We are currently living through the most sweeping rollback of progressive achievements since the end of the post-slavery reformation. Since the 1970’s, numerous progressive programs and policies have been either substantially diminished or completely reversed including expanding the democratic franchise to people who had been previously excluded; waging a “war” on poverty with increased spending on public housing and social welfare programs; educational programs like project headstart; free and low cost access to higher education; criminal justice reform and educational opportunities for incarcerated persons; and making a women’s right to bodily autonomy the law of the land.
To ensure that progressive changes being fought for today are not again easily undone we need to understand why such progressive policies were dismantled in the first place. The retreat from progressive policies is not the result of new knowledge about the human experience, in fact, quite the opposite – the rollbacks occurred because our basic beliefs about human nature and what causes us to behave as we do did not change.
In the United States, most people have deeply held traditional beliefs about human nature and behavior. The traditional view of human nature is that we are selfish, greedy, and unwilling to contribute unless coerced. The traditional belief about what causes us to behave as we do is that humans are unconstrained by the law of causation that governs essentially everything else in our universe. Therefore, regardless of circumstances, we are all free to act as we choose and deserve to be credited, or blamed.
These ideas have supported a highly conservative agenda throughout most of American history, but by the middle of the 20th century a unique confluence of factors had emerged.