Michael Gerson, at Townhall and at the Washington Post, weighed in today on the ongoing debate over Glenn Beck’s WOP (War on Progressivism). He attributes to Theodore Roosevelt, and by extension the Progressives, a particular view of capitalism and revolution: capitalism, left to its own devices, produces social conflicts and hazards so intolerable that if not curtailed would lead to revolution: “overly centralized and unaccountable power in a capitalist system creates destructive clashes of labor and capital, rich and poor.”
This view parallels that of Joseph Schumpeter, who argued that the wealth and security created by the free market would create a citizenry so risk averse that they would proceed to regulate out of existence the culture of risk-taking that made that wealth and security possible in the first place. Whether one sees Progressivism as saving capitalism from the revolutionary tendencies it has fostered, or as a kind of conservatism produced by the beneficiaries of capitalism themselves, the view put forward by Beck, that Progressivism has been foisted upon us by a secretive and arrogant elite would have to be substantially modified.
Gerson identifies those he calls the “undoers”: those (he names Beck and Ron Paul) who would “Undo the expansive American global commitments that proceeded from World War II and the Cold War. Undo progressive-era economic regulations. Undo the executive power grab that preserved the union. Undo it all — until America is left with a government appropriate to an isolated, 18th-century farming republic.” He goes on: “This is a proposal for time travel, not a policy agenda. The federal government could not shed these accumulated responsibilities without massive suffering and global instability — a decidedly radical, unconservative approach to governing.” This very productively puts the issue on the table, and helps those of us debating the WOP provide a pragmatic definition of the thing: Progressivism is all of those “accumulated responsibilities” of government, undertaken in order to shield us from the irrationalities, inequalities, and insecurities brought about by capitalism. (Note that this definition implies that there is no Progressivist desire to do away with capitalism itself.)
If Gerson is right about capitalism, then he is right about the WOP—it is quixotic and destructive to the extent that it succeeds. And if he is wrong about capitalism, one would need a different account of capitalism, to some extent counter-factual (the kind of “time travel” historians often engage in, indeed must engage in if history is not to look “inevitable”), which considers the way in which new forms of free association might have emerged to address widely and deeply felt discontents as capitalism became “big” towards the end of the 19th century. Such speculations might come into their own today, because we now have to consider the possibility that regardless of whether we want the state to take care of our retirements and environment, to bolster our relatively weak bargaining position with our employers, to license and regulate safety, and so on—we may be past the point where the state, even staffed by people far better-intentioned than those placed there today, can simply no longer do so, at least not without creating even more destructive unintended consequences than those dangers it prevents or minimizes.
Gerson says there is only an “interesting ideological” debate over these questions today: placing those who question Progressivism as a whole on the ½ of 1% fringe, he presents “reform conservatism” as the only alternative. And yet he seems worried. TR, the good example of reform conservatism, is also the bad example of party splitting, even “treason.” But if that ½ of 1% can pose such a threat, there must be lots of positions intermediary to the TR one and the Beck/Paul one. Gerson doesn’t consider that Paul’s fringe position might be attributable to other features of his politics: his views on foreign policy, which are indistinguishable from many on the far left (if we have enemies out there, it is our fault for provoking them), and the gathering of various cranks (anti-semites, 9/11 Truthers, etc.) around his campaign—rather than, say, his views on the Fed and sound money. (It may very well be that, statistically speaking, those views are “fringe” as well. They can be aired openly and discussed reasonably, though, without accusing opponents of being tools of the system, and we don’t know what the effects of such publicity might be.)
All the ferment among conservatives today is in that intermediate zone Gerson would rather not name, much less explore. Everything Gerson names, and a lot that he doesn’t, as a permanent and unquestionable feature of our political culture is, in fact highly questionable: regulations, from safety to financial are of dubious effectiveness and contain all kinds of hidden costs; labor laws protect union rackets far more than, indeed often against, more industrious and marginalized workers; notions of privatizing social security and medicare presuppose what no one does any more, a reliable financial system and stock market, and so on. In other words, it might be Gerson who is time traveling—only back to 1996-2006 or so, but that period may already be very distant.
The only way ahead will be to intensify the ideological debate and (maybe this is a kind of reform conservatism) try to channel it within political debates as openly and inclusively as possible—through Republican primaries and (thanks to the latest Supreme court decision on corporate political spending) the participation of a wide range of political groups in framing the meaning of political campaigns. Gerson brings these debates back to sacred ground when he says “Real, hairy-chested libertarians pin the blame on Abraham Lincoln, who centralized federal power at the expense of the states to pursue an unnecessary war — a view that Ron Paul, the winner of the CPAC straw poll, has endorsed,” and goes on: “Lincoln doesn’t need defenders against accusations of tyranny — the mere charge is enough to diagnose some sad ideological disorder.” I’m a lot closer to Gerson than to Paul here—I doubt there is anyone who defends Lincoln’s political thinking and action more fiercely than me (well, there is Harry Jaffa, who also knows it better than anyone). But Lincoln’s sacred name will be sullied as well, as the debate goes to the root of things, and, we should be forewarned, will resist attempts to channel it in ways I just suggested. There may be cause to hope, though, that investing in the debate itself, as it will inevitably emerge out of the Tea Party movement, will serve as a kind of refounding.
What we will really need to look for is the emergence of new forms of conservative civil disobedience. It is easy enough to imagine that if the Democrats are able to get their health care bill passed there will be plenty of people willing (depending upon the final version) to make a point about going to jail rather than buy insurance they don’t want; beyond the health care bill, it may not be long before we can expect people to practice various forms of tax evasion out in the open, daring the government to arrest otherwise law-abiding individuals, or even set up local forms of currency in defiance of the government, and who can tell what else. Even if the Democrats are swept out of power over the next couple of years the Republicans will be distrusted, and thinking along these lines may even intensify. And then they will no longer be mere ideological debates—but they will certainly be very interesting.
Comments 74
really wouldn’t be necessary to jail people not wishing to buy health insurance. unlikely as that penalty is, the cost of treatment for the uninsured is penalty enough.
however if people need to be imprisoned for being defiantly uninsured, so be it, and may they be subjected to rendition to Cuba, where we can count on the government there to deal with the insurance question summarily.
