US progressivism today has two wings, or overarching belief structures.
The transhumanist, culture war side. Conquer the natural world with our technology, reject the natural order, be whatever you want to be. Its purest distillation at the moment is transgenderism, which is why that is such a huge emphasis right now.
The technocratic, manage all of human life via experts side. To some extent this might be older, original progressivism, with #1 a more recent (though not that recent) addition. This shows up in… well, the public health priests of COVID, ten thousand rules to manage your life from gigantic centralized bureaucracies, and efforts to ban gas stoves for a recent example.
Progressivism will claim to hold to other principles, will often even “speak” liberal language. But, as we’ve seen now, those “principles” will be sacrificed in a moment if they conflict with #1 or #2, which are the real permanent deal.
The recent school / library fights “activate” both impulses. From your Secretary of Education last night.
As I wrote by way of reply, this would mean more if he didn’t mean “protecting” it from parents who want to guide the education of their own children. We want to “protect” the rule of state-appointed experts from YOU.
Similarly, look at Illinois, the first state to outlaw “book banning”! As the game is played, the language of the law sounds liberal, but it won’t be applied that way. The point, again, is to protect the “experts” (good progressive librarians) from YOU, the public paying their salary, who might want to get gay porn books aimed at children off the shelves for some reason. (Some “non-partisan” excuse can certainly be found for rejecting any undesired Christian / traditional / pro-natural-order book from the library, so there is little danger about the law backfiring on them in any way.)
So those are both #2… but #2, in this case, is being used to aid #1. Their most recent problem, as was mentioned in a recent post, is a (perhaps growing?) rebellion from both parents and even students who are finally done with LGBTism being force fed down the throats of children. To deal with that “problem”, they are increasingly comfortable saying what they already believed anyway, that parents SHOULDN’T be in charge of directing the education of their children. “Oh they have degrees in education?”, as someone replied to me last night. Then why should they have any power here at all?
After all:
Progressives have no problems squaring their crackpot extreme of antinomianism with their crackpot extreme of micro-management interventions. I would get badly disoriented from the attempt.
The House passed a few bills dealing with the bureaucratic/technocratic aspect of this last week. See https://clerk.house.gov/evs/2023/index.asp
The Jerrold Nadler/Chip Roy fracas on Wednesday, I believe it was, about masking toddlers had to do with an amendment Roy was offering (vote 263) to the REINS Act.