Post-Progressivism

Christopher Rufo: Eric Kaufmann and I have been traveling almost on parallel tracks. We had a book about the origins of woke ideology—mine is published. We work on some of the policy and university reform, me in the United States, Eric in the U.K. I thought this was a great opportunity to sit down with you and explore something that you’ve been working on at length, and it’s this idea of post-progressivism as an academic discipline, a concept, and a fulcrum for instituting some of the changes that we’ve been talking about the last few years. Why don’t you just open up at the beginning and tell me what is post-progressivism?

Eric Kaufmann: Thanks, Chris. Well, the first thing to say is that if you look at big trends in ideas, they often follow rather than lead events on the ground. If we think of postmodernism, or if you think of critical theory as well—critical legal studies, critical race theory—they all emerged after the tumult of the ’60s, when there was a real questioning about a lot of what the postmodernists called grand narratives or verities. One was this idea of economic progress. You’d had the oil shocks in 1973, and there was a questioning of the fat years after 1945 seemed to be coming to an end. You also had a number of events in the ’60s, obviously, the Vietnam conflict, but clearly decolonization. The Western empires were breaking up, and all these colonies were becoming independent. Then you had the so-called new social movements, the black Civil Rights Movement, followed very quickly by radical feminism and also the gay rights movement. All of these movements then lead to an intellectual ferment, which leads to something like postmodernism.

One of the things that I’m asking about, and I think we both have our antenna on this, is whether we are in a moment like the ’60s when there’s a change going on as a result of events. Just as in the ’60s and early ’70s, there was a questioning of this inevitable modernization and this enlightenment, scientific, technological progress narrative. Whether they were right or wrong, there was this questioning.

What we’ve seen with what’s now a decade—the populist moment, has been running since 2014 when the National Front, the U.K. Independence Party, and the Danish Progress Party both hit almost thirty percent of the vote at the European elections. And then we had Trump, and then we had Brexit, and we had a number of other things happening. We’ve now had a solid decade of populism. It’s not something you can say is a blip. We’ve got polarization happening in country after country. And there are a whole series of other social problems. For example, you’ve obviously got a problem with birth rates, and you’ve got a problem with men dropping out of the workforce, and you’ve got problems with disorders that you’ve covered. A lot of these problems aren’t easily addressed by the progressive paradigm.

What I’m arguing is the progressive paradigm that has sort of obtained since the late ’60s, which combines an expressive individualism in culture with a left-wing humanitarianism, again, related to race, gender, and sexuality—that’s been the paradigm that has energized a lot of the left-wing intellectual movements—it’s run its course. I’m arguing with post-progressivism that we are almost seeing the emergence of a bookend to the progressive era of 1965 to 2025, 60 years. I think we’re coming to the end of that, and I think there’s a shift in cultural mood. And I think that then leads to a whole series of questions we can get into.

Rufo: Before we do that, let’s go backward just a step. I wanted to talk a bit about what progressivism is. You’re talking about it in ideological terms. I see it also in bureaucratic terms. In the US, we had the Great Society, the buildup of programs and social programs designed to reshape inner cities, education, and welfare programs, to lift up the poor, to provide not only equal rights but equal educational or material conditions—equality of opportunity was a euphemism that many use in including people on the right. And I think that is also really at its exhaustion point. If you look at all the promises from the Great Society, they have spent now tens of trillions of dollars on these programs, and the numbers haven’t budged at all. In fact, many of the numbers have deteriorated. Do you factor that into if the ideology follows the conditions on the ground? Do you see that as far as government practice? That hasn’t changed at all. It’s not going to change in the near term. Are you arguing, though, that there’s just a sense of recognition that these ideas have failed in real life? How do you approach the bureaucratic question in addition to the ideological question?

Kaufmann: That’s a really good question. Here’s the way I think about this. I think that the economic Left—economic progressivism, if you like—has a somewhat different rhythm, not totally different, but a somewhat different rhythm. For example, there was already a lot of questioning of the welfare state. If you go back to stagflation and worries about economic growth and the debates around supply-side economics. What I would say is the welfare state model, the union power model, all those things have been questioned already in the 20th century. That’s not to say there aren’t issues there. But what really wasn’t questioned, what really was just taken as the inevitable progress of humanity was on the cultural side—race, gender, sexuality—that was becoming antiracist, more tolerant of different sexualities, sexual orientations. Women are going to be entering the workforce in larger numbers, becoming a more diverse society. On those sort of identity dimensions, I think was really a sort of unquestioned belief in progress.

Whereas I think on the economic side, you already had a debate between people who said, ‘Well, growth of the state crowds out economic dynamism.’ I think that’s not as new. Even if those reforms weren’t made, and, yes, maybe that’s overdue, but that’s a somewhat separate debate. I see this as primarily the end of an era of cultural progressivism, this idea of liberating the individual from tradition on the one hand, that diverse differences and change are always the best thing, but equally also that we have to have equal outcomes and emotional harm protection for minorities, that that represents human progress and you can’t question it. And I guess it’s that cultural side that I think is really hitting the barriers now.