Checking Progressive Privilege

by Carrie L. Lukas

Progressives have taught us that it doesn’t take overt discrimination to make society unfair. Privilege afforded to different groups—such as whites, males, and heterosexuals—can infect our cultural institutions, creating unfair burdens for other groups.


But one form of privilege has been overlooked: progressive privilege. Today, the progressive worldview is depicted as what is normal, right, and worth celebrating by our cultural institutions. Conservatives are marginalized and stereotyped in entertainment, news, academia, and throughout our culture.


Progressive privilege isn’t just unfair to conservatives; it has warped our entire political environment and made our country more divided. Recognizing progressive privilege is the first step to ending it, so that we can have a fairer, more truly inclusive society. 

29 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 23, 2019

About the author

Carrie L. Lukas is the managing director of the Independent Women's Forum. Lukas is the co-author of Liberty Is No War on Women, and the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex, and Feminism, which was published by Regnery Publishing in May 2006. She is also a contributor to Forbes.com and the vice president for policy and economics at the Independent Women's Voice.

Lukas's commentaries have appeared in numerous newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, USA Today, and The New York Post. Carrie has testified before the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Social Security. Before joining IWF, she worked on Capitol Hill as the senior domestic policy analyst for the House Republican Policy Committee. She is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. She currently lives with her husband and four children in Berlin, Germany.

- See more at: http://www.iwf.org/about/carrie-lukas...

Reviews

[Lisa Mandina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I saw this on another book blog last November I think and searched it out after reading its synopsis. I used to consider myself pretty conservative, but I’ve come to be much more of a centrist. And one thing I’ve always had an issue with is the hypocrisy of many who call themselves progressive. This book puts what I’ve always thought into well explained terms and even gives suggestions for why this is the way it is and what things we might try to do in order to work on this. We need the people who say they want to work together with the other side and work on compromise to be willing to actually do that, to think on how other people see things and work to compromise, not just steam-roll their own beliefs as the only ones. I know that I used to like to argue with people all the time. It didn’t matter their viewpoint though, I liked to be the devil’s advocate and come up with the opposite of what they thought. Even when they agreed with what I thought I was right, by doing this, I often convinced myself to change my own thoughts and opinions. I wish everyone was able to do this. Until people can do that, I think we will continue to struggle as a country at coming together and working for the good of everyone.

Review first published on Lisa Loves Literature.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Carrie Lukas gives us a laudable primer for a national discussion on the social privilege enjoyed by Western progressives.  She fights fire with fire in exposing and emphasizing this widespread double standard.  And she does so to point us all toward a better way of interacting with our neighbors and diverse communities and of looking at Power.

Certainly, the trend of the past couple of decades--at least on the American coasts, in its northern regions, in its education institutions, and in its dominant media--has been one of drumming conservatives into silence and submission.  For a movement which denigrates the cultural imperialism of past eras, progressivism has proved itself adept at employing exactly that phenomenon to gain and extend its influence in schools, the religious sphere, the very fabric of the American family, etc.

Reading Lukas here reminded me of Jonathan Haidt's wonderful 2011 speech, "The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology."  In that speech, made to an esteemed convention of his peers in the field, Haidt spoke of the miniscule number of conservatives in the field as proof that it had become a "tribal moral community" with a hostile climate to outsiders.

If you talk continually about ending privilege, and all the while you're extending it toward your own tribe, you've done nothing but consolidate power through hypocrisy.

Until we all--left and right alike--recognize the privilege afforded to progressives in our society, all rantings about toleration and diversity can be nothing better than hot, empty air.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

We've heard people being told they need to check their white privilege, male privilege, heterosexual privilege, class privilege, and probably more. The white elephant in the room that is missing is, of course, progressive privilege that lets them think entitles them to be the arbiters of who is creating burdens on other groups (even if many in such groups are totally unaware of these burdens) resulting in deep divisions in American society today. They also hold themselves above reproach in thinking they have no privilege when it is clear that any challenge to their absurd ideas will result in violent protests and more, like a terrible twos tantrum but more dangerous. Checking Progressive Privilege (Encounter Broadsides Book 60) by Carrie L. Lukas explains this in detail and how progressives are out to warp our political and societal environment and marginalize members of any groups that they disagree with by claiming they got where they are due to some imagined unearned privilege. This is not born out by the numbers of highly successful minorities who came from nothing and worked their way to success as represented by Dr. Thomas Sowell, former president Obama, General Colin Powell, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and more too numerous to list here. This also doesn't explain the many poor white communities such as those in the Appalachians or in poorer parts of major cities; these are conveniently ignored since they don't fit the narrative. The author explains that recognizing progressive privilege is the first step to ending it.