Our Turning Point: Either a Liberal or Progressive America

... The United States is at a "1776 Moment" of ideological transformation. The American Revolution of 1776 marked a change of political ideology from constitutional monarchy to liberalism. Today, the ideological transformation is from liberalism to progressivism....

The American Ideology of Liberalism

Historically, the United States has possessed a single dominant ideology of liberalism... Liberalism is a political ideology that promises liberty for the individual. It employs the concept of inalienable rights and individual freedoms. These ideas and principles are expressed in America’s founding documents...

U.S. political institutions encompass liberal principles, values, norms, and culture. These include the ideas that animate liberalism—freedom, private property, respect for the rule of law, citizenship, and patriotism—and thus the country’s formal political institutions....

For liberalism to work, the power of government must be controlled. It is limited, first, through the separation of powers...

...  it was the political ideology of liberalism that unified all Americans, including later immigrants....

In the American context, while "liberals" and "conservatives" had their policy differences, both camps were classically liberal in their general outlook. Other ideologies, such as socialism, arose out of foreign philosophies and experiences that were alien to the American experience...

Progressivism and the History of Communist Thought

A symptom of our "1776 Moment" is that the Democrats, once stalwart liberals, have become progressives, which means, in fact, they have become socialists. Progressivism’s origins are found in the thought of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels....

In the West, Italian communist Antonio Gramsci and in Germany the Institute of Social Research, known as the Frankfurt School, argued independently of each other that culture would be the instrument of revolution in the West....This revolution could be executed over decades of gradual change....

The educational system, in particular, was of central importance to shape subsequent generations...

Independently from Gramsci, the Frankfurt School—most significantly Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse—advanced a similar message for advancing communism in the West.... This would evolve into critical theory....

The family, as the "germ cell" of bourgeois culture, had to be undermined, destroyed, and reconstituted... 

... these dogmas promote the liberation sought by critical theory—liberation of those who were once oppressed—and the destruction and replacement of liberalism and traditional American identity, values, and principles. Here are the seeds of "hate speech" laws and speech codes to... control thought and expression....

Third, progressivism is totalizing...  which means that there can be no opposition or allowance of alternative political choices or political thought...

Fourth, liberalism’s individualism is replaced with group identification...

Fifth, progressives replace meritocracy with equity so that principle of outcome supplants that of using talent and skill to gain a position....

Sixth, progressivism seeks to replace liberalism and American political culture and history with progressivism’s principles, culture, and history...

CRT [Critical Race theory] serves as the mechanism to accelerate revolutionary change....

The Consequences

The impact of progressivism is revolutionary: the replacement of liberal ideology and culture with its Marxist alternative.... The beneficiaries are America’s enemies, most significantly China, which watches with glee while the United States tears apart the sources of its great strength....

... Americans do not know which should be obeyed, or perhaps even which is legitimate. Moreover, there is a generational divide....

The consequence of the "1776 Moment" is that the United States will either sustain liberalism as its ideology or become a totalitarian country. The plan of progressivism is clear. To prevent it requires a renaissance of liberalism to assert America’s political ideology, culture, and history....

About Bradley A. Thayer

Bradley A. Thayer is the co-author of How China Sees the World: Han-Centrism and the Balance of Power in International Politics, and author of Darwin and International Relations and the forthcoming Understanding the China Threat.