Progressives are regressive. They are people that are truly mired in ideological bog, unwilling to adapt to the world that is. Anyone whose had the pleasure to read the Grok for any stretch of time is surely to have noticed the word “regressive” mordantly used in place of “Progressive” when referring to those that characterize themselves as one.
The HealthCare.gov / Obama Care rube-goldberg-Three-Stooges episode shines a klieg light glare on this truth for anyone honest enough to admit what they’re witnessing with their own eyes. There is indeed more truth in this substitution of progressive for regressive than one might initially suspect. It’s not simply an ad hominem (Though, let’s be fair, it’s that too and deservedly so:0)
The single payer healthcare, universal healthcare, command and control authoritarian diktat healthcare has been a dream for Progressives for at least a hundred of years in this country. They haven’t changed. They haven’t adapted. They’re still clutching ideas from 1912. Still cheering ideas carried by their man who would become the most racist president of the 20th century, Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Still yearning for “compulsory health insurance”. That’s not revolutionary. That’s not new. That’s not edgy. That’s antique. That’s decrepit.
It’s not that they didn’t ask themselves why it hasn’t been popular in this country for over a hundred years, why it hasn’t gained favor of the masses. They’ve asked themselves, told themselves that the answer is that people just are too stupid, they need a sinister legerdemain to coerce them into it. For their own good. They’ll like it in the end, which is precisely where they stuck it.
So it’s no surprise, when they had all the levers of government at their disposal and could advance a lefty goody, they went to the healthcare at all speed and force. But did they come up with something new and cutting edge for healthcare? No. They walked up to Uncle Joe’s rickety attic, swept away the cob webs, blew off the dust and cracked open the dormant hundred year old artifact. Never mind that its underlying principle hasn’t worked in the interim (including for Uncle Joe— warning graphic).
Then the October 1st liberal face plant came in all its delicious glory. And Progressives were perplexed and bewildered by its failings. They deflected it with, “its just the website, it’ll be fixed”. But even here, their embrace of the antiquated and old is rich. The monster governmental Leviathan (that the Progressive foisted in place) oversaw the construction of the chief Progressive “achievement” with cutting edge technology circa 1994. That’s right, the sclerotic reality of Progressives ideals used 20 year old technology to build their Holy Grail that they’ve been yearning a century for.
But there’s more to it than that. There’s another relation. In software development this dichotomy exists as well. For the most part, one side is a top down, central planned approach called Waterfall, and the other is referred to a Agile.
In Waterfall, things are extensively planned and dictated in advance of doing any actual development. Experts pretend to foresee the detailed intricacies way down in the code, and understand the dependencies of pieces that do not exist except for in their plans.
The other is Agile. Where one part of the system is addressed at a time in an iteration. There’s a long term plan of where to go, but features are deconstructed into manageable pieces, and each piece is tackled one at a time. Things are learned throughout the process and the iterations are planned and adjusted accordingly.
The main distinction I’d like to draw here is that in Waterfall, decisions are made remotely. By people who do not know the code yet, do not know where the problems are because it doesn’t exist. In Agile, the decisions are made by people closest to the problem. Who know the code because it does exist. They know if they made a mistake. They know if other pieces will need to be redressed. The notion of an all-seeing expert does not exist in this approach.
Progressivism is Waterfall. It wants planned, predetermined outcomes and pretends the human can achieve this on a grand scale. And if it doesn’t work, it wasn’t the idea that failed, but its implementation (i.e, it wasn’t done right). For an interminable, risible example of this read Paul Krugman’s insistence that we need more government stimulus to get us out of this protracted Obamanomic stasis. He’ll state the last wasted excursion didn’t work because it simply wasn’t big enough– he means that it wasn’t implemented correctly. That will always be his reply. The progressive mind is a kind of biological thought emaciating disease where healthy synaptic fluid desiccates and moulders into a powdery hokum which is then stuffed in a bowl, lit and passed around a drum circle.
As is typical with the Progressive they project their own malignant characteristic onto others. We hear all the time from the left how the right is stale, old, and doesn’t want to advance. Meanwhile it’s the right champions the free market and liberty, which, together, is the most radical vehicle for change the world has ever seen. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the standard of living through the centuries and marvel at its alacritous rise in the last 200 plus years vs. the previous 2000. It’s astonishing. Thank the free market and people who cherished liberty, and stiff arm the dormant Progressive.
It’s a simple truth. The people closest to the problem, know best how to deal with it. Not some remote central planner bureaucrat. That’s the old way, the ancient way. That’s regressive, not progressive. The self described Progressive will never learn. For they can’t. They are truly regressive.