Categories: Features
Progressivism Isn’t Progressive
“Hesiod was right 2,700 years ago that with material progress often comes moral regress.” -Victor Davis Hanson
On April 13, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas delivered an address in which he sharply criticized progressivism for being incompatible with the vision of America that inspired the Founders. “Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence, and hence, our form of government. It holds that our rights and our dignities come not from G-d, but from government,” Thomas said. “It requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a Constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights.” (This naturally creates a problem: What government giveth, government can take away.) He went on to say, “Progressivism was the first mainstream American political movement – with the possible exception of the pro-slavery reactionaries on the eve of the Civil War – to openly oppose the principles of the Declaration. Progressives strove to undo the Declaration’s commitment to equality and natural rights, both of which they denied were self-evident.” This philosophy, he contended, made it easy for Southern-born President Woodrow Wilson, who was generally acknowledged to be the first Progressive president (although Theodore Roosevelt moved leftward after leaving the White House and attempted a comeback in 1912, running as the nominee of the third party he co-founded, the Progressive or “Bull Moose” party), to re-segregate the federal work force and to promote eugenics and the sterilization of people deemed “unfit to reproduce.” (A revival of the Progressive party in 1948, which nominated FDR’s former Vice President, Henry Wallace, for President, was deemed by many to be a Communist front.) One of Progressivism’s first successes came in the economic realm. America’s entry into World War I necessitated a considerable expansion of the federal government, which came to be known as “war socialism.” In essence, the Progressives realized that the necessity for greater government spending provided them the perfect opportunity to achieve their objective of creating an administrative state more powerful than Congress or the President without the inconvenience of having to run for re-election. For example, they created the Federal Reserve to control the banking system. Among the more distasteful aspects of wartime Progressivism was the suppression of dissent. Postmaster General Alfred S. Burleson ordered all local postmasters to monitor opponents of America’s entry into World War I. Activists were actually charged and tried under the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. Likewise, publications critical of our involvement were suppressed – in particular, the Jewish socialist newspaper The Forward, whose editor, Abraham Cahan, was so outraged by the presence of Czarist Russia as an ally of Britain and France that he wrote editorials supporting Germany, which had torpedoed the British civilian ship RMS Lusitania in 1915 and, after backing down in the face of international outrage, resumed unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917. The federal government was about to shut down The Forward when Louis Marshall, the chair of the American Jewish Committee, intervened by promising to restrain Cahan. Thus, The Forward has continued publishing to the present day, albeit switching from daily to weekly and from Yiddish to English, reflecting the increasing assimilation of American Jews. After the war, there was a brief reduction in the federal government’s power under the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations, but then came the Depression, with an impressive array of centralized programs: the Tennessee Valley Authority, Social Security, WPA, etc., and after the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the National Recovery Act (NRA), which sought to regulate wages and prices, FDR’s threat to pack the Court, i.e., appoint additional liberal justices, brought the majority of the Court back in line. As we know, the same threat is back again to intimidate the present conservative-leaning Supreme Court. This isn’t the time or place to debate the merits of the New Deal, but there is one true threat to our democracy looming in the form of the Leftist-Islamist takeover of the nation’s schools. Even before entering elective office as governor of New Jersey, then-president of Princeton Woodrow Wilson had given a preview of his policies when he stated that the aim of the university was to make young men as unlike their fathers as possible. Over the years, that aim became the goal of the American school system, especially higher education. A major force driving the transition was the philosophy of John Dewey. His view was that education should involve the “whole child,” including manual training and civic engagement, encouraging exploration and discovery, and maintaining “democratic classrooms,” which emphasize cooperative learning and put social skills on a par with academic content. Dewey himself criticized some of his disciples for going too far in implementing his ideas by elevating social issues above instruction, but the damage was already done. The results of progressive education have been clear since the 1960s. Radicalized young people who took advantage of graduate school deferments from the draft (as did I, for medical reasons) or emigrated to Canada and were subsequently pardoned by Jimmy Carter, pursued graduate degrees and, over the course of two generations, have taken full control of the nation’s educational system, from kindergarten to doctoral programs. Racism, rioting, and revolution have replaced reading, writing, and arithmetic as ideology takes priority over basic skills. This is evidenced by the steady decline of SAT and other comprehensive testing scores. Students have occupied campus buildings and barred Jewish students from entering or forced them to barricade themselves in the library to escape the howling mobs. Hatred of America and all it stands for, distortion of history, excessive environmentalism, and rampant antisemitism thinly disguised as anti-Zionism have infected all areas of society, spreading from education to government, politics, corporate boardrooms, media, entertainment, book publishing, and even sports, and have become the hallmarks of our popular culture. A total assault on both Judaism and Christianity is ongoing, threatening our very concept of morality, as exemplified by Leftist positions on issues such as abortion, assisted suicide, and transgendering minors without parental consent, as well as twisting laws to harass pro-life organizations and expel the Bible from the public arena. To take just one example, the Fairfax School District in Virginia, upon learning that a boy wearing a skirt had entered a girls’ restroom and sexually assaulted a girl, transferred him to another school, where he repeated the same offense. Comparison with ancient Rome suggests that we are a society in danger of collapse. The acid test of the progressive reordering of society may well come in the rebuilding of Pacific Palisades. California Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, both card-carrying leftists, have worked assiduously to prevent the rebuilding of former luxury homes so that they can build low-income housing to give the poor and unfortunate their fair share of desirable locations. My guess is that having had faux altruism drilled into them since elementary school, the majority of the former residents will meekly accept their “loss of privilege” and move to less desirable neighborhoods with inferior schools in the interests of social justice, while continuing to vote for the Left. And the anticipated Democratic landslide in the elections of 2026 and 2028 should confirm this hypothesis. The fact is that progressivism isn’t progress, but rather a regression to pre-Sinaitic – perhaps even pre-Abrahamic – norms, with periods of tyranny following periods of chaos. Real progress was epitomized by the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, as our Founders promoted the ideals of liberty and justice for all. Even when we have fallen short of those ideals, we are still better than the other nations whose inhabitants aspire to move here, legally or illegally (who far outnumber the disaffected denizens of Hollywood who want to leave – that is, until they experience life elsewhere on this planet). It is fitting to conclude with the words of President Calvin Coolidge in an address given on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence: “If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with unalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress, can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which they can proceed historically is not forward but backward.”
