Save The Last Dance For Me - Progressives Leave Washington With An Empty Dance Card

It has been a particularly bad year for progressives.  Not only has Donald Trump reassumed the presidency, but he has done so in high style; and in just a few months he has rolled back DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusivity), closed the southern border, attacked Iran, opened vast lands for drilling, reduced and/or eliminated the bureaucratic behemoth, sent in federal police to clean up crime-ridden cities, ridiculed the gender spectrum, and withdrawn punitive regulation from private business. 

This is not simply a change of administration, but a cultural coup.  The days of woke governance, flaccid immigration, the deification of race, redistribution of wealth, and the demission of religion were over in a flash.  Such is leadership, and such was the unspoken demand for change - once the President said what was on people's minds - that radical progressivism was nothing but a chimera, a fevered Utopian fantasy full of Sturm und Drang but with no substance, no historical precedent, and no foundational principles - the cultural shift was quick, complete, and dramatic. 

The Emperor had no clothes on after all realized Americans after being told for four years that he was wearing finery.  The preposterous cant, the outrageous claims, and the bald self-righteousness of the Left were there for all to see. 

Now, it is one thing for policies, programs, and initiatives of one administration to be shut down upon the arrival of another; but when the whole foundation of the progressive movement is shown to be the sham that it is, that is real trouble.  There can be no legislative tinkering, no compromises around the edges, no quid pro quo when it comes to such radical reversals of political fortune.  The entire rug has been pulled out from under progressives, the whole kit-and-kaboodle of sinecures, lame justifications, and febrile assumptions thrown out and tossed on the curb. 

And so it was that the progressives who had staffed the government and its non-profit claques were sent packing, unceremoniously dismissed.  There was no orderly transition of power, friendly adversarial handshakes, and ceremonial respect.  Biden and his shills were gone and done with and everything in Washington changed.

Blonde, blue-eyed young women strode proudly along Pennsylvania Avenue on their way to the White House.  Loud parties of celebration were heard on the South Lawn.  The tenor, the atmosphere, the environment, the language, and the furnishings all changed.  It was a different world, an alien one to those who had just left. 

Where to go? was the question these progressives asked. What doors were still open to them? What jurisdictions would have them?  Where could they fit, accommodate, and produce?

The answer was simple - nowhere; or at least nowhere that mattered.   The county was turning red from top to bottom, and even the most radically progressive cities were losing public support and political approval.  The private sector, forward looking and now more optimistic than ever wanted nothing to do with old political hacks and retreads.  The world of enterprise, free association, open discussion, and apolitical intentions was an unimaginable thing for these political vagrants.

The vision of Walmart greeter loomed in Washington as resume after resume was rejected.  Applicants were ghosted as never before.  A DC postmark alone was enough to toss an application in the trash.  

Older politicos considered early retirement, but a long life of selfless commiseration for the poor and the black man had bled their bank accounts, and so decades of scrimping by loomed large. 

'Don't worry, Bob', Corinne Muzelle said to her husband who had seen his NGO, Scientists For Social Justice, close its doors after many years of hectoring and bullying. Corporate sponsorship had been withdrawn, foundational support was now nil, and individual memberships down to zero.

Bob's organization was exactly the kind that the new Administration ridiculed.  It had been at the forefront of gender reallocation and the integration of transgender teachers in the school system, on the barricades with Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street, and on the hustings when it came to socialist reform. 

There was no way to retool or reconfigure radical progressivism, make it fit into some private sector niche or figure in its algorithms.  The ideas and ideals were contrary.  There was no room in a Silicon Valley start-up for the likes of Bob.  The young Korean and Chinese geeks wanted nothing more than a big gigabyte computer and clear sailing to profitability.  

Corporations which had jettisoned all DEI programs and had backed off from woke imagery had no place for the reintroduction of discredited ideas. 

'The Park Service', said Bob out of the blue. 'I've always wanted to be a park ranger'.  The idea of sitting in solitude atop a ridge in the Shenandoah had always appealed to him; and this was an occupation which required little training or previous experience. 

'I'll open a book store', he said.  'A small boutique place, offering high-toned fiction and coffee'. 

Anything to avoid becoming a Starbucks server.  'I could be a MacDonald's manager what with my managerial experience', he said to his wife, 'or write my memoirs'. 

In short Bob like anyone who had never really worked for a living, who had lived off of ideas and their supposed political salience, cannot be too harshly criticized for such fanciful ideas.  To be out of work as a steam fitter is one thing - small tool-and-dye outfits would always need them - but a liberal activist? No, the landscape was as dark and gloomy as an Anselm Kiefer tableau. 

All the Washington cabals, cliques, and claques offered no shelter.  Everyone Bob knew was leaving Washington - back to Boise, Ames, and Chillicothe.  One former colleague was going to take over his father's mattress discounter business, another as a gofer on an offshore Louisiana oil rig, and a third as an apprentice stylist in his brother's hair salon.  Each on his own.  The old political camaraderie had no place anymore.  The old ideas - collaboration, cooperation, solidarity, uniformity - were more irrelevant in the new America than ever.

'What about a trailer park in North Carolina?', Bob asked Corinne.  A no cost solution, drawing down little of their meager savings, good climate, good fishing. 

They ended up in a reconverted garage in the back of their daughter's house in Ardmore, took over childcare for the family, did a little cooking, and tried to make themselves scarce; but the old American can-do, do-it, make-something-of-yourself ethos bit hard, and Bob had to find something, anything to give him a measure of identity - Hah, there was that word again, so often used as a rallying cry for black, brown, and Chicano people’s and now applied to him, how ironic. 

Nothing showed the transparency of progressivism more than this turn of events - a progressive without his nostrums and Utopian dreams was a nothing, a cipher, a zero.  A conservative, born and bred in an environment of individual enterprise, hard work, and private opportunity was fungible.  A Darwinian survivor. 

Alas, little was heard from or about Bob after he left the garage, and your guess is as good as mine where he landed; but the moral of the story is not about Bob, but about the floating fantasy palace he thought would always be home.