Progressing

NOTWITHSTANDING AN INCESSANT and vociferous conservative clamor espousing traditional American values such as racism, patriarchy, social Darwinism, social hierarchy, and cultural conformity, including conformity of religious and sexual orientation, among others, the United States is basically a progressive country. Surveys, which utilize scientific, statistical methods which are verifiably accurate, clearly reveals this. Despite all efforts to establish and maintain a white Anglo Saxon protestant (WASP) uniform culture, it has never happened, and now never will. The very existence of a native civilization predating the imposition of our European one made it impossible from the beginning. Importing slaves and their culture further damaged any hope of a ubiquitous Anglo-Christian American nation. Then too, a nation built by immigrants has never been able to stop immigration, though it has used extreme measures, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1872 and the immigration law of 1924, without success. Not everything in the pot melts. And that which does irreversibly transforms American culture. American music is black. American cuisine is Mexican, Italian, and Chinese. Anybody who is a senior citizen today can remember an America entirely different from the current one, and the evolution has been progressive, not conservative. No matter how tenaciously we the American people cling to racial segregation, racial barriers, against great resistance, continue to erode. that's progress, albeit slow. The Christian religion has never been able to conquer American culture, and sweep all others out of the country, and in the past twenty years the percentage of Americans who identify as "Christian" has dropped from eighty five to just over seventy percent. The millennial generation is only half Christian. The future is religious diversity, which will enforce by numerical fact the putative American value of religious tolerance. And now, for some specific issues. A majority of American, if only a slim one, is pro choice. Most people who are pro choice oppose abortion, but support a woman's freedom of reproductive choice. A huge majority of Americans want to increase taxes on the wealthy, and install a much more progressive taxation system. All social spending, including all forms of welfare and transfer payments, are popular. And why not? Most Americans are either poor, or lower middle class. We the American people want to redistribute wealth from wealthy to poor through government action, despite claims to the contrary. Among poor people, redistribution of wealth is always popular, as it is in theory, but not practice among Christians. Despite the current administration's policy of mocking and ignoring climate change, and the fact that as many as eighty five percent of republicans deny its reality, an overwhelming percentage of the population accepts the reality of climate change, and the vital necessity of enacting policies which mitigate it. Inevitably, future American leaders will enact such policies, and if they are successful in their efforts, those who currently deny their necessity will fall silent, or claim to have supported them all along. Progressivism creeps, incrementally. Yesterday's proud racists are today's ashamed, closet racists. Gay and transgender people, despite a strenuous ongoing conservative campaign to exclude them from social equality, are and will attain it. The numbers are on their side, as are the demographics of the incoming and outgoing generation of leaders and activists. yesterday's liberalism is today's conservatism. History, with sidetracks, moves from fight to left, as the forces of progress overwhelm that of entrenched tradition. In a world of global interconnectedness, teh viral nationalism which has in recent years swept across Europe and the America's is bound to fade from history, as future generations see themselves more as citizens of an global, interconnected culture. A small percentage of the world's population still possesses a disproportionate share of the world's wealth and power, an anachronistic, inefficient arrangement, and this too is destined to be relegated to history's trash heap; the world's poor are increasingly able to organize worldwide movements for progress. Conservatism is tradition, progressivism is change. America and the world are rapidly changing, ever more so, much to our good fortune.