Progressives’ Desperate Grunts

Confused, alarmed, and unbalanced by the changing world around them, America’s erstwhile progressive class has been eventually reduced to the grunt. The proximate stimulus doesn’t matter a great deal, for, whatever the question, the answer is always the same: “Racism! Sexism! LGBT!” Perhaps, in the grand scheme of things, a little paralysis will do the movement good?

“Abortion bans,” the ACLU tweeted recently, “disproportionately harm Black, Indigenous & other people of color, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, young people, those working to make ends meet, people with disabilities.” Quite why this is so — or, in the case of “the LGBTQ community,” how it is so — was not explained. The words were just snapped carelessly together, like Freudian Duplo. In the distant past, an argument might have been stapled on, but not now, when everything is everything — when slogans have replaced expostulation and ideas have been melded into pink noise. Like Shakespeare’s Thomas Mowbray, progressive America may at long last have run out of gas, leaving its participants to confess in desperation that, “The language I have learned these forty years / My native English, now I must forego / And now my tongue’s use is to me no more / Than an unstringed viol or a harp.”

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About the Author

Charles C. W. Cooke

Charles C. W. Cooke is a senior editor at National Review and the host of The Charles C. W. Cooke Podcast.

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Confused, alarmed, and unbalanced by the changing world around them, America’s erstwhile progressive class has been eventually reduced to the grunt. The proximate stimulus doesn’t matter a great deal, for, whatever the question, the answer is always the same: “Racism! Sexism! LGBT!” Perhaps, in the grand scheme of things, a little paralysis will do the movement good?

“Abortion bans,” the ACLU tweeted recently, “disproportionately harm Black, Indigenous & other people of color, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, young people, those working to make ends meet, people with disabilities.” Quite why this is so — or, in the case of “the LGBTQ community,” how it is so — was not explained. The words were just snapped carelessly together, like Freudian Duplo. In the distant past, an argument might have been stapled on, but not now, when everything is everything — when slogans have replaced expostulation and ideas have been melded into pink noise. Like Shakespeare’s Thomas Mowbray, progressive America may at long last have run out of gas, leaving its participants to confess in desperation that, “The language I have learned these forty years / My native English, now I must forego / And now my tongue’s use is to me no more / Than an unstringed viol or a harp.”