention.  'Inner beauty', that catch-all term for the leftovers now seemed all the more fatuous.  There was no beauty here, period. 

Apostasy! Bob quickly thought as these images came into his head, these treasonous, poisonous thoughts; but he could not shake them as his eyes went up and down the room, one desperately unattractive woman after the other. 

It was time to hang 'em up, he concluded.  He had done his best, given the best years of his life to the cause.  No one could expect more.  Retirement was not defeat by any means.  Even in his chaise lounge on a Tampa beach he would still be proudly and defiantly progressive. 

'Lovely, dear', his wife Corinne said to him when he proposed the move. 'It will be a nice change'.  She meant what she said for she had grown very tired and impatient with her husband's tedium, his moroseness, his constant worrying about the plight of the black man when there was more to life than losers.  Sorry, she said to herself, the truth hurts but there it is. 

 

Bob was summary in closing shop - no fanfare, plaudits, or plaques.  It was off to Florida with a U-Haul and a few things coming by freight, a complete break with the past except for fond memories.  He, Martin, and Ralph on the Pettis bridge, getting whupped by Bull Connor and his dogs, sit-ins with Negroes at Dot's Kitchen in Montgomery...

Younger progressives left behind were not so lucky, there was no Tampa Bay in their immediate future.  Many decided to change their stripes and join the new majority, others hunkered down, and others simply went back to Chillicothe or Ames or Dubuque or wherever they came from to pick up their old lives; but the fact remained that The Movement was no more.