Noah Smith recently published a stirring essay asking where a liberal goes after the progressive crash landing. His answer is historically literate and emotionally powerful: imagine yourself as a French liberal in 1815, standing in the wreckage after the Terror and Napoleon, and take heart — because liberalism eventually won the world. The ideals are still sound. You try again.
We admire Smith's honesty about progressive failures. His litany is devastating and largely correct. But the essay depends on an assumption we think is mistaken: that there is a "my side" in the long arc of history at all.
The Great Conversation Has No Sides
What Smith calls "liberalism" is not a team that wins or loses across centuries. It is a collection of ideas — some brilliant, some catastrophic, many contradictory — that enter what Michael Oakeshott called the "conversation of mankind" and get absorbed, modified, co-opted, or quietly abandoned by everyone, including the people who once fought them hardest.
Consider Smith's proudest examples. Abolitionism triumphed, and within a generation the grandchildren of slaveholders were insisting their ancestors had fought for "states' rights," not slavery. The Confederacy lost the war but its sympathizers spent a century rewriting the story so thoroughly that the Daughters of the Confederacy were placing plaques on courthouses well into the 1960s. After the civil rights movement won its major legislative victories, the Republican Party — the party of Lincoln and Reconstruction — had already absorbed the old Southern Democrats into its coalition, while the Democratic Party, whose members had filibustered civil rights bills and stood in schoolhouse doors, now claims the movement as its patrimony. Who exactly is "my side" across that span?
The same pattern repeats everywhere. The Loyalists who opposed the American Revolution did not vanish; they became patriots within a generation, or their children did. The anti-Catholic bigotry that animated much of early American progressivism — Woodrow Wilson screened The Birth of a Nation at the White House — has been memory-holed so thoroughly that modern progressives would be baffled to learn it was ever part of their tradition. The eugenics movement was the cutting edge of Progressive-era science, endorsed by Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger, and the editorial boards of the most respectable journals. It was "my side" for a generation of reformers. Then it wasn't, and no one wanted to remember it ever had been.
This is not hypocrisy in any simple sense. It is how the Great Conversation works. Good ideas do not belong to the movements that first champion them. They get taken up by everyone, including former opponents, who then claim they were always obvious. Bad ideas get disowned so completely that their former champions develop a convenient amnesia. The result is that every movement, looking backward, sees a selective highlight reel that confirms its own righteousness.
Did Smith's Parents Also Support Castro?
Smith writes movingly of his parents — center-left Democrats who viewed Martin Luther King Jr. as a prophet and hung an American flag on the Fourth of July. It is a recognizable portrait of a certain kind of decent American liberal household in the late twentieth century.
But those same years produced another kind of liberal sympathy that Smith's essay does not mention. In the 1950s and 1960s, American progressives — not fringe radicals, but mainstream intellectuals like Norman Mailer, C. Wright Mills, and much of the American academic establishment — looked at Fidel Castro and saw a romantic liberator. They looked at Mao and saw a land reformer cleaning up the corruption of Chiang Kai-shek. They were wrong on a scale that cost tens of millions of lives. When Henry Wallace ran for president in 1948 on what he called a "progressive" platform, his campaign was so thoroughly entangled with Communist Party support that even mainstream liberals eventually repudiated him — but not before the word "progressive" itself had become toxic enough that smart Democrats switched to calling themselves "liberals" for the next forty years.
The modern revival of "progressive" as a label, beginning in the 1990s with figures like Bernie Sanders and later Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, required precisely the kind of historical amnesia we are describing. The label was available for reuse only because its prior owners had been forgotten. Reviving it was like moving into a house without checking what was buried in the basement.
This matters because it reveals something about how political movements process their own history. Smith frames progressive overreach as a kind of success-driven excess — the movement pushed too far because it had won too much and lost the conservative check on its ambitions. That is partly right. But there is a deeper pattern: movements that believe they are on the right side of history have consistently weak defenses against their own worst impulses, because those impulses always look, from the inside, like the next logical step in demonstrated progress. Eugenics looked that way in 1915. Castro sympathy looked that way in 1960. The more aggressive claims of identity politics looked that way in 2015. The internal logic is always impeccable; the results are not.
