Over the last two decades, Democrats have increasingly labeled themselves “progressives,” repurposing an old word long fallen out of use. Before the 1990s, you rarely heard anyone call themselves or anyone else a “progressive” outside of historical accounts of turn-of-the-century politics. The Progressive Movement flourished back when suffragettes wore elaborate hats, bicycles were a craze, and Teddy Roosevelt hunted big game. Liberalism was the political philosophy of the New Deal Democratic Party. Over the 1970s and 1980s, however, associations with student radicals, utopian ideals, and urban dysfunction had tarnished the word “liberal” in the minds of too many voters, and Republicans learned they could win a lot of campaigns by simply pinning the word “liberal” to their opponent's lapel. Republican political consultant Arthur Finkelstein rose to national fame with this strategy, airing devastating attack ads in countless campaigns that simply repeated “liberal” again and again as if it were the filthiest of words.1 The label “progressive” rode to the rescue.

When adopting the name of this old historical force, many modern Democrats presume the historical progressives believed much the same things they believe. Conservatives, on the other hand, attack the policies and sins of the historical Progressive Movement, presuming that discrediting the historical progressives discredits modern liberalism by extension. Neither seems to understand a basic historical fact—progressivism isn't the same thing as New Deal liberalism. Not all modern Democrats are progressives. Nor do progressive ideals inevitably lead to all facets of modern liberalism. The modern Democratic Party contains substantial progressive impulses, but a lot of what people now call progressivism isn't.

THE IMPULSE FOR MORAL REFORM

Every human society that has ever existed has been flawed. Human beings, after all, are flawed. From the smallest ancient tribes to the greatest modern civilizations, every human community has in different ways tolerated gross inefficiency, rank injustice, and the perpetuation of unspeakable evils by some people against others. Time and again, in every corner of the earth, accidents of birth like race, tribe, or social class have arbitrarily placed the boots of some people on the necks of others. Time and again, ignorance has defeated knowledge and the ignorant have punished the wise. Time and again, the cruel and the dull witted have risen to power to destroy the lives and families of the meek and the just. Everywhere in the world, during every era in history, cruelty, injustice, and ignorance have prevailed despite our best hopes. No one has yet devised the perfect society. Depravity lurks inside too many human hearts. The world is imperfect. Life is not fair.

At the same time, human societies aren't just cruel and irrational Hobbesian struggles of man against man. For every cruel dimwit on a throne, a near-saint rises to protect citizens against misrule. For every unjust proclamation, someone else imposes a just one at personal cost because it's the right thing to do. For every unkindness, someone else offers self-sacrificing kindness. There are always people pushing to make things better. Along with cruelty, murder, and war, humanity has created prosperity, joy, art, and culture. The struggle between these two sides of humanity creates civilization, which, while never perfect, protects us from the countless wicked depravities we would suffer if we were ever cast back into the savage wasteland. Despite all our flaws, humans have done a reasonable job of creating fair and workable social orders because some people have always sacrificed to improve the human condition, creating societies more just, fair, and prosperous than before.

The root of modern progressivism thus stretches back to the very beginnings of civilization, with all those who looked at flawed societies, saw imperfections, and had the impulse to work toward improving them to make them a little better, richer, more moral, or more just. For most of world history, that mostly meant advancing the moral codes of religion. That's because, until recently, nearly every society was under a near-absolute ruler backed by a small and powerful ruling class. Whether that ruler was a king, a queen, a prince, a warlord, a chief, a sultan, a high priest, or a khan, the bottom line was always the same—while culture and custom imposed some limits on dealing with other members of the ruling class, rulers and those around them could essentially do to peasants what they liked. For millennia, the politics of improving society was therefore the politics of improving kings. If you wanted your society to be ruled better—not just for the king but for the people at large—you needed to convince the king and nobles to be judicious in the exercise of power over others. You needed to convince them not to hoard the nation's bounty and to govern fairly under laws and not by whim. You needed to convince them not to rape, murder, and steal when the law, as it existed, allowed them to do all that and worse for no reason other than that they felt like it. The citizens in societies with just kings and relatively benevolent ruling classes enjoyed more fairness, justice, and prosperity than citizens in societies with ruthless kings and unscrupulous ruling classes. The only way to impose limits on an absolute ruler is with the help of someone stronger. The only person stronger than a king is God, or in some circumstances the gods.

