Two Kinds of Progressivism, President Obama, and Pat Deneen

Pat Deneen does well to call attention to this confident comment by our President:

Stumping in Iowa on May 24, President Obama declared, “We don’t need another political fight about ending a woman’s right to choose, or getting rid of Planned Parenthood, or taking away affordable birth control. We don’t need that. I want women to control their own health choices, just like I want my daughters to have the same economic opportunities as my sons. We’re not turning back the clock. We’re not going back there.”

Pat loses me a bit when he goes on to connect that comment with the wacky Marxist hedonism of Shulamit Firestone (hadn’t heard her memorable name in years).

Obama’s comment is “merely” just what the Court said in PLANNED PARENTHOOD v. CASEY. Women are free individuals defining the mystery of their own being. They, like men, aren’t essentially biological beings. They aren’t breeding machines for the state. In order to be free and equal participants in our nation’s political and economic life, they need to be able to choose all means necessary not to be tied down biologically in a way men can’t be.

Now I don’t have the words to required to show my contempt for that quite unrealistic and basically anti-woman way of thinking. Still, it’s understandable. The Court believes it can use the single word “liberty” in the 14th Amendment to bring state law in line with the Constitution of 1787, which treats us all as free persons, and not as black or white, Christian or Jew, or man or woman. The president’s statement is, in an understandable way, Lockeanism run amok.

That kind of progressivism—where every generation thinks through more completely than one before the meaning of individual liberty—has to be distinguished quite radically from the sort of progressivism that organically treats people as members of a Great Community, favors the redistribution of wealth, civic education etc. It has nothing to do with the welfare state’s indefinite growth, at least in principle.

A libertarian would say: What we have here is one form of individualism (good) and one form of collectivism/historicism (bad).

I am not a libertarian. But we Straussians or whatever have to stop thinking of progressivism as a single anti-Lockean movement.

Actually, Pat does seem to think of all of progressivism as Lockeanism—the project of mastery or rational control—run amok. That’s wrong too. By identifying progressivism with Lockeanism, he can find an anti-progressive way not to vote for the essentially oligarchic Republicans.