Rediscovering Americanism: And the Tyranny of Progressivism

by Mark R. Levin

  Indeed, the Declaration sets forth this same understanding of reform over change: “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”33 Thereafter, the Founders list the specific injustices “to a candid world.”34

  TWO

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  THE PROGRESSIVE MASTERMINDS

  THE END OF THE nineteenth century saw the rise of a movement thoroughly hostile to the underlying principles of the nation’s founding—the “Progressive Movement.” Although I argued in Liberty and Tyranny,1 Ameritopia,2 and elsewhere that the term Statist better describes the left and its multifarious ideological forms and manifestations, it is impossible to decipher, unravel, and highlight certain aspects of the “progressive” history and influence on Americanism, and reference at some length its ideological founders and activists, without referring to it and them by the usual and accepted term. Therefore, for the purposes of this book I must do so out of convenience and necessity, albeit reluctantly.

  Progressivism was imported from Europe and would result in a radical break from America’s heritage. In fact, it is best described as an elitist-driven counterrevolution to the American Revolution, in which the sovereignty of the individual, natural law, natural rights, and the civil society—built on a foundation of thousands of years of enlightened thinking and human experience—would be drastically altered and even abandoned for an ideological agenda broadly characterized as “historical progress.”

  Progressivism is the idea of the inevitability of historical progress and the perfectibility of man—and his self-­realization—through the national community or collective. While its intellectual and political advocates clothe its core in populist terminology, and despite the existence of democratic institutions and cyclical voting, progressivism’s emphasis on material egalitarianism and societal engineering, and its insistence on concentrated, centralized administrative rule, lead inescapably to varying degrees of autocratic governance. Moreover, for progressives there are no absolute or permanent truths, only passing and distant historical events. Thus even values are said to be relative to time and circumstances; there is no eternal moral order—that is, what was true and good in 1776 and before is not necessarily true and good today. Consequently, the very purpose of America’s founding is debased.

  To better understand this ideology, its refutation of the American heritage, and its enormous effect on modern American life, it is necessary to become acquainted with some of the most influential progressive intellectuals who, together with others, set the nation on this lamentable course. Given their prolific writings, it is neither possible nor necessary to delve into every manner of their thoughts or the differences among them in their brand of progressivism. For our purposes, it is enough to expose essential aspects of their arguments.

  Herbert Croly (1869–1930) was among the leading academic and progressive thinkers. Croly cofounded the magazine The New Republic and authored The Promise of American Life (1909), an essential book among his fellow intellectuals, jurists, and certain powerful politicians, including Theodore Roosevelt. Among other things, Croly argued that “[t]o conceive the better American future as a consummation which will take care of itself,—as the necessary result of our customary conditions, institutions, and ideas,—persistence in such a conception is admirably designed to deprive American life of any promise at all. The better future which Americans propose to build is nothing if not an idea which must in certain essential respects emancipate them from their past. American history contains much matter for pride and congratulation, and much matter for regret and humiliation. . . . [Americans] must be prepared to sacrifice to that traditional vision even the traditional American ways of realizing it. Such a sacrifice is, I believe, coming to be demanded; and unless it is made, American life will gradually cease to have any specific Promise.”3

  Hence the American heritage and founding principles must be thrust aside if there is to be human progress. They are dismissed as outmoded and obstructive, impeding the pursuit of utopian ends, for they are unconnected to the present. Man, society, and the political and governing systems must be pliable to meet the special conditions of the day, subject to the commands of a consolidated and amalgamated ruling class. This requires a far-reaching change in education, the culture, and the American mind-set. In particular, the sacred rights of the individual, paramount under the Declaration of Independence’s order, are said to be an old notion of individualism; they must give way to the new individualism—where the individual is subjugated to the mortal power of the state in the name of the general will and greater good.