A king and his courtiers are unlikely to restrain their appetites just because it's the right thing to do. The threat of eternal damnation is more likely to seize their attention. When reformers sought to reform kings, they naturally tended not toward abstract arguments about the benefits of a just society but arguments of personal morality based on religious teachings. A king could easily understand that it was in his personal interest to obey the will of the only being stronger than he was. It was therefore in the interest of reformers to connect their arguments not to abstract public policy or grand theories of society but to the tenets of the king's religious beliefs. Whether it be hell and Satan, reincarnation as a lowly earthworm, the possibility of shaming one's ancestors, or having one's heart weighed too heavy before Osiris, the powerful would suffer if they behaved too unjustly. For kings and nobles, fear of the divine instilled good reason not to behave like monsters. For most of human history, social justice and religious morality were therefore essentially intertwined. While philosophers sometimes thought and argued over systems of rules or abstract fairness, and while some eastern systems of morality had both secular and spiritual elements, the core of most social reform was grounded in codes of personal morality backed by the tenets of belief. Even an eastern philosophy like Confucianism that didn't directly call on the will of a god was invoked and obeyed like religion. From antiquity to the Renaissance, the practical work of reforming society was mostly about ensuring the personal morality of individual lords and kings, encoded and enforced by the authorities of a religious establishment. A society where justice depended on whether the ruler was personally receptive to arguments about religious morality, however, was perilous. While a pious king and ruling class meant society would most likely be more fair, a king and ruling class who didn't much fear God often meant nightmares. Worse, even pious rulers sometimes interpreted religious morality to justify cruel or unjust actions. World history is chock full of wars, jihads, human sacrifices, crusades, tribal raids, and inquisitions justified on the basis of moral belief.

During the eighteenth century, the Western world embraced the Enlightenment and Western societies began to believe that people ought to order their affairs according to reason instead of according to the whims of authority or the habits of tradition. Among the many earthshaking results of this simple premise was the spread of republican governments responsible to the will of the people and not to absolute rulers or powerful nobles. How society treated its citizens no longer turned on whether the current cabal of rulers happened to be good people. If officials proved cruel, selfish, evil, or indifferent to the needs of any class, the people could replace them. How a democratic republic treated its citizens turned on the morality not of kings but of voters. If you wanted to reform society in a democratic republic, you needed to reach its people. The most powerful tool available for reforming people, however, remained the same—morality and religion. From attempting to instill morality into a few powerful rulers, moral reformers turned their attention to saving the souls of the great mass of ordinary citizens. The first of these new republics was the United States of America.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, these forces—democracy, religion, and reform—intermingled in America through the religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening, helping to bring America's Second Party System to its end by the middle of the century. Reformers launched movements for the better treatment of prisoners and the mentally ill.2 They threw themselves into poverty aid work. Most important, they began a crusade to abolish slavery from America's shores. Their methods, however, still mainly involved teaching personal religious morality as a tool to improve the individual characters and behaviors of Americans.³ Where prior generations of reformers would have achieved their goals by making arguments of religious morality to a king, the reformers of young America quoted scripture at the American people. Reformers reasoned that, since the people of the republic controlled the government, the only way to improve and perfect society was to improve and perfect its citizens.⁴ For all the Enlightenment and democracy had changed about politics, social reform was still a battle to save souls.⁵ The only thing that changed was whose souls must be saved—the king's or everybody's. The desire for social justice we associate with progressivism and the desire to protect and advance virtue were, for most of human history, for all intents and purposes the same thing. Then we invented social science.

