Saving the Soul

Old Gadfly:  Gentlemen, if my memory is correct, a few months ago, on one of the Sunday morning news analysis programs, the topic was the Republican Presidential campaign with 17 competitors.  Former Democrat Congresswoman Jane Harman suggested we are witnessing a struggle for the soul of the Republican Party.

AM:  I saw the same episode.  When I heard her say that, I thought, “at least the Republican Party had a soul!”

IM:   And by implication, then, the Democrat Party sold its soul to the devil, probably when Woodrow Wilson initiated his progressive agenda for America.  He and his fellow progressives, like John Dewey (the father of public education in America), Frank Goodnow (advocate for the same concept of collective liberty as that advanced by Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler), and Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood), refused to acknowledge natural rights.  Instead, they believed all rights were conferred upon members of society by the government.  This allowed them to establish an administrative state that became the moral authority for all rights.  This now justifies, for example, why administrative law judges can avoid due process (no jury of peers; only the agency-paid judge, the plaintiff, and the defendant) punish bakers for not wanting to participate in same sex weddings.

Old Gadfly:  Let’s bring this back to today, where the Republican Party seems reluctant, even hostile, to accepting Trump as the presumptive nominee.

AM:  Don’t forget, early in the primary season, the Republican Party went to great lengths to get Trump to sign a pledge that, if he were not the Republican nominee, he would support the final nominee and not compete as an independent candidate.  He signed the pledge.

IM:  What the Republican establishment presumed was that Trump would not be the nominee.  Those that are now resisting his nomination and even talking about hijacking the nomination are hypocrites.  They insult the American people.

Old Gadfly:  The “fair and balanced” Fox Sunday with Chris Wallace aired a segment in March 2016 with the title:   “Can Donald Trump unify a Republican Party he fractured.”

AM:  Trump merely tapped into a fracture the Republican Party created on its own.

Old Gadfly:  Do you have any evidence?

AM:  Tons of evidence.  First, during the George W. Bush Presidency, when he committed armed forces to Iraq, based no less on a bipartisan joint resolution of Congress, he had nearly a 90% approval rating from the American public.  When democrats saw no political capital from this undertaking, they decided to derail the Bush momentum.  Democrats and the press were brutal—“wrong course,” “lies, lies, lies,” and so forth.  Instead of being good wingmen, Republican congressman slinked into the shadows.  This allowed Democrats to establish the conditions that led to a major political shift in both houses of Congress in 2006, and the political wolf pack momentum carried Obama into the White House.  During the last two years of the Bush Administration, the Democrat Congress pushed their progressive agenda while a morally defeated Bush capitulated to their demands. 

IM:  And while this will sound racist, the truth is, Obama was elected because he was black (to assuage the guilt of white privilege and previous racism in America) and because progressives were successful in blaming the 2008 financial crisis on Bush policies.   We discussed these false narratives previously (see here, here, here, and chapters 3, 4, and 5 here).

AM:  Obama’s resume had no qualifying experience for the position:  what might be learned from school records have been sealed; he was a Saul Alinsky trained community organizer and the author of two memoirs that had more to do with his socialistic worldview because there were no notable achievements to reflect upon; he did one-term touch and goes at the Illinois state legislature and the US Senate, with no legislative distinction except for being a leading critic of the Iraq war; but he has excellent oration skills that would make the ancient Sophists proud. 

IM:  The mess created during the past eight years was not because of Obama’s chosen race (his mother was white after all), but because he tried to fundamentally transform America from a constitutional republic into a socialistic administrative state (Woodrow Wilson would be pleased).  Then, in 2010 and 2012, when the Tea Party movement influenced a major swing back to Republicans in charge of both houses of Congress, the elected officials seemed to lose the courage to follow through on campaign promises.  Knowing there was no way Democrats would compromise; Republicans capitulated because Democrats could and did shut down the government and could blame it on Republicans because of a complicit media.  And the IRS successfully shut down the Tea Party voice between 2010 and 2012 (in time for a presidential reelection) with Democrats shielding Lois Lerner and others involved.  Thus, many Americans, while feeling under assault by internal socialist pressures by progressive Democrats, also felt betrayed by the Republican Party.  They feel orphaned by a lack of moral leaders that would and should do their duty to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

Old Gadfly:  What are the implications?

