Rediscovering Americanism: And the Tyranny of Progressivism

by Mark R. Levin

  Again and again, the goal of the progressives is to unmoor the individual and society from America’s heritage with populist tirades, prodding, and indoctrination, the purpose of which is to build popular support for a muscular centralized government ruled by a self-aggrandizing intellectual elite through an extraconstitutional and autocratic administrative Leviathan. Moreover, the individual is to be denuded of his personal traits, “primitive nature,” and “old beliefs,” since his true liberty, satisfaction, and realization are said to be tied to the universality of the state. The government, through “science” and administration—unencumbered by ancient and archaic eternal truths—can alter society in ways that supposedly modernize and improve it. Furthermore, the individual’s focus on self rather than community, and his old habits, beliefs, and traditions, must be altered through socializing education and training, thereby making him the kind of person and citizen whose behavior better conforms to the egalitarian purposes and general welfare of the overall society.

  Of course, this is the death of individualism and republicanism. Administrative-­state tyranny is precisely the kind of tyranny Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), an iconic French thinker and philosopher, feared for America when he wrote his luminous two-volume book, Democracy in America, in 1835 and 1840.66

  As in the past, I turn to his prescient observations about democracy and America during his travels in this country. Tocqueville wrote, in part: “Nothing is more striking to a European traveler in the United States than the absence of what we term the government, of the administration. Written laws exist in America, and one sees the daily execution of them; but although everything moves regularly, the mover can nowhere be discovered. The hand that directs the social machine is invisible. Nevertheless, as all persons must have recourse to certain grammatical forms, which are the foundation of human language, in order to express their thoughts; so all communities are obliged to secure their existence by submitting to a certain amount of authority, without which they fall into anarchy. . . .”67 “The administrative power in the United States presents nothing either centralized or hierarchical in its constitution; this accounts for its passing unperceived. The power exists, but its representative is nowhere seen.”68 “In the American republics the central government has never as yet busied itself except with a small number of objects, sufficiently prominent to attract its attention. The secondary affairs of society have never been regulated by its authority; and nothing has hitherto betrayed its desire of even interfering in them. The majority has become more and more absolute, but has not increased the prerogatives of the central government; those great prerogatives have been confined to a certain sphere; and although the despotism of the majority may be galling upon one point, it cannot be said to extend to all.”69

  As if sensing the onset of the American Progressive Era, Tocqueville amplified further: “This point deserves attention; if a democratic republic, similar to that of the United States, were ever founded in a country where the power of one man had previously established a centralized administration and had sunk it deep into the habits and the laws of the people, I do not hesitate to assert that in such a republic a more insufferable despotism would prevail than in any of the absolute monarchies of Europe; or, indeed, than any that could be found on this side of Asia.”70 The despotism of which Tocqueville spoke was of politically misapplied or imposed equality of social and economic conditions (in this he was not rejecting human equality and equal justice, which he vigorously advocated, but the sort of administrative social engineering of the individual and his environment that seeks conformity over individuality). Tocqueville explained: “[T]he vices which despotism produces are precisely those which equality fosters. These two things perniciously complete and assist each other. . . .”71 “The Americans have combated, by free institutions the tendency of equality to keep men asunder, and they have subdued it. . . . The general affairs of a country engage the attention only of leading politicians, who assemble from time to time in the same places; and as they often lose sight of each other afterwards, no lasting ties are established between them. But if the object be to have the local affairs of a district conducted by the men who reside there, the same persons are always in contact, and they are, in a manner, forced to be acquainted and to adapt themselves to one another.” “Thus far more may be done by entrusting to the citizens the administration of minor affairs than by surrendering them in the public welfare and convincing them that they constantly stand in need of one another in order to provide for it. . . . Local freedom, then, which leads a great number of citizens to value the affection of their neighbors and of their kindred, perpetually brings men together and forces them to help one another in spite of the propensities that sever them.”72

  And then Tocqueville warned that “the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world; our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. . . . I have no fear that [the people] will meet tyrants in their rulers, but rather with their guardians.”73 “The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.”74

  By stripping the individual of his uniqueness and spirit, the democracy transitions into an omnipresent state. “Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances; what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things; it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.”75

  As if describing the progressive’s ideological plan, Tocque­ville added: “After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”76 Moreover, Tocqueville understood how this form of oppression would be sold to the American people. “I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and that it might even establ
ish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people.”77

  What is left, then, is administrative-state tyranny. “Subjection in minor affairs breaks out every day and is felt by the whole community indiscriminately. It does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to surrender the exercise of their own will. Thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated; whereas that obedience which is exacted on a few important but rare occasions only exhibits servitude at certain intervals and throws the burden of it upon a small number of men. It is in vain to summon a people who have been rendered so dependent on the central power to choose from time to time the representatives of that power; this rare and brief exercise of their free choice, however important it may be, will not prevent them from gradually losing the faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves, and thus gradually falling below the level of humanity.”78

  Thus, while claiming to extend true democracy, the people are made subservient to their guardians and the state. “The democratic nations that have introduced freedom into their political constitution at the very time when they were augmenting the despotism of their administrative constitution have been led into strange paradoxes. To manage those minor affairs in which good sense is all that is wanted, the people are held to be unequal to the task; but when the government of the country is at stake, the people are invested with immense powers; they are alternately made the playthings of their ruler, and his masters, more than kings and less than men. . . . It is indeed difficult to conceive how men who have entirely given up the habit of self-government should succeed in making a proper choice of those by whom they are to be governed; and no one will ever believe that a liberal, wise, and energetic government can spring from the suffrages of a subservient people.”79

  THREE

  * * *

  THE PHILOSOPHER-KINGS

  IN AMERITOPIA, I WROTE of the philosophers who best describe what I term the utopian mind-set and its application to modern-day utopian thinking and conduct in America, which certainly includes progressivism. I explained that “Plato’s Republic, Thomas More’s Utopia, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, and Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto are indispensable in understanding the nature of utopian statism. They are essential works that have in common soulless societies in which the individual is subsumed into a miasma of despotism—and each of them is a warning against utopian transformation in America and elsewhere.”1 But the progressives were also guided by the societal observations and formulations proffered by, among other philosophers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). Therefore, a partial but useful introduction to their writings is essential, as is another look at Karl Marx (1818–1883).

