The Post-Progress Consensus Is Forming — and It Is Not What Either Side Thinks

The idea of progress — specifically, the Enlightenment-derived notion that human history is a directional movement toward greater knowledge, greater freedom, and greater welfare — has been the organizing assumption of modern politics in both its liberal and socialist variants. It is the assumption that makes policy meaningful: if things can get better in a directional and measurable sense, then choosing better policies has a point.

That assumption is being questioned at a scale and seriousness that has not been visible since the early 20th century, when the first intimations of mass industrial destruction began to complicate the Victorian confidence in civilizational advancement. What is unusual about the current questioning is that it is occurring simultaneously across ideological lines that have historically been separated by precisely this question.

The Signal

The publication cluster is the clearest indicator. In the past four years, a distinctive set of books has achieved significant intellectual influence by questioning the progress framework from positions that do not map onto the familiar left-right binary: Ross Douthat's The Decadent Society, Jason Crawford's intellectual influence as "The Rootclaim" blogger challenging progress narratives, Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed, Alasdair MacIntyre's continued influence in academic philosophy, the reception of William MacAskill's What We Owe the Future (which accepts the progress framework but questions its timeline and probability), and the growing influence of complexity theorists and systems thinkers who are skeptical of both linear progress and linear decline narratives.

These works do not share a political conclusion. Douthat is a conservative Catholic. Deneen is a communitarian. MacAskill is a utilitarian effective altruist. Crawford is a pragmatist technologist. What they share is a common target: the Whig interpretation of history, the story of progressive liberation, the assumption that the direction of human development has been, is, and will continue to be toward greater freedom and greater welfare.

The Historical Context

The progress assumption has been challenged before, and understanding the prior challenges illuminates what is distinctive about the current one.

The 19th century critics of progress — Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Burckhardt — were reacting against what they saw as the spiritual and cultural hollowness of material improvement. Their critique was fundamentally about value: progress toward what? For what purpose? At what cost to depth, particularity, and the non-measurable dimensions of human experience?

The 20th century critics — Adorno, Horkheimer, the Frankfurt School, the postmodern tradition — were reacting against progress's complicity in catastrophe. The Holocaust and the atomic bomb were not aberrations of the progress narrative; they were produced by its institutional outputs (bureaucratic rationality, scientific mastery, instrumental reason). Progress had midwifed atrocity, and the intellectual tradition derived from Enlightenment rationality had not provided the tools to prevent it.

The current critique is different from both prior waves. It is not primarily a spiritual critique (though that element persists in Deneen and MacIntyre). It is not primarily a catastrophe critique (though climate change and AI risk provide updated versions). It is primarily an empirical critique: the claim that the specific metrics used to measure progress — GDP growth, life expectancy, literacy, formal democratic participation — have advanced while other dimensions of human welfare that are harder to measure (belonging, meaning, mental health, ecological stability) have deteriorated. The critique is that the progress framework has optimized for the measurable and neglected the real.

The Mechanism

Three structural forces are producing intellectual convergence across the traditional ideological divide.

The measurement problem has become undeniable. The GDP-based progress metrics that have organized both liberal and conservative policy debate were calibrated in an era when the most pressing welfare problems were material: starvation, disease, illiteracy, premature death. These problems have been substantially reduced in OECD countries. The welfare problems that have increased in salience — social isolation, purposelessness, ecological degradation, political alienation — are not well captured by the existing progress metrics. The demand for different frameworks is intellectually legitimate.

The limits of institutional optimism have been revealed by decades of policy failure. Both liberal technocratic programs and conservative market-reliance programs have promised progress toward specific welfare outcomes and have not consistently delivered them. The institutional confidence that animated 20th century policy thinking — that the right combination of markets, state programs, and expert management could reliably produce welfare improvement — has been eroded by experience.

The ecological constraint is producing a genuine modification of the progress framework even among thinkers who are not environmentally motivated. An open-ended growth framework on a finite planet is mathematically unsustainable. This is not a new observation — it was made by Malthus and in various forms by 20th century environmentalists — but it is gaining intellectual acceptance in mainstream economics in ways that previous generations' economists resisted.

Second-Order Effects

The political implications of the post-progress consensus are not what either progressive or conservative readers would predict. The consensus is not a victory for conservatism — it does not justify existing distributions of power and wealth, and most of its contributors are explicitly critical of the market economics that contemporary conservatism has identified with progress. It is not a victory for the left either — it is skeptical of institutional programs' ability to deliver the welfare improvements they promise, and it is more sympathetic to particular, community-based, and non-institutional forms of welfare than left technocracy typically is.

The policy implications tend toward what might be called welfare pluralism: recognition that different people, communities, and cultures may define flourishing in ways that a single metric-based progress framework cannot capture, and that institutional interventions should be evaluated not only by their effects on measurable outcomes but by their effects on the non-measurable dimensions of human welfare.

What to Watch

Economics curriculum change: Watch whether major economics departments begin integrating non-GDP welfare measurement frameworks (Genuine Progress Indicator, Wellbeing Economy approaches) into introductory and policy courses. This would signal that the critique is entering the discipline's training rather than remaining in its intellectual margins.

Institutional mission statements: Watch whether major institutions — foundations, governmental bodies, international organizations — begin revising their stated objectives to include non-progress-metric welfare goals. Institutional adoption of post-progress framing would signal the intellectual shift has reached policy influence.

Political platform language: Watch whether center-left or center-right political parties in major democracies incorporate post-progress welfare language (wellbeing, community, meaning) into their platforms as primary rather than supplementary goals.

Academic citation patterns: The convergence thesis will be confirmed or refuted by citation patterns in political philosophy, economics, and sociology journals. Watch for cross-citation between the conservative and progressive wings of the critique — this would be the strongest indicator of genuine convergence rather than parallel conversations.