America winced at MSNBC anchor Nicolle Wallace’s comments following President Donald Trump’s speech to the joint session of Congress in early March, during which 13-year-old cancer survivor D.J. Daniel was made an honorary member of the Secret Service.

“I hope he never has to defend the United States Capitol against Donald Trump’s supporters,” Wallace said about Daniel. “And if he does, I hope he isn’t one of the six who loses his life to suicide.”

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What sort of mind, America wondered, could make such a pivot? From a black child with brain cancer being hoisted by his father to thunderous applause to … suicide? 

It’s essentially the same question Americans have asked themselves about progressives for years: What’s wrong with these people? 

Of course, there are many answers. For one, progressives seem to struggle with expressing joy. Ironically, this was laid bare by former Vice President Kamala Harris‘s feigned “joy” campaign, which attempted to mask venomous misery with Beyonce and balloons. Progressives are also humorless and often witless, which is why “resistance” comedy is so terrible and Democrats can’t meme. And they revere ugliness, the kind that drives pleasant-looking people to dye their hair the color of Kool-Aid. 

But a comment Wallace made before her grim aside exposed the deeper thread tying these traits together:

“I think this was a lesson in finding one thing that you let yourself feel,” she said. “And I let myself feel joy about D.J.” (emphasis mine).

The comment was revelatory because experiencing joy in that moment should have required no special form of self-permission. The natural human reaction was to cheer or cry, as many did. However, the Democrats in attendance suppressed their natural human instincts in service of their worldview — they sat on their hands while America roared. Wallace at least allowed herself a brief moment of human feeling before correcting course and pivoting to doom.

The scene underscored the fundamental trait of progressivism: To live this worldview faithfully, one must suppress natural human instincts and allow only rare and curated bursts of feeling. Being a progressive requires a perverse mastery of the mind over the heart, especially in relation to the pursuit of self-interest and the nature of the human person. 

For a nation eager to unwind decades of progressive “progress,” unmasking this fundamental characteristic is an important step toward reclaiming what makes us human and what makes our nation great. 

Suppressing self-interest

To implement the progressive worldview, the pursuit of self-interest must be stifled, which is no small task. The drive to secure shelter, food, and sexual partners to pass on genes was established long before humans developed language. The brain’s natural reward systems light up when we pursue food, money, and social status. Self-interest is programmed into our biology. It’s as natural as breathing. 

Of course, as civilization developed, humans became concerned with “the greater good,” not only because it worked toward survival but because of our moral development. The most consequential moral teacher to ever live, Jesus of Nazareth, taught his followers to love one another as they loved themselves. This was not a call to malign or repress self-interest but to heed the heart’s natural tug to help the impoverished. Indeed, to love others as we love ourselves is useless if we don’t love ourselves at all.

This ethical framework informed the creation of the modern free-market system, which harnesses self-interest while lifting the poor from poverty. Led by America, this economic model has slashed poverty rates and sparked innovation, drastically raising the standard of living for billions of people.

Meanwhile, economies that suppressed and disincentivized the pursuit of self-interest had no such success. The Soviet Union, Mao’s communist agrarianism, post-revolution Cuba, etc., bred stagnation and misery through state-controlled industries and excessive redistribution.

Indeed, suppressing the pursuit of self-interest cuts sharply against natural instincts and defies all available historical evidence. Modern-day progressives would deny that they are proposing a drastic shift, but their guiding economic principle suggests otherwise. 

The use of the term “equity” exploded late last decade, though its meaning was often obscured. The famous “baseball fence” illustration showing people of different heights being boosted up according to their needs struck many as self-evidently good. After all, why shouldn’t everyone have the same view? 

The problem, of course, is that it’s impossible to quantify all the variables necessary to see who stands above whom and to what degree. People of African descent, it may be argued, have historically had a tougher time in the job market than people of European descent. However, given the range of additional variables that affect employment outcomes, from individual intelligence to attractiveness to personality markers, it is impossible to determine with certainty how much of a boost each person requires to see over the fence. 

Scorning complexity, progressives push to engineer equal outcomes in education and employment along group identity lines. This necessarily requires reducing the height of some as much as raising the height of others. Making sure “we all end up in the same place,” as Harris famously said in 2020, means stifling the natural instinct toward self-interest for many.

Suppressing natural sexuality

The suppression of natural sexuality is another priority for progressives. Since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, they’ve endeavored to rewire human sexual relations by suppressing the reproductive drive and replacing objective sexual categories with a socially constructed spectrum.

To be sure, the reproductive instinct is among the most powerful. Every species prioritizes passing on its genes. Our biological reward systems, including oxytocin and dopamine spikes, as well as physical pleasure, encourage the act for this reason. 

But for three generations, the pro-abortion movement has helped normalize the most unnatural act of all: a mother taking the life of her own child. Since Roe v. Wade in 1973, approximately 1.3 million babies have been aborted each year on average. Birth rates have fallen 25% in that span, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drastically aging the population. Census projections show that seniors will outnumber children by 2035.

“Be fruitful and multiply” was considered a self-evident moral good for millennia. This wasn’t merely sentimental but a necessity for survival. Having children meant having help on the farm or at the store. It meant energy and innovation that would help the family and community thrive. It meant more responsibility and toil but also greater satisfaction and meaning. Until very recently in history, our natural instinct to reproduce was aligned with our guiding values and priorities. However, the progressive influence has ruptured this alignment, convincing many to suppress the drive to reproduce in the name of greater “freedom,” which is often illusory since parents live longer, report higher levels of happiness, and suffer lower costs and loneliness in old age.

Eradicating natural distinctions between men and women is another crucial step for progressives. They see sexual differences as a deep root of inequality since different gender roles yield unequal outcomes in income and power. The complementarity of the sexes and the meaning and fulfillment this partnership has brought humans for millennia don’t factor into their equation. The goal is to flatten outcomes by any means necessary. That means erasing sexual differences, even among children, which is only achievable through unnatural means.

The normalization of tampering with children’s natural sexual development in the form of puberty blockers and risky surgeries speaks to the Left’s blind obsession with overpowering nature. The use of these “treatments” has skyrocketed in recent years, bolstering the notion of a social contagion. The number of children diagnosed with gender dysphoria tripled from 2017 to 2021, and puberty blocker usage spiked 400% from 2014 to 2021, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association. The children experimented upon can expect permanently reduced bone density, damaged fertility, stunted cognitive function, and impaired sexual function. 

The sudden explosion in the use of “personal pronouns” among progressives was another attempt at mastering nature. However, the idea that society should be expected to memorize hundreds of different combinations for different individuals was patently ridiculous and flamed out naturally. Declaring one’s pronouns to begin a conversation was so unnatural that not even progressives could do it with a straight face. 

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Of course, human instinct must occasionally be checked, especially in terms of greed and lust. However, this is a matter of mastery, not mutilation. It’s a matter of harnessing nature, not twisting it in service of ideological ends. 

One way to tell the difference is to ask: Is my behavior building up my humanity or beating it down? Unlike Wallace, America should embrace its natural humanity once more — surely, this would make it great again.