...2. What is your attitude toward Progressives?
Here, I seem to be more with Rothbard than with Wilkinson. Doherty cites this essay as an example of Rothbard's thinking.
The enormous growth of intellectuals, academics, social scientists, technocrats, engineers, social workers, physicians, and occupational "guilds" of all types in the late 19th century led most of these groups to organize for a far greater share of the pie than they could possibly achieve on the free market. These intellectuals needed the State to license, restrict, and cartelize their occupations, so as to raise the incomes for the fortunate people already in these fields.
I differ with Rothbard in that I see the advance of the Progressive ideology less as a result of conscious conspiracy and more as an emergent phenomenon based on man's status-seeking nature. The academy is a fractal set of ranking systems, almost as if it were designed to appeal to people looking for status measures. Moreover, to a great extent, your status depends on your profession of faith, in things like global warming. The system is recursive, in that above all, you must profess faith in the process by which intellectuals gain power, both within the academy and in the apparatus of the state.
(Given that the Obama Administration consists of the exact sorts of technocrats that the Progressive movement exalts--not a single businessman among the key players--I predict that the Progressive narrative will never concede that this Administration failed. Instead, the narrative will necessarily be that its problems were inherited and that the country became ungovernable. Robert Wright is the latest contributor to this narrative. Another narrative variation that you will find is that Obama's only flaw was his unwillingness to fight harder for Progressive policies.
Again, I do not see a conspiracy to protect Obama. Instead, I see a natural attempt to resolve the cognitive dissonance that results from having to reconcile a nearly ideal Progressive scenario--Obama plus 60 Senators plus a House majority--with adverse poll numbers, a failed stimulus program, a health care reform that was hardly worth fighting for, and in general not much to show for all the technocratic brilliance.)
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