These Progressive Ideas Flopped. They’re Still Dangerous.

If Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign ends in defeat, one of her responses during her Oct. 16 Fox News interview will make a fitting epitaph. Asked about her former advocacy for giving driver’s licenses, college tuition and free health care to undocumented immigrants, she replied, “Listen, that was five years ago.” Those words hold a valuable lesson for a progressive movement more often heard quoting the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous and rather different declaration that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Dr. King’s line, originally from a 19th-century abolitionist and preacher named Theodore Parker, has become so embedded in modern American progressivism that President Barack Obama had it woven into an Oval Office rug. Justice, in this thinking, is not some ideologically neutral improvement of the human condition but rather a progressive notion of social justice, greater rights and autonomy and triumph over systemic forces of oppression. History has a right side, and it is the left side.

Sure enough, the United States has steadily expanded rights and lifted marginalized groups — making good on what Dr. King called the “promissory note” of the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. American culture has steadily liberalized — tolerating, then accepting, then welcoming a broadening range of beliefs and identities. Thus the boundless confidence of young activists that whatever radical idea they pursue next will someday become conventional wisdom. Thus, too, the nervous and awkward following along by older progressives, who dare not risk a position that might seem reactionary.

But what the moral universe’s long arc really has is survivorship bias. Progressive causes that achieved success and bettered the nation, like the New Deal’s worker protections and the civil rights movement of the 1960s, are highly visible today and taught in history books as important inflection points. But for every success, there are also many failures — bold ideas that proved not ahead of their time but simply foolish. Having flickered only briefly in the national consciousness, they are easily forgotten.