Progressivism never survives its own victories

The conservative philosopher Kenneth Minogue proposed an allegory that has since become an unavoidable key to understanding contemporary activism: that of Saint George who, after slaying the dragon, is left without a job, condemned by his own legend to indefinitely seek a smaller and smaller monster to continue justifying his sword.

For a decade now, and with unsettling regularity, Western progressivism never survives its own victories. In fact, each battle won deprives it of an enemy, and therefore of a reason for being, which it must hastily replace because it does not want to disappear.

The structural inflation of the dragon

This mechanism is very visible and is part of progressivism. Once legal discrimination is abolished, the militant, associative, and media apparatus that thrived on that struggle does not vanish along with the injustice it denounced, but rather redefines, through successive displacements, an ever-wider perimeter of what constitutes oppression.

Unlike conservatism, whose vocation is preservation and not perpetual advancement, progressivism derives its very legitimacy from its ability to point out an adversary; if it disappears, it endangers the identity of the movement, its funding, or its militant careers.

In Western universities, although they are strong advocates for inclusion and fight against discrimination, the complaints filed refer to problems that are much less severe than in the past. Proof that the mechanism is real and that there is no longer any material...

The proof is in the acronym

The trajectory of the LGBTQ+ acronym offers the clearest illustration of the decade. The struggle of homosexual and bisexual people (LGB) for decriminalization, recognition, and marriage was a real dragon, slain in just a few decades across almost all of the West.

But the incorporation of the “T,” and later the “Q” or other parts, imperceptibly shifts the fight from the right to live without persecution to a much more debatable gender theory, even provoking, within the historical movement itself, a schism.

LGB Alliance was born in London on October 22, 2019, founded by lesbian activists who rejected the merger, imposed by Stonewall, between sexual orientation and gender identity.

For many, these successive incorporations and new struggles have distorted their cause, leading them to reject everything as a whole.

The cascading scientific disavowal

The institutional rectification came later, country by country, and calls into question this progressive struggle that has gone too far. Finland, as early as 2020, established psychotherapy as a first-line treatment for adolescents and relegated puberty blockers due to a lack of sufficient evidence. Sweden, in February 2022, disavowed its own recommendations from 2015 and restricted those treatments.

The French National Academy of Medicine, on February 25 of that same year, warned against a “diagnostic overestimation” in minors. In other words, although it was politically correct to act this way, some doctors opted for the easier route and joined the idea of sex change.

The United Kingdom, finally, closed the Tavistock clinic on March 31, 2024 following the Cass report, which showed, after four years of research, that there is no solid scientific basis for those treatments.

Today, the West painfully corrects errors that will certainly leave scars. The culprit is progressivism, which has failed to stop once its goal was achieved and has distorted both its cause and society, under the pretext of inclusion and progress. The knight, once again, had ended up inventing a dragon that did not exist.