Where do progressive politics go from here?

Progressivism is reeling from two disasters, of different kinds. The first was the reelection of Donald Trump. The second is the ongoing Los Angeles wildfires. Each, in its own way, has exposed the feeble condition of progressive politics.

Contemporary progressivism has been attempting of late to combine two competing projects, one quite old, one more recent. The older is progressivism’s century-old commitment to administration: the impulse to centralize and rationalize in the name of efficiency and transparency. The impulse is as old as the Progressive Party and the “modernization” efforts of Woodrow Wilson, and it has endured, more or less intact, for a hundred years, albeit channeled and strained through the New Deal, the Great Society, and the Reagan Revolution. Barack Obama was the apotheosis of the progressive vision of technocratic management. His cadres of wonks promised to bring expertise into every nook and cranny of government. Expert hands would carefully manage everything from the nationwide health-care exchange to Iranian nuclear policy, calibrating the machine of American administration with an unfailing touch. When Joe Biden was reelected and staffed his White House with a host of Obama alumni, the endless refrain, “the adults are back in charge,” signaled progressive relief that expertise would again guide American policymaking after the disastrous finger-painting years of Trumpian populism.