Opinion: The progressive protection racket
J. Peder Zane, Real Clear Politics, 2/25/26
Progressives are the last bastion of unbounded exceptionalism. The unblinking moral duty to redeem our country and the world by recasting both in their image reflects a city on a hill, God is on our side sense of manifest destiny that would have made Ronald Reagan and Theodore Roosevelt blush.
Certain that they alone can see how the arc of history is bending, they feel duty-bound to align humanity with the universe.
This spirit, however, often puts them at odds with American democracy. So assured of the rightness of their cause, they cannot fathom good faith reasons why some might oppose their policies on a range of issues, from immigration and race to the role of government. They are, after all, informed by selfless reason and expertise. Only defects of the mind and the soul – white supremacy, Christian nationalism, the naked ignorance of deplorables – can explain their defeats.
Back in 2016, they assumed President Obama had ushered in a golden age of progressivism. They saw his eight years as a high-water mark of the presidency, filled, as the New York Times reported this week, with epic achievements on the economy, health care, and foreign policy spearheaded by a man who was the epitome of decency. And yet the Times also reports that the administration’s best and the brightest were gobsmacked by Donald Trump’s 2016 victory. It was “inconceivable” to “Obama and his team that populist disenchantment with the establishment, globalization and demographic changes would elevate a figure they scorned.”
Obama’s last White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, correctly observed, “The outcome of the election was a direct rebuke of everything that we had been trying to do for the last 10 years.”
What the Times tendentiously ignores – and Paul Sperry detailed in a recent article for RealClearInvestigations – is that instead of engaging in soul-searching or working to reconfigure their values to a changing electorate, Obama and his team strove to nullify the election results and delegitimize Trump by smearing him as a tool of Vladimir Putin.
The Russia hoax lasted well beyond Obama’s tenure because of progressivism’s secret sauce: its dominance of the federal bureaucracy, academia, the media, NGOs, and international organizations. Even with Trump at the head of government, leaders of the Justice Department, FBI, CIA, and other agencies colluded with their allies to kneecap the president.
During the 2020 election, they conspired to censor the damaging contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop to secure the White House for Obama’s former vice president, Joe Biden. Note that “Trump’s FBI” not only stood by as Biden dismissed the laptop as a “Russian plant” – never leaking word that it had possessed the laptop for almost a year and verified its authenticity – but aided the deception by publicly warning that Russia was spreading misinformation to damage Biden.
You can’t make this up – except they did.
Even as this duplicity came to light, key architects of one of the worst political scandals in American history – including former CIA Director John Brennan, former DNI James Clapper and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe – were rewarded with jobs by leading news outlets. Biden’s Justice Department paid $2 million to fired former FBI Agent Peter Strzok – who was leading the Russia probe of Trump – and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, to settle lawsuits claiming their privacy had been invaded when fiercely anti-Trump texts they wrote on government-issued phones were shared publicly. Hillary Clinton remains the grand dame of the Democratic Party; President Obama’s halo shines as bright as ever.
This protection racket – powered by the control of the unelected levers of power – helps progressives advance their agenda even when they were out of power. Periods of Republican control only slow the march. As the Times article about Obama suggests, it also hardens their ideological bent; electoral defeats are merely bumps in the road.
They remain confident that they will never be held to account for their hypocrisy and deceit. Here are a few examples from just the past few days:
- While Democrats assail Trump for engaging in retribution against his enemies, Obama’s former National Security Advisor Susan Rice declared that once Democrats return to power, they will punish corporations that have “take[n] a knee to Trump.” This echoed Sen. Elissa Slotkin’s earlier invocation of the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals to warn soldiers and other government employees that they may be held to account if they carry out orders Democrats deem to be illegal.
- Amidst their calls for national unity, partisan flamethrowers such as former New York Times columnist Paul Krugman continue to advance the false narrative that Jim Crow is alive and well in America, arguing, most recently, that Elon Musk’s X is “a cesspool of white supremacists, a lot of open Nazis.”
- As Democrats criticize Trump’s coarse language, they have applauded an ad by Juliana Stratton, who is running for the U.S. Senate in Illinois, that features six people – including Sen. Tammy Duckworth – saying f*** Trump. At the end of the spot, Illinois governor and presidential aspirant JD Pritzker stands next to Stratton to offer his endorsement.
- To put the cherry on this sundae of deceit, Pritzker joined MSNBC Host Nicole Wallace to claim that no Democrat has ever compared Trump to Hitler. Never mind that Pritzker himself is inordinately fond of Nazi comparisons.
One might scratch one’s head at how and why progressives can be so two-faced. It is not a bug but a feature of their ideology. Even as many celebrated the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York – and count socialists including Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as party leaders – Democrats and their media enablers attack anyone who notes their connections to the failed ideas of Marxism.
Yet, they follow communism’s playbook chapter and verse. It’s all right there in the American diplomat and historian George Kennan’s seminal 1946 “Long Telegram” that outlined the challenges the U.S. would face in dealing with the Soviet Union.
The Soviets, Kennan wrote, “doubtless believed – and found it easy to believe – that they alone knew what was good for society and that they would accomplish that good once their power was secure and unchallengeable. … it lies in the nature of the mental world of the Soviet leaders, as well as in the character of their ideology, that no opposition to them can be officially recognized as having any merit or justification whatsoever.”
Kennan observed that, because they believed they were the sole possessors of truth – and the destiny of humanity – Soviet leaders believed it was necessary to deceive in the name of truth. “The leadership is at liberty to put forward for tactical purposes any particular thesis which it finds useful to the cause at any particular moment and to require the faithful and unquestioning acceptance of that thesis by the members of the movement as a whole.”
While some might be mystified at the speed with which liberals have submitted to far-left policies on issues from immigration to race, Kennan noted, “Once a given party line has been laid down on a given issue of current policy, the whole Soviet governmental machine, including the mechanism of diplomacy, moves inexorably along the prescribed path.”
It is hard to see this changing any time soon – or the Republicans’ gradual evolution into a right-wing version of this mindset in response. But there is a flicker of hope. The recent, massive layoffs at the Washington Post may be a sign that the public is not so willing to support arms of left-wing propaganda.
The Post, unfortunately, is an outlier in the progressive protection racket. Unlike government and much of academia, it has to turn a profit. Its problems are a step toward accountability, albeit a small one.