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The percentage of the American population living in poverty has in fact decreased considerably from where it was at in the late 1950’s (roughly 22%) to where it is in the 2020’s; in 2019 the number hit a record low of 10.5%. We can argue all day about whether this has any causative relationship with LBJ’s specific policies, but can you at least understand why a good-faith political operator could look at that and not see the War on Poverty as a failure? Do you think that anything less than a full elimination of poverty means that the effort was not worth trying and that we should scrap every program that’s even trying to move the needle? Can you see how somebody who is t a “utopian” could have a reasonable disagreement with you about the answer?
Many of the people you’re identifying as “utopian or as “wanting to perfect humanity” would actually describe what they’re doing as an attempt to incrementally improve the human condition through sustained effort. And I think there are concrete observable examples all around us which can at least plausibly be interpreted as a demonstration of their successes!
Obviously I agree with you that human beings are not blank slates, and I do agree with you that, for example, racial gaps in educational attainment have not closed nor even significantly narrowed as a result of progressive theories of education. I think that progressives are wrong about some pretty important bedrock facts about humanity. However, I think they’re wrong in a different way than what OP described, and I think that there have been some landmark successes in progressive government (for example, the massive reduction in rural poverty and illiteracy in the South under the FDR and LBJ administrations) which make it difficult to credibly accuse progressivism of just being a totally manifestly failed project which only utopians stubbornly denying reality would have any interest in continuing.
I'm not sure how to communicate this without sounding snarky, but you sound exactly like a Stalinist to me. Modernity has killed more people than any other event in the history of mankind, and immiserated Man in ways hitherto unimaginable, yet we ought to be grateful because technical advances whose causes are only tenuously related should see full credit attributed to the policy of the Party and nothing else.
Yet we see regimes that do not actually hold to such ideas benefit from industry without necessarily encountering the same cultural issues. Could it be that improving the human condition and reducing everything to reason and commerce aren't actually joined at the hip?
I think the Enlightenment is a failure, because it did not reach its own goals. I don't think it's an total failure because we did create useful institutions and discover useful truths along the way, but I don't regard the Soviet Union as a total failure either for the same reasons.
Still, Managerial Totalitarianism is a cruel farce and must be destroyed for the welfare of mankind.
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