February 26th, 2010 at 4:52 pm
Now I lean somewhat more toward the Gerson angle, on this particular point, as well. I saw Judge Napolitano’s speech denouncing Lincoln for the slaughter of 600,000 Americans during the Civil War as disgraceful, last year at CPAC. And I don’t cotton to RC’s argument that it could have been avoided, and child labor did needed to be restricted. But on
the wider point, Progressivism does chose to supplant the existing constitution, by expediting the changes through executive dictat and legislation, rather than the Amendment process
February 26th, 2010 at 5:12 pm
narciso wrote:
Can you give specific historical examples? We have a whole series of amendments to the Constitution associated with the Progressives. We also have acts by Wilson that at a minimum stretched the bounds of constitutionality – though the same is true of Lincoln, as Lincoln himself admitted (quasi, destroying the Constitution to save it), and in different ways of other presidents, with or without a war excuse.
February 26th, 2010 at 5:31 pm
narc, if either the executive branch or the legislature institute something, how is that not within our constitutional framework?
February 26th, 2010 at 6:15 pm
If the founders had intended that changing the constitution be so easy, they wouldn’t have created the system, they did. They didn’t want a king, the example of George 111, was deep in their mind, and
they didn’t want a dictator like Cromwell
February 26th, 2010 at 6:24 pm
narc, how is it changing the constitution if the exec/leg do something that is not found to be constitutionally impermissible by the Supremes?
February 26th, 2010 at 6:42 pm
Now having read the piece, I am reminded that he was the Sorenson figure in the Bush Administration, his pro democracy speech on the Middle East, and his post Katrina speech, wrote checks that couldn’t be cashed in any responsible way.
February 26th, 2010 at 6:46 pm
Doesn’t have much to do with the particular article, narc. It can be judged on its own terms. Doesn’t matter who wrote it.
You still haven’t given me an example of progressivist diktat and anti-constitutional/constitution-supplanting legislation. I’d really appreciate it, since one hears this kind of thing all of the time, about Progs hating the Constitution. There’s that interview on social justice with BO that GB has played numerous times, but it always struck me that GB, Hannity, and others were reading a lot into a conventional if left-tinged analysis of the Supreme Court and the law. What else?
February 26th, 2010 at 7:14 pm
I think the issue and increasing concern is that for instance OSHA – it is so much more likely to be injured outside of work than at it – your homes are dangerous places. That is just the stats. So now we have an administration that intends to increase penalties, audits, etc. So when do they back off? When no one ever gets hurt? Most injuries in the work place today occur because the worker isn’t paying attention to what they are doing.
The CRA was a more recent attempt to let the government force privaate lenders to bypass appropriate loan underwriting standards and give loans to people who had no chance of paying them back.
The wage and price controls of the 70s instituted by Nixon where the government directly dictated selling prices and almost completely destroyed the economy in the process.
Take your pick of any one of anumber of FDR policies, many which were declared unconstitutional until he finally got to stack the SCOTUS with his cronies.
You keep asking the same question and yet are refusing to see what is in front of you. Its there, and thankfully, now a majority of citizens according to I think it is Gallop now fear their own government. Excellent. The people are beginning to realize that the ever expansive nanny state is a wonderful thing until you get in their crosshairs and then people don’t like it so much.
I could go on, but how much cyber space do you need in order to realize you are wilfully missing way too many examples – if necessary I can just start listing them until everyone gets tired of reading them.
February 26th, 2010 at 8:46 pm
I guess you’re answering the question I put to narciso, JEM, except he was speaking about executive diktat supplanting the constitution and bypassing the amendment process, suggesting something rather more egregious. I don’t see how that applies incisively to OSHA, CRA, or W&P controls. I don’t believe that the Constitution is so constrictive and all-encompassing that it can prevent all bad policy. That’s enveloping legal idealism – in theory, nothing bad could ever happen to anyone that didn’t break some law – superimposed on a relatively short document. You won’t be able to go back through American history, I don’t believe, and find a moment of Constitutional perfection (and even if you could, we couldn’t return there). Before the ink was hardly dry, people were bypassing or testing it – First Bank of the US, the Whiskey Rebellion, Alien & Sedition Acts, the Louisiana Purchase, Mr. Madison’s War, the Nullification Crisis, the Second Bank, and on and on. We’ve been roiling in confusion about what we can and cannot do from the very beginning.
There’s an excellent progressive argument for radically reforming government – and for setting on the path of reform to its logical conclusions or the re-establishment of a sustainable and secure national life, whichever comes first. It’s hard to make that argument and implement it practically when you’re instead preparing the logical and rhetorical bases for civil war to the death.
February 26th, 2010 at 10:02 pm
@ JEM:
I’m not sure you think our disagreement lies–in my shortage of examples?
The most compelling part of Colin’s argument for me was his targeting of the use of the metaphor of “cancer” on Beck’s part, which does seem to suggest the possibility of total eradication of those who, in essence, would be tagged “heretics.” Error and deviation have always been American because they have always been human, and eliminating them once and for all is a dangerous fantasy.
A few hundred people die in a car crash. A new drug seems to be responsible for a thousand heart attacks. A new pocket of poverty is discovered. A popular food turns out to have more unhealthy ingedients than previously thought. A lake is polluted. A dozen workers die in a workplace accident. (You can surely provide your own examples.) A cry goes up throughout the land: the government has let us down! The government must save us! There are investigations, hearings, regulations–opponents are denounced as stooges of the corporations, caring more for profits than people.
When, in such situations, the cry, in the majority of cases from the majority of people, is “The government can’t help us here! Leave us alone! We will ensure ourselves, we will rely upon private consumer protection mechanisms, we will use contract law and the principles of private property to preserve our environment! Let our currency alone, we will buy gold and other precious metals with stable value, let the bad banks fail, we know how to tell the bad ones from the good ones ourselves!” Etc.; when that happens, the Progressives will no longer have a grip on our public life.
Philosophical and political critiques, including the sharpest and most uncompromising ones, of Progressivist principles and practices, will help us to get there; but the sheer intensity of denunciation can’t substitute for a willingness to take on the burdens of freedom and responsibility.
Maybe a majority of Americans are ready, but I don’t see how we can know–the amazing Tea Party movement has targeted the obscene excesses of the Democrats, and nothing more as yet. But part of my point in the post is that they won’t be able to stop there, even if they want to, in large part for the reason you seem to be giving–the government we actually have bears no resemblance to the government needed to keep “saving capitalism from itself.”
