Incivility: Progressivism’s Unacknowledged Cost

High and rising levels of anger, hatred, aggression, violence, coercive legislation, and litigation are recurring themes in commentaries regarding contemporary America’s uncivil social and political cultures. Conventional analyses typically describe these disruptive phenomena without proposing either a coherent theory to explain them, or coherent policies for curtailing their rising incidence and reversing their adverse consequences. This essay argues that the principal, yet generally unacknowledged cause of today’s uncivil, adversarial culture is the prevalence of identity politics and political factions acting within a conflicted environment of redistributive progressive politics and counterprogressive postmodern ideology. Progressive policies tacitly trade—often without regard for either inherent human nature or the “common good”—civility for hoped-for reductions in social and economic inequality in the name of “social justice.” Returning society to a less contentious and more productive equilibrium would require a return to the tenets of classical liberalism, which eschew progressivism’s destructive utopian and moralistic ideals.