If Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign ends in defeat, one of her responses during her Oct. 16 Fox News interview will make a fitting epitaph. Asked about her former advocacy for giving driver’s licenses, college tuition and free health care to undocumented immigrants, she replied, “Listen, that was five years ago.” Those words hold a valuable lesson for a progressive movement more often heard quoting the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous and rather different declaration that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Dr. King’s line, originally from a 19th-century abolitionist and preacher named Theodore Parker, has become so embedded in modern American progressivism that President Barack Obama had it woven into an Oval Office rug. Justice, in this thinking, is not some ideologically neutral improvement of the human condition but rather a progressive notion of social justice, greater rights and autonomy and triumph over systemic forces of oppression. History has a right side, and it is the left side.
Sure enough, the United States has steadily expanded rights and lifted marginalized groups — making good on what Dr. King called the “promissory note” of the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. American culture has steadily liberalized — tolerating, then accepting, then welcoming a broadening range of beliefs and identities. Thus the boundless confidence of young activists that whatever radical idea they pursue next will someday become conventional wisdom. Thus, too, the nervous and awkward following along by older progressives, who dare not risk a position that might seem reactionary.
But what the moral universe’s long arc really has is survivorship bias. Progressive causes that achieved success and bettered the nation, like the New Deal’s worker protections and the civil rights movement of the 1960s, are highly visible today and taught in history books as important inflection points. But for every success, there are also many failures — bold ideas that proved not ahead of their time but simply foolish. Having flickered only briefly in the national consciousness, they are easily forgotten.
Because they did not get far, we tend not to learn the lessons of their catastrophic potential. Few Americans may know about the early-20th-century push by progressives for eugenics, which flopped. The harm its entrenchment would have done is nowhere in the historical record. Zealous young activists, not unlike those now marching around campuses for decolonization, once made Marxist revolution their idealistic cause. American Communism didn’t get far, so it elicits mostly chuckles today, not contemplation of its horrible specter. Because it never took hold, the danger it posed became an antiquated curiosity that no one today must answer for.
In 2019 and 2020, confidently embracing the full progressive agenda of the day, she advocated decriminalizing illegal border crossings and praised the “defund the police” movement, promoted a fund to bail protesters in Minneapolis out of jail and called for “some form of reparations.” She wanted to ban fracking, effectively eliminate gas-powered vehicles and establish a “mandatory gun buyback program.”
When Donald Trump said during his debate with Ms. Harris that “she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison,” prominent progressives assumed he was lying. That “is the WILDEST thing I’ve ever heard in any debate. EVER,” the City University of New York presidential professor Marc Lamont Hill wrote on X. “He just put words together that scares people and barely forms sentences,” Representative Jamaal Bowman exclaimed. But in 2019 Ms. Harris indeed told the American Civil Liberties Union that detained immigrants should be eligible for gender transition surgeries at taxpayers’ expense.
All these ideas now appear to have been on history’s wrong side and stand renounced by the apparently tough-on-crime former prosecutor who is running for the White House and by the Democratic Party more broadly. A decade from now, many of those progressive positions will have vanished from the public consciousness, just as support for detained immigrant transition surgeries has already done. Many universities are abandoning their use of diversity statements in hiring, and some are recusing themselves from political posturing entirely. The enthusiasm for slashing police budgets has reversed itself, and “Black Democratic mayors from San Francisco to New York, Chicago to Washington, D.C.,” NBC News reports, “are moving to increase police budgets.”
For conservatives, with their inclination toward the status quo, these dynamics run in the opposite direction. Less than a decade before Dr. King explained in his “Letter From Birmingham Jail” “why we find it difficult to wait,” William F. Buckley Jr. introduced the conservative National Review as a magazine that “stands athwart history, yelling ‘stop.’” Conservatives are sometimes right to yell “stop” and other times wrong, but the latter is more easily recognized and remembered because change is more visible than stasis. Along with his fellow conservatives, Buckley was right to warn against “fashionable concepts” like “world government.” But world government has made few inroads, so it’s hard to summon much gratitude for the conservative defense of nationhood, an institution that most take for granted.
When conservatives have resisted necessary change, though, history’s judgment is harsh. The Industrial Revolution consigned workers, including countless children, to exploitation and abominable living conditions. Conservatives mounted widespread resistance to government regulation of the workplace, protection for improving those standards and letting workers organize and maintained that resistance until the repeated and decisive political defeats of the New Deal. The emergence of the world’s largest and most prosperous middle class will forever validate that change; any remaining holdouts are just embarrassing. In these contexts, history’s two sides are plain to see: its brave progressives, the heroes, and its backward conservatives, the villains. Undoubtedly, on some issue where conservatives are fiercely resisting change today, the future consensus will be equally harsh.
Our politics would benefit from greater recognition by partisans on both sides that they have been on the right side of some important issues and the wrong side of others and will be again. A country dominated by progressives and pursuing every progressive project unchecked would veer quickly and sharply off course, but so would one beholden only to conservatives determined to resist reform. A constructive politics requires a continual contest between the two intuitions, ensuring that longstanding policies and practices face continual challenges and also receive a robust defense. Participants on both sides of those debates should have confidence that each approach is necessary to the society’s deliberations but not confidence that their own approach will always be proved correct.
In a common thought experiment, people try to identify a belief or practice that they defend today but will someday seem an abomination, as happened with slavery. (Eating meat is a popular answer.) It can be humbling. But it is equally illuminating to ask what social change people demand today that will someday seem outlandish. Five years ago, had someone asked Ms. Harris or her supporters which of those beliefs would soon seem preposterous, they would have been stunned to learn the correct answer was “all of the above.”
That reality should engender some humility among progressive politicians and their supporters, so confident of how to bend the moral universe’s arc and so disdainful of anyone not on board. The Freedom Riders thought they were bending that arc toward justice, but so did the card-carrying Communists.
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