Matthew Yglesias questions my argument (after Jay Nordlinger) that conservatism has become the new progressivism. Writes Matt:

I think that this is more of an illusion than anything else. It’s true that the anti-war far left has been much more prominent than any anti-war elements on the far right, but the mainstream of American progressivism broke with those elements long ago.

This argument — that those on the left who are anti-war are not representative of the “progressive left” — would come as quite a shock to regular readers of Common Dreams, or The Village Voice, or the San Francisco Chronicle. Weisberg, Bloom, et al., have trotted out this same rhetoric on a number of occasions — that those on the left who’ve been pilloried since 9/11 for giving voice to long-held Left-progressive inanities aren’t taken seriously by the “real” progressivist left — and I don’t find it any more convincing now than a did a few months ago.

The fact is, the icons of the progressivist left held their (admittedly shaky) ground even after 9/11, committed as they are to the idea that America must be responsible — in some way, at least — for virtually any evil visited upon it by those who cannot equal its power. True, the “mainstream of American progressivism” soon broke with their estwhile philosophical heroes — but only after it became apparent that the strategy of Chomsky, Said, Sontag, Kingsolver, Walker, et al, would be to continue to back a comfortably pre-worn ideology, even at the expense of the smoldering new evidence caking in their nostrils. In short, the progressivist Left stayed put. But a whole slew of “progressives” didn’t.

It was Bill Clinton, after all, who waged the Kosovo War over the loud objections of Tom DeLay, and American conservatives haven’t abandoned their quest to theocrafy America with restrictions on abortion and gay rights, they’ve just been (temporarily) drowned out by other things.

The New Republic is still a liberal magazine and still, I think, the best statement of progressivism to be found anywhere, The Weekly Standard’s admirable hawkishness aside.

Clinton was right on Kosovo, while any number of paleoconservatives and libertarian isolationists were wrong. But Clinton was also wrong on a host of issues himself. The New Republic (while remaining ostensibly “liberal”) has become perfectly centrist — and reads far more like The Weekly Standard on many (most?) issues than it does, say, The Nation or The American Prospect. To me, progressivism is a reformist movement, and I — like many of the newly “conservative” — find myself supporting a whole host of liberal (as opposed to restrictive) reforms, reforms that harken back to the founding principles, which I feel the Left is drifting from. Modern “liberals” have given us “free speech zones” and “hate crime” laws — laws, I should add, which have had the perverse effect of privileging one type of murder, say, over another. They’ve given us anti-smoking regulations at the expense of personal choice (though they have no qualms appealing to personal choice arguments when it suits their agenda). They’ve given us institutionalized identity politics and an unfettered “multiculturalism” — Balkanizing forces that tear at the very fabric of the American tapestry. They’ve given us arguments for cleaning up and re-apportioning history under the rubric of a postmodernist “critique” (remarkably misused) — up to and including some spirited defenses of turning three actual firefighters into an instructive colorwheel of “diversity” cast in bronze. They’ve bequeathed us an education system that privileges self-esteem and radical egalitarianism over rigor and the spirit of good-natured competition that has historically promoted innovation.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m fluid on policy issues; I don’t count myself as a Republican (in fact, I’ve never voted Republican). I don’t support the “war on drugs,” and I don’t advocate “theocrafizing” America by restricting gay rights or abortion rights. At the same time, I don’t raise knee-jerk ideological objections to the Pledge of Allegiance or “God Bless America,” nor am I interested in pushing the Establishment clause to its extremes, either (which only trivializes it, and makes less pressing the instances when its invocation has legitimate import).