I.

There’s an article in The Atlantic, “How Progressives Froze the American Dream,” by Yoni Appelbaum. Beyond the point that there’s much to criticize about the article in terms of fact (such as physical mobility being uniquely American – tell that to, say, medieval Mongols or ancient Greeks,) but I want to focus on Appelbaum’s critique of progressiveness. To Appelbaum, somehow, the problem is that those darn progressives value equality! Not the generations during which fundamentalists have gutted American education, particularly in poor states. Nope. Not THAT. Not that! Not the deindustrialization of the US that gutted the middle class through the Rust Belt. Not that, either.  Not greedy capitalist land developers or the lack of political will to make affordable housing in urban areas.  Nope.  Not them.

Appelbaum blames “progressives” for gentrification. The set piece for the article’s thesis is the gentrification of the West Village in New York City: rich people move into a working-class neighborhood and take it over, causing property values and rents to rise, displacing the working-class people who once lived there. Here’s the thing: actual progressives hate gentrification! The progressives aren’t the urban professionals who move into a neighborhood to gentrify it, but the people fighting the gentrification! They’re the ones in the streets, forming tenant unions, fighting for rent control. That’s basic political literacy. This article is so fucking bad. (1)

There are villains in the story of gentrification, too: the real estate developers and their corrupt political allies. But Appelbaum loves a good entrepreneur! He believes if only Americans moved around every year, entrepreneurship would flourish and… freedom! But if people are free to make those entrepreneurial choices that Appelbaum loves so much, why would a developer choose to sell something to poor people when selling things to rich people is far, far more profitable?

Everywhere in the world, housing prices are rising because it’s more profitable to sell to rich people than to poor ones. Nowhere is there the political will to do social housing projects. The perception is that they have failed, that they become places to warehouse the poor, which are then taken over by criminal elements, which trap people in densely populated buildings with gangsters. While this is, I think, primarily due to a lack of continuing support for social housing projects after their construction, the problem is true in all poor communities. Taking down the projects in South Chicago hasn’t reduced the crime there! The gangsters are equally capable of taking over whole blocks as housing projects, and they do. But the alternative is where we are now: where there is no attempt to provide affordable housing to poor people, which means that city development is in the hands of capitalist real estate developers who will maximize profits. For them, that means “homes for rich people and the businesses they support” and not “quality, safe affordable housing.” Entrepreneurialism is at odds with affordable housing.

Appelbaum goes on to envision how to fix this problem – the “call to action” that has become a depressing staple of essayists, the idea that you have to do more than describe the problem but have the wisdom to fix it, which is preposterous in something as complex as city design which is an incredibly contentious and challenging subject; the truth is that there is no formula to make a prosperous, affordable city – is fixing zoning laws to be consistent, which is at least something the government can do, but also… tolerance and abundance! This is divorced not only from reality but inconsistent.

I mean, again, what the actual fuck? People should just be tolerant? The dude went to Brandeis. He knows that freedom is vulnerable to intolerance, it’s been written about and discussed abundantly for, well, centuries. Freedom is the freedom to be a bigot. Not to mention that tolerance is a progressive value.

And who will pay for this “abundance” to make poor neighborhoods attractive? It’s a bizarre thing to say after Appelbaum’s defense of capitalism. “People should make their own decisions and be entrepreneurs!” he says. But profit motives and the redistribution of wealth are contrary fucking values! If you say that people should make their own decisions, well, that’s how you get gentrification, not a defense against it. Why would a rich person choose to ruin what they love about their neighborhood because someone else can’t afford to stay? Gentrification is great for the people who own property in the gentrified neighborhoods. They see their property values grow while more people “like them” move in. Freedom to choose is the freedom to choose yourself over other people. It’s the freedom to be intolerant, to resist taxation to improve declining neighborhoods, to use your social power and wealth to oppose affordable housing and social services for the less fortunate.

But, yeah, ignore the role of entrepreneurialism in causing the housing crisis. Blame it on the victims, instead, the progressives who have seen their homes taken from under them because of the profit motives that Appelbaum praises.

I think the problem goes deeper, though. The problem is with American liberalism, represented by people like Appelbaum and magazines like The Atlantic. I believe liberal cognitive dissonance has reached its limits. It is no longer possible for liberals to hold their contradictory views in their minds, and something has to give.

II.

When Obama was elected, I was talking to my liberal friend in Santa Cruz, California. We were walking near the beach, I don’t even remember why, and he was delirious that Obama had won. My friend believed that Obama would roll back the worst of the Bush-era BS. Gitmo would be closed down, drones would stop bombing people, stuff like that. I said, “I don’t think so. Presidents rarely give back the powers seized by their predecessors, even if they were gained by the other party.” He said, “In that case, we’ll have to hold Obama’s feet to the fire.” I remember that specific phrase: hold Obama’s feet to the fire. I said, “Liberals won’t do that.” They didn’t. Not only did Obama fail to close Guantanamo Bay’s illegal prison and torture center, but the scale of illegal drone attacks escalated during his administration. Liberals don’t like to talk about that. Just like they don’t want to talk about Bil Clinton being a sexual predator or how Joe Biden deported more people than Donald Trump’s first administration.

I think this illustrates the fundamental problem of American liberalism. They say one thing but act – and have consistently acted – against their stated values for generations. They all say they want universal health care but never seem to elect people who are willing to fight for it. They want to save the environment, but not if it means they have to give anything up, and certainly not enough to vote ecowarriors into positions of power. And, yes, they’re the kind of people who say they support the rights of the poor while also paying developers to gentrify neighborhoods. After decades of this cognitive dissonance, they’re hitting a wall. So, Appelbaum doesn’t want to turn the lens towards himself. The problem isn’t that liberals are hypocrites, saying one thing and constantly doing another. It’s that progressives are the problem! Even as Appelbaum cuts a paper tiger that looks far more like a liberal than a progressive, holding forth on values that aren’t just contrary to progressive values but were once against even liberal values.

