Progressivism's Fatal Flaw: Rejecting America

Progressivism has been tried, tested, and repeatedly found wanting. No matter how many times left-leaning intellectuals or activists insist they can “get it right this time,” the ideology remains self-destructive because it rejects the very principles on which America was built. Progressivism is not only contrary to American heritage but fundamentally incompatible with the nation’s present and past...

The Journal of Democracy reported in 2021 that progressives increasingly framed traditional American values as oppressive relics. Such rhetoric alienated ordinary people who took pride in their nation’s heritage...

The deeper reason progressivism cannot work, however, lies not only in failed policy outcomes but in its philosophical roots... Progressives emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries asserting founding principles were outdated...

Progressives discarded the Declaration’s bedrock principle that rights are unchanging and naturally ordained. Instead, they embraced the notion that rights are relative, malleable, and defined by government. By doing so, they opened the door to government not as the protector of liberty, but as the bestower of temporary privileges^*...

Woodrow Wilson, before becoming president, outlined a system where the functions of government were “independent of legislation, and even constitutions.” In practice, this created the administrative state... The Founders had designed a government bound by the Constitution, wary of concentrated power. Progressives replaced it with an unelected shadow government, undermining accountability at every turn...

The record speaks for itself. Progressivism consistently produces economic decline, population flight, cultural alienation and political instability...

Progressivism is fundamentally at odds with America herself...

* Negative rights, such as freedom of speech, are inherent, natural rights. Positive rights, such as "public" government education, are those granted by others or by government. A government that transitions from protecting natural, negative, rights to arbitrarily granting positive rights is fundamentally at odds with the nation that America's framers established.

The concepts of negative and positive power are clearly discussed in Mark Levin's 2025 book, On Power.