11-24-2020, 12:40 AM
(11-23-2020, 01:45 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: Keeping the vote to those that could afford a good education and to whites was never progressive. As it turned out the Marxists were autocratic, against democracy, and could not be progressive no matter how progressive the theory said the ought to be.
My grandfather was abusive towards my grandmother when he was drunk. Before prohibition, males drinking their salary was a traditional response to the worst abuses of capitalism. I can see why a lot of people wanted to try the great experiment. Substance abuse is still a problem, but keeping it to a manageable level seems to have required prohibition for a time. The problem is you can’t totally ban something the public badly wants.
The arrow of progress - equality, human rights, democracy - is real enough. People who pretend that you are being progressive while going against those things are delusional.
As I said above, you're simply defining "progressive" to match the values progressives hold today, which means you don't have to take responsibility for failed progressive values and actions in the past, and you can claim to have always been on the right side of history.
Prohibition didn't keep substance abuse to a manageable level. Its only value was in showing what a complete failure that it was. In fact, prohibition resulted in the utter disappearance of the temperance movement in the United States. The temperance movement was a major movement in society, wherein large portions of religious institutions and government officials regularly preached against alcohol, and considered alcohol a great evil. All of the temperance organizations disbanded when Prohibition was passed, but they never re-formed when Prohibition was repealed. So suddenly society had a blind eye to the negative effects of alcohol.
Socialism has been a disastrous failure worldwide, but we only know that because we saw it in action on a wide scale. The left has been flirting with socialism for well over a century, while conservatives fought tooth and nail to stomp it out wherever they could.
Essentially, conservatives in any era tend to resist change, while various types of progressives and radicals and others push to try to introduce new ideas to improve society in their eyes. This means that successful positive changes were always resisted by conservatives, but it also means that terrible disastrous new ideas were also resisted by conservatives.