In the post-Soviet world, capitalism became triumphalist. Liberals, en masse, rejected not just socialism (they’d always rejected Soviet-style communism, so I won’t speak to that,) but what had been the mainstay of liberal economics since the Great Depression: Keynesianism. That’s the economic policy that dominated Western policy from roughly 1932 to 1981. It’s the economic theory behind limited redistribution of wealth – characterized by very high taxes on the extraordinarily rich – to provide a social security net. But in 1992, the liberal Democrats elected the free trade warrior Bill Clinton into the presidency. Clinton slashed services and supported globalism in the service of free trade. It was entrepreneurs all the way, bab-ee. The Rust Belt wasn’t a temporary industrial setback anymore, but official US policy. Democrats haven’t looked back. It’s free trade – entrepreneurialism – all the way. Not just no socialism but not even Keynesianism.

At the same time, words kept filling the liberal’s mouth! Words like “Everyone needs health care” and “We need to fix the environment.” Or, in this case, “We need more affordable housing.” Some of them even mention raising taxes. But, here’s the thing, not enough to actually do it. Not enough to elect people who say that we need to raise taxes on the rich and redistribute the wealth to the poor – to create the “abundance” in less fortunate communities that Appelbaum identifies as necessary for their “revival” without gentrification.  Instead, they imagine, against all evidence to the contrary, after generations of the super-rich fucking over the poor, that entrepreneurs will fix the problem.  Or even that they want to fix it.

Appelbaum is not yet willing to say, “Liberals are cowards.” He probably never will. After all, he works for The Atlantic. He’s an apex liberal, a well-off Ivy League-educated East Coast elite. Such an admission would also be, after all, synonymous with admitting cowardice, and that’s hard. Liberals believe – as do we all – that they’re the good guys, but they don’t walk the walk. They know what they need to do, but they don’t want to do it. It is easier to blame progressives for something they didn’t do than yourself for what you are doing. That’s their cognitive dissonance talking.

III.

Obviously, progressives make mistakes. I think that “cancel culture” is cruel, myself. Scouring the Internet for all the stupid things people have said and then roasting them for it? That’s mean-spirited and solves nothing.  (It often fails, so it’s a combination of cruel and incompetent.  Louis CK is still headlining shows in sold-out venues.  I fully expect Neil Gaiman to bounce back, and JK Rowling has had no noticeable decline in her success.) But what’s the opposite of a “progressive.” At best, it’s conservative. But more generally, the people who oppose progressives are reactionaries.

Yeah, progressives might do something like support cancel culture. Reactionaries round people up and put them into camps. They created laws that keep two million Americans in prisons and jails. They take away women’s medical rights. They try to overthrow the fucking government.

Do progressives make mistakes? All the time. But their goals aren’t the overthrow of democracy. But when you attack progressivism itself rather than the errors it makes – when you say that progressivism is the problem, not that it has flaws that need to be fixed, while attributing to them problems they have nothing to do with, like blaming them for gentrification – you empower reactionaries.

This is, I think, the point. Appelbaum desires a world where entrepreneurs – people like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, etc. – run everything. The weird thing is, they already do! Some of the only people left in the way of a clean sweep of American society by the entrepreneurs that Appelbaum loves so much are progressives.

But actual progressives are hard to attack. They do want to make things better. So, if you’re a reactionary dipshit or, perhaps, an idiot, you invent a straw man “progressive.” In this alternate universe, gentrification is caused by “progressives” and not by money-hungry real estate developers, a world where entrepreneurs – again, against all evidence to the contrary and their openly expressed desires – would ignore the very profit motives that drive entrepreneurialism to create affordable housing! Then you find a magazine that has equally ignorant or evil editing and get it published.

Unfortunately, this article is now just one of many. My actual take is that Appelbaum is a liberal – and certainly, the overall editorial policies of The Atlantic are liberal – in a time when American liberalism is eating itself alive. Many liberals in the US voted for Trump because of Biden’s handling of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. They didn’t vote for the Green Party or some other progressive party but for a felon who tried to overthrow the government! Think about that for a moment: liberals voted for Trump because they imagined he would be better than Biden in handling Israel’s crimes in Gaza! That’s how liberals protest these days, by supporting even worse options.  Liberals are so good at owning the libs! Liberalism in the US is in a crisis. I believe they have reached a critical point in their cognitive dissonance.

Appelbaum and The Atlantic are a microcosm of American liberalism in 2025: a serpent eating its own tail. They know what’s wrong, but they can’t seem to muster the courage to demand universal health care and fix the environment; then they buy into the ideology of their rivals to justify their failures rather than facing up to their mistakes and walking through the hail of arrows to live according to their values. It’s easier to say, “Oh, it’s those progressives.”

Note:

(1) Seriously bad. Embarrassingly bad. It’s crap like this that makes me critical of editorialship in general. The Atlantic is supposed to be a flagship of American literature, but it’s chock full of editorial decisions that are so awful, so repugnantly incompetent that it demonstrates the corruption of the traditional publishing business. For fuck’s sake, Appelbaum mentions that zoning laws started as anti-Chinese legislation! Following the well-known progressive values of screwing over minorities! Jesus. Appelbaum can’t keep his fucking argument straight. How did this pass editorial muster?