The Perils of Excess: When Liberal Progress Overreaches

by Don Hall

Trump 2.0 starts this month. Plenty of handwringing has been engaged in by those on the Left about how this travesty could have possibly occurred. Many blame crime despite it more a flawed perception of crime when the facts on the ground indicate that crime has gone down across the board. Some cite the economy despite the facts on the ground that economy is actually doing pretty well. I’d suggest it has more to do with the perception of progress, the very lifeblood of liberalism, and how far and fast changes in society must come. It is the perception that progress, rather than developed over time and with persuasive consensus, must be jammed down the throat of the country with an arrogant assumption of righteousness.

I recall a quote from some random television show I was binging recently. I can’t remember the show or the character who said it but it stuck nonetheless. “It isn’t that people don’t want progress. They just don’t want so much of it all at once.”

Look, progress is the lifeblood of democracy. Without it, we’re just standing still, and the world—like it or not—keeps spinning. Liberalism, in its purest form, is a breathtaking ideal. It tells us to aim higher, to fight harder, to ensure the rights and dignity of all people, not just some people. But let’s not confuse the momentum of progress with its trajectory. Because when progress becomes untethered from pragmatism, it risks becoming something else entirely: a runaway train, hurtling toward a future that might look bright on paper but feels alarmingly alien in reality.

Liberal progress is supposed to be the counterweight to excess, not the source of it. It’s supposed to say, “Let’s pull back the curtain and examine what’s broken,” not, “Let’s burn the whole stage down and start from scratch.” But somewhere along the way, we’ve lost the thread.

We’re so obsessed with being on the right side of history that we’ve stopped asking whether we’re making history or rewriting it. And rewriting history, well, that’s a tricky business. When you edit the past with the eraser of moral absolutism, you risk creating a future where nothing is learned, nothing is contextualized, and nothing is forgiven.

The problem isn’t the principles of liberal progress—it’s the purity tests that have metastasized around them. Somewhere along the line, we decided that nuance was the enemy, that compromise was cowardice, and that moral imperfection was unforgivable.

Purity feels good. It’s clean, it’s righteous, it’s absolute. But it’s also profoundly undemocratic. Democracy isn’t about purity; it’s about balance. It’s about the messy, uncomfortable process of building consensus among people who disagree on almost everything except that they have to live together.

But we’re not building consensus anymore. We’re building echo chambers. We’re retreating into ideological silos where the only acceptable answer is the most progressive one, where dissent is treated as betrayal, and where self-righteousness has replaced self-reflection.

And this isn’t just happening in smoky backrooms or college lecture halls. It’s happening on social media, in boardrooms, in the arts, in schools. It’s happening everywhere.

We’ve reached a point where the pursuit of justice is often indistinguishable from the pursuit of revenge, where the moral high ground feels more like a firing squad, and where the line between accountability and annihilation is getting harder and harder to see.

Progress, by its nature, is corrective. It’s about fixing what’s broken, righting what’s wrong, and ensuring that the sins of the past are not repeated. But what happens when progress doesn’t stop correcting? What happens when it overshoots its mark?

We’ve seen this movie before. The French Revolution didn’t end with liberté, égalité, and fraternité—it ended with the guillotine. The moral imperative to tear down injustice can quickly become a moral imperative to tear down everything, to uproot traditions, institutions, and even people in the name of an ever-shifting ideal.

And don’t get me wrong—I’m all for shaking things up. It is at the heart of my contrarian nature. Some traditions deserve to be torn down. Some institutions are rotten to their core. But not all of them. And if we’re not careful, we risk confusing progress with destruction, forgetting that the goal isn’t to obliterate what came before but to build something better in its place.

Take free speech, for example. Once the sacred cow of liberalism, it’s now being sacrificed on the altar of emotional safety. And yes, safety is important. But the problem with prioritizing emotional safety over free speech is that it turns dialogue into a minefield. It makes people afraid to speak, not because they’re wrong, but because they might be misunderstood.

And when people are afraid to speak, the conversation stops. And when the conversation stops, so does progress.

Here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud: The excesses of liberal progress are alienating the very people it’s supposed to help. Working-class families, rural communities, and even marginalized groups themselves are looking at the liberal agenda and saying, “That’s not progress—it’s paternalism.”

Because let’s face it: Telling people what they should care about, how they should think, and what words they should use isn’t progress—it’s arrogance. And arrogance has a way of backfiring.

It’s why so many people feel left behind, even as progress marches on. It’s why phrases like “woke” have become cultural battlegrounds. It’s why liberalism, the ideology of inclusion, is increasingly seen as exclusionary.

We can’t let that happen. Liberal progress has to be about bringing people in, not shutting them out. It has to be about finding common ground, not declaring moral superiority. It has to be about solving problems, not just pointing them out.

So what do we do? How do we rein in the excesses of liberal progress without betraying its principles?

We start by listening. Not just to the people who agree with us, but to the people who don’t. We stop treating disagreement as a moral failing and start treating it as an opportunity to learn.

We reclaim nuance. We stop demanding perfection and start accepting complexity. We recognize that people are messy and flawed and that progress is, too.

We remember that the goal isn’t to win—it’s to make things better. And sometimes, making things better means taking a step back, slowing down, and asking, “Are we sure this is the right path?”

Most of all, we stay humble. Because progress is a privilege, not a guarantee. It’s something we have to earn, every day, through hard work, honest dialogue, and a willingness to admit when we’ve gone too far.

Progress isn’t the enemy. But unchecked progress—the kind that forgets its purpose and ignores its consequences—can be. And if we want to keep moving forward, we have to be willing to look back, to course-correct, to learn from our mistakes.

Because the only thing worse than standing still is running blindly into the dark.