SOCIAL SCIENCE AND THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT

The birth of social science finally severed the cause of social reform from religious morality. For most of human history, what we call the social sciences—economics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, political science, and their cousin disciplines—weren't considered sciences but fields of philosophy. Human behavior wasn't something we could study and catalogue or describe with the rigidity of theorems, statistics, and axioms. It was a mystery to contemplate. Those who attempted to understand humanity were “moral philosophers,” while those who studied the natural world of what we now call the hard sciences were “natural philosophers.”⁶ Then Isaac Newton popularized the scientific method as the most rational means to solve problems. Before long, people in the West began to wonder whether the same method Newton used to examine, understand, and manipulate the natural forces of physics might also help examine, understand, and manipulate the patterns of human societies. That idea transformed the contemplations of moral philosophy into the empirical systems of social science.7

The moral philosopher Adam Smith invented the first social science—economics—in 1776, with his now famous work The Wealth of Nations. Smith, who had previously written on philosophical ethics, now dismantled prior mercantilist understandings and set the stage for the modern view of capitalism by setting out theories on how labor and capital actually interrelate in practice. As the nineteenth century progressed, political philosophy transformed into the new field of political science. Anthropology emerged out of the philosophical field of natural history. Emile Durkheim invented sociology. Psychology was recognized as a valid field of study. By the late nineteenth century, looking at human problems through the lens of scientific vigor had gone from a pathbreaking concept to an established academic discipline to a booming and trendy field.⁸ In each discipline, thinkers adopted Newton's scientific method to move past philosophical theories about how human societies might behave to real experimental explorations into how they actually do behave. The scientific exploration of social questions promised to transform the world—if poverty, war, and prosperity could be studied, measured, and understood, perhaps that meant they could be tamed.⁹

This new tool of social science arrived just as novel technological marvels were driving astonishing economic progress. New technologies like railroads, photography, and electric current were changing the country. Factories transformed cities. Telegraphs allowed long distance communication. America was booming with new innovation and inventions and opportunities. It stood to reason that the innovation of social science might just bring social progress that rivaled the economic progress these technical marvels had delivered. At the same time, with peace and stability restored after a brutal civil war, America's appetite for social reform resumed once more. A new generation had grown up without scarring memories from the conflict. Free of Civil War era obsessions, they looked at a changing Gilded Age America and saw a host of troubling new problems without solutions.10 America was no longer an agricultural secondary power building farms in the wilderness but a budding industrial powerhouse and rising global power, with its young people fleeing farms for new opportunities in cities. It was a nation with new immigrants crowding into dangerous tenement houses, exploitative and dangerous sweatshop labor, and women and children working grueling fourteen-hour days. Social reformers faced social ills for which no solutions yet existed.

At about the same time, a new religious revival swept across the land. American religion had grown quiet after the Civil War as the nation focused on rebuilding, but now evangelical activists, seized by the belief that they might bring about God's Kingdom on Earth by reforming away society's ills, rushed forth again eager to reform America into a more just and moral nation. This new generation of reformers, however, discovered they had a new tool to address the problems of their era that previous reformers hadn't had—social science. Instead of improving every individual one by one, reformers could use social science to design and implement institutions that redirected human impulses toward moral outcomes. Despite the inevitability of individual moral weakness, wise and moral experts could employ social planning as a tool to transform a nation.¹¹ Not only could they build a society that yielded just, fair, and moral results, but they could even use these tools on malleable humans to reshape them using education and public policy.¹² This marriage of reformist moral fervor and social science created the Progressive Movement,¹³ whose crusade to remake and reform America shone across America's Fourth Party System.¹⁴

The Progressive Movement was an interrelated network of movements, activists, journalists, social scientists, and professionals who shared a common perspective and philosophy. Believing change didn't bubble up from below but rather came from moral and just leadership above, progressives wanted to empower strong, wise, educated, and rational leaders to impose beneficial change on society.¹⁵ Progressives, therefore, wanted to employ modern knowledge and expertise to socially plan a more fair, moral, and efficient America, eliminating the novel ills the new economy had brought as well as older ones that had long plagued human societies. Progressivism was a phenomenon of the educated middle and upper classes.16 It flourished most with the generation that grew up amid new stability after the carnage of the Civil War.¹⁷ It mixed scientific rationalism with evangelical revival, as many progressives held millennialist beliefs about the importance of reforming America into God's Kingdom through a new “Social Gospel.”¹⁸ It was both business friendly and pro-regulation, drawing lines between good and moral wealth (like that of its frequently wealthy followers) and bad immoral wealth (like that of the “trusts”).¹⁹ It prized efficiency, order, and professionalism as keys to advancing human progress over irrational human impulses.²⁰ It was a movement “middle class in its outlook, moralistic in its temper, moderate and resourceful in its approach to problems of policy”²¹ that united social reformers, poverty workers, good-government advocates, evangelical preachers, business leaders, efficiency experts, and energetic social scientists into one single political group.