  Croly continued: “[T]he individual American will never obtain a sufficiently complete chance of self-expression, until the American nation has earnestly undertaken and measurably achieved the realization of its collective purpose. . . . [T]he cure for this individual sterility lies partly with the individual himself or rather with the man who proposes to become an individual; and under any plan of economic and social organization, the man who proposes to become an individual is a condition of the national as well as the individual improvement. It is none the less true that any success in the achievement of the national purpose will contribute positively to the liberation of the individual, both by diminishing his temptation, improving his opportunities, and by enveloping him in an invigorating rather than an enervating moral and intellectual atmosphere.”4

  More than a century later, in remarks delivered on July 13, 2012, President Barack Obama echoed Croly’s sentiment: “[I]f you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. . . . I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something—there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires. So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together.”5

  Of course, no one is suggesting that individuals live in a bubble; certainly not the Founders or the philosophers who informed them. On the contrary, their dread was the deprivation of individual liberty and human rights by tyrannical governments of any form, but especially of the historically familiar centralized form.

  Moreover, Croly, like many before and since, tied historic progress and the modern state to the idea of material egalitarianism, a central tenet of Marxism. Croly wrote: “It is the economic individualism of our existing national system which inflicts the most serious damage on American individuality; and American indiv
idual achievement in politics and science and the arts will remain partially impoverished as long as our fellow countrymen neglect or refuse systematically to regulate the distribution of wealth in the national interest. I am aware, of course, that the prevailing American conviction is absolutely contradictory of the foregoing assertion. Americans have always associated individual freedom with the unlimited popular enjoyment of all available economic opportunities. Yet it would be far more true to say that the popular enjoyment of practically unrestricted economic opportunities is precisely the condition which makes for individual bondage. . . .”6

  In order to clear the way for the new progressive state—the fundamental objectives of which are largely antithetical to the American founding—its principles and institutions and the Founders themselves must therefore be disemboweled. In his book, Progressive Democracy (1914), Croly was blunt: “As in the case of every great political edifice, the materials composing the American system are derived from many different sources, and are characterized by unequal values, both as to endurance and as to latent possibilities. The appearance of definiteness and finality which it derives from its embodiment in specific constitutional documents and other authoritative words is to a large extent illusory. . . . Both historically and theoretically the American system is based upon an affirmation of popular political authority. When the colonists proclaimed their independence of the British Crown and Parliament, the repudiated sovereign had to be replaced with a capable substitute; and this substitute could consist under the circumstances only of the supposed makers of the ­Revolution—the American people as a whole. After the Declaration of Independence, the people, whoever they were and however their power was to be organized and expressed, became the only source of righteous political authority in the emancipated nation.”7 Croly went on: “Emphatic, however, as was this assertion of its direct control over its own political institutions by the primitive American democracy, its willingness to restrict its own effective political power was no less definite and insistent. It did not show the slightest disposition to translate this supposedly effective popular control over the institutes of government into active popular control over governmental behavior. The democracy abdicated the continuing active exercise of effective power in the very act of affirming the reality of its own ultimate legal authority.”8

  Besides, asserted Croly sarcastically, why should we revere the Founders, let alone surrender the present to their old and confining ideas and governmental designs? Not only were the Founders imperfect, they were reacting to unique events at the time. Therefore, allegiance to their dated notions and governing construct constrains the natural flow of historical progress. “These early American democratic law-givers had no misgivings as to their own ability to draw up such a code. Both the political experience of their own forbears and a radical analysis of the origin of the meaning of society demonstrated the existence of certain individual rights as incontestable, indefeasible and inalienable as the right of the people to institute and alter their form of government. . . . The sacred words must be deposited in the ark of the covenant, there to remain inviolate as long as the commonwealth shall endure.” Croly even raged against the Constitution’s Bill of Rights: “By attempting to define a code of righteous political behavior, which could be enforced as law and which should be morally and legally binding on the people, the constitution makers were by way of depriving the sovereign of his own and necessary discretionary power. They did not merely associate popular political authority with the ideal law, but they tended to subordinate popular authority to an actual law. . . . The human will in its collective aspect was made subservient to the mechanism of a legal system.”9

