Progressives constantly tout themselves as highly educated experts who will improve the lives of our citizens. They claim to be fighting the unenlightened traditionalists, favoring mere incremental improvement of the existing political order.  In fact, the great majority of modern evils have long flowed directly from ill-advised progressive policies, pushing us further back than where we started.  Just a few examples should suffice.

Confusing fiscal policy with monetary policy, progressive Keynesians have advocated governmental deficits since FDR’s tenure, thereby touting them as beneficial profligate spending and confiscatory taxation.

Contrary to progressives, this taxing and spending cycle, increasing since the 1930s, ensures that the price of everything continues to increase dramatically.  When prices rise, so do, generally, asset values, thereby favoring the wealthy. The high taxes of the modern welfare state have become a huge barrier between buyers and sellers.  With the added cost of all goods from excessive regulation, including the cost of money, the poor get poorer and the rich get richer.

With so many poor becoming homeless and so many middle-class renters unable to purchase a home, progressive political power grows counterintuitively.  More and more citizens stuck in dependency rely on the government for means-tested programs.  progressives have for decades bulldozed poor but cohesive and proud minority neighborhoods in favor of ghettoized low-income towers.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave increased opportunities to minorities, while, countering this effect, Great Society programs encouraged unmarried pregnancy and familial breakup, as males were chased out of government housing and unmarried mothers were subsidized.

Progressives have proven far more autocratic than democratic, favoring not so much union members as union leaders.  Teachers’ unions and their servile progressive politicians fight against vouchers and charter schools, minorities be damned.  In dense urban areas controlled by progressives, most students cannot read at grade level, while increasingly fatherless homes and decreasing employment opportunities for youth spell delinquency and crime. Progressive minimum wage laws, to the extent meaningful, depress entry-level hiring.

The encroaching administrative state circumvents Congressional intent and restricts free religious expression and personal freedoms through bureaucratic fiat.  There is no better example than the COVID pandemic, when group religious worship, along with hairdressing, was subject to criminal prosecution while city-burning looting by maskless masses was encouraged. Kamala Harris’s support of the Minnesota Freedom Fund and Tim Walz’s riot cheerleading are but two examples.

DEI warriors have hampered military recruitment and morale and strained veteran programs while looting FEMA funds to support illegal migrants.  Massive illegal migration, condoned if not encouraged by progressives, has driven down wages and opportunities for minorities seeking upward mobility.

Immediately after progressives successfully defunded the police in large urban areas, Chicago saw over one weekend a 300% increase in murders, with New York not far behind.

Believing themselves more advanced than others, progressives have pushed counter-effective climate “remedies” that increase environmental devastation.  For every electric vehicle battery, half a million pounds of earth must be disturbed, an amount that will only increase as demand for rare earth minerals necessitates lower-grade ores.  Hundreds of thousands of large birds are destroyed annually by American windmills, while offshore wind farms maim marine mammals.  Solar farms require massive China-imported toxic chemicals while destroying valuable farmland.  Large EV batteries are environmental time bombs.  Our electrical grid is overloaded while rendering society more dangerously vulnerable to easily sourced EMP bombs and software hacking, which in turn can disable all-electric vehicles.

True female empowerment is regressing, as biological males are permitted to compete and win in women’s sports, all in the name of progressive transgender ideology.  Progressive politicians are friendlier with Iran than they are with Israel, giving the mullahs billions of dollars with which to kill innocents through sponsoring terrorists and potentially to devastate the world with progressive-encouraged nuclear weaponry.  These are the same progressives who confiscated Ukraine’s weaponry through President Obama but refused the same country American Migs and F-16s when Russia invaded Ukraine.

Yet, when the presidential election is discussed, the mainstream media downplay or even outright suppress these progressive evils while portraying conservatives as a backward, dangerous American proletariat and their leader as a “threat to democracy,” simply because they attempt to preserve Constitutional rights, traditional freedoms, and fair elections.

With progressives demanding more control over the lives of citizens, anyone can see why America is in decline and danger.  Our country has progressive politicians who are increasing heavy-handed centralized governmental control over religious beliefs, automobiles, and gas stoves, aided by cheerleading from a media functioning as their “useful idiots.”  As long as the media conceals the truth about progressive policies, we will continue accelerating down Hayek’s Road to Serfdom.

The coming election is, as the media would have it, about potential danger to democracy. But which is the more serious danger: mean tweets or progressive policies?

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John D. O’Connor is a former federal prosecutor and the San Francisco attorney who represented W. Mark Felt during his revelation as Deep Throat in 2005. O’Connor is the author of the books, Postgate: How the Washington Post Betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate and Began Today’s Partisan Advocacy Journalism and The Mysteries of Watergate: What Really Happened.