Since progressivism was more a common spirit and philosophy than a united political organization, it linked a multitude of interrelated efforts to reform America. There were the settlement houses that sprung up in major cities, such as Hull House in Chicago, in which people like Jane Addams, mainly young middle-class women with a Christian outlook, sought to assist, educate, and reform the urban poor.²² There were the social workers like Frances Perkins, who advocated for new laws that would stop factory abuses such as the ones that had caused the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, and lobbied for maximum work hours laws and the end of child labor.²³ There were the Muckrakers who exposed abuses and outrages in muckraking magazines like McClure's, such as Ida Tarbell and her famous expose on Standard Oil.²⁴ There were the suffragettes who organized and battled to finally win the vote for women. There were the temperance crusades and prohibitionists who, through the Women's Christian's Temperance Union and Anti-Saloon League, convinced America that alcohol was immoral, leading working-class men (especially Catholic immigrants from places like Ireland) to squander money their families needed desperately and to become violent toward their wives and children.25 There were the middle-class reformers who campaigned for good government against political machines such as Tammany Hall. There were the journalists and writers like Herbert Croly, who created an intellectual framework for progressive reform, and the professionals and social scientists who offered up their expertise to solve public problems.²⁶ There were the preachers of the Social Gospel, such as Walter Rauschenbusch, who taught that it was every Christian's duty to throw themselves into national projects for social reform to remake America into a truly godly society.²⁷

For the first two decades of the twentieth century, progressivism reigned as the most powerful political and social movement in America. Progressives cooperated to stamp out abuses, impose rational planning, and morally reform America. Their accomplishments were astounding.²⁸ Progressives targeted the new social problems industrialization had brought at a time when abuses ran rampant—dark practices like child labor, wage slavery, and hard fourteen-hour working days; huge new factories with inhumane conditions; cities newly bursting with poor and struggling immigrants from every corner of the world; massive new transportation networks bringing processed food and untested medicines from unknown sources; behemoth trust corporations run by wealthy and powerful men who dominated entire industries; and organized political corruption keeping it all in place.

Progressives won laws that eliminated child labor, eradicated abusive sweatshops preying on working women and children, imposed maximum work hours, and implemented minimum wages.²⁹ They created public assistance regimes to help the struggling working class and poor.³⁰ They created the Food and Drug Administration to ensure contaminants didn't enter the industrial food supply and to eliminate quack remedies from medicine in an era in which new national markets empowered unscrupulous fly-by-night schemers to harm masses of people with scam products. Progressives created antitrust laws to stop anticompetitive behavior like price-fixing that unfairly drove competitors out of business at a time in which powerful national businesses had emerged that could leverage their size to drive smaller competitors from the market.31 They fought for good government providing competent service to everyone, without the graft most Americans had come to take for granted in an era in which patronage and machine-boss politics dominated. They pushed parties to pick candidates through primary elections and fought to replace city bosses with nonelected expert city managers to degrade the power of the political bosses who had previously handpicked machine candidates they controlled.³² They won a constitutional amendment to allow citizens to directly elect their senators (whom state legislatures had elected previously). They built parks in cities so children had healthy green places to play.³³ They promoted the conservation of nature and created the National Parks.³⁴ They promoted an “efficiency movement” in the public and private arena, inventing a new science of business management that taught that expert managers could create optimally efficient systems to produce more for the benefit of all.³⁵ They finally won the vote for women and cleared the way for national alcohol prohibition to eliminate the corrupt influence of intoxicating drink.

