Progress, populism and deconstruction

The word progress sounds good. At first sight, it is not easy to understand why progressivism, the progressive, is associated with a counter-cultural intention, faced with progress, improvement, science, growth, construction, the future. Something perverse has to happen for the idea of progress to become an action of going back in time, of returning to violent origins, of erasing any sign of past identity in order to empty society of its history. A macabre revolution, an excessive and intolerable assault, is currently devastating the United States and many cities in Europe and the democratic world. The demolition and beheading of statues and symbols of historical figures without any concrete reason, under the iconoclastic torch of the vindication against racism provoked after the death of George Floyd. 

Progressivism has its origin, like so many ideologies, in the liberal revolutions. It could be said that from its origin it is a mutation of enlightened reformism towards a permanent struggle to impose new laws that transform society, assuming as incapable and insufficient the advances and achievements of moderate liberalism. The progressives during the 19th century were the most demanding liberals in terms of both proposals and methods. Not always on the margin of destruction (Jacobins) and close to the most radical reforms to abolish privileges and break with laws the Old Regime. They were not able to adapt to the growth of the workers' movement and suffrage, nor to recognize as successes the achievements of liberal democracy (May 1968) and lost the battle for ideas in the 20th century. 

The fall of Marxism and the crisis of social democracy has allowed the populist and extreme left currents (the Progressive International) to recover the spirit of progressivism, but now adding some demands and uproar, activated from the social networks and from imitation in the new global scenario, of a subversive and violent nature. Taking power from the streets and parliaments to deconstruct society first and then rebuild it with ideas and laws that go beyond the constitutions, institutions and consensus of democratic history. This has been called neo-constructivism or constructionalism. 

In the United States, the progessives became strong by raising the banners of feminism and the struggle for the civil rights of minorities (African Americans) and pointing to the bipartisan establishment as the cause of the corruption of the system and the inequalities generated by capitalism. In times of crisis, at the end of the 19th century and in the 1960s, they made some progress. But as former President Obama has pointed out, American society is much more in favour of reforms within the constitutional system, of which it is proud, than of extremist revolutions. The failure of Warren and Sanders in the Democratic Party's pre-campaign confirms this. 

Disenchantment with the crisis caused by the pandemic, political uncertainties, the common enemy (Donald Trump and the rich), the anticipated failure of their ultra-progressive proposals in the run-up to the 2020 elections and the anti-racist outburst after George Floyd's death, has put a radical minority on the warpath. Their excesses and protests have now taken the path of destroying symbols with the aim, not of fighting racism (condemned by the United Nations and all democratic legislation), but of destabilising liberal democracies and indiscriminately deconstructing society, shattering its past in order to fracture its present.

Symbols of historical progress (Fray Junípero Serra); of victory over slavery, as Pérez Maura pointed out in ABC (Grant); of recognition of the workers' vote (Jackson); of the struggle against Nazism and totalitarianism (Churchill); of universal culture (Cervantes), have succumbed to the irrational attacks of the ultras of the new left, before the astonished eyes of their fellow travellers and of the civilised world.