COMMUNITY VOICES: Selling the progressive utopia – The Bakersfield Californian

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. CS Lewis

William Jennings Bryan was the genesis of the progressive movement in America. This movement transformed the federal government into a cancer for massively expanding the state and making it responsible for redistributing wealth, breaking up businesses, assault on private property and providing all forms of aid to the poor. He was the leading spokesman of progressivism, an ideology that would go on to redefine the Democratic Party for generations and ultimately destroy the experiment in limited government.

This movement was not new but proposed by Georg Hegel, a professor at a German university at the turn of the 19th century, the very place the founders had fled due to the authoritarian ruled nations of Europe. What was needed was a government that could direct human nature for the greater good. Karl Marx, who was a generation younger, was intent on proving that mankind could establish a progressive utopia here on earth.

Teddy Roosevelts quest for real democracy and for centralizing power was a clear break with the founders. In his New Nationalism speech, he proposed how the federal government could regulate the economy, resulting in busting up large companies and transforming the presidency from its 19th century practice of quietly governing to making it the center of all power in the nations capital. This was a Republican essentially saying that private wealth is only allowable to the extent that it benefits the greater good.

Woodrow Wilsons presidency was the beginning of the end for the radical experiment in individual liberty that the founders had fought for. Wilson spent most of his life in academia until in his 50s when he got his first real job as governor of New Jersey and two years later became president of the United States. Woodrow Wilson believed that the state trumped individual rights and was the genesis of the administrative state run by unaccountable experts. Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals. Limits of wisdom and convenience to the public control there may be: limits of principle there are, upon strict analysis, none.

Franklin D. Roosevelts new liberalism clearly betrayed the classical liberal thought of John Locke and Adam Smith, not to mention the men who signed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It was a noble lie, a label cynically reappropriated to obscure the total break from an older meaning and tradition that progressive ideology represented. Progressives see the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution as outdated and no longer relevant in the way our government works today. This was everything that classical liberals had come to reject about the divine right of monarchs and the tendency of the state to trample individual liberty.

FDR proposed a Second Bill of Rights in his State of the Union address. He argued, True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. Government had to secure Americans fundamental right to a job; a decent living; a fine home; sufficient health care; financial support in old age, poor health or unemployment; and a solid education all to prevent tyranny.

Lyndon B. Johnsons presidency is primarily remembered for the Vietnam War and the Great Society. The war was a failure, and the Great Society pushed America further toward progressivism. The Great Society approach started with Johnsons disastrous War on Poverty. In reality, this wasnt a war on poverty at all; it was a war against prosperity and with a cost to date of $15 trillion and nothing to show for it. The Great Society, LBJs ultimate promise of hope and happiness, could be saved by government. Like Wilson and Roosevelt before him, Johnson would sacrifice the rights and personal liberties of individuals for government solutions to any conceived issue. The Great Society was utopian, statist and reckless and the most destructive program of the 20th century.

Progressives insist upon flexibility in political forms unbound by fixed and universal principles and have viewed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as obstacles to overcome in pushing their agenda. They are advocates of social justice and might even think they have better solutions than the founders. The common characteristic of the above presidents is grandiose narcissism, as published by the Association for Psychological Science, with Johnson ranked at the top spot, followed by Theodore Roosevelt (No. 2), FDR (No. 4) and Wilson (No. 10). It may account for why they lacked wisdom, virtue and ethics.

We appear to be in a similar state that existed in 1773 and 1857 but unaware that we are already in another civil war. As President Lincoln said in a speech, a house divided against itself cannot stand.

Jim Hansen is a retired mechanical engineer.

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COMMUNITY VOICES: Selling the progressive utopia - The Bakersfield Californian