If you are old enough, you probably remember that the 1970 film “Love Story ” was promoted with the tagline “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”
Of course, like a lot of slogans and lyrics in popular culture, that tagline is 180 degrees wrong : If you want to preserve a loving relationship, you have to say you’re sorry when you have made a mistake, and sometimes even when you haven’t.
But one type of person never has to apologize, no matter how wrong he was or how much damage he has done. This type of person is the influential “progressive” politician or commentator.
People of this sort make one false prediction or bad decision after another, leaving confusion and wreckage in their wake. It’s much like how the slobs in leftist street demonstrations leave mounds of filth and garbage for others to clean up. But “progressive” luminaries almost never apologize for their mistakes. Instead, they forget about them and move on.
The phenomenon is so well-recognized that it was memorialized in the name of a “progressive” group that got its start by urging us to overlook President Bill Clinton’s impeachable conduct—and instead just “move on.”
Leftists may be wrong to claim America suffers from “white privilege” or “male privilege.” But Progressive Privilege is real.
The examples are innumerable:
- Members of the Biden administration have never apologized for misleading the public about the President’s mental condition or for unconstitutionally assuming his powers.
- Neither Vice President Kamala Harris or any member of Biden’s cabinet has apologized for their failure to invoke the disability provisions of the Constitution’s 25th amendment.
- Similarly, no one in the Biden administration has apologized for the botched evacuation from Afghanistan.
- When the Department of Government Efficiency uncovered massive abuse of taxpayer funds by the U.S. Agency for Economic Development, there were no apologies, only attacks on Elon Musk for leading the team that
- discovered the abuse.
- When “Russiagate” was proved to be a hoax, we heard no apologies from its promoters: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Adam Schiff or any of their accomplices.
- When libertarian Javier Milei was running for president of Argentina, a public letter signed by 108 prominent left-wing economists warned that Milei’s pro-free market proposals would cause economic disaster. When their prediction proved entirely wrong, few, if any , of the letter signers publicly acknowledged their mistake.
There is the very rare exception. Economist Paul Krugman deserves credit for admitting that he erred when he predicted that President Biden’s extravagant spending would not cause inflation. But such cases are unusual. In general, “progressives” feel no need to apologize for the damage they cause or for the false predictions they make.
I’ve had some close encounters with the same phenomenon during my academic and political careers. First, an academic anecdote:
During the 1970s and 1980s, state legislatures adopted resolutions requiring what the Constitution calls a “Convention for proposing Amendments.” The idea was to propose constitutional amendments requiring a balanced budget, imposing term limits, and overturning the abortion case of Roe v. Wade.
Liberal academics and opinion-molders—including some still active—opposed all these ideas. But rather than merely debating the merits, they tried to scare people by claiming the composition and procedures for an amendments convention were totally unknown, and that the convention could rewrite the entire Constitution.
Subsequent scholarly research—by myself and other academics—has shown these claims were entirely false: The procedures are well-understood and the convention’s powers are strictly limited. But to my knowledge, none of the doomsayers has apologized for misleading the American people.
Here’s an experience from my political career: During the 1990s, I was active in Montana politics. Montana then had the highest state income tax in the country, tied with California. Leftists claimed the high rate was needed for balancing the state budget.
Citing facts to the contrary, I campaigned throughout Montana for income tax cuts. A friend of mine in the state senate sponsored a bill to reduce the rates substantially. While the bill was pending, “progressives” warned of economic catastophe: They claimed the proposed rate cuts would “blow a hole in the budget,” causing huge deficits.
But after the bill passed, Montana enjoyed only prosperity and budget surpluses. The critics never publicly acknowledged their error, much less apologize for it.
Most of us do not enjoy this kind of Progressive Privilege—nor would we wish to do so. By way of illustration, in 2018 I wrote a scholarly article speculating about the meaning of “high Misdemeanors” as a constitutional basis for impeaching a federal officer. Two years later, additional research convinced me that I had been wrong. So I wrote a new article in the same journal acknowledging the error and correcting it.
I don’t claim any special virtue for making the correction. It’s just common decency. But this rule of common decency doesn’t seem to apply to prominent “progressives.”
I’m not sure we fully understand why the double standard exists. For leftist academics, the bias in the universities may help shield them from their mistakes.
But a more important reason may be the statist agenda of the legacy media.
Consider this simple contrast: When a Republican Vice President, Dan Quayle, recited an inaccurate spelling of “potato,” the media relentlessly pounded the incident into the minds of the American public. But when a Democrat Vice President, Kamala Harris, participated in the greatest cover-up in presidential history—and betrayed her obligation to invoke the 25 th amendment—the media were largely uncritical.
That is what Progressive Privilege looks like.
Robert G. Natelson, a former constitutional law professor who is senior fellow in constitutional jurisprudence at the Independence Institute in Denver, authored “ The Original Constitution ” (4th ed., 2025). He is a contributor to the Heritage Foundation’s “Heritage Guide to the Constitution.”
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