IM:  While the media ruminates about apparent racism and fraud in the Trump University civil suit, there is no media interest in $16.5 million paid to former President Bill Clinton to serve as honorary chancellor for Laureate International Universities.  In return, the university received $55 million from the US State Department while Hillary Clinton was the Secretary of State.  It took a liberal law professor from Georgetown University to alert the public about this (see here).  Is the media so biased as to be blind about what deserves scrutiny?  Ideology can be dangerous when it becomes moral orthodoxy.  This is why secular humanism, which partially defines American progressivism, is the new state religion.

          AM:  Trump has emerged as a signal from the American people.  This signal is to restore the constitutional republic that made America the leader of the world.

Old Gadfly:  How does this relate to the soul of the Republican Party?

AM:  The presidential campaign is a wake-up call.  This is an opportunity to seek forgiveness and redemption for betraying George W. Bush and the American people, and for the hypocrisy in insisting that Republicans support the Republican nominee assuming it would not be Trump.  The Party can do this by “helping” Trump to clarify positions on important issues, by ensuring the Party can restore a constitutional republic, and by repudiating the progressive ideology that seeks to substitute the ideals that made America great with their notion of utopia and human perfection.  This thinking was vividly portrayed by Margaret Sanger and her eugenics and neo-Malthusian cohort and carried on by the Planned Parenthood crusaders today.  Of course, the anthropomorphic cause of climate change (and corresponding political punishment for skeptics) conveniently dovetails into these notions of utopia and human perfection.

IM:  That is a big mountain to climb.  Let’s hope Trump’s exertions and the blessings of American liberty can overcome the progressive ambition so appropriately portrayed in the myth and fate of Sisyphus.  Here is an excerpt from a Wikipedia entry on Sisyphus: 

James Clement van Pelt, co-founder of Yale's Initiative in Religion, Science & Technology, suggests that Sisyphus also personifies humanity and its disastrous pursuit of perfection by any means necessary, in which the great rock repeatedly rushing down the mount symbolizes the accelerating pace of unsustainable civilization toward cataclysmic collapse and cultural oblivion that ends each historical age and restarts the sisyphean cycle.

Old Gadfly:  Trump’s and the Republican Party’s exertions require a healthy soul, inspired by the blessings of natural rights and the duty to preserve and protect them by a constitutional republic that guarantees a just society where all citizens and legal residents are equally protected and empowered by the rule of law.  Let’s pray that we can break the current Sisyphean cycle.

What Is Progressivism?

AM (an American combat aviator with an inquiring mind):  Gadfly, we are now starting to hear the term progressive mentioned more and more in the public narrative.  It sounds, well, “progressive,” implying deliberate efforts toward “progress.”

Old Gadfly:  Yes, the term is very seductive.

IM (an American citizen with an inquiring mind):  I have even heard some of my relatively “conservative” friends claim to be progressive, typically as in a Teddy Roosevelt progressive.  As I understand it, Teddy was one of the first American advocates of progressivism, a political movement historians refer to as the Progressive Era, 1890s-1920s.

AM:  This progressive era focused on (a) cleaning up corruption in government (i.e., political machines) through direct democracy: and (b) reigning in monopolies through antitrust laws and actions, mostly for the benefit of fair competition and for the benefit of consumers.  Proponents of these objectives consisted of Republicans (e.g., Teddy Roosevelt and Wisconsin’s Robert La Follette) and Democrats (e.g., William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson).     

Old Gadfly:  The focus seemed appropriate, whether Republican or Democrat.  So, it seems to me that the progressive era was a good thing for America.  Am I wrong?

