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Comment by thrance | Hacker News Reader

> Anyway, the thing about traditional communities, in this context - the ones that "have to be a certain way" because they've been that way for generations - is that they have immense inertia; they create real social ties that can bind people together and make them resilient even in the face of very real, structural, systemic oppression.

I really don't know where you're pulling that from. Jim Crow America wasn't a good time for black people. Women got lobotomy after showing the first signs of depression. Gay people were demonized at every occasion.

A return to this awful social hierarchy is MAGA and the right's ultimate goal, no matter how unrealistic. They're dismantling the Civil Rights act piece by piece, just last week they've been able to gerrymander the black vote away thanks to SCOTUS.

Like it or not, every social progress in this country has come from the left.

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> Jim Crow America wasn't a good time for black people. Women got lobotomy after showing the first signs of depression. Gay people were demonized at every occasion.

Many of these things were actively advocated for by the Progressive movement, back in the early 20th c. (Lobotomies came a few decades later, but were ultimately rooted in the exact same ideas about the primacy of 'science!' and trusted institutions over people's lived experience and the deep reality of enduring traditional values.) Studying that history in depth is an excellent way to disabuse oneself of the naïve notion that Progressives are inherently the good guys.

These progressives and modern ones share nothing but the name, and you now it perfectly well.

The progressives back then may have been wrong, but the progressives today have it all right!

You are parroting criticisms made by antiracists and intersectional feminists who are themselves part of the contemporary progressive movement.

This is like when laypeople say "economics is all hogwash because humans aren't rational actors": They are citing behavioural economics as if it disqualifies the field of economics rather than being part of the field.

> Many of these things were actively advocated for by the Progressive movement, back in the early 20th c.

Yeah, the early 20th Century American Progressive movement has no connection to the late 20th-early 21st century American progressive movement, the latter of which adopted “progressive” not in reference to the earlier movement but in reference to "progress” in contrast to what its members perceived to be increasing static defense of a corporate capitalist status quo by other elements of the American liberal movement from which it emerged. It is a essentially a social democratic movement, which is about as far from the early 20th century movement's technocratic elitism as you can get.

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