The foundation of the progressive movement may be Cromwell.

I am one of the few people around who have a soft spot for Cromwell. He was no anti semite: he defended the realm, and his military dictatorship was less noxious than that of the conservators in Edinburgh. And within his time some questions were asked: the genesis of statist socialism existed and also libertarianism. Consider this from Samizdata: the comment about modern progressives acting like Charles I is all to accurate: they want the divine right of kings without the divinity.

My own off-the-top-of-my-head take on this is that libertarianism of the sort I espouse most definitely did make its first big appearance in Seventeenth Century England, in the form of the Levellers. But the impeccably libertarian nature of this first great libertarian ideological eruption has been masked by the kinds of questions that most exercised those first English libertarians. Libertarianism now tends to be about what governments ought to do, and most especially about the many things that governments now do, but ought not to do, or at the very least to do much less. In the seventeenth century, libertarians with unswervingly libertarian views on, e.g., property rights as the correct institutional foundation of liberty, were not quite so exercised about how the government should behave, although they did have plenty to say about this. Their central concern was: Who has the right to be the government in the first place? If you do have to have some kind of government, who should choose it? The central preoccupation of those Levellers was: Where does political authority come from? If there must be government, who decides about who shall be that government?

Charles I – famously or infamously according to taste – claimed that God had chosen the government of England, in the form of … Charles I. This the Levellers, of course, challenged. But having challenged it, and the king having been executed, the question remained: If Charles I is not the legitimate ruler of England, then who is?

The Levellers were “egalitarian” in the sense that they were indeed far more egalitarian about who should be allowed to participate in that political debate, about who should govern. Political authority sprang from … everyone! When it came to deciding who the government was, everyone’s voice counted. This was the sense in which the Levellers really were, sort of, “levellers”.

But this political egalitarianism was seized upon by Seventeenth Century Royalists as evidence that the Levellers were also egalitarians in the modern sense, who believed that economic outcomes should be equalised by the government. They were accused of being socialists. There were indeed real socialists around at that time. These were the Diggers. But the Levellers had very different views to the Diggers.

Later, the Levellers were proclaimed to be socialists by another ideological tendency, namely … socialists.

The irony being that these later socialists mostly had ideas about how government should conduct itself were pretty much identical to those of Charles I. Charles I believed that the state (i.e. Charles I) had relentlessly to intervene in the market and in the workings of the wider society, in order to correct freedom’s economic and other injustices, and never mind any harmful consequences that flowed from such intervention, or “tyranny” as the Levellers called such activities. Modern socialists believe exactly the same, about themselves.

So, the Levellers, historically, have been caught in a pincer movement of lies, proclaimed by two different brands of statists. Royalist statists accused the Levellers of being socialists. Subsequent socialists claimed the Levellers as socialists. Both were wrong. But if we libertarians do not now correct these errors, nobody will.

The left has descended into floppy sentimentality and the farming of identity politics. The market revolution of the 1980s gutted the power of the indigenous working class, and when the progressives took power back after Thatcher, Lange and Reagan they proceeded to open up immigration (although in the case of the UK, this was forced ny the EU) further decreasing the cohesion of working class culture. There is now no solidarity between journeyman and factory worker: our society is atomized.

The more interesting group is the libertarians. For they are pushing liberality as far is it can go, to the point where getting married to how many people you want whomever you want is now seen as a human right, and any opposition is bigoted. And the question is from where this is coming. The left, with their identity politics, consider that they are the elite and have a natural right to rule, for now and forever.

THe better libertarians just want to be left alone. A position which makes them better neighbours. but the idea of compulsory liberality, confirmed by demotic elections, can all too often become a tyranny.

And that leaves us in a position akin to Hobbes. There needs to be some form of state: some Leviathan. Preferably with feedback systems within that function. But there also needs to be the private, the domestic — and here both the socialists intrude because they insist we are politically correct, in alliance with the populists, who want us to believe what everyone else does. In the meantime, the church has a divine mandate. To preach the gospel, regardless of the political circumstances.

When the church becomes the state, as in Cromwell’s London or Calvin’s Geneva, then there is a problem (Calvin argued against executing some of his opponents but was over ruled). When the state thinks it can control the church there is an equal problem.

Perhaps seeing a divine order for both — which is a Pauline suggestion (and he was dealing with pagan emperors who were inciting pogroms against both Christians and Jews for political gain — and Paul was both a Jew and Christian) is a better way forward. Because without some degree of divine order the boundaries between the church and preaching and the magistrate who enforces the law get blurred.

And there is a reason that the reformers spent much time of this in their confessions, from the very same century. And Cromwell did allow the Westminster Confession to be made. So while the radical left and libertarians can argue their politics started with the English Revolution, the reformed can say that their confessions deal with the problems that resulted from it.

In the end, the Church wins, and political movements fade. So we need to treat our alliances with any politician with great caution.