February 27th, 2010 at 6:49 am
Isn’t it this simple?,we have a “Limited” form of government,but the nation is full of people that are in one of three categories,Mainly Good,a mixture of good and bad,mainly bad;category 2 is the big one. Anyhow,because we are a free nation of people,people are free,with their limited Government,to do bad things,and because we’re free,we don’t often agree completley on these good-bad actions. So people used to be free,say to prevent certain people from,eating at their restaurant,based on Race,and we never agreed completly whether this was good or bad or a mixture,but those that couldn’t eat in the restaurant,were agreed that it was bad,so they got the government to help them,and so it goes,this is the dialectic between “limited” government,and the progressive concept of using the Government to Correct Wrongs,which logically will lead to a bigger more intrusive Government,because there are endless wrongs to correct,but again we don’t agree about these wrongs UNLESS WE ARE ON THE Wrong END OF THE WRONG,then we are generally in agreement. Those without Medical Insurance generally have different opinions on HealthCare policy than those that do have Medical Insurance. And so it goes.
February 27th, 2010 at 9:01 am
@ CK MacLeod:
And then I wake up to the article that Fannie needs over another $15B. I think we could show that there is never perfection in how the government has taken to administering their duties over the course of our history. I think however it is not difficult to see that we seem to be screwing up in ever greater frequency with ever greater negative impact.
February 27th, 2010 at 9:19 am
I’ve been thinking your post over, adam, and, though I still find it extremely useful, I think your definition of progressivism remains too reductive. Progressivism, in my view, is and has been a much broader phenomenon than “all of those ‘accumulated responsibilities’ of government, undertaken in order to shield us from the irrationalities, inequalities, and insecurities brought about by capitalism.” At the same time, those accumulated responsibilities have been built up on other bases than progressive reform, and in some critical respects precede the Progressive Era.
I’ve been arguing, in particular with JEM and JED, that progressivism is not the enemy. JED describes it as antithetical to constitutionalism, but even that phrase understates her view, since it implies at least the potential for a dialectical process: You can and indeed have to “co-exist” with your “antithesis” in the hope of synthesis. That is actually a lot closer to my view, though I don’t think “progressive” is the true antithesis of conservative, and, as your own discussion tends to suggest, progressivism itself was and is a relatively moderate and conservative response to conditions, compared to authentically revolutionary ideologies.
Partly for that reason, progressivism doesn’t work as a synonym for leftism. Nor is progressivism the same as liberalism or statism.
Turning progressivism into the opposite of constitutionalism, in the meantime, would force us to adopt a narrow and unrealistic, historically unjustifiable definition of the latter term – turning it into a kind of reactionary fundamentalism of the sacrosanct document, susceptible only to literalist or prophetic interpretation.
When in fact we’re dealing with a contract whose terms are designed to be re-negotiated, and could not ever have been comprehensive.
As I’ve argued at other points: There can and should be a conservative progressivism or, not exactly the same thing, a progressive conservatism. It’s early in the day, but it strikes me at the moment that the former might look a bit more like John McCain, the latter a bit more like his former running mate. It also happens to look a lot more like Glenn Beck, at times, than Glenn Beck seems to realize. He may need to see a political oncologist.
February 27th, 2010 at 9:25 am
@ Rex Caruthers:
Rex, I think there is a great deal of truth to what you say. The problem of course is people are looking for an easy out if it can be given to them and are looking for the government to screw what ever philosophy I subscribe to if I need help. This was most recently reinforced by a lettter to the editor this morning in the local rag which said unless there is universal healthcare it isn’t fair. Brilliant.
Fairness is described by the ability for the masses to take by force the fruits of my labor for something they want the government to provide, beside the fact just about everything the govt touches it complicates. Where is the fairness to me? How about saying everyone needs a 3000 sq ft home. We have increased the food stamp program to the point that a rather elaborate black market exists where benefits are traded for other consumer and I might add luxury goods. Obviously the benefit is too generous. How much do I pay in taxes just to support the lazy amongst us?
Rex I am not suggesting you are the lazy amongst us, far from it. But when the government tries to fix some legitimate problems, they create many more unintended consequences. They do too much, and perform a great deal of harm while doing so.
February 27th, 2010 at 9:28 am
@ CK MacLeod:
“Partly for that reason, progressivism doesn’t work as a synonym for leftism. Nor is progressivism the same as liberalism or statism.”
I think this is the major point of our disagreement. Progressivism I believe at its core believes in the power of the state to order the lives by direct interference in the daily affairs of its citizens for the betterment of the nation state. While I am sure you can find a slightly different exacting definition between the three (and of course assuming I think you are taking liberalism in its current usage as opposed to its classical one), that is the essence of them all.
If you wanted to use a real shock type of analogy I think of the Borg from Star Trek.
February 27th, 2010 at 9:35 am
First of all, I agree completely with Rex’s dissection of the paradoxes of resentment, and would just add (risking breaking the agreement) that the only thing that makes government or, for that matter civilization, possible, is that we all develop, at a roughly equivalent pace, a higher tolerance for wrongs that don’t involve violence to one’s person or property.
I deliberately took over a definition of “Progressivism” from Gerson (with slight modifications) because you have convinced me, Colin, that “fixing” Progressivism as a “target” we can be sure of “hitting” is futile and a waste of energy. It seems to me that modern society keeps throwing new problems at us, new problems that are themselves the results of solutions to preivous problems, and that generate a whole new set of desires and resentments that work according to the logic Rex just outlined, and that each new problem confronts us with a choice: find solutions through the state or allow solutions to emerge through contracts and private associations. We can’t be sure that the answer will always lie in the latter category, but we can cultivate a disposition towards looking there first, and having recourse to the government as a last resort. At a certain point, though, enough people will (or do) feel that that possibility is being (or has been) taken away from them, and at that point the normal rules of politics lose their binding force and a more polarized situation emerges, where “opponents” start to become “enemies.” Dropping “Progressive” as a term of antagonism won’t change the fact that we are entering (or have entered) that territory. Maybe you don’t think so, in which case that’s where the real disagreement lies.
February 27th, 2010 at 9:56 am
Your definition amounts to statist progressivism, which I would describe as an offshoot or major branch of progressivism, not the sum and substance or inevitable destination of progressivism.
I return to the referendum or ballot initiative, one of the centerpieces of progressive reform in state government. In California, the initiative process has repeatedly been used to advance or at least to express a conservative agenda in restraint of the state. It’s a very imperfect instrument, but in Propositions 13 (property tax limitation), 187 (restriction of services to illegal immigrants), and 8 (traditional marriage), to give three very prominent examples, or in the defeat last year of the budget initiatives (one of the first victories of Tea Party rebellion), it provided a vehicle for popular opposition to statist-liberal overreach. The process has been used for similar purposes in other states – and also for contrary ones. The point is that it’s not inherently leftist/statist or conservative/libertarian, and the same could be said in the larger sense for the progressive outlook or worldview.
