A generation ago, to be progressive meant to have faith in revolution. All of the left’s programs and policies aimed a single transcendent purpose: to make the world anew. The debate was whether revolution should be achieved violently, in what the French lustily called un grand soir—“one great night”—or, as the more inhibited Anglo-Saxons preferred, by means of incremental reforms. But the direction was the same, the orientation of change unproblematic. Between 1789 and 1989, faith in revolution inspired some of the finest minds and most atrocious acts in history. That faith is now gone.

A generation ago, to be progressive meant to have faith in revolution. All of the left’s programs and policies aimed a single transcendent purpose: to make the world anew. The debate was whether revolution should be achieved violently, in what the French lustily called un grand soir—“one great night”—or, as the more inhibited Anglo-Saxons preferred, by means of incremental reforms. But the direction was the same, the orientation of change unproblematic. Between 1789 and 1989, faith in revolution inspired some of the finest minds and most atrocious acts in history.

That faith is now gone.

—[The Age of Negation, or How Progressives Regressed

The Ümlaut](http://theumlaut.com/2013/07/09/age-of-negation/)