Republicans usually get the bad rap of trying to relive some long past Arcadian age when weird things like intact families, cultural maturity, and leaders who weren’t socialists strode the land. Okay, guilty as charged.

But you want to know who really wants to go goosestepping back to bygone days? The so-called progressives who do everything in their power to stop progress in many areas and turn America into a story of failure, incompetence, and weakness, not to mention tyranny. They are absolutely terrified of actual progress.

Energy? Remember the 70s energy crisis? I sure do. My mom had to wait hours in line at a gas station to fill up. Well, granted, we are not there yet. However, since then American capital and technology turned America into a energy exporter. Less than three years ago gas prices were at around two dollars a gallon. From the energy crisis to the unleashing of the American capacity for energy independence. That’s progress, right?

No, say progs and their political vehicle the Democrat Party. Let’s kowtow to the Marxist dictator in Caracas instead of producing energy. Let’s strengthen Putin so he can use his oil weapon to intimidate our allies. Let money flow out of this country instead of into it through energy production and export. Progress? Really?

For most of mankind’s history on Earth political freedom was a chimera. Then slowly, through Magna Carta to the US Constitution, free men threw off the shackles of base oppression and began to think and say what they pleased. This was a good thing. But not to progs.

They want speech codes at colleges. They demand limited speech in secondary education. Any creative activity that does not correspond to an authoritarian socialist line must be stamped out. Individuals who dare to challenge their orthodoxy must be canceled.

This is not progress. This is a leftist retrograde motion back to a time when they hanged people for thinking for themselves. This is Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. This is, red flags flying and demagogues bellowing, a march back to a period when the authorities dictated conscience, like it or not. Stumbling backwards through history is not progress.

And bigotry? This country shed oceans of blood in our Civil War to make a captive people free. That freedom, as was also Dr. King’s dream, is that men and women would not be judged on their skin color but as individuals. That was certainly progress and it made life better for millions. It gave them a chance of equal opportunity before the law. Utopia was not achieved, as it is impossible, but massive improvements were made in this regard.

However, the left has other plans. They would have us classify and categorize all by pigment and gender, if they can define gender, in a virulent racism and sexism that mocks the dead of Gettysburg and the protesters of Selma.

How in the world is that progress to a fairer America? Substituting one favored group for another, regardless of the groups, is the false progress of the Klan and Jim Crow. Just switch the pigment and the archaic reasoning is the same. It belongs in a grave with Lester Maddox and Orval Faubus, not stalking the halls of academia and Congress.

Such is the progress of the progressives. It’s a fearful twisted rush to a new dark age, made still worse by a mass media that repeats any lie, fabricates any fact, as long as it fits their backwards looking script. Mankind has striven too far out of the muck and mire of despotism to go back. To paraphrase WFB, we must stand athwart the runaway reactionary train of progressivism and pitch it off the tracks by every legal and political means necessary. If not, eventually, it will roll right over our dearest liberties.