Can "Progressives" be aligned with libertarians

In case you missed the memo, liberals are now trying to call themselves progressives because of the awful reputation they have given to liberalism. It is a title they did not deserve to have in the first place. Classical liberalism means a challenge to conventional means of the thinking. It means questioning, although not necessarily acting on, traditions and evaluating their merits and the any results, both positive and negative, that might result from either changing or eliminating the traditional ways of doing things.

Traditions are things that we no longer think about even though there may have been some rational explanation for the original creation. We call today Saturday out of tradition. It was not arrived at empirically. Women in our society wear dresses and mean wear ties. This is also apparently tradition. Very few people evaluate let alone attempt to change some of these traditions because they would not seemingly yield any beneficial results. The one exception is perhaps college students who somehow considered themselves enlightened by such antics, but these are more just cries for attention than legitimate challenges to traditions that have meaning.

Traditions are not, by definition, rational even if they had an originally rational explanation. Married women assume their husband's surname. This is tradition and no longer based on reason. It is something that most people do automatically out of tradition. Pink is for baby girls. Blue is for baby boys. People come up with all types of seemingly rational and psychological explanations for how these traditions arose, but more often than not, the answer is usually unknown because it is probably mundane or based on other cultural forces that are no longer present in society. However, when a so-called liberal wants to change any of these traditions, they are often quick to resort to why these traditions are racist, sexist, homophobic, what have you. They don't know either and the explanation is usually incidental to the main goal of giving the group that believes it is affected by the tradition more power. This has been the history of the 20th century.

The 18th and 19th centuries, if a generalization is acceptable, were more characterized by the true liberal tradition of applying the underlying philosophies of rationalism and natural rights developed primarily in the preceding centuries. It took about 100 years for Locke's philosophy regarding limited government as being primarily concerned with the protection of life, liberty, and property to be applied in practice in the form of the American revolution. It took 100 years after Adam Smith published ''The Wealth of Nations'' for the more capitalistic aspects of his book to be applied in the second industrial revolution of the late 19th century. As an aside, I'm aware that often philosophies are retroactively found and usually revived from obscurity to rationalize and justify what certain groups want, however, an empirical and moral proof of the justification of free market capitalism is for another day.

These earlier philosophies regarding the rights of man, individual freedom, and representative democracy were the true liberals since they questioned the existing social order regarding monarchy and the church and created virtually from scratch the idea of natural rights. In science, the classical liberals challenged the Aristotelian explanations of the natural world. All of the existing systems that they challenged were themselves rationalized, but they were traditions at the time and hence the principles of liberalism dictated the need to evaluate and change these traditional systems if they were found lacking. They could truly be called liberals because they were open to all ideas and one were not pitted in one particular direction. Hobbes was a liberal in this sense and is usually classified as one, but he is also the one who created the concept of the "commonwealth" and approved of an absolutist government.

Here is the problem with so-called progressives. Their thinking is pitted in one particular direction at all times and more often than not, they are not original thoughts, but merely irrational contempt for traditional values that are often characterized as being conservative. The liberals of today often do not rationally evaluate traditions and decide whether or not they should be changed based on identifiable criteria of what is best. Instead, it is almost as if they need to wait for conservatives, i.e. white Christian males, to state their position on a given subject before making their decision. And their decision is ALWAYS to oppose that consensus in the name of "diversity". Like the term liberal, though, the term diversity has been exposed as the Trojan Horse of gaining power for one particular group at the expense of another through the use of state action.

It is this final reason why "progressives" can never agree with libertarians. Progressives have never been advocates of free market capitalism. This is so obvious is does not need a proof. Progressives are often mislabeled as socialist though for these tendencies. The reality is that on economic issues so-called progressives tend to be socialist on only a few issues and interventionists on just about every other issue. The purest and perhaps best definition of socialism is that the state owns the means of production. This is what our education system is. The is the way most of our transportation and utility infrastructure are run. They are slowly attempting to do the same with health care. The vast majority of policies favored by "progressives" however are interventionist and deal primarily with regulating behavior either through laws prohibiting certain activities, making changes in the tax codes to coerce market behavior to punish and reward activities, or outright government subsidies to encourage market behavior. The private individual still ultimately controls the means of production, they are just increasingly limited in what they can do with that means through interventionism.

The real place where progressives might claim to be in lock step with libertarians but are not is in the area of civil liberties and rights. They claim to be in favor of increased liberty, but are more likely than conservatives to call for new laws to coerce social behavior and thinking. Speech codes, laws against smoking in private establishments, hate crime laws, hate speech laws, and campaign finance laws, are all attempts by so-called free thinkers to get the state to coerce behavior among the general public for things that involve the mere acts of individuals exercising individual rights that do no direct harm to others against their will.

To promote so-called "gay rights" the progressives do not call for the state to remove their intrusion from the personal and purely religious institution of marriage. Instead they demand that society pass and change these laws to "empower" gay citizens who wish to marry by adding yet more people who will now be subject to state control in determining whether or not they are married. Progressives have no choice in this matter, however, since "gay marriage" is not about marriage, but about entitlement to government benefits given to married couples. It is, to some extent also about acceptance from the general public through attempting to change legislation and forcing "society" to recognize "gay rights" in this area. Nothing has ever prevented gay people from calling themselves married and nothing ever will. This also tends to show the problem with progressives which is their confusion of society as being synonymous with government. It is problem that conservatives have as well. The true libertarian understands that society and government are not and should not be the same and that it is morally reprehensible for government to interfere in the decisions individuals make in society that do not directly harm anyone else.

This is why so-called progressives and libertarians are incompatible on most issues. Progressives are often just as statist as so-called conservatives who also often want societal norms and traditions to be codified and enforced as laws. It makes them feel so much better than facing the fearful notion that someone somewhere might be acting or thinking differently than what they find to be acceptable.