Columns

No progress for selectively exposed

Nine Nguyen/The Daily Cougar

Nine Nguyen/The Daily Cougar

William Galston, political theorist and Senior Fellow of Governance at the Brookings Institution gave a lecture on progressivism Thursday at the Honors College. The subject matter should be obvious.

“Does the American progressive tradition have a future?” Galston said, echoing the title of his lecture. “I’ll argue that it does.”

The Honors College commons — located to the right of the M.D. Anderson Memorial Library — hosted Galston’s speech. People filled the 80 or so chairs, stood against the walls and crowded in the corners. The audience was alert and attentive, but they weren’t told much that honors students and faculty did not already know.

Galston started his talk with the decades after the Civil War. He went through the Great Depression. He touched on the New Deal. He quoted Herbert Croly, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. He mentioned the ties between progressivism and conservatism; religion, business and war.

Although Galston contrasted progressivism and conservatism several times in his speech, he did not mention liberalism as a synonym for progressivism. According to Galston, progressives were originally opposed to liberalism — classic liberalism that is, and in this context, progressivism is not an overlap.

Before the feedback comes in full-force about how “progressivism” is doublespeak for “liberal” keep in mind the US political system is two-dimensional with little room for height or depth.

Progressivism is not synonymous with populism, either.

This reveals that those who attended the talk did so with selective exposure — they went to an event they favored, which contained information that bolstered their preconceived political views. Optimistic left-leaning libertarian honors students might not have been 100 percent of the audience, but the Q-and-A session that followed the talk contained no dissenting opinions.

Galston did mention drawbacks  — or as he put it — dangers of progressivism: increasing national government at the expense of localism, impatience with constitutional limits, tension with individual rights, public control weakening markets and government failure with market failure.

However, this should have been the meat of his discussion, and it was not. Galston no doubt knows the details of progressivism like an attorney knows their briefs, but the point is to relay this information to the jury against the dissenting opinion. Knowing the dissenting opinion, then, is just as important.

This discussion of progressivism and conservatism needed to be somewhere like Texas A&M — where the political atmosphere finds progressivism more alien and thinks democrat is synonymous with “bleeding heart liberal.”

Thousands of students could have learned plenty from Galston and the Honors College series. These students in all likelihood exposed themselves to other media that evening: video games, fashion shows and satirical news on the internet.

“Progressivism and conservatism are not opposed root and branch. Rather, they represent competing interpretation of the American experiment, and they often draw from the same sources,” Galston said.

You won’t find many assenting that opinion on cable-network television news.

David Haydon is a political science senior and may be reached at [email protected].

Leave a Comment