For Progressive Activists, Failure Is A Strategy

Something I’ve noticed about the progressive activist class is that their political energy rarely aims at improving conditions in the real world. What drives them is not problem-solving but performance: the impulse to regulate, restrict, and compel. Their policies function less as tools for reducing harm and more as rituals of ideological enforcement. The debates over gun “violence” illustrate this perfectly. They are not, as advertised, efforts to solve a crisis. They are efforts to ensure obedience.

Consider the history.

For thirty years, progressives have promised that sweeping gun-control measures would deliver dramatic reductions in crime. The 1994 “assault weapons ban” was sold as a breakthrough that would transform public safety. It didn’t. Independent evaluations – even those commissioned by the government – found no measurable effect on gun violence. Crime rates rose and fell for reasons unrelated to the ban, yet its defenders still speak of it with near-religious reverence. The symbolism mattered more than the results.

This fixation continues today. Cities with the strictest gun regulations – Chicago, Baltimore, Washington, D.C. – consistently experience some of the nation’s highest rates of gun homicide. Meanwhile, many states with far less restrictive laws see significantly lower levels of violence. The data are plain, but the progressive reaction follows a script so predictable it’s almost mechanical: blame the nearby state with “lax” laws. Blame the rural county. Blame the gun shop 40 miles away. Never blame the regulatory strategy that has failed for decades.

This blame-shifting is not an accident; it is a feature of the worldview. If the primary goal is enforcement rather than improvement, then failure does not require reevaluation – it requires expansion. The logic goes something like this: if strict laws in one jurisdiction didn’t work, it’s because someone else didn’t have to follow them. The answer, conveniently, is always more control, more restriction, more centralization of authority. The cycle becomes self-sustaining because failure feeds the very ideology that caused it.

At bottom, the philosophical error is simple. Progressives routinely confuse control with competence. They assume that if government can dictate enough behaviors, prescribe enough rules, or limit enough freedoms, the desired outcomes will inevitably follow. When real-world evidence contradicts the theory, they do not question the theory – they question the public. The problem is never the policy; it’s the people who won’t bend to it.

The irony is that the jurisdictions being blamed for “lax” laws are often the ones demonstrating a workable alternative. They rely more on enforcement of actual criminal behavior than regulation of lawful behavior. They treat gun crime as a matter of policing and culture, not an excuse to restrict ordinary citizens. And in many of these places, violence remains dramatically lower. This contrast should provoke serious reconsideration. Instead, it provokes denunciation.

That, ultimately, reveals what this debate is really about. It is not primarily about guns. It is not even primarily about violence. It is about hierarchy – about who gets to decide how everyone else lives. As long as new rules are imposed and the public is compelled to comply, the continued presence of violence is an inconvenience, not a crisis. It does not undermine the ideology; it justifies strengthening it.

This is why the logic feels circular and self-defeating: because it is. A movement that values obedience over outcomes will never be moved by outcomes. A policymaker who mistakes control for progress will always call for more control. And a political class that treats failure as an excuse to expand authority will never run out of excuses.

When authority becomes the goal instead of safety, failure isn’t a problem – it’s a strategy.