If we define statism as an obstacle to progress, then there’s nothing un-progressive about restraining or reducing the state. On the other hand, if you define the state as the prime vehicle for achieving progress, then you’re on the road to dictatorship by way of Wilson, with Stalin or Hitler on the horizon, but the identification of progressivism with statism is in a sense an accident of history: The ideology arose alongside the rise of the modern state, which was in turn conditioned by the same technological and economic factors that progressivism was designed to cope with, in part as an alternative to Marxist revolution. Modern liberalism increasingly became progressivism separated from its original impetus, until in our own time it’s been converted into its opposite, a contradiction in terms – progressivism without progress, progressive stasis: Obamaism.
Maybe we’ve reached the exhaustion of leftwing progressivism after a century’s diversion, but that doesn’t mean that we have to accept that progress itself – or, more narrowly, the ability to achieve improvement of conditions through actions of self-government – has come to a halt. The challenge would be to envision a path of libertarian and conservative progress, and in the meantime not to let the battle with leftwing or statist progressivism brand conservatives as reactionaries and fantasists.
February 27th, 2010 at 10:36 am
I think another issue is that progressivism leads to the situation we see being played out in Greece,and to a lessor extent a significant portion of the recent stimulus which worked to temporarily shore up a number of the state governments.
At a certain point the progressives must admit, the money runs out, and then everyone who has become entitled to their goodies has an even bigger problem than when the govt came marching in in the first place.
February 27th, 2010 at 10:43 am
And yet, CK the Courts have tried to block at least two of these, in part because of the success of the first. TR really started on this road, MCKinley was more of a laissez affaire proponent, except for the tariff question, but Taft followed suit, and then Wilson. Supporters of the first trend, Harding, Coolidge, were vilified because of what happened after 1929, which was also in part due to the tariff.
February 27th, 2010 at 10:46 am
@ CK MacLeod:
Another thread of your objection to the WOP emerges here: you don’t want to give up the word “progress.” I have thought about this as well, and agree with you insofar I advocate progress in many areas and many ways: we should and probably will continue to make scientific discoveries, invent new and helpful machines and improve the ones we have; create new drugs that prolong and ease life, etc. But there is a difference between all this and adhering to “progressivism,” and the difference lies in political discourse. Harry Reid declared that those opposed to health care were “on the wrong side of history,” and it was on those grounds that he made that very strange link to slavery a few weeks back. That’s the kind of thing progressives say (all the time) and others don’t, including, I think (or would prefer to think), those you would like to call “conservative progressives” or “progressive conservatives”–those who simply believe that we can improve things, but don’t believe there is a predetermined direction we have to improve them “in” (or “towards”)–or that it’s the people themselves that require improvement in that direction. It’s that belief in a logic of history, that the more scientific among us can discern, and that might require for its fulfillment ignoring the wills and interests of individuals and groups (especially the “bitter clingers” among them) that needs to be rejected. I don’t know if it’s a “cancer,” but it needs to be forcefully opposed.
It is also true that we can speak about moral and political progress–ending slavery was progress, there has been progress in race relations, and so on. But in these cases, progress is towards where we already were, in a sense–a fundamental belief in human equality, that becomes more actualized as we go on.
And so one might then say: well, isn’t gay marriage, or universal health care, progress in exactly that sense? No. Only equality of opportunity counts; equality of outcome is a completely chimerical concept, that in fact undermines the former. But this starts to move beyond a discussion of Progressivism.
February 27th, 2010 at 10:52 am
CK – I think we are going to have to just agree to disagree. The work of popular initiatives while full of their own problems are a somewhat unique response to the work of progressive govt types. The problem in California is that the initiatives couldn’t stop the politicians from bribing their constituents with goodies that they could no longer afford.
I think your attempts to identify various strains of progressivism merely demonstrates a desire to defend some activist actions of govt as OK while not liking others. I realize nothing is completely pure and in that regard I think Beck is speaking to progressivism in a general sense, various types of it be damned.
But I still feel that his basic premise in that regard is correct. Modern progressivism – liberalism, statism, fascism, etc. – is incompatible with limited representative govt of the kind fashioned by the US Constitution. While we may be slightly put off by his cancer analogy, it is essentially correct. And it would appear more Americans share his concern by the day. Beck himself doesn’t do it for me, I am not a fan of TV politics much at all, even if I agree with the viewpoint of the host. But on this point, outside of his 3rd party hints, he is correct.
February 27th, 2010 at 10:54 am
Indeed. I’m not sure exactly on which side of this you’re placing yourself. As in Gerson’s article, a large and vocal section of the “undoers” see the security state, neoconservative foreign policy, the national defense establishment, etc., as governmental activism at its worst. Ron Paul’s Constitutionalism specifically attacks the WOT and nearly every military operation going back to the Revolution as a betrayal of the Founders. Beck flirts with this view.
Most of us – even Rex, in his way – part company with the Paulians decisively on this score. Yet the military as it exists – not just as one of the things we agree the Constitution says is an essential purpose of government, but the real existing American armed forces and support structure, pervaded by progressivist assumptions and aims – displays, enables, and requires government activism, state power, and much else that many of those joining the WOP are defining as cancer. Why exactly is mere co-existence with, say, even a single atom of the EPA impossible, but co-existence with the Pentagon not only possible but necessary and desirable?
February 27th, 2010 at 11:56 am
Providing for the common defense is a specific function of the government. It is one very explicit function and appropriate use of state power. Its existance per se is neither progressive or not – it just is. Some people will determine whether or not our footprint is worthy or not. The Navy maintains world trade and so helps in our economic development, and that is a task which the Founders – particularly Adams – approved. In the WOT we do not have the ability to sit and wait and so must take the fight to them, unless they choose to surrender which I presume we both do not expect. That we have bases around the world does not bother me because unfortunately, too many other nations don’t want to live without shooting us if they get the chance. I would love a world where that wasn’t the case, but I haven’t been given the chance to choose. Paulians fail to realize that we cannot just sit around and hope nobody wants to hurt us and that retreating from the world isn’t possible. The industrial-military complex that the Paulians might fear,and that never was what it was accused of being, has been supplanted by an industrial-progressive govt complex that is increasingly behind energy, tax and commerce policy. GE would be out of business without US energy policy moving green.
