PART ONE: A History of Democratic Certainty

In 2020, a woman in Melbourne could terminate a pregnancy without notifying her parents, her partner, or her local member of parliament. Her body, her choice. The state had no standing to compel her to carry a child she did not want. This was, and remains, a foundational principle of progressive politics in the West.

In 2021, that same woman could not enter a café in the same city without proving she had injected a substance into that same body. Her body, the state's choice. The principle had not been modified or debated or voted upon. It had simply been inverted, silently, while everyone was watching the case numbers.

This is not a contradiction. It is a clue.

It is a clue to the answer of this question: What exactly, at the root, is the real difference between a Progressive and Conservative, given that Democrats are overwhelmingly on the wrong side of history of almost all historical social movements.

The Democratic Party in the United States, and progressive parties throughout the Anglosphere, present themselves as the party of freedom. The party of individual rights. The party that trusts people to make their own decisions about their own lives. This is the brand. It is also, as you will see, false.

What the abortion-to-vaccine pivot reveals is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense — the kind where a politician says one thing and does another. It reveals something deeper and more structural. The underlying principle has never been individual autonomy. The underlying principle is deference to the credentialed consensus. When the medical-academic establishment supports abortion rights, your body is yours. When that same establishment demands vaccine compliance, your body is a public health vector.

This is not a new development. It is not a response to an emergency. It is the recurring pattern of progressive politics across more than a century, and it explains a great deal that the standard political narrative cannot account for.

The standard story of American politics goes something like this. The Democrats were once the party of slavery and segregation, but they changed. The civil rights movement realigned the parties. Today's Democrats are the party of Martin Luther King, and today's Republicans are the party of, well, the people who opposed Martin Luther King. The arc of history bends toward justice, and the Democratic Party has been its primary vehicle.

This story is not entirely false. But it is selective in ways that conceal more than they reveal.
The inconvenient truth is that the Democratic Party's historical record of oppression was not an aberration from its progressive character. It was an expression of it. Jim Crow was not mob rule. It was a legal-administrative regime, designed and maintained by Democratic legislatures, enforced by Democratic officials, and justified by the language of order, stability, and social science.

Democratic state governments built the architecture of segregation — separate schools, separate transportation, separate public facilities, poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, all-white primaries. Democratic governors signed the laws. Democratic local officials administered them. The White League, the Red Shirts, and the Ku Klux Klan supplied the violence that enforced the system when administration alone was insufficient.

The national party did not merely inherit this arrangement by accident. For generations, its congressional power depended on the Solid South, and the Solid South depended on racial exclusion. Southern Democrats used committee chairmanships, seniority, and procedural rules to protect the region's racial order from federal interference. Woodrow Wilson, the progressive Democrat who gave us the League of Nations and the modern administrative state, also segregated federal offices and screened Birth of a Nation at the White House. He was not a secret conservative who had infiltrated the party. He was what the party was.

The same pattern appears in women's suffrage. Southern Democrats opposed the Nineteenth Amendment not because they were uniquely misogynist but because they understood, correctly, that enfranchising women would strengthen federal oversight of elections and potentially enfranchise Black women in states where Black men were already being excluded. The language of states' rights was not a neutral constitutional principle. It was a mechanism for protecting an existing racial and political order. And it was Democrats who deployed it. Republican votes and Republican congressional leadership supplied a large share of the support that carried the amendment through Congress.

The same applied across the pond in Britain. The ‘liberal’ party opposed women getting the vote because the women who would get the vote (property owenrs only) were largely conservative, so opposing it was political expediency, not principle.

Federal anti-lynching legislation was blocked for decades. The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill of 1922 passed the House with strong Republican support. It died in the Senate because Southern Democrats threatened a filibuster. Similar efforts met the same fate across the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. The obstacle was not a lack of information about lynching.

Newspapers, activists, and Black organisations had documented the violence for decades. The obstacle was political power. Southern Democratic senators treated federal intervention as an attack on state sovereignty, but their definition of sovereignty depended on the ability of local governments to ignore or tolerate racial terror. This was active obstruction, sustained across generations, by the dominant faction of the Democratic coalition.

In 1956, almost every Southern member of Congress who signed the Southern Manifesto — condemning Brown v. Board of Education and urging resistance to school desegregation — was a Democrat. The signatories did not describe themselves as extremists standing outside American liberalism. They presented themselves as defenders of constitutional order, local control, and social stability. The language was respectable. The objective was to preserve segregated education.

Then there is eugenics. In the early twentieth century, compulsory sterilisation laws were enacted across multiple American states, and the Supreme Court upheld Virginia's law in Buck v. Bell in 1927. The movement drew on the language of science, efficiency, and social improvement. (Remember the reference to ‘science’, it is important.) It attracted reformers, physicians, social workers, and public officials who believed that society could be improved by controlling reproduction. These were not fringe cranks. They were progressives, applying the best available expertise to the project of human betterment. Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing for the majority, declared that "three generations of imbeciles are enough." The confidence was absolute. The consequences were the sterilisation of people classified as unfit — the poor, the disabled, the inconvenient.