The historical Progressive Movement, however, wasn't the same thing we call modern “progressivism.” At its heart, the Progressive Movement wasn't a movement to empower poor and working people. It was a national movement with a moral and religious backing seeking to use rationalism and science to purify America. Progressives wanted to help the poor and destitute, but they didn't want to empower the downtrodden. They wanted to reform and uplift the lower classes to instill the habits of their betters.³⁶ Progressives didn't want more representation for the poor in government or to break the power of elites—in fact they actively worked to break up the very urban political machines built to do so in the belief that they were inefficient and corrupt.³⁷ Progressives didn't want the people to rule, as William Jennings Bryan demanded, but to empower a brilliant, strong, independent, and morally good elite group of experts who would drive progress for everyone.³⁸ Progressives had an uneasy relationship with labor unionism.³⁹ Progressive charity was often explicitly predicated on the recipient's moral character because it wasn't motivated by solidarity with the poor but their improvement. Progressives seized upon the new science of eugenics—holding that experts could even improve the quality of the human race by rationally intervening into the human gene pool—seeing a scientific method to permanently eliminate social ills by breeding out undesirable human traits (leading to abominable discrimination against the disabled, compulsory sterilizations and abortions, racial classifications, and interventions into the family life of the poor).40 Progressives wanted to regulate low behavior in business not because they distrusted capitalism—they often came from wealthy business-owning families themselves—but to drive immoral people of low character from the marketplace. Many progressive reforms also had secondary motives that would trouble modern progressives, such as the good-government reforms meant to break up the power of Democratic-voting immigrant political machines, alcohol prohibition meant to break up the saloons where Catholic immigrants politically organized, education meant to Americanize Catholic immigrants and instill moral righteousness, and women's suffrage that would dilute the votes of immigrant Catholic men who wouldn't let their wives or sisters vote.⁴¹ The poor and immigrant targets of progressive reform usually held progressive causes in contempt, such as temperance, women's suffrage, and good government initiatives.⁴² The religious Republican progressives weren't modern liberal Democrats.

During the Great Depression, when Franklin Roosevelt invited so many progressives into his party, he created a new ideology that drew in part on this progressive tradition. Progressivism is the part of the Democratic Party that believes experts using knowledge, science, and planning, can design more fair, just, efficient, and prosperous systems for everybody. A progressive believes human society is imperfect but perfectible—or at least greatly improvable. Progressives have confidence in the ability to study and plan away human ills, working around the human condition to design more fair, efficient, and prosperous societies. Progressives believe in good government, meritocracy, and ambitious plans. They're the “cause Democrats” who see the party as a base for their activism. They're the environmentalists who think we can enjoy prosperity while also leaving a wholesome and undamaged earth. They're the civil rights activists who believe we can eradicate prejudices and intolerance. They're the social reformers who think we can stamp out poverty. They're the advocates for smart regulation that smooths out the jagged edges of private enterprise. A working-class Democrat who believes in the party's economic agenda but who is also religiously conservative, uncomfortable with homosexuality, suspicious of claims about what must be done to protect the environment, unsure about the truth of evolution, and deeply worried that social and economic change is shattering the America he knew and leaving him and his family behind, is not a progressive. His political beliefs come from a completely different place than the politics of an upper-middle-class university professor concerned about gay rights, climate change, whether women can break into the corporate suite, and the advance of social justice.

Progressivism remains a powerful idea in American politics. It's a political expression of the can-do American spirit that believes any problem, no matter how seemingly impossible, can be solved if only good men and women roll up their sleeves and fully apply themselves to the task. Progressivism is about planning, good government, expertise, efficiency, and making systems more fair and just. It's about belief in the perfectibility of human societies and the promise of a better future if we just find the right institutions, interventions, and plans. It's only one part of New Deal liberalism, but it's also bigger than New Deal liberalism. Societies will always have social and moral reformers looking to make things better. In America, the progressive impulse to engineer a better society with knowledge and expertise remains a strong expression of that impulse, one that's likely to remain an influential driver of our politics as far into our future as we can now foresee.