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Swiss-French theorist who had a dreadfully bleak view of the individual and humanity. For Rousseau, societies are built on existing conditions of inequality, competition among individuals breeds exploitation, and the individual is more inclined toward vice than virtue. Therefore, he dismisses natural law and its moral order as a useless jumble, much like his modern progressive descendants. In “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality” (1755), Rousseau asserted:

  Knowing nature so little and agreeing so poorly on the meaning of the word “law,” it would be quite difficult to come to some common understanding regarding a good definition of natural law. Thus all those definitions that are found in books have, over and above a lack of uniformity, the added fault of being drawn from several branches of knowledge that men do not naturally have, and from advantages the idea of which they cannot conceive until after having left the state of nature. Writers begin by seeking the rules on which, for the common utility, it would be appropriate for men to agree among themselves; and then they give the name natural law to the collection of these rules, with no other proof than the good that presumably would result from their universal observance. Surely this is a very convenient way to compose definitions and explain the nature of virtually arbitrary views of what is seemly.2

  Rousseau also believed that the civil society as constituted was corrupt, had no moral claim, and, in fact, enslaved the individual to existing law and other men. For the most part, the history of society and government was mainly a succession of unequal systems and arrangements, one built atop another, followed by revolution.

  Rousseau pointed to two obvious kinds of inequality, the second of which becomes the focus of his academic progeny: “I conceive of two kinds of inequality in the human species: one that I call natural and physical, because it is established by nature and consists in the difference of age, health, bodily strength, and qualities of mind or soul. The other may be called moral or political inequality, because it depends on a kind of convention and is established, or at least authorized, by the consent of men. This latter type of inequality consists in the different privileges enjoyed by some at the expense of others, such as being richer, more honored, more powerful than they, or even causing themselves to be obeyed by them.”3

  This goes to the heart of it. Rousseau’s objection was with the nature of humankind. Individuals are different in infinite ways. That has always been and always will be the case. But what binds individuals is exactly what Rousseau criticized. As John Locke put it: “The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges everyone, and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in life, health, liberty or possessions. . . .”4

  Rousseau elaborated further on life’s inequities:

  [I]t is easy to see that, among the differences that distinguish men, several of them pass for natural ones that are exclusively the work of habit and of the various sorts of life that men adopt in society. Thus a robust or delicate temperament, and the strength or weakness that depend on it, frequently derive more from the harsh or effeminate way in which one has been raised than from the primitive constitution of one’s body. The same holds for mental powers; and not only does education make a difference between cultivated minds and those that are not, it also augments the difference among the former in proportion to their culture; for were a giant and a dwarf walking on the same road, each step they both took would give a fresh advantage to the giant. Now if one compares the prodigious diversity of educations and lifestyles to be found in the different orders of the civil state with the simplicity and uniformity of animal and savage life, where all nourish themselves from the same foods, live in the same manner, and do exactly the same things, it will be understood how much less the difference between one man and another must be in the state of nature than in that society, and how much natural inequality must increase in the human species through inequality occasioned by social institutions. . . .5

  For Rousseau, where there was private property, economic progress, competition, and wealth creation, there was no escaping economic or social inequality, which he saw as a toxic injustice. It was endemic to the social condition that existed in increasingly complex economies and societies. He wrote: “As long as men were content with the rustic huts, as long as they were limited to making their clothing out of skins sewn together with thorns or fish bones, adorning themselves with feathers and shells, painting their bodies with various colors, perfecting or embellishing their bows and arrows, using sharp-edged stones to make some fishing canoes or some crude musical instruments; in a word, as long as they applied themselves exclusively to tasks that a single individual could do and to the arts that did not require the cooperation of several hands, they lived as free, healthy, good, and happy as they could in accordance with their nature; and they continued to enjoy among themselves the sweet rewards of independent intercourse. But as soon as one man needed the help of another, as soon as one man realized that it was useful for a single individual to have provisions for two, equality disappeared, property came into existence, labor became necessary. Vast forests were transformed into smiling fields that had to be watered with men
’s sweat, and in which slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow with the crops.”6

  Of course, for America’s Founders, equality was not about material equity or social uniformity, truly absurd notions then as now for their impossibility, which should be self-evident, but the principle of unalienable rights for each individual and the impartial application of just laws. Rousseau wrote further: “If we follow the progress of inequality [in the history of governing systems], we will find that the first stage was the establishment of the law and of the right of property, the second stage was the institution of magistracy, and the third and final stage was the transformation of legitimate power into arbitrary power. Thus the condition of rich and poor was authorized by the first epoch, that of the strong and weak by the second, and that of master and slave by the third: the ultimate degree of inequality and the limit to which all the others finally lead, until new revolutions completely dissolve the government or bring it neater to a legitimate institution.”7