As to where I would draw the line? Very much up from most I figure. Most social programs are spectacular failures and are going broke, including our UC system. All govt health care programs are also unsustainable. If I were czar just about every social program starting with the new deal would be gone. Most consumer protection legislation doesn’t. The new credit card rules are actually quite punitive to people who managed their credit responsibly. Obama is protecting deadbeats.
The EPA has evolved from stopping overt pollution to saying everyone of us is a polluter with every exhale. They distort the idea of protecting endangered species by just lately lying in testimony about the polar bear populations. Get rid of it. The department of education takes a well intentioned NCLB idea and in the end kills high achieving districts at the expense of low perfoming ones, loaded with students AND parents who don’t value an education and who ridicule the few who do. The govt will take care of you, why worry.
Our affirmative action laws, a byproduct of overt discrimination, now penalizes whites and asians in education and employment. It provides a hammer for the approved minority groups when their employer tries to eliminate deadbeats in their places of business.
I could go on. We do live in a benign semi-fascist state today, which its citizens are right now trying to determine if it wants to succumb to its siren song and go all the way or pull back and see if there is a better way. I pray we step away from the abyss. If we fold on health care – then our path is set. The world my kids, and most importantly my grandkids, will inhabit will be a far cry from the land I knew. And Freedom, and liberty, will be extinguished. As Franklin is alleged to have said, it’s your republic if you can keep it. I hope we can.
February 27th, 2010 at 2:35 pm
While I argue against the progressive state as a matter of philosophical temperment, there is a pragmatic reason as well. It teaches a lack of responsibility, Alan Ryenolds has argued that govt UC benefits increase unemployment by a point or two, and certainly no one feels they have to worry about saving any money because if their job disappears the govt will step in, much I am sure to Rex’s chagrin. But of course no one ever writes about the big picture like Mark Steyn, and his most recent NRO article does not disappoint. In esssence, there isn’t enough money.
http://article.nationalreview.com/426405/when-responsibility-doesnt-pay/mark-steyn
Progressivism isn’t to me the philosophy of the ability of mankind to improve continually their lot in life, it is totalitarianism, outwardly with a smiley face, but with something much more sinister inside.
February 28th, 2010 at 6:57 am
JEM wrote:
providing for the common defense of world commerce might be just a tad outside of the specific functions of the US government.
February 28th, 2010 at 8:16 am
JEM wrote:
I really think you should find a different word than “totalitarianism.” Would you rather live in Greece or a concentration camp? Would you rather have lived in East Germany or West Germany?
February 28th, 2010 at 8:51 am
I don’t deny that we have degrees of authoritarian governments – and I have no intent of trying to equate the modern day progresives to what was the abhorant racial/ethnic politics of Nazi Germany. But the politics that created that state are in the progressive’s playbook. I of course would prefer the benign fascist state to the more ruthless one. I have never implied otherwise in anything I have written on this topic.
But it doesn’t change the reality that I would much prefer to live in the US instead of the UK where the energy police come and tell you that you are using too much energy, or the Netherlands where speaking the truth of Islamofascists gets you landed in court, or even Canada where freedom of speech isn’t protected and I cannot get timely medical treatment unless I come south.
And it doesn’t change the reality that this country is not as free as it used to be and that there will be a point where the freedom that must be lost to fund the progressive/welfare state will be more painful than today. Rep Ryan’s performance at the healthcare summit while not grounded in freedom and liberty overtly (the venue just didn’t support getting all philosophical) was good because it called to all the lie that is the bill and its funding. WE cannot afford it even if it was a good idea. You have read about all the govt agencies the bill creates, and yes that does include the infamous “death panels” that will determine when treatment will be withheld because someone decides you are too old, or the illness is too unimportant.
February 28th, 2010 at 9:36 am
And the problem in each of those cases is the statist impulse, not the progressive one – unless you’re in favor of wasting energy, insulting people, and denying people medical care.
The key original demands and flickeringly surviving impulses of progressivism were rational reform on behalf of and controlled by the people. The conservative critique reveals statist progressivism as a contradiction in terms and an oxymoron, in a way that was unapparent to the progressives who gained power during the rise of the modern technocratic state, but which is now readily apparent in the manifold crises of liberal and social democratic governance.
That has always been the basis of the most effective conservative critique of the left: not that the goals of the left are wrong, but that the preferred methods of the left make achieving them impossible and more often than not push them further away.
February 28th, 2010 at 10:20 am
@ CK MacLeod:
The most effective critique in what sense? Short or middle term political? Sometimes you have to make the arguments that will push things the way you want them, or prevent things from getting worse right now, and in that case saying something like, “we want the government to ensure everyone has health care, but we have a different way of doing it,” etc. might be useful. But abdicating on the philosophical debate has its long terms costs, because fewer people well understand why we consider one short term result better than another–the leftist can always come up with plausible claims that they will be improving something (well, sometimes, anyway), and they will learn how to outmaneuver us if all we object to is the price tag and inefficiency. We can’t stop talking about freedom, equality and constitutionalism, and tracing different political and party positions back to different understandings of those concepts.
By the way, which progressive reforms were set up so as to be controlled by the people, and “controlled” in what sense? I’m asking because I don’t think you will be able to extricate “rational reform on behalf of and controlled by the people” from the “statist impulse.” You’ve mentioned the referendum system, which can be used for various purposes, as you say, but in what sense is it “rational”–it seems to me to serve (and rather transparently at that) the aim of displacing a representative consitutional order with balancing powers with a plebiscitarian democracy. There might be reasons for preferring the latter, but you won’t find them in the Federalist Papers, and i don’t know why you should consider it rational.
And, while you reject my opening definition of progressivism, I note that you don’t really say why–you want some other impulse than “shield[ing] us from the irrationalities, inequalities, and insecurities brought about by capitalism” to be informing progressivism. Is it because you don’t grant the antagonism between progressivism and the market and private property? I don’t say Progressives are against those things like Communism, but they primarily see them as dangers, sources or irrationality and injustice, even if we can’t quite do without them yet. You see it otherwise, I assume.
February 28th, 2010 at 11:24 am
hey, I’m willing to accept that progressivism calls for eliminating private property if you can point out where progressives state that.
February 28th, 2010 at 11:35 am
That is not a leftist goal, that is a statist goal. The goal is care for the sick.
Direct democracy is not in itself put forward as a replacement for the constitutional order (except in the writings of utopian theorists – Buckminster Fuller’s essay “No More Secondhand God” is my favorite work of this type), but rather as a check on the runaway/corrupted state, and that is, indeed, the precise purpose to which we have repeatedly seen citizen initiatives used to conservative ends and with the full backing of conservatives. Maybe you consider those somehow a betrayal of the American republican system. I don’t.
The Federalist Papers were chiefly concerned with the creation of the federal state, not with the democratic procedures adopted within the states (other than ensuring that they remained privileged and protected in the face of rising federal power). As for a resort to national referenda on some questions, I could see good arguments for it in certain circumstances, and good arguments against it in others, but I would begin from a position of skepticism, for the same reasons that I don’t favor replacement of the electoral college with direct popular vote.
As I mentioned to JED on the Cancer thread, I’d refer you to the echt-progressive Hiram Johnson package in California, that included the citizen initiative, ballot referendum, and recall process – all of which have been used to advance key conservative agenda items, though under the familiar democratic dance of 3 steps forward-2 steps (or more) back. Other such reforms included voter information pamphlets and displacement of the patronage system with the city manager system, another vast improvement in its day that now requires major reform that would be progressively anti-statist.
What’s “rational” isn’t the referendum process per se, but rather the outlook that says “here’s what we’re trying to do, here’s what’s preventing us from accomplishing it, how can we best fix the problem?” The modern leftist looks to expansion of the state under centralized/top-down frameworks. In 1900, that was the latest and greatest thing. In 2010, it’s obsolete, and the authentically progressive answers lie elsewhere.
By “Progressives” I take it you mean the self-styled progressives of the modern Democratic Party and the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the liberal left. I completely reject the notion that they represent genuine “progressivism.” Under whatever name we use, we need to wrest ownership of “progress” from them.
As you yourself demonstrate in your top post, there is no inherent antagonism between the progressive impulse and capitalism. To the contrary, as I believe RWR would say if he were a participant here, American capitalism, democratic capitalism, has been the greatest engine of progress the world has ever seen. We are the change.
February 28th, 2010 at 12:23 pm
I’ll shift gears a little bit (in part to discern exactly where we agree and disagree). We conservatives are supporters of progress–material progress (greater wealth, improved technology, etc.) and moral and poltical progress (more freedom, closer approximation in reality to the dictum that all men are created equal; more inclusive and responsive rules of the political game). And, on the rhetorical field of contemporary politics, you don’t want yourself on the reactionary side of a progressive/reactionary binary; nor do you want to position yourself in such a way that you are forced to reflexively reject proposals and mechanisms simply because they come from the side you have labeled “other” in some fundamental way. Finally, with such an attitude we can tell a different story of American history–one in which the fundamentally progressive dynamic of America addressed the challenges of the 20th century in both productive and misguided ways, and anyway in a manner that needs to be reviewed and revised in terms of where we are now.
And the sum of it is, you would use Levin’s term “statist” as opposed to “Progressive” as the position you think we need to oppose.
This is your position, as I understand it now, and I don’t see anything to disagree with.
I will conclude by dissenting on the following point–it seems to me there is a critical philosophical debate that gets shortchanged here, and neglecting the terms of that debate makes us less equipped to notice the ways “statism” advances itself through the administrative state and the judiciary, in particular, and the way it has dominated the way 20th century historians and the media have represented American history. There is an argument made by figures like Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, Herbert Croly and many others which has become a kind of common sense and needs to be displaced; and it is an argument based on an understanding of “history” itself as progressing in ways we can detect. (After all, how do the “statists” know what they want to do, and what has made them so persuasive?)
February 28th, 2010 at 2:19 pm
Incidentally – and I hate seeing people like Niewert being put “in the right”:
February 28th, 2010 at 2:26 pm
@ adam:
Generally, but I think that, in addition to the complication you point out, we also have to recognize the limitations and distortive operation of any fundamentally oppositional, dichotomous, binary – even dialectical – framework.
All names for “the good” and “the evil” need to be treated as provisional, and not just because in time they have a distressing tendency to change places, though that’s reason enough to be cautious. In this connection, it’s worth recalling that war is a supremely imitative activity, and making war on progressives, statists, communists, Nazis, and jihadists often requires becoming more like them, especially along the emergent main axis of conflict. To digress for the moment, it’s also worth recalling that the major accretion of state power in the United States has taken place in the context of life and death competition, and the major excuse, even among good Levinites like you and me, for a powerful state apparatus is our fear of a global free-for-all resulting from our precipitous withdrawal from military hegemony.
In this regard it may not be as important what we oppose as what we stand for, and in choosing what we stand for I think we need to meet means with ends, and attract support more than we need to destroy enemies, and disarm, neutralize, and convert opponents rather than turn them into enemies.
That means having a program, and having a program means making compromises, one after the other, with what is. In the place of a program, Paul offers a fantasy, and Beck tends to offer apocalypse. We may get apocalypse, but probably not through the ballot box.
February 28th, 2010 at 2:50 pm
CK MacLeod wrote:
That is where we disagree then – I see zero difference between the progressives and the statist – none.
Who is to say I am wasting energy if I want to be comfortable at 72 in my home instead of chilly at 67? Who decides? You? I am unwilling to accept your judgement when you haven’t all the knowledge to know whether you are right.
MMGW, we see what happens when the enlightened think they know better – they don’t know so they make things up.
February 28th, 2010 at 3:27 pm
CK- you are pretty well read guy, but you are showing your limitations here. Progressivism as a political philosophy is statist and it is with the family of socialists, communists and fascists. And whether you will accept that or not, it IS the definition that Beck uses. So if you are struggling with the word progressivism, just substitute statist, and lose the notion of progress.
February 28th, 2010 at 3:29 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
I’m very sympathetic to all this, but it’s impossible to withdraw from imitative activities–all human life is mimetic, and I agree with you that this is a major (I would say main) cause of human conflict and the escalation of conflicts. We can’t separate what we are for from what we are against, and programs are set up as a point-by-point comparison with what the other side wants to do. I also agree with you that compromise is what enables us to transcend, provisionally, conflicts, and prevent them from spiralling out of control. But compromises, especially the major, founding compromises, those which create something new that was envisioned by none of the parties beforehand, therefore become critically important reference points in the history of a social-political order. When people defend documents like the Constitution, or revere it in ways that seem beyond reason, that’s the reason. What we have to be for, then, is the constitution–and that includes good faith arguments over what it means, which will never be nailed down for certain–and we have to be against attempts to erode it from within. What keeps us from eliminationist fantasies and apocalypse, then, is that we pursue that struggle in a manner that accords with the Constitution. Ultimately, then, any program has to be a program for restoring and preserving the Constitution, and that must include itemizing what seem to us the main contemporary threats to it. This is why so much contemporary conservative thought has organized itself around opposition to the Progressives. Beck is far from being an isolated case–if you read the Claremont Review of Books, you see that for many if not most of their authors their narrative of American history sees Progressivism as a crucial turning point; and Harry Jaffa’s (along with others) determination to retrieve the political thought of the founders (in Jaffa’s case, through Lincoln) is also motivated by the conviction that 20th century Progressive theory and practice has deliberated and systematically aimed at erasing the Constitution as an event in the fullest sense–in the sense that the most serious thinking about a free political order successfully engaged the practical exigencies in the crisis of a new country founded on those principles.
