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Progressivism's promise is that if it is provided with power and control, it will deliver a better life for society generally. It has been provided with increasing amounts of power and control for decades, to a point where it has visibly approached total sociopolitical closure for the forseeable future, and what it has delivered is stagnation at best and more often a steadily-growing avalanche of crises. Given its track record, it becomes extremely important for Progressivism to silence any attempt to establish common knowledge and chain-of-accountability for its monstrous failures. One obvious method is to claim that its critics only destroy, only tear down, only criticize, without offering any constructive alternative of their own.
It seems to me that critics of Progressivism have no shortage of constructive alternatives to Progressive doctrine. When we have spent seven decades concentrating every scrap of social, political and economic power into the hands of Progressivism, though, almost all of those constructive alternatives are either going to involve demolishing things Progressives have built or routing around them entirely. This is the nature of misallocation: you either have to re-allocate, or simply eat the sunk-cost loss. Progressives have built an unworkable system and then condemn us for not offering an explanation of how to make it work, but there is no reason to entertain this chicanery. I cannot tell you how to operate America's current educational system through tinkering at the margins, but that does not mean I do not have a pretty good plan for how to educate my children, or ideas that I think are positive-sum on how to build a new general education system from scratch. "The current system has to come down" is the fault of the system and its designers, not my abilities as a critic. I can explain at some length how serious engagement with Christianity builds community, personal development, support networks, family formation, long-termer preferences, all the necessary building blocks of durable community that more than a half-century of liquid modernity has destroyed in most other contexts, but there is no way to integrate these insights into a sociopolitical system whose designers explicitly see total exclusion and eventual elimination of Christianity as a foundational part of their social program.
Likewise for economics, rule of law, foreign policy and most other questions of governance. The problem is not a lack of constructive alternatives. The problem is that, at a certain point along the seizure-of-power gradient, all constructive alternatives reflect the common nature of the problem, which is that one faction has seized all the power and escaped all accountability for its wielding.
Republicans have managed to get elected roughly half the time, so it seems like it's you who's trying to escape all accountability here. If you say they couldn't do anything because of progressive Republicans, well, maybe you should have won more elections.
And it's not like the Right has no successes. Desegregation busing was heavily limited. Welfare reform in the 1990s. You even managed to overturn Roe v Wade and ban abortion in many states, which did nothing to create the "community, personal development, support networks, family formation, long-termer preferences," etc. that Christian conservatives tell us their ideology brings, but you did do it.
These two sentences contradict one another.
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