Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

The rise of coercive progressivism

A ritual of coercive progressivism? Photo by TOLGA AKMEN/AFP via Getty Images

What has followed the killing of George Floyd did not begin with the death of a man under the knee of a police officer. The rioting and the statue-toppling, the shunnings and the firings, the institutional genuflections and the gleeful marching through newly conquered territory are the fruits of ideas and impulses long in germination. Critics interpret these events as the work of either a political movement or a new religion, but it is more accurate to say that it is both. A secular millenarianism is trying to tear down the liberal order and erect in its place a new order that we might call coercive progressivism. It is an ideological project to enforce a progressive moral code through law, social convention and brute force, but the morality itself emerges from and satisfies a post-Christian search for meaning. 

The historian Gertrude Himmelfarb died at the very end of last year but had she lived she may have been the quickest to understand our present tumult. Himmelfarb was a perceptive scholar of the Victorians and in particular their ideas about virtue, which rested, she contended, on a ‘continuum of manners and morals’. In the Victorian era, Himmelfarb observed, ‘manners were sanctified and moralised, so to speak, while morals were secularised and domesticated’. Simply put, manners were the guardrails of morality: they could not make men paragons but they could keep them within the bounds of propriety. ‘The Victorians thought it no small virtue to maintain the appearance, the manner, of good conduct even while violating some basic precept of morality,’ she explained. Their immediate intention was not saving souls but making men respectable, that more would be in with a chance of salvation. 

Identity politics functions as ‘Christianity without redemption’

Salvation could take many forms. When Margaret Thatcher urged a return to ‘Victorian values’, Himmelfarb reminded the Iron Lady that fierce moralism had also fired radical movements like the Chartists and the temperance campaigners.

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