February 28th, 2010 at 3:31 pm
JEM wrote:
Where did I advocate that anyone, myself or anyone else, judge for you whether you are wasting energy?
JEM wrote:
From where are you drawing that definition? Beck? I see you asserting it over and over.
February 28th, 2010 at 4:04 pm
Progressivism 1900-20
http://spider.georgetowncollege.edu/htallant/courses/his225/progmovt.htm
lately?
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2005/0512.newprogressivism.html
February 28th, 2010 at 4:11 pm
@ adam:
I don’t really disagree with the first part of your statement.
I’ve already explained at length why I consider a fundamentalist literalism of the Constitution to be untenable. I’d even go so far as to suggest that it would be a betrayal of the Constitution itself. It reminds me of that wonderfully horrible STAR TREK episode when Kirk discovers a bunch of savages with a document they worship. Suddenly, he realizes that “e plebnista” is their weird inherited pronunciation of “We the People,” and he then goes on to violate the Prime Directive and teach them that it’s not an object to be worshipped, but a plan for organizing self-government.
I won’t comment on the Claremont Review and the conservative intellectual attack on progressivism, except to say that, in the terms you describe it, and certainly as popularized via Beck, or following the Hillsdale authors Pestritto and Atto, I approach it with some suspicion, since the moment at which Progressivism becomes separated from its initial impetus, as a 19th Century reform movement, and attached to statism and the reigning ideologies of the 20th Century as a governing philosophy, seems to be the same moment that this attempt, as you put it, to erase the Constitution occurs.
February 28th, 2010 at 4:15 pm
@ fuster:
A helpful summary, but dating the Progressive Era as commencing in 1900 is odd – unless you’re strictly referring to the Progressive Era in presidential and national politics. Even then, the Sherman Antitrust Act was in 1890. Prohibition had been a movement since mid-Century. The first US Settlement Houses were founded in the late 1880s. And so on.
February 28th, 2010 at 4:22 pm
Adam, further to my comment on the Claremont Review – could you perhaps save me some time and point me to one or a couple of the best articles encapsulating the “sober” conservative critique of progressivism?
February 28th, 2010 at 4:28 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
In this case, it seems that a lot of your argument depends upon isolating that “originary” moment or moments when Progressivism was still possessed of its initial impulse, before it was hijacked by statists and Leftists. I don’t have any problem with that–it seems, as far as I can see, to eliminate the last of our disagreements (often one speaks too soon in such cases, though).
It’s easy to caricature “originalism” as “fundamentalism” or “literalism.” But could you imagine a Supreme Court decision that never referred to the Constitution at all? What would it refer to in that case? (In case where a particular statute is at stake, the question is the same–does the statute “mean” anything? If not, what are we talking about?) If it does refer to the Constitution, it invites everyone else to refer to it as well, to point to part of the reference that would make better sense otherwise, or to place that part of the Consitution in the context of the document as a whole; or the document as a whole in the context of its origin and purposes. There are two alternatives to proceeding in this manner: first, ignore the Constitution. Even the most radical statist-progressivist doesn’t dare try this–Roe v Wade is bizarre precisely because of the effort made to shoehorn the decision into the Constitution. The other alternative is the one actually adopted–erode the Constitution from within by reading it in terms of contemporary norms and social-scientific doctrines. My suggestion is that we can tell when this is being done. Not simply by pointing to some neglected or grotesquely misapplied phrase in the document, but through sustained interpretive activity–and by listening to what the Justices themselves say about what they are doing.
February 28th, 2010 at 4:33 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
Here’s a few–I’ll keep looking. (One is from Pestritto and another is a review of his book.) I hope these help.
http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1640/article_detail.asp
http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1009/article_detail.asp
http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1254/article_detail.asp
http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.859/article_detail.asp
http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.826/article_detail.asp
February 28th, 2010 at 5:02 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
Here’s one (I had a few more but was told that my comment was detected by the site’s spam detector and hence, I assume, obliterated):
http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.826/article_detail.asp
February 28th, 2010 at 5:04 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
Here’s another:
http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1152/article_detail.asp
February 28th, 2010 at 5:14 pm
@ adam:
The spam detector doesn’t like comments that consist of multiple links. They’re not obliterated – they go into the spam queue pending approval. You can sometimes bypass the spaminator by making text-hyperlinks out of them.
February 28th, 2010 at 5:28 pm
From the first link, a book review, the first paragraph:
Which, though it prefaces an earnest anti-Progressive article, would be of equal utility to someone in my position denying that there is such a thing as a coherent “political philosophy” called “Progressivism” that could be isolated and surgically removed from the American body politic like a “cancer.”
The author goes on to complain about the favorably biased treatment Progressivism has received:
Quite – but if it offers justification for performing the reverse operation, so as to nudge the dialogue toward overall balance, two distortions still don’t make a truth.
February 28th, 2010 at 5:40 pm
Thanks, Adam, for those links. I’m saving the 1912 article for closer reading. In my opinion, what I’ll call the “Claremont narrative” supports the notion that, in the first two decades of the 20th Century, the leading Progressives sought ideological coherence, the establishment of a durable political philosophy, as a necessary precursor to taking national power and as a tool for wielding it, with Wilson – love him or hate him, truly a remarkable figure – playing a critical role. TR and Wilson together seem to complete the transformation of Progressivism from movement to ideology, and it’s interesting, at least symbolically, that the Progressive Party dies off in the process.
One reading would be that the Progressives lacked the tools to overcome, or even to recognize, the contradictions between their reforming impulses and state power. They were products of the American constitutional order, but, in their ambition or hubris, they lost sight of that fact at the very moment they came into possession of it.
