Hope and Change
Why progressives are not like Conservatives
I have never voted for Barack Obama, a fact for which I give myself considerable credit. I followed his campaign with some interest and I have to admit, I was a bit in awe of this guy—an “outsider” Black politico who exuded coolness and who appeared out of nowhere, like Superman plummeting from outer space into Smallville and then blazing his path to Metropolis. Obama was more than different or interesting, he was intriguing; he has the most exotic background of any man who ever sat in the Oval Office. His father was a Harvard-educated African. His mother was an anthropologist. And there was something wonderful in the idea that America would, at last, have a Black President.
So I listened to some of his early speeches. Followed his campaign activities.
I was put off by many things, of course, because I am not easily swayed by the latest cool cat to descend on D.C. Was he intelligent? Check. Was he articulate? Check. Did he come out of nowhere? Yes (but don’t ask questions about where he was born, that’s racist.) But when I saw Obama, I saw Chicago. Barack was not from Chicago (Michelle was and, interestingly, Hillary was born there) but he made sure on his educational odyssey—between Occidental College and Columbia and Harvard Universities, that he did a stint in Chicago to do “activism.” He needed “activist” on his resume; he also needed a Black activist wife which he also found in Chicago in the person of Michelle Robinson. I don’t think activism should be a career any more than being beautiful is a career or being a loudmouth is a career. Activism is how you do things, not what you do—and Obama has always been extremely coy about what he believed in. A beautiful person can become an actor or a model or just lead a normal life; being beautiful is not the career. Obama was clearly for improved race relations, but I am not sure he ever said that. We just assumed that. We assumed a lot, and he encouraged us.
I was seriously worried about his close ties to the corrupt Chicago political machine, his mediocre performance as a junior Senator, his absentee career as a professor, his condescending use of the term “folks” when talking to us fly-over state people, and the most empty-headed slogan I’ve seen in a long time. Remember his slogan? Hope and Change. It was only marginally better than Hillary’s slogan in 2016, which, to the best of my recollection, was nonexistent.
The problem with the slogan that involves the word “change” is that change is not inherently good or beneficial. Change is just something different. Change means throwing out what you have and trying something different. Is that worth doing? Maybe on occasion but it’s a poor general policy.
For instance, Obama could have arrived at the Oval Office and declared, “From now on, Americans will drive on the left.” That’s change. A big change. Not a good change, but it’s a change.
He could have changed the color of the currency from green to pink, painted the White House purple, and started a program whereby any citizen who wrote a letter saying to the IRS stating, “I love Obama” got a 10% reduction in their income taxes that year. He could have repealed Social Security, slapped a 50% tax on vegetables, and instituted a program so that billionaires would no longer have to pay taxes at all.
That sounds ludicrous—but that’s the point. Any of those things would be a fulfillment of the vague “change” promise/ Change is a dumb slogan. It’s a dumb mission. It lacks substance.
You can’t reason with a person who is hell-bent on change for change’s sake. They have no ideas, just a desire to detonate everything. It’s the main reason it’s so hard to talk policy with a progressive. They don’t have policy ideas, they have temper tantrums.
Progressives think all change is good. In other words, anything is better that what we have now (thus, it is fundamental to progressive philosophy to hate this country and its history). That’s the meaning behind their name. They believe that change, any change, equals progress, which means any change is an advancement. If you do X, the minute you stop doing X and start doing Y, things will be exponentially better. That’s the heart of the progressive agenda. Whatever we have now, stinks; any change would be an improvement. In fact, for progressive politics there is almost no such thing as a bad change as long as the change lurches us further left. (In other words, a change that would make government smaller or taxes lower is not true “change” in the liberal lexicon.)
This is based on the underlying philosophy of progressivism:
1. Nothing now is as good as it could be, but …
2. Perfection is possible if you just do what we tell you.
It is the second foundational premise that causes us the most harm. Progressives believe in the inherent goodness of man, or perhaps I should be inclusive and say humans. As much as many leftists do not much care for people, to a lefty, human beings are beautiful and nearly perfect entities who have been contorted into suboptimal performance and characteristics because of poor laws, insufficient regulations, and not enough government oversight.
In other words, if the flyover states and deplorables would just listen to the progressive minority, everything would be swell. If the irredeemable people in their unfashionable little towns would just shut up and obey their betters, America could be a fine place.