  For Croly, the entire process of popular sovereignty exercised through representative republicanism, which led to the drafting, adoption, and ratification of the United States Constitution, was illegitimate, since it lacked direct popular voting. “In theory the fundamental Law should have been more completely the people’s law . . . ; but in practice, the people have never had much to say about it. It was framed by a convention, the members of which were never expressly elected for the purpose by popular vote. It was ratified, not directly by the electorate, but by conventions which often represented only a small minority even of the legally qualified voters. In seeking to amend it the popular will could not act directly, but must get expressed through Congress and through state legislators and conventions. . . . The whole Federal system was by way of being an able, deliberate, beneficent and finally acceptable imposition on the people rather than an actual popular possession.”10

  Of course, the irony is that the kind of centralized administrative state Croly advocated, and which surrounds us today and is managed by a relative handful of architects, is all but immune from the popular will and completely impervious to direct popular sovereignty.

  In a recurring theme among progressives, Croly condemned the Constitution’s separation of powers, a doctrine essential to averting centralized tyranny, as the main obstacle to progress. “If the people are to be divided against themselves in order that righteousness may rule, still more must the government be divided against itself. It must be separated into departments each one of which must act independently of the others. . . . The government was prevented from doing harm, but in order that it might not do harm it was deliberately and effectively weakened. The people were protected from the government; but quite as much was the government protected from the people. In dividing the government against itself by such high and rigid barriers, an equally substantial barrier was raised against the exercise by the people of any easy and sufficient control over their government. It was only a very strong and persistent popular majority which could make its will prevail, and if the rule of a majority was discouraged, the rule of a minority was equally encouraged. But the rulers, whether representing a majority or a minority, could not and were not supposed to accomplish much. It was an organization of obstacles and precautions—based at bottom on a profound suspicion of human nature.”11

  Furthermore, Croly was frustrated by legal restraints generally on governing as he continued to confound the unalienable rights of the individual (the supposed “old individualism” of the Declaration of Independence) with the liberating government authority of the state (the supposed “new individualism” manifested through the collective and general will). “Thus was instituted a system of representation by Law. Inasmuch as the ultimate popular political power was trustworthy only in case it were exercised, not merely through the medium of regular forms, but under rigid and effective limitations, the trustworthy agents of that power were not representative men exercising discretionary power, but principles of right which subordinated all officials to definite and binding restrictions. When the sovereign itself have implicitly surrendered its discretion to the Law, the personal agents of the sovereign can scarcely expect to retain theirs. The domination of the Law came to mean in practice a system in which the discretionary discriminatory purposive action of the human will in politics, whether collective or individual was suspect and should be reduced to the lowest practicable terms. The active government was divided, weakened, confined and deprived of integrity and effective responsibility, in order that a pre-established and authoritative Law might be exalted, confirmed and placed beyond the reach of danger.”12

  Consequently, Croly was not actually an advocate of popular sovereignty so much as he was an opponent of genuine individualism and constitutional republicanism, the latter two being obstacles to a centralized state in which it is claimed that governing authority exists at the behest of the people and for the good of the people. Let us remember, for the progressive, historical progress is said to be a process of never-­ending cultural and societal adjustments intended to address the unique circumstances of the time, the ultimate goal of which is economic egalitarianism and the material liberation of “the masses.” Unlike most of Europe, the American attitude, experience, and governing system were not compatible with the progressive i
deology. Although Croly lamented the lack of direct democracy in America’s founding, despite the open and active participation of the citizenry, he conveniently ignored that the people were never formally consulted or asked to approve the all-embracing counterrevolution and societal mutation of his progressive movement.

  Like other progressives, Croly proclaimed a new secular “science,” a political and social science in which politicians, bureaucrats, academics, and experts harness the power of the state to indoctrinate and rule over the individual, and attempt to remake his nature and society in general through constant experimentation and manipulation. This is said to be progress. Croly also argued that the American mind-set—the view of the “all-around man”—must be altered. The people must be conditioned to accept and then demand the kind of centralized administrative state he advocated. This is accomplished not only by demonizing the successful individual and, as he explained, demonstrating the benefits of administrative governance, but by producing like-minded believers through higher education. Croly wrote: