Conservative Writer Claims Progressive Movement Resurrects Ancient Caste Systems and Blasphemy Laws

In a sweeping critique published by American Thinker, marriage and family therapist Daniel Winston makes the case that today’s progressive movement—far from pushing society forward—actually drags it backward toward the very arrangements Western civilization spent centuries trying to escape.

Winston’s argument hinges on a deceptively simple test: take each major progressive commitment and ask whether it moves us away from oppressive historical systems or back toward them. His conclusion? The contemporary left is “regressive in its essence,” and the evidence, he argues, is “close to uniform.”

From Merit to Blood: The Return of Caste

According to Winston, the essay begins with a nineteenth-century observation by Sir Henry Maine, who wrote in 1861 that progressive societies had moved “from status to contract”—from a world where birth determined destiny to one where individual action mattered most. That shift, Winston argues, represents the core achievement of the modern world.

Yet when Winston examines contemporary diversity initiatives—hiring regimes organized by ancestry, university admissions adjusted by lineage formulas, conferences assigning speaking authority based on pigmentation—he sees something entirely different. “That is not the frontier of human freedom,” he writes, “but a caste system with a diversity officer, installed by people who loudly imagine themselves the heirs of the abolitionists.”

The charge is sharp: that policies framed as corrective justice actually resurrect the very blood-based hierarchies that the Enlightenment dismantled.

Blasphemy Law in New Clothing

Winston turns next to speech, arguing that every free society had to fight its way out from under blasphemy law—and that progressives have simply rebuilt that apparatus with different terminology. There is doctrine that cannot be questioned, he contends. There are statements punished not for being false but for being profane to what he calls a “nouveau religion.”

Excommunication has become cancellation, according to the essay. The Holy Office now operates as a misinformation desk. Public confession—once a feature of Mao’s struggle sessions—appears in contemporary form when the accused recite their failings in approved vocabulary, hoping for readmission to the community.

“Nobody calls it progress,” Winston writes, “except the people running it.”

Inherited Guilt and Permanent Stain

Perhaps the essay’s most provocative section addresses the concept of inherited guilt. Winston describes it as “among the oldest and most destructive notions in human history”—the idea that a person carries the moral debts of ancestors in their blood. Western law’s slow work, he argues, was to establish that guilt is personal, not heritable.

But privilege pedagogy, in his view, resurrects that doctrine wholesale—and in its cruelest form. The older versions at least offered sacraments: confession, baptism, a road out. The contemporary version, Winston contends, offers only “permanent stain and endless penance with no absolution available at any price.”

The Collapse of Universal Truth

According to Winston, the universalist claim—that there is one human reason and one human nature, that an argument is valid or invalid regardless of who makes it—made both abolition and the Declaration of Independence thinkable. Standpoint epistemology discards that framework, ruling instead that truth is “a property of the tribe” and that claims must be weighed according to the identities and feelings of both claimant and audience.

This, Winston argues, is simply “the communal mental world of the clan, dressed in seminar vocabulary.” Both systems abandon the universal for the tribal—which is, he notes pointedly, “where mankind started and where mankind bled.”

Economic and Scientific Regression

The essay extends its regression thesis to economics and science. Rent freezes, Winston argues, revive Diocletian’s price edict—attempting to set just prices by decree rather than letting them emerge through exchange, with predictable shortages following. Degrowth movements openly propose managed scarcity, “preached by people who have never spent a winter in one.”

Even empirical science, according to Winston, has reverted to pre-Enlightenment thinking. He argues that requiring chromosomes and skeletons to yield to feelings and declarations represents no advance beyond Lysenko—Stalin’s biologist who bent science to ideology. “It is enforced,” Winston writes, “by men who have never once considered that they might be the ones burning the books.”

The Jewish Question Returns

Winston devotes particular attention to antisemitism, arguing that nothing exposes progressivism’s regressive direction like “the speed with which the progressive movement recovered the oldest hatred in Europe and sold it as the newest idea on campus.”

Blood libels return as claims that Israelis harvest organs and target children by design, according to the essay. Conspiracy theories about hidden Jewish power resurface as analyses of lobbies and donors that “any reader of the Protocols would recognize on sight.” Segregated dormitories and graduation ceremonies echo ghettos. Mobs at Hillel doors mirror mobs at synagogue doors.

“There is no innovation here at all,” Winston writes, “only a very old European product with a new label, sold to keffiyeh-draped students and activists of all ages dutifully trained never to inspect the contents of anything marked anti-racist.”

A Clinical Framework for Social Regression

Winston, drawing on his background in family therapy, cites Dr. Murray Bowen’s work on family systems and differentiation theory. According to Winston’s reading, Bowen described societal regression as what happens when a society under chronic anxiety starts making decisions to relieve immediate distress rather than following principle.

The symptoms Bowen predicted, Winston argues, match what we see today: individual responsibility collapsing into group emotion, blame as governing style, demands that others change so the anxious may feel calm, and steady erosion of the capacity to think under pressure.

This describes, Winston contends, “a movement which cannot tolerate a dissenting sentence and has mistaken fusion with the group for moral seriousness.” Low differentiation, he notes, always feels like solidarity from the inside. From outside, it looks like “a mob that has learned to cite sources.”

Not Wickedness, But Direction

Winston is careful to note that this pattern doesn’t make all involved “wicked.” Most are young, most are frightened, and most have been handed vocabulary that flatters them for reflexes they should have been taught to govern. But sincerity, he argues, is not a direction. The fact that an idea is fashionable tells you nothing about which century it belongs to.

“Judge the destination,” Winston urges. On caste, on heresy, on inherited guilt, on tribal truth, on the treatment of Jews—”the destination is behind us, and we have been there before. We know what it costs because our grandparents paid for it.”

The honest name for this movement, Winston concludes, is not progressive. “It is nostalgic, and what it longs to regress back to is the world the modern West was built to escape.”

Winston is a marriage and family therapist who studied for decades with Dr. David Schnarch, runs intensive programs for couples, and has trained more than 150 therapists worldwide in the Crucible Approach.

Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/11/there-is-nothing-progressive-about-progressives/