IM:  Good question.

Old Gadfly:  What was going on in America at the time?

AM:  America was still transforming based on technology-driven industrialization. America shifted from an agricultural, rural nation to and industrialized, urban nation that lacked institutions to accommodate these changes.

Old Gadfly:  What do you mean by “institutions”?

AM:  I found one of the books in your study particularly useful for answering that question.  Douglass North, in his book, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, defined an institution as simply, “the rules of the game.”[1]  North expands on this simple definition by explaining that institutions are “the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction.  In consequence, they structure incentives in human exchange, whether political, social, or economic.  Institutional change shapes the way societies evolve through time and hence is the key to understanding historical change.”[2]  Thus, in answer to your bigger question, Teddy Roosevelt advocated new rules of the game to better accommodate the technology-driven changes taking place in America.

Old Gadfly:   All this sounds like a good and needed approach.  Yet, why was the term progressive used as opposed to modernism, solutionism, or some equivalent word?

IM:  Do you think it related to the idea of progress?

Old Gadfly:  What do you think?  Is there such an idea?

IM:  Yes, it stemmed from the Age of Enlightenment.

Old Gadfly:  Explain.

IM:  The theory of the idea of progress subscribes to a combination of technology, science, and social action (e.g., social engineering) to improve the human condition.

AM:  We have seen where single elements or combinations have produced positive and negative results.  For example, nuclear energy can be used for electrical power for the benefit of many people or it can be used for death and destruction.  So, these concepts can improve or adversely impact the human condition.

Old Gadfly:  Excellent point, AM.  So, if the idea of progress can have different paths, that is, creative versus destructive, then what is the determinant of those paths?

AM:  Any application of technology, science, or social action is based on human decision-making.

Old Gadfly:  I agree.  Now, how does this decision-making relate to the nature of progressivism?

IM:  It requires someone or a like-minded group to make decisions.

Old Gadfly:  And this is why progressivism is seductive and dangerous.  The notion of progressivism emerged based on reasonable expectations to accommodate major changes taking place in the American culture with new institutions; yet, the scope and application of progressivism evolved over time.  As a consequence, many today who favor progress believe they are a “progressive.” 

IM:  So, those who understand the seductiveness and danger of progressivism are considered “conservative” and opposed to progress.  That is why it is so customary today to hear the left accuse the right of being anti-women, anti-black, anti-gay, anti-equality (this runs the gamut from income inequality, gender-based wage inequality, to marriage inequality), anti-immigrant, anti-reproductive rights, and so forth.    

AM:  It appears that the major leftward evolution of progressivism took place during Woodrow Wilson’s presidency. 

Old Gadfly:  What was Wilson’s view?

AM:  The main tenet of Wilson’s progressivism is that central planners with superior knowledge could advance policy to promote the idea of progress for the benefit of the people.  Wilson was critical of a constitutional republic because it was based on property ownership and individual rights.  He believed that the principles of democracy and socialism were essentially the same, with socialism being a more advanced condition that only the historical evolution of organizational institutions (i.e., a large, national, central government) could support.  Ronald Pestritto provides evidence of this view based on a critical analysis of Wilson’s documented writings and actions in his book, Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism.[3] 

IM:  Pestritto also provided an excellent analysis, often ignored in histories and biographies, of Wilson’s view on the role of “progressive races” in the historical development of the modern state.[4]  He was openly critical of post-Civil War Reconstruction because “blacks were an inferior race.”[5]  Thomas Sowell, in his book, Intellectuals and Race, provided a wealth of evidence about Wilson’s and the American political elite’s fascination with and advocacy of eugenics.[6]  Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood is a modern legacy of this thinking.[7]

Old Gadfly:  A little more than a year ago, I visited the presidential library of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  In one of the displays, I was amazed to read the explicit acknowledgement by FDR of his admiration for Wilson’s progressive views.  So, as I turned the corner and examined a series of panels listing all the New Deal policy changes FDR instituted during the course of his presidency, I began to realize how serious this group of American progressive political elite was in transforming America from a constitutional republic to a socialistic democracy.