Progressives believe that the answer to just about every social, economic, professional, medical, scientific, public health, financial, and political question is more government. More regulation, more codes, more bureaucracies, more laws. more think tanks, more committees, and certainly thousands of pages of more rules. The progressive approach to every problem is to deconstruct it (that means smash it into pieces, ideally racial or ethnic pieces), make some new new rules, and then patch things up with spit and duct tape. The heart of the progressive movement is to destroy everything, implement change (the more radical the better), and create a new government agency to oversee it.
Progressive ideas about change are like the ideas of my ex-husband toward chili peppers and hot sauce: too much was never enough.
It's like finding ants in your house and then burning your house to the ground with the conviction that whatever you did next would get rid of the ants plus be a beneficial change. Then you hire 200 people to oversee the rebuilding of the house and slap the taxpayers with the bill. No matter how well or poorly the house is reconstructed, you are thrilled to pieces because the ants are gone. If the house is not well constructed by your overpaid contractors, that’s fine, too. Just sell it or abandon it and let it be somebody else’s problem.
When a violent crime or shooting takes place, progressives all want specific gun-control laws. But when you can prove that those specific laws would not have stopped a given shooting, they get angry. They want the new gun laws anyway. It is not progress if you’re not making new laws, ideally every single day.
And that means more people to interpret and enforce and argue about these new laws. Over the past 12 months in the United States, government employment increased by an average of 55,000 new hires a month. That’s not new people, that’s new jobs. Biden himself has the largest number of taxpayer-paid staffers in American history: in 2023, Biden has 524 full-time paid staffers working for him but paid by us. (Back in the day, Michelle had 24 on her staff and Jill has 20; Melania, at her peak, had a staff of 12.) By the way, despite the largesse of the Biden White House, they have a 46% turnover rate.
But Biden needs a big staff to make more new laws and agencies and programs. On average, the United States issues more than 600 new laws every two years and that’s not counting regulations, which are vastly more numerous. Almost every branch of our federal government maintains its own unique website just cataloging the reams of new laws and regulations it has made in the past few months—because progressives run these departments and to a progressive, making 20 new laws is progress. It’s good. It is practically holy.
The federal internal revenue code is more than 2 million words in length and federal tax regulations run over 7 million words. (War and Peace, the massively long novel by Tolstoy is just under 600,000 words so our tax codes are the equivalent of 3.3 and 11.6 versions of the novel, respectively.) It costs the American economy about $234B a year to comply with this Mount Everest of regulations in the form of professional consultants, attorneys, and tax software.
Remember the war on drugs? Politicians declared war on drugs. This shows you how ineffective the government is at solving things. Today, more people than ever die of drug overdoses. More than 300 people in America die every day of an illicit fentanyl overdose or polysubstance abuse, such as illicit fentanyl mixed with xylazine (“tranq”). Illicit fentanyl is illegal in every state. As they said in Moneyball in a different context and in a slightly different way: if laws work, then why don’t laws work?
This seems bizarre to progressives, who assume that once a law is made, a problem is solved. When drug use continued and even escalated, politicians have rolled out a variety of contradictory and feckless programs of strict incarcerations and harsh penalties, followed by rehabilitation initiatives, and then outright legalization and harm reduction. Today, you can find safe shooting zones in many cities along with tranq zombies and homeless people. There is a lot of change in our nations’ drug policies (some would say flip-flopping) and maybe even some hope … but no results other than massive increases in drug use.
But results do not matter to progressives. (If progressives cared about results, they would not be progressives.) What matters is a constant state of change because remember—everything stinks, but with enough government and lots of new laws, everything can be made awesome. Results do not count, it’s the flux, the state of perpetual change that invigorates. What’s good today is bad tomorrow but good again the day after.
This contrasts to Conservatives who tend to want to conserve or protect the things that work. What works? Truth be told, nothing works perfectly, but Conservatives tend to accept the inherent imperfections and vanities of humans. Conservatives know that nothing will work perfectly every time. Any law can be broken, any system can be corrupted. We know that no matter how many laws and bureaucracies are created, some knucklehead will still try to get away with something. While many people are good and decent, there are those who are always trying to cheat the system. Sometimes they will succeed. Bad people exist. Violent people exist. Mentally ill people exist and wacked-out bizarre people exist. We have to do what we can to stay safe but realize that we cannot create a perfect world. We cannot legislate or litigate our way back to the Garden of Eden, but we can gather data and see what works and make sensible incremental changes to improve things—but not change for change’s sake, change that is meaningful and works. Evidence-based change. Serious change. And we still have to build in safeguards to keep the mighty knucklehead army at bay.
