Progressivism Then (As Now)

Edmund Wilson, from "Meditations of a Progressive", circa 1930-31 (collected in The American Jitters: A Year of the Slump):

...Still, one who like to see them come out and say, "Capitalism has got to go. It's just a question of time, so we're trying to make the transition easy." If they're going in for scaring the manufacturers, they might as well scare them good and proper. I suppose they're afraid of scaring their constituents, too. But why do the American progressives have to be tongue-tied with inhibitions? - they're shy of the whole language of real political thought. The surest way to shake an American reformer and make him back down has always been to accuse him of socialism - that's what they did with Bryan, and we ought to be beyond the Bryan stage. I suppose that we still have a lingering feeling that God is going to strike us dead if we admit that our old-fashioned republic isn't the last word in political science. A few high words would do no one any harm.

Clearly things have changed little since Wilson's day. We're still not "beyond the Bryan stage" - any proposal for genuine political reform, for wresting power away from the plutocracy, is met with charges of socialism (as if socialism is really that bad - it's done quite well for the standard of living in many countries in Europe), from which progressive reformers nearly always shrink in fear, weakly retreating from their positions and leaving the status quo intact.