IM:  It was also during this timeframe that American political elite traveled to Europe and Russia to see first had the great experiments by Hitler and Stalin to advance the human condition.  As Amity Shlaes described it in her book, The Forgotten Man, collective freedom observed by these elite seemed superior to individual freedom.[8]

AM:  The American political elite’s admiration of the statist and social engineering efforts taking place under Hitler and Stalin gave birth to the neoconservative movement.  Francis Fukuyama explained this development it in his book, America at the Crossroads:  Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy.[9]  He traced the roots of neoconservatism to City College of New York in the mid-1930s to early 1940s, where a group of Jewish intellectuals attended as students.  A late-comer to this group was Daniel Patrick Moynihan.  There were two major reasons for splitting away from their left-wing liberal colleagues.  The first reason was their disgust for communism and those who sympathized with communist developments in the 30s and 40s.  These founding neoconservatives generally had no issue with the idealism of socialism; yet they saw the realities of socialism—its evil manifestations stemming from the Hitler-Stalin pact and other significant unintended consequences—and wanted nothing of it.  The second major reason for the split from their liberal colleagues was the liberal’s passion for social engineering.  Social engineering, as an egalitarian approach to shaping society, assumed perfect knowledge by elite who conceived the engineering.  These elite were members of a central planning effort within the government.  The evolving progressive ideology had already demonstrated its similarities to the statist and socialist movements in Germany and the Soviet Union.

Old Gadfly:  When you say, egalitarian approach.  What do you mean by that?

AM:  Egalitarianism is a manifestation of modern liberalism and progressivism.  Its guiding principle is equality of outcomes.  Thus, egalitarianism chooses equality of outcomes over freedom of choice.  According to Milton Friedman, a classical liberal is encouraged by greater material equality in a free society, trusting that material equality is a by-product of a free society.  Progressives are not content with this dynamic; they feel morally obligated to take control of society and justify taking from some to give to others as the “just” thing to do.^[10]  Even the celebrated John Rawls, a Harvard political philosopher, argued for egalitarian approaches in his book, A Theory of Justice.  Rawls claimed an impartial system of justice is not possible, even in modern, civil societies because of various conceptions of justice.  Thus, he argued, “Clearly this distinction between the concept [ideal, impartial justice] and the various conceptions of justice settles no important questions.  It simply helps to identify the role of the principles of social justice”.[11]   Consequently, in Rawls’ reasoned judgment, justice in the form of “social justice” is a means, not an end.  Egalitarian approaches, as a form of social justice, are morally coercive because they “take away” and “give to” in the spirit of equal outcomes.  Progressives believe central planners of superior intellect can make these types of decisions.  Forced redistribution of wealth is a classic example.

IM:  C.S. Lewis addressed this coerciveness in his book, The Abolition of Man.[12]  His chapter, “Men without Chests,” challenges political correctness and the threat to free and spontaneous expression and behaviors.  Lewis wrote in the mid-1940s.  During this same period, “progressive” developments in the Soviet Union prompted Winston Churchill to give his “Iron Curtain” speech (the real title was The Sinews of Peace, delivered on March 5, 1946 at Westminster College in Fulton Missouri—after losing reelection).  Stalin denounced Churchill’s speech and accused him of “racism.”

AM:  Stalin’s reaction is interesting and ironic.  In modern America, it is typical for a progressive to accuse those on the right as being racist (as well as homophobes, xenophobes, anti-women, etc.).

