Progressive Feudalists

In Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty, Murray Rothbard makes a good case about how Socialists are actually the middle ground between monarchists and libertarians. He does so by tracing the evolution of the political ideologies from the original French Assembly spectrum (wrongly considered to be the definitive political spectrum) to modern times where the different ideologies are thrown together basically at random until the original leftists are now considered to be on the right with their original opponents and the middle ground between the two is considered to be on the left.

He also neatly ties in progressives and fascists in with the feudalists, demonstrating how they are all superficial variations on each other, through a combination of direct ownership of the means of production, government and corporate mergers, and the regulatory state.

Progressivism has finally reached its final conclusion and become indistinguishable from the more extreme members of its family. Under President Bush and President Obama it has come to mean absolute power in the government and endless war, both for the sake of the ruling class. The rhetoric about having an omnipotent government for the sake of the people is rapidly fading away. First President Bush dropped any pretense about how "conservatives" favor any lessened role for the government in the lives of the people through the creation of the Transportation Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security, and the passage of the USAPATRIOT Act, No Child Left Behind, S-CHIP, Prescriptions Drug Coverage for Seniors, and capping it off with the first round of Bailouts and Stimulus. Then President Obama dropped any pretense of how "progressives" favor any sort of civil liberty or commonality with the common man by continuing the bailout of Wall Street, expanding the War on Terror to include directed assassinations without a court order, expanding the War on Terror to include congress having no role at all, and passing a version of healthcare reform that as none of the goals that Democrats have clamored for years over such as Single Payer or other versions of socialized medicine, while also failing to move on any gay rights issues and expanding the Drug War.

Based on all of that, it is clear that Progressive now means an absolute authoritarian state with no concern for the people governed. It can still be debated if the US is a free country or a dictatorship, but there is no debate left that the leadership certainly has no regard for freedom and only has concern for their own power, and a willingness to shed as much of other peoples blood may be necessary to hold and increase that power. They have returned to their original root, described by Rothbard, as feudalists, the original enemy of libertarians.

It is time for liberals to abandon their “progressive” brothers if they want to reclaim what is left of their original identity as holding their ideology for the sake of improving the world and not just themselves. It is time for liberals to decide which way they want to go, it is time to choose between government and freedom, they cannot have both and they can no longer pretend that they can have both. It is also time for liberals to stop consider the term "liberal" and the term "progressive" to be interchangeable.