Dennis Saffran

In an article in the Summer 2014 issue of City Journal, I discussed the effort by the de Blasio administration, the NAACP, the United Federation of Teachers, and other “progressives” to replace the legally mandated merit-selection test for acceptance into Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and New York City’s other elite high schools with “holistic” admissions criteria.

Modern “progressives” are not, as some economic conservatives would say, socialists. In fact, today’s so-called progressives are not even particularly progressive, at least in the usual sense of seeking to redistribute wealth from rich to poor. As Fred Siegel has noted, contemporary progressivism is an upper-middle-class movement that caters to the social libertarianism of coastal elites, while paying lip service to left-wing economic concerns. Even when modern progressives do support economic development, they often do so in ways that stand traditional progressivism on its head—redistributing wealth upward to favored industries.