A (short) list of liberal accomplishments

In my post about the National Review Institute, I complained:

Too many of the NRI panelists were willing to cede ground to global warming, the biggest liberal hoax since the "homeless crisis" of the 1980s. Besides the specific evidence of fraudulent statistical manipulation and the problematic assumptions of climate "modeling," the very fact that liberals passionately believe in global warming is an argument against the theory. When have liberals ever been right about anything?

That last taunt prompted a troll to respond:

Let's see, off the top of my head:
Civil rights (and abolition, for that matter)
Ending child labor
40 hour work week
Rivers tend not to catch afire anymore
There are still bald eagles
Read "The Jungle" next time you eat a steak

I suppose other examples might be added, but let's go with this list for starters. Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" was published in 1906 and the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed that same year. Child labor was outlawed and the 40-hour week was mandated by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire in 1969. The Environmental Protection Agency was created in 1970, and the Endangered Species Act (credited, rightly or not, with saving the bald eagle) was passed in 1973. Slavery was abolished by the 13th Amendment (1865) and the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964.

Shall we credit all of these measures as "liberal"? U.S. Grant and W.T. Sherman might eschew that label, and both the EPA and the ESA were signed into law by Richard Nixon. Shall we credit all these measures as successes? After all, we have not abolished child labor, merely outsourced it to the Third World, and you can ask the average professional (say, a young lawyer) when the last time was he worked a 40-hour week.

Yet call all of these measures unalloyed successes and credit them all to liberalism, and it's still a pathetically short list of achievements, most of them accomplished 70 or 100 years ago. And I fail to see how today's liberals can really claim credit for a food-safety law passed before any of them were old enough to vote. Will liberals next claim their opposition to the crucifixion of Christ as evidence that we should trust them about global warming?

Liberals promote a sort of Whig history of continual progress, wherein everything good and beneficial is credited to crusading liberals and all failures and shortcomings are the fault of their opponents. And this mantle of historical liberal virtue is then draped around the shoulders of the next liberal crusade, so that to oppose liberalism is analogous to opposing progress -- not merely the "progress" proposed today, but centuries-old "progress," as well.

It's a scam, a dishonest hustle, and if all the myriad measures that liberals say are necessary to "progress" today were enacted tomorrow, the liberals would come back the day after tomorrow with a new list of demands. This fact -- the absolute endlessness of the liberal appetite, the sheer voraciousness with which they seek new legislation -- is why it's so much easier simply to oppose liberals in everything.