The original Progressivism, the Progressivism that arose in the 1880s and 1890s and flourished during the first two decades of the twentieth century, was marked by a paradox. On the one hand, it sought to democratize American politics, reforming American political institutions to make them more responsive to the will Listen to Audio
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Download Audio as MP3 of the people. On the other hand, Progressives favored the creation of an administrative elite that would exercise substantial state power but without traditional forms of political accountability. It is one of the virtues of Progressive era that writers gave both opinions clear and emphatic expression. Like the original Progressivism, the new Progressivism, which arose in post-1960s politics and has been refined and taken to a new level by President Barack Obama, seeks to democratize American political institutions by making them more responsive to the will of the people. And like the original Progressivism, it has great confidence in the ability of elites to administer the state on the people’s behalf.

In contrast to the original Progressivism, the new Progressivism does not give clear expression to Progressivism's awkward combination of egalitarianism and elitism. On the contrary, the new Progressivism strives to conceal Progressivism's paradox--the new Progressivism's academic wing has even developed a variety of theoretical and rhetorical approaches that conceal the paradox. Whereas the dependence on elites can be reconciled with self-government, this concealment has disquieting antidemocratic and illiberal implications. Peter Berkowitz will deliver the November Bradley Lecture at AEI.

Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He chairs the Hoover Task Force on National Security and Law and cochairs the Hoover Task Force on the Virtues of a Free Society; sits on the Policy Advisory Board at the Ethics and Public Policy Center; was cofounder and director of the Israel Program on Constitutional Government; worked as a senior foreign policy adviser to the Rudy Giuliani 2008 presidential campaign; and served as a senior consultant to the President’s Council on Bioethics. He is the author of Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton University Press, 1999) and Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist (Harvard University Press, 1995). He has written articles, essays, and reviews on a wide range of subjects for a variety of publications, including The American Interest, The American Political Science Review, The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Claremont Review of Books, Forbes.com, Haaretz, Jerusalem Post, National Review, The New Republic, New York Post, Politico, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Weekly Standard, and The Yale Law Journal.