I get asked a lot about the theses where history always bends to the left forever, with some people triumphant and some people depressed about that concept. I think it's mostly survivorship bias, with only the wins getting remembered.

Many left-wing stances on the Soviet Union that were held during the 20th century are largely discredited and abandoned now.

Prohibition, once a big progressive cause, is no longer claimed by progressives.

This is fine, of course, they have the right to update their beliefs.

A predictable response here that I'm already getting:

"why are you lumping modern progressives in with Frances Willard!? She was a conservative Christian! That's not us!"

Well, she was also a feminist and a labor organizer.

I agree that the vector of Frances Willard politics is different than the vector of Hillary Clinton politics. Willard pulled the nation in one direction, Clinton pulled it in a somewhat-different direction.

As the vectors are different, they can't both match the arc of history.

Now, you could say "today's progressives, unique among all coalitions throughout time, are now perfectly in tune with the Arc of History."

Also no. That's the equivalent, statistically, of testing on in-sample data, and thinking your model will be as good out-of-sample.

It's easy to backfill reasons why you don't want to revisit an unpopular, rejected idea. It's much harder to spot and avoid, prospectively, ideas that are *trendy now, but likely to be rejected later.*

Frances Willard failed to avoid eventually-rejected ideas. So too will you.

Even beyond the straight-reject ideas, there are a a *ton* of adjustments to ideas.

For example, if you want to draw an intellectual line between William Jennings Bryan and Fed Up or Employ America, you can. But note that the latter do not spend their time talking about silver.

This is not, like, a minor adjustment to the platform. Silver was WJB's big thing. The process of public policy inquiry has burrowed into WJB's ideas, found the stronger pieces, and discarded the weaker pieces.

Your descendants will do the same to you.