IM:  Incidentally, F. A. Hayek, like C. S. Lewis, explained how progressive central planners even insist people internalizing values that the planners determine.  In Chapter 11, “The End of Truth,” in The Road to Serfdom, Hayek explained:

The most effective way of making everybody serve the single system of ends toward which the social plan is directed is to make everybody believe in those ends. . . . It is essential that the people should come to regard them as their own ends.  Although the beliefs must be chosen for the people and imposed upon them, they must become their beliefs, a generally accepted creed which makes the individuals as far as possible act spontaneously in the way the planner wants.[13]

AM:  Lewis and Hayek wrote in the 1940s.  Their observations certainly apply to the emotional reaction and labeling by those on the left in America today.  Secretary of State Kerry recently called global warming skeptics members of the Flat Earth Society.  Yet, while the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) politicizes a consensus view among 52 scientists, there are over 700 who disagree for a variety of legitimate, scientific reasons.  

Old Gadfly:  What you are describing AM is how progressives use scientism, not science, to advance their notion of progress.  In another conversation, we’ll discuss scientism in greater depth. Meanwhile, we have discussed the Progressive Era and some of its spinoff manifestations from Wilson and FDR.  Is there any other evidence of progressivism in America since FDR?

IM:  As I understand the evolution of the neoconservative movement, there was a “second wave” stemming from the emergence of the “New Left” led by Tom Hayden who authored the Port Huron Statement in 1962 that spawned the Students for a Democratic Society.  As Fukuyama asserted, the New Left fueled a “revival of large-scale social engineering on the part of the U.S. Government, in the form of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and Great Society Programs.”[14] 

AM:  In 1966, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven published an article that laid out a political strategy to overload the welfare system to precipitate a crisis that would justify (a) blaming capitalism for its inherent flaws, and (b) replacing our economic system with socialism and a government run guarantee of equal income for everyone.[15]  Given this New Left momentum, combined with significant Democrat majorities in both houses of Congress (see table below), Lyndon Johnson resurrected progressivism after significant stability and infrastructure investments under the Eisenhower Administration. 

IM:  Barack Obama has taken progressivism even further leftward with his hope and change agenda.  The further left it moves, the more coercive it becomes.  Obamacare is an obvious example.

Old Gadfly: Excellent analysis, gentlemen.  So, we have arrived at a definition of modern progressivism:  a belief that central planners with superior knowledge can combine technology, science, and social action in such a way as to improve the human condition, using coercion if needed.  This approach seems to completely disregard the importance of individual liberty.  We have also mentioned other concepts such as Democrat, Republican, modern liberalism, classical liberalism, and so forth.  In our next conversation, let us further define various terms and then place them on a political map to see if we can further understand where we are today in America.  

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[1] Douglass C.  North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance.  (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 1990).

[2] Ibid, p. 3.

[3] Ronald J. Pestritto, Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism.  (New York, NY:  Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005).

[4] Ibid, pp. 43-45.

[5] Ibid, p. 44.

[6] Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Race.  (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2013)

[7] Vanessa Murphree and Karla K. Gower, “’Making Birth Control Respectable’:  The Birth Control Review, 1917-1928.”  American Journalism, Volume 30, Issue 2 (2013), pp. 210-234.

[8] Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man:  A New History of the Great Depression.  (New York, NY:  Harper, 2007), pp. 78-139.

[9] Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads:  Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy.  (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 14-21.

[10] Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 40^th Anniversary Edition, (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 195.

[11] John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Revised Edition.  (Cambridge, MA:  Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003 (originally published in 1971]), p. 5.

[12] C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man.  (New York, NY:  Simon & Schuster, 1996 [originally published in 1944]).

[13] F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, The Definitive Edition, Edited by Bruce Caldwell.  (Chicago, IL:  The University of Chicago Press, 2007 [originally published in 1944]), p. 171.

[14] Fukuyama, op cit., p. 18.

[15] Richard Cloward and Frances Piven, “The Weight of the Poor:  A Strategy to End Poverty.” The Nation (May 2, 1966).  Available at http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/03/24-4.  If you visit the website, note the subtitle under Common Dreams:  “Building a Progressive Community.”