John Quiggin wrote something stupid on the internet six years ago:
At a deeper level, the appeal of revolution has a substantial residue of aristocratic sentiment. In the course of the last 200 years, and even allowing for the defeats of the past 20 years or so, the achievements of the Left have been impressive, starting with universal suffrage and secret ballots, going on the creation of the welfare state, continuing with progress towards equality without regard to race, gender and sexuality, preserving the environment from the disastrous impact of industrialism and so on. Yet most of this progress has been achieved in a thoroughly bourgeois fashion, through long agitation, boring committee reports and so on. Gains that are ground out in this way are not noble enough for an aristocratic sensibility: far better to fail gloriously.
Which is so not right it’s not even wrong. Fortunately, John Quiggin recognises that and in his current post linking back to this called it “unjustifiably snarky”. It remains however a good example of the whiggish view of history,where ideas like universal suffrage sort of hang in the air until it’s their time to be implemented and progress is inevitable and achieved by reasonable men without emotional attachment working within the legitamite democratic channels of government. It ignores all the revolutionary unpleasantness that made it possible and necessary for those “boring committee reports” to be written and deliberately minimises or removes from view entirely the contributions of those people not “thoroughly bourgeois”.
Every leftwing advance has been achieved against the resolute opposition of the bourgeois, who’d immediately took the credit for it once it had become the status quo, rewriting history to make it inevitable. That’s what Quiggin did here.