A non-glib assessment of progressivism.

This is an important summary of a recent book The Pity Party: A Mean Spirited Diatribe Against Liberal Compassion

"First, being simultaneously compassionate and nonjudgmental — caring about how people are but not about what they do — disregards the many important ways that what they do determines how they are. Liberalism’s moral paradigm for social welfare programs is the relief effort after a natural disaster. For the same reason, liberals try to frame every issue they can in terms of children’s needs and vulnerabilities. But governing an entire nation on the basis of being nice to children inevitably infantilizes those who are not children."

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"Second, liberals’ hopeful, trusting view of human nature leads, counterintuitively, to strident denunciations of those who disagree with them, or who stymie the progress of the liberal project. Believing that the world’s default option is to be a nice place, liberals explain all the ways it remains an ugly and difficult one in terms of villainy, stupidity, or psychological pathologies. Liberalism exists to solve problems, and regards every source of dissatisfaction or discord as a problem, not an aspect of the human condition that we might ameliorate but can never eliminate."

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"Finally, liberals’ view of human nature jeopardizes many valuable things, the modern bargain chief among them. They are, for example, inclined to interpret, by which I mean to misinterpret, people who detest our way of life as people who aspire to it. Tolerant, nonjudgmental liberals’ instinctive response when Islamist terrorists commit acts of mass murder is, in critic Paul Berman’s words, “to suggest ways in which the apparent mass pathologies were anything but pathologies, and terror was reasonable and explicable and perhaps even admirable.” Of the recent ISIS beheading videos he has written, “The spectacle of black-uniformed holy warriors conducting human sacrifices gives us the chills, but it also makes us sigh. We tell ourselves: Here is what comes of failing to provide adequate social services to young men in blighted neighborhoods.” In other words, liberals’ first reaction is to believe that if decent people simply appeal to the decency latent in others, all will ultimately be well."