Wartime censorship under Wilson used the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 to suppress anti-war speech, socialist publications, and criticism of the administration. The justification was national efficiency and wartime unity. Many progressives believed that a modern democracy required ‘disciplined public opinion’. (Now that is a phrase worth dwelling on for a moment.) They were comfortable with experts, administrators, and social planning, and those commitments turned quickly against dissent. If national efficiency was treated as a higher good, speech that obstructed the program could be cast as sabotage. The very tools that reformers had developed to attack private power — licensing, censorship, surveillance, administrative control — were redirected against radicals and minorities.

Immigration restriction in the early twentieth century was supported by many progressives who argued, sometimes on economic grounds and sometimes on explicitly eugenic grounds, that the state should engineer the composition of the population. The Immigration Act of 1924, which established national-origins quotas, reflected a convergence of labour organisations, nativists, eugenicists, and reformers who agreed that experts should decide who belonged. The language of protecting workers and preserving social democracy could coexist comfortably with racial exclusion.

This is not a record of unfortunate accidents. It is a pattern. And the pattern demands an explanation.

The standard progressive response to this history is to invoke realignment. The parties swapped positions. Today's Democrats are not the Democrats of 1890 or 1924 or even 1964. This is true as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough.

Realignment explains how a party changed its coalition. It does not explain why the same structural tendency — the impulse to use expert authority and state power to enforce compliance with an approved vision — keeps reappearing in progressive movements across different eras and different issues. The content changes. The mechanism does not.

The underlying driver, I want to suggest, is a particular relationship to complexity and uncertainty. In this article, I propose that much of the differences between blacks and whites can be traced back to one cultural difference – how they perceive time. In simialar fashion, the difference between progressives and conservatives can be understood in reference to how they approach complexity and uncertainty.

This is the Enlightenment project taken to its logical endpoint: if we can understand nature, we can understand society, and if we can understand it, we can improve it.

The conservative looks at the same society and sees an evolved order — something closer to an ecosystem than a machine. The rules, norms, and institutions that survive have done so because they solved real problems, even if no one can fully articulate why. Hayek called this "the fatal conceit": the belief that a few planners can possess the distributed knowledge embedded in millions of individual decisions, customs, and traditions accumulated over generations. The conservative impulse is: before you tear down a fence, understand why it was built.

This is not a disagreement about values. It is a disagreement about epistemology. How much do you trust that a committee of smart people can redesign something as complex as a society without catastrophic unintended consequences?

The progressive answer, demonstrated across a century of policy, is: quite a lot – or maybe even completely. The conservative answer, also demonstrated across that same century, is: not nearly as much as you think.

This explains something that otherwise appears puzzling. Democrats are, on average, more formally educated than Republicans. The party draws disproportionate support from universities, from the professions, from the credentialing institutions that certify expertise.

This is often presented as ‘evidence’ that Democrats are more intelligent or more informed. It may be evidence of something else: epistemic hubris. The more credentials you accumulate, the more you are trained to believe that credentialed people should run things. The worldview and the career incentives align perfectly, and a classic example of self-reinforcing loop (or maybe even circular thinking.)

It also explains the peculiar Democratic relationship with democracy itself. A party that trusts expert administration over distributed decision-making will, inevitably, find democratic processes inconvenient. If the people vote the wrong way, the people need to be educated, or the process needs to be adjusted, or the courts need to intervene. In the recent (2024) election (Trump/Harris) the Democratic Party replaced their nominee (Biden) without a democratic process. The label "Democrat" becomes ironic not by accident but by structure.

There was a moment when this was not true. The 1960s counterculture — Berkeley, the Free Speech Movement, the anti-Vietnam protests — represented a genuine liberal tradition within the left. These were people who defended individual conscience against state power, who demanded free expression even for unpopular views, who were suspicious of authority in all its forms. This was classical liberalism wearing tie-dye.

It did not last.

The New Left was absorbed into the university system it had once challenged. The radicals became professors. The free-speech activists became administrators of speech codes. The suspicion of authority became a new authority — less overt than the old one, but in some ways more pervasive, because it operated through professional credentialing, social shaming, and institutional capture rather than through legislation alone.

What emerged from the 1960s was not the triumph of the liberal tradition but its domestication. The progressive movement returned to its default setting: a class of credentialed experts who know what is best for everyone else, and who are increasingly impatient with the people who disagree.

The modern manifestations of this pattern — DEI bureaucracies, cancel culture, the COVID-era enforcement of medical orthodoxy, the capture of social media platforms by the sensibilities of their university-educated engineers — are not departures from the progressive tradition. They are its most natural expression. The tools are newer. The confidence is the same.

A common trope today says that Republicans are voting exactly as Bill Clinton did twenty years ago, implying that the Democrats have moved further to the extreme left. The rise of the Democratic Socialists of America, the normalisation of language and policies that would have been unthinkable in the party of John F. Kennedy, the embrace of identity-based frameworks that treat individuals as representatives of groups rather than as agents of their own lives — all of this suggests the trope has substance. The party has not simply evolved. It has accelerated along its default trajectory: more expert authority, less individual discretion, more enforcement of the approved view.

The question is not whether this is happening. The question is why anyone expected otherwise.

In Part 2, to follow, I will try to make sense of this in the contemporary environment.