While the continuity between John Stuart Mill and Barack Obama may not be obvious, Mencius Moldbug says — considering as their preferred policies are almost opposite — it is there:
The policies changed. But the movement is one. 19th-century Radicalism and 20th-century progressivism are unified by a single force: the collective quest for power.19th-century Radicals favored libertarian policies because they faced an ancien regime which still, to some extent, existed. This was the old regime of Throne and Altar, of mercantilism, Anglicanism and Anglo-Catholicism, imperialism and colonialism — in a word, Toryism.
When Toryism was a reality rather than a bugaboo, liberals could only seek power by destroying it. Thus they sought to cut off its air supply, destroying its sources of profit: protectionism, venal offices, chartered companies, and so forth. They favored rigorous economies of government, and other such ideals quite foreign to the modern liberal.
As they gained power through these aggressive measures, the liberals entered government itself. Thus their interests naturally shifted, toward enlarging and empowering the State. A State that had become “us,” rather than “them.” And thus, the Left went from libertarian to statist.
Thus when we look at policies, which as good democrats we should, we see a discontinuity. But when we look at power structures, which as good reactionaries we must, we see a continuity.
The key is to remember that the Left, at all times, is an adaptive phenomenon. If it were a conspiracy (organized by — the Jews) it would not be Left, but Right. Right is organized; Left is distributed.
The Left is the alliance of all those who seek power through the mind — intellectuals, basically. The Right is the factious and impotent collection of all those who seek to resist the Left, by any means — corruption, or violence, or propaganda, or (seldom, very seldom) the truth and nothing but the truth.
Thus, there was no one in 1900 who said “okay, guys, enough with the libertarianism, our work there is done. Now let’s bring on the statism.” At all times, the Darwinian dynamic of the Left has favored those ideas which brought their thinkers power.
In the 19th century (and before), that power was the power to destroy the ancien regime. Victory in this task naturally brought authority to the destroyers, who established a regime of their own. The ideas of power then became expansive ones, and liberalism pulled its 180.