Progressives are needy people.  Their infatuation with Barack Obama is a manifestation of one of these needs, the need for a hero to transcend the grim, gray conditions inside the progressive egalitarian mind.  An internal world of radical equality is a world without natural heroes.  

When someone with the right combination of ideas and approved distinctions comes along, the bonfire ignites and we have something like the phosphorescent adulation for Barack.   His approved distinction is race, which ameliorates his banality,  callowness, hard ambition and Will Rogers’ smarminess.  He fills the hero/good parent need perfectly. 

This neediness in Progressives, in my opinion, emanates from the simple unsatisfying, anxiety-filled materialism of modern Progressivism itself, together with its natural, philosophical alienation from the distant past, and any norm or code more than a year or two old. 

Progressivism seems to be less of an ideology now than a way of life,  a lifestyle - a ceaseless, shark-like exertion in search of the next intellectual style, the next injustice, issue, dissatisfaction or comfort to be investigated, altered, erased or fulfilled.  It’s a kind of social hyperactivity, and it’s one symptom of a social class on the run from reality.  

This seems, to me,  to be all  there is to modern Progressivism even though I’d like to find more.   Desires, wants, needs imbedded in a philosophy of who, whom?  Who governs and takes, and who submits and gives ?  But there are problems in the simplicity. 

The instant that a desire is converted to a want and then to a need must remain invisible.  Studying it would introduce a kind of Heisenberg Principle where the observation of the change from desire to need, the movement from “I’d Like” to “I Want” to “Give Me” alters the phenomenon…and it might even end up in self-denial and laughter.   

That is, talking about a want is a form of observation and testimony, it often exposes it as only a want, a souffle of discontent rather than a genuine need; and discussion of a want could activate something like an ethical exchange among the givers and takers. 

Most people, of all kinds, appreciate this kind of analysis, which is why it can’t be allowed.  It would disclose, and dispose of, false or vague moralities and raise the ugly truth of Progressive simplism, stupidity, megalomania and alienation.     

Whether Progressives are really smart enough to have arrived at a strategy to avoid scrutiny all by themselves, they seems to have found one anyway.   Inside the box-of-samples spiel of progressivism is the seductive bargains of “Order Now and Get Even More”.  Enhance the present, by the mental imposition of what can be called, for my purposes, an Infinite Procession of Nows.  

The IPoN is the state of mind, often an induced mass state of urgency, that rivets the attention on the anxieties of today, on the momentary and ephemeral.  Global warming?  A closed issue (Sun Flux Values anyone?)  Scared witless today about medical bills?   Single payer.  Social Security?  A guarantee from the little Uncle Sams currently in first-grade.  Don’t think.  Do. Life is a perpetual present tense.   In some ways, Progressivism is the perfect capitalist consumer political ideology.    Even Marx understood what it took to produce something, and what each  generation passed to its successors.  Progressives, do not.