Burke's Insight: The Slow Is the Fast
There is an older tradition of political thought that takes a different view of progress — not as a destination to be reached by bold action, but as an emergent property of systems that are allowed to develop organically with minimal interference. Edmund Burke, the usual starting point for this tradition, did not oppose reform. He supported the American Revolution, Catholic emancipation, and the reform of British governance in India. What he opposed was the revolutionary's conviction that you could deduce the correct society from first principles and impose it wholesale.
Burke's core insight is that the accumulated wisdom embedded in institutions, customs, and common law represents a kind of distributed intelligence that no single generation of reformers is smart enough to replace. The common law system is perhaps the best example: it evolves case by case, adapting to new circumstances through incremental adjustment rather than comprehensive legislation. It is slow, frustrating, and often unjust in particular instances. But over centuries it has proven remarkably self-correcting — precisely because no single faction ever gets to impose its vision of justice all at once.
The free market operates on the same principle. Smith himself, as an economist, surely appreciates that the most robust economic outcomes emerge not from central planning but from the accumulated signals of millions of individual decisions. The parallel to political life is direct: the most durable social progress tends to emerge not from sweeping legislative victories but from the slow, grinding work of changing minds and habits one community at a time.
This brings us to the most provocative implication of the Burkean view, and we offer it with appropriate caution: it was entirely possible in 1963 to oppose Jim Crow and also to have reservations about the Civil Rights Act. Not because one was indifferent to racial injustice, but because one believed — as some thoughtful people did — that the pace and mechanism of change mattered. Black incomes and educational attainment were already rising before 1964. The black middle class was growing. Social attitudes were shifting. A person could have looked at those trends and concluded that the organic process was working, that legislative compulsion would generate resentment and backlash that slower change would have avoided, and that the long-term outcome might actually be better if reform proceeded through persuasion and local adaptation rather than federal mandate.
We are not arguing that this view was correct. The historical evidence is genuinely mixed — economists Donahue and Heckman found that the major economic gains for Black Americans in the years 1965 to 1975 were concentrated in the South and were largely attributable to the 1964 Act's antidiscrimination provisions. But we are arguing that holding this view did not make a person a bigot, and that the progressive habit of treating every opponent of bold action as a moral monster is precisely the kind of thinking that produces overreach. If you cannot imagine a good-faith reason someone might disagree with your approach, you have stopped thinking and started crusading.
Standing Athwart History Is Not Standing Still
William F. Buckley famously described the conservative as someone "standing athwart history, yelling Stop." The phrase is often quoted as evidence that conservatism is merely reactionary — opposed to progress itself. But this is a misreading. Buckley was not saying nothing should ever change. He was saying that the pace and direction of change should be subject to deliberation, and that the burden of proof lies with the reformer, not the skeptic.
This is not an argument against progress. It is an argument about how progress happens most durably. The movements Smith celebrates — abolition, the New Deal, civil rights, gay marriage — did not succeed because one side was right and pushed hard enough. They succeeded because the ideas behind them were absorbed into the broader culture through a long, messy, multi-generational process that included persuasion, compromise, reversal, and eventual consensus. By the time the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in 2015, public opinion had already shifted so dramatically that the ruling was confirmatory rather than revolutionary. That is how durable change actually works.
The progressive fallacy — and we think Smith falls into it — is to look at the endpoint and credit the movement, when in many cases the movement was riding a wave of cultural change that would have arrived regardless, perhaps more slowly but also more firmly. And when the movement outpaces the culture, as it clearly did on trans issues, criminal justice reform, and education policy in the 2010s, the backlash is not a temporary setback in an otherwise correct trajectory. It is the system doing what it is supposed to do: correcting an overcorrection.
Smith closes with the image of a climber who has taken wrong paths but still sees the summit. We would suggest a different metaphor. Political life is not a mountain with a summit. It is the Great Conversation itself — ongoing, directionless, absorbing good ideas from every source and discarding bad ones at a pace that no single movement controls. The liberal in 1815, the conservative in 1965, the progressive in 2025 — each believes the conversation is headed somewhere in particular, and each is wrong in the same way. The conversation is not going anywhere. It is just continuing, and the best any of us can do is contribute to it honestly, without the comforting illusion that history is secretly on our side.