For instance, a Conservative has a front door to his house with a lock and deadbolt on that door. There is also a video camera on the porch and some motion-detector type lights on the law and porch. Does this prevent crime? Not entirely, but it works better than leaving the front door wide open.
A liberal would rather outlaw locks (they don’t work perfectly in all cases), then roll out a $50M training program for neighborhood kids to teach them not to play ding-dong-ditch, followed by building a $100M rehabilitation program to re-educate porch pirates and then put in a series of laws describing all the sorts of doors and locks that are not to be tampered with. Finally, they’d set up new work-release programs so that home invaders get job training rather than annoying prison terms (hope and change, baby). Then, when burglaries and home invasions increase, progressives will blame poor policing and defund the police.
Conservatives like to conserve what works and not fritz with systems gratuitously. When fritzing is required, Conservatives prefer data-based minimal fritz. We like our change the same way we like our property tax increases… small, slow, and spaced far apart.
A slogan like “hope and change” is a tipoff that one is dealing with a progressive—with a person who likes to tear things apart, with no firm idea as to how things work, no data to support their deconstruction, and only the most haphazard inklings as to how to reconstruct things— all the while complaining about the next thing, walking away from all consequences and responsibilities.
Progressives do not build anything, otherwise they wouldn’t be so intent on deconstructing everything. A person who designs and creates a beautiful statue suitable for public display in a park is not obsessed with destroying statues. The people who destroy statues are the “hope and change” crowd who never built a single art object worthy of public display in their lives.
Progressives are more focused on deconstructing than constructing, whereas Conservatives excel at constructing and only reluctantly deconstruct. For instance, progressives came up with the idea of defunding the police. Did that fix anything? Is crime down in places where police got humiliated and fired? Is any place that embarked on this progressive fever dream better off? And where defunding the police failed so spectacularly, what was the progressive response? Have any of those places had progressives come in and restore things at least back to where they were? Of course not.
Progressives deconstructed the Southern border and have no idea how to fix things, even now when the consequences of their treasonous stupidity is being bussed and flown into their backyards. They had no idea what would happen when they tore down the border and they have no idea how to fix things now. The Southern border has changed a lot since the progressive Biden regime got into power. For progressives, that’s cause for jubilation. Meanwhile, many cities are reeling trying to deal with this sudden influx of illegals. That’s change, too.
The other problem with the “hope and change” slogan is that it does not promise anything. Years ago, back in 2016, I was re-acquainted with somebody who graduated high school with me. This guy was very active in the Hillary campaign, I think he was some sort of local chairperson or something. I did not like Hillary but in reconnecting with this old schoolmate, we got to talking politics. I asked him why I should vote for her.
He said that she was a former Secretary of State and she used to be a Senator, plus she had been a First Lady.
I answered and not in a snarky way, “Yes, but that’s a resume. I want to know what her platform is. What is she going to do?” I liked this guy, and I was trying to make what I thought was intelligent conversation. (This is always dangerous when dealing with politically engaged Democrats.)
And the guy—who I thought was my friend—suggested I do something anatomically impossible in a vulgar two-word phrase.
That was the day I decided to vote for Trump. Although the insult stunned me at the time, I learned a lot. I learned that even asking a progressive for a platform or a goal or a political objective is considered highly insulting. To paraphrase the legendary bandito character in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre played by character actor Antonio Bedoya, progressives don’t need no stinkin’ goals. They just have to foment constant change and expand the government. Asking them for goals is perceived is a shameful insult! If it had been 1800, I bet my old school mate would have challenged me to a duel for offending his honor as a progressive.
Change is the goal. Nonstop pointless change and government expansion.
When Conservatives want change, it is either to fix the rampant destruction of progressive policies (such as shutting down the border, enforcing immigration laws, cash bail, arresting criminals, supporting the police) or because they have good data that suggests a change will bring more benefit than harm. For instance, Conservatives wanted schools to open sooner in the pandemic, they want to reduce taxes across the board, they want a strong military—because they had data and evidence these things would help rather than hurt. However, when Conservatives propose change, progressives freak out. That shows they don’t really even believe in “hope and change” as much as they believe in raw power for them and for nobody else.
I see a lot of mass-formation type slogans in the mass media about Donald Trump—that he might make alterations in Obamacare, for example. But that’s change, isn’t it, progressives? Change we can hope for.