Progressives opposing progress

By Robert M. Levy

The information has been classified for over 100 years. But I know the janitor at the National Archives, and he told my cousin that the grandfather of Al Gore became extremely upset with Henry Ford. Ford’s automobiles were emitting poisonous gas into the atmosphere. Gore projected that thousands would be afflicted by asthma. Many more would be killed and severely injured by car crashes. Cities like Los Angeles would soon be covered in smog.

Mr. Gore demanded that production of motor vehicles be halted and he sued for an injunction.

But Henry Ford was a powerful capitalist. He threatened to have Mr. Gore arrested as a radical anarchist. He also threatened to have Mr. Gore’s Jewish business partner deported back to Poland. Ford even gave a bribe to President Wilson to declare that products from the Gore farm were contaminated and could not be sold.

In this fictional scenario, Al Gore’s grandfather was brave. He looked that dirty capitalist in the eye and spat in his face. Gore sued Henry Ford and every other carmaker. And, like the soda cracker his face resembled, grandpa’ won.

By 1916, the United States became the only nation which still banned both automobiles and the internal combustion engine. “Progressives” like Al Gore’s grandfather kept horses and livery stables as the cornerstone of the American economy.

Unfortunately, I am writing this column in secret. For lack of modern industry, America lost both World Wars I and II. Our German colonial rulers east of the Mississippi and our Japanese rulers west of the Mississippi have banned the use of the English language.

The penalty for violation of that law is to be trampled by a herd of horses on the German side or be forced to eat spoiled sushi west of Memphis.

The cousin who knew the janitor from the National Archives also tattled another top-secret tale. In an alternate universe explored by scientists from Area 51, about 1811, during the early Industrial Revolution in England, a group of “progressives” called “Luddites” claimed that the use of machinery to manufacture everything from clothing to horseshoes would destroy the good life of every Englishman who made these goods at home. They predicted death and misery from pollution and industrial accidents. Such Luddites successfully convinced Parliament of the inhumanity of this industrial capitalism. The Luddites also won.

England banned mechanized industry and therefore could not fight to stop Germany in World War I. They also lost the Napoleonic War and never really burned the White House in 1814. That was a Jewish myth.

During World War II, working from their homes rather than factories, the English built guns for the Germans. Jointly, joined by the German-ruled French, the Axis conquered the American East Coast. On June 6, 1944, the amphibious German invasion of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina was no match for the horse-drawn carts brought to the area by the Defending Strom Thurmond Brigade from Fort Sumter in Charleston. The subsequent German conquest of America’s East Coast became only a matter of time.

Yeah, it sounds like the Twilight Zone; but the alternate universe above forms a parable. It’s not as profound as those parables found in the Bible; but this is illustrative of the need to see our current lives more clearly.

The people we call “progressives” are not “progressive.” These mostly Democrat environmentalists and socialists are actually “anti-progressive.” They are what used to be called “reactionaries.” They fight every innovation and technological step forward with crushing authoritarian regulation. They destroy new industries by either eliminating the industry entirely or sending it overseas to strengthen other countries, many of which are America’s enemies.

For instance, today, the destruction of industry supporting the generation of energy, especially electricity, is one example of “reactionary progressivism.” While progressives ban coal-fired power plants and non-polluting nuclear power, enemies like China are making progress by building gigantic electrical capacity, particularly coal plants and hydroelectric dams at emergency speed.

They are creating new innovation and industrial capacity, everything from shipbuilding to automobile production, at a rate well beyond the ability of the “free world” to compete. They are able to build a new steel plant in less time than it takes to complete an American environmental lawsuit enjoining a proposed factory from being built in the first place.

So, American industry goes overseas, often to enemy China, where regulation is more relaxed and workers are paid as low wage “slave labor.” Former American industrial towns which used to thrive with middle-class homeowners have now become ghost towns with unemployed or underemployed renters relying on government charity. They feel entitled to what their parents enjoyed before the days of over-regulation and the climate change myth. So they become socialists and confiscate any wealth still left in the hands of the few surviving innovators. This reality makes the parable of losing two 20th Century world wars look more like prediction rather than historical fiction.

Dealing with technological change is hard. But contrary to the doom panic which accompanies every technological change, overall, technology makes life better.

Yeah, the automobile brought smog, but it also got patients to hospitals at 60 miles per hour rather than at the speed of a horse. Before “progressivism” killed progress, the rising technology of telephones, video, and computers created more jobs and more wealth than the Luddites could have imagined. And the industrial might of U S. industry made it possible to win those wars that were lost in the fantasy imagined above.

Sure, we must reasonably regulate industry to assure clean air and clean water. But, destroying technology with a “new…green new deal” is just a formula to make academics happy while stripping from average Americans the technology that makes their lives better.

So when an issue like a nuclear power plant or a data center becomes an issue of public discourse, Americans should not panic and make laws allowing an activist to rush to the court of a “reactionary” judge who calls himself “progressive”. Americans should not stop the progress which expands the economy and has for 250 years made America exceptional. Instead, Americans should ask, “How can we adapt this technology to serve both the nation and our local communities?”

In the case of data centers, we might ask, “How can we expand the electrical grid to make data centers possible and still keep electricity prices stable? Could we expand the electrical grid to provide for data centers and even lower the price of electricity with the creation of excess energy?

“Could data centers be placed in abandoned industrial areas rather than rural communities? Could data centers recycle water, cooled in the same way as nuclear power plants? Could the need to cool data centers become the inspiration for creating and expanding recreational lakes as was done with the Shearon Harris Nuclear Power Plant on in North Carolina?”

Progress will never happen if America depends on “progressives.” Rather, America needs to welcome market-friendly libertarian Republicans to “make America great again.” Market-friendly technology advocates call themselves “conservatives,“ but they are not. Essentially, the people we know today as “conservatives” are the real “progressives.” They value the prosperity that sensible technology creates.

We live in a time where language has become meaningless. The “root” of words like “progress” and “progressive,” become jumbled into a 1984 dystopia. Such a disjointed sense of reality may not have caused America to lose two world wars, as reported in the fiction above. But the next world war with China, maybe backed by a rejuvenated Russia and the recovered ashes left in Iran, will not be fiction. America should not abandon the progress of technology just because the “progressives” say so.

July 19, 2026.

By Robert M. Levy. Republished with permission.

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Robert M. Levy grew up in Moore County and graduated from Pinecrest High School. He earned a BA in history and sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where his honors thesis on the Wilmington Rebellion of 1898 became part of the university’s library collection.

Admitted to the California State Bar in 1978, Levy practiced law for 40 years in California and Maryland, focusing on family and criminal law, including work with juvenile offenders and abused children. His writing on affirmative action appeared in the San Fernando Valley Law Review, and he authored Divorce: A Cynical Experience. He later earned a North Carolina teaching certificate from UNC Charlotte and taught high school social studies across Moore County.

Levy has served as chairman of the Moore County School Board, president of the North Carolina Electoral College, chairman of the Moore County Republican Party, and a columnist for The Pilot in Southern Pines. He lives in Pinehurst with his wife, Linda, and they have three children and four grandchildren.

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