Paradigmatic Progressivism

By Jesse Smith, November 5, 2025

Since 2010, a surge in academic expressions of progressive scholar-activism has sparked substantial opposition from observers concerned about the university veering from its truth-seeking mission.

Yet transparent scholar-activism is not the most serious form of ideological capture in academic research. Particularly in social science, partisan distortions can easily seep into research programs even when the researchers are fully committed to scientific objectivity. Social science is a human activity, and so inevitably reflects the strengths and weaknesses of its practitioners. Ideally, the blind spots of some scholars should be offset by the insights of others in a viewpoint-diverse academic community. But when liberals outnumber conservatives 10:1, their biases not only go unchecked, but harden into theoretical assumptions that shape every aspect of the research process. I call this problem paradigmatic progressivism. 

As an example, consider the decades-long research program on psychological authoritarianism. In 1950, Theodor Adorno and collaborators published The Authoritarian Personality, which purportedly revealed evidence of a psychological trait that leads some people to idolize strength, disdain weakness, and demand social conformity. This landmark work has sparked widespread attention, imitation, and revision up to this day, resulting in hundreds of empirical studies. 

In these studies of authoritarianism, social scientists create scales out of collections of survey items (e.g., “Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn”), identify the political characteristics or opinions correlated with these scales, and then declare the expressions of these opinions to be manifestations of the authoritarian trait. Since the subjects who express these opinions tend to be conservative, studies conducted in this manner overwhelmingly conclude that authoritarianism drives conservative political commitments—which makes conservatism intrinsically pathological. The social scientists advancing such claims argue—we can assume, sincerely—that they are not engaging in partisanship or activism. They believe they are simply reporting the results of objective analysis.

This program has some major problems, however, apparent to any critical observer unblinded by progressive assumptions. First, when constructing the scales used to measure “authoritarianism,” social scientists often conflate it from the outset with  conservatism. For instance, one commonly used authoritarianism scale contains the statement, “The old-fashioned ways and values still show the best way to live.” The resultant finding that conservatives are more authoritarian is little more than a tautology.

The second problem is a normatively charged conceptualization. The choice of the term “authoritarianism,” combined with alleged links from this trait to Nazism and other evils, makes it clear that the views under study are pathological. Meanwhile, people low on the scales are not assigned any label at all, and so presumptively given a clean bill of mental health. However, it would be equally possible to call the characteristic in question, say, “orderliness,” and avoid building excessive, partisan-inflected normative judgment into the theoretical framework.

The “psychological authoritarianism” research agenda has been enormously successful by typical academic metrics. Yet its key claims are sustained, not by empirical observation, but by tacit assumptions guiding that observation and its interpretation. 

Similar problems underlie research programs on other politically charged topics. After explicit expressions of racial prejudice went near-extinct in surveys, researchers developed the concept of “racial resentment:” a form of prejudice which is on display when a subject explains racial inequality in individualistic, rather than systematic, terms (e.g., “It’s really a matter of some people just not trying hard enough: if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites”). Yet any such sentiments are difficult to distinguish from a genuine commitment to individualism and self-reliance, meaning the concept substantially recasts common conservative principles as disguised prejudices. 

As additional examples, the influential concept of implicit bias has gained traction not only in psychological research but also public discourse and practice, including its regular appearance in workplace anti-bias trainings. The concept lends apparent support to the progressive perception that racial and other prejudices, rather than substantially declining, have simply morphed into a more latent form. Yet recent critiques have revealed unreliability and poor predictive power that substantially undermine the concept’s utility. Similarly, the flourishing “Christian nationalism”  research program is substantially founded on radical and pathologizing interpretations of mainstream expressions of conservative Christianity.

Paradigmatic progressivism shapes academic discourse more profoundly than scholar-activism. Because affected research programs exhibit the indicators of solid science, their claims enjoy greater legitimacy. Because the biases are built into the research programs themselves, they are self-sustaining even without strong ideological commitments from individual researchers. Because they rest on tacit assumptions, those biases go largely unrecognized. The result is that even non-activist research programs on topics relevant to partisan politics are at high risk of producing distorted claims.

The claims coming from paradigmatically progressive research programs are not necessarily false; in some cases, unbiased procedures would produce the same results. In others, paradigmatic progressivism may produce partial truths which, however distorted, still point to real and important phenomena. Furthermore, paradigmatic progressivism entails concentrated areas of focus as well as blind spots, attuning us to aspects of social reality we might otherwise miss. But it nonetheless leaves social scientific claims vulnerable to invisible distortions—distortions that all occur in the same direction, given the present ideological skew of the academy.

This means efforts to reform social science must go beyond combatting scholar-activism and promoting scientific rigor. We must build communities where genuine intellectual pluralism can make social scientific research less myopic. In practical terms, this means that we must seek out and include identifiably conservative perspectives, which have a necessary role in correcting the distortions presented by paradigmatic progressivism.