February 28th, 2010 at 6:22 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
But, of course, FDR considered himself a fully paid up member of the Progressive movement, and so did most if not all of his aides and advisors, didn’t they? So, wouldn’t that mean that the leading Progressives took advantage of the crisis of the Depression to install themselves, quasi-permanently, in state power.
What your reading suggests, though, is that there may very well have been a reductionist process along the way–so, going back to your earlier point about a progressivist impulse squelched by leftist statism, perhaps that’s how it happened–the contradiction got resolved by the reforming impulses being subsumed within state power.
By the way, I couldn’t find a good link for Harry Jaffa talking about the Progressives, and I’m not sure that he (or other’s who have tried to retrieve the thought of the founding, like Martin Diamond, Hadley Arkes and others whose names escape me at the moment)ever does talk in detail about Progressivism as such. But the whole idea of a “retrieval” of the thinking of the founders is in direct response to their “eclipse” or “erasure” by the generations schooled in Progressivism. So, at the level of political philosophy, at least, there is a profound dialectic which itself gives some substance to “Progressivism.” And might someday come to elevate public discourse on the matter.
February 28th, 2010 at 6:39 pm
@ adam:
Not to downplay the self-conscious challenges by important Progressives to the Constitutional order, but I still wonder whether there isn’t some blame-shifting or scapegoating going on in the Claremont narrative. We can’t know how Constitutional we’d all be today if the Progs had never existed, but it’s reasonable to expect ideological drift over any extended period, even before you begin to consider the immense material differences between the US of A today and the 13 original colonies then. The original impulse for many 1st wave Progressives seems to have been the perceived abject failure to realize the promise of America – the Constitutional order – for large numbers of citizens. Without the Progressives, the country might have evolved into something infinitely worse – the direction of history ca. 1880 might have seemed moving toward a nationwide Oligarchical Octopus that at most preserved certain Constitutional forms and observances – e plebnista, etc.
A couple hundred years after Jesus Christ, there was already wide variation in the practices of different sects of Christians. Not too much later, Rome had its first Christian emperor. It’s not for me to declare him a bad Christian, but how much he had in common with the first Christians is at least questionable. It’s a commonplace to observe that the first Christians, Jesus Christ included, might not have been comfortable in many of the most ardently Christian nations of the last 2000 years.
February 28th, 2010 at 8:18 pm
And yet because of progressivisms consecutives acretions over the last century, we may end up not unlike the eponymous home of the Yangs. The world you suggest might resemble the pharaonic cities of
Jack London’s Iron Heel.
The Fed has fundamentally failed, in it’s Guardian role, a series of interests groups, ACORN, the Soros trusts, corrupted the legislators which persuaded the banks to fail to observe their due diligence, similar elements in our media and academia, systematically disinform and alienate the next generation, by depriving them of the knowledge of the legacy of hard won freedoms, substituting license
as the lesson, On the economic sphere, they suppress industrial production, consequently engendering more symbolic analysts with
the former viewpoint.
February 28th, 2010 at 8:38 pm
That article on the election of 1912 was fascinating. I commend it to all: Why the Election of 1912 Changed America
Has lots of material for both sides of this discussion in a fairly compact space. One thing I found particularly interesting, in light of my tentative Progressive Betrayal of Progressivism theme, is that TR’s run for the presidency involved an ever more radical demand for “pure democracy” – meaning un-corrupted democracy, but also meaning the initiative, referenda, and recall on a national level.
Such proposals had their own problems, of course, and I’m not advocating them (they were opposed by other Progs who felt they belonged in the states, not the national government). But compare TR and Jane Addams’ ideas – that the American people would accept expanded national administration and a welfare state ONLY if they retained control of it through direct democracy – to the insistence of our present-day Progressive Queen Pelosi calling on her party to enact HCR even in the expectation that it will cost them their seats. It’s the complete inversion of the TR/Addams idea. Meanwhile, it’s the conservatives demanding that the people’s voice be heard. It was The Weekly Standard last Summer that entitled its anti-HCR, pro-Town Hall cover story, “Here, the people rule.”
Also incidentally, for those obsesssed with defining the Progressives as the forebears of the Nazis, the Communists, the soft tyranny of European social democracy, what could be more opposed to dictatorship than a system in which national officials were subject to popular recall, and legislation subject to popular repeal?
February 28th, 2010 at 10:11 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
I agree with you here, and it’s almost always a pretty good response to charges of “betrayal” of and “deviation” from some original principle: if the original principle was unproblematic, consensually understood, and in good working order, how was it possible for the betrayal or deviation to have any effect? Certainly the end of the 19th century threw up a whole series of new questions and problems, and critiques of the Progressives rarely, in my view, take up the question of how those problems might have been addressed on the terms of the generally shared understanding of the American republic at the time. I believe they could have been, and there are some very interesting discussions among libertarians of how issues like pollution and safety could have been addressed without the government taking primary responsibility, but it’s easy enough to see why the way that was taken would have seemed the most plausible to a lot of people.
March 1st, 2010 at 3:32 am
@ CK MacLeod:
If not the Nazis, I do think you can see the makings of soft tyranny in direct democracy. If you can get the whole people to agree that government run health care is necessary, you can just do it, without worrying about the rights of patients, doctors or insurance companies; if you want cap & trade, the same goes–the federal government would just be empowered to take and use property as it sees fit. And I think they counted on the probability that the more of these things the government took care of, the more obvious it would become that there was no one else left to take care of them–so, the people’s will would be a foregone conclusion.
March 1st, 2010 at 3:44 am
@ CK MacLeod:
“And the problem in each of those cases is the statist impulse, not the progressive one – unless you’re in favor of wasting energy, insulting people, and denying people medical care.”
I guess based on this comment. If I misread you my apologies. You seem hung up on the word progressive. You recoil at the idea that it and statist are one in the same. At least that seems to be from all you have written. With regards to Beck, I am merely trying to state that Beck sees them as the same, so when you hear him say progressive, in your lexicon he means statist (and worse!).
I really don’t keep up with him much, in fact this little discussion has made me pay more attention to his comments than I ever have. But I noticed Al Gore’s little missive in the NY Times over the weekend. Progressive (i.e. statist) diatribe to the max.
March 1st, 2010 at 5:46 am
@ CK MacLeod:
I will read this article – thanks for the link. But to your final question. The Founders feared the government as well as the tryanny of the majority. Most of the federal system was built to slow down the application of power, with the ability of a well organized and substantial minority to gum up the works. The Founders feared the concentration of power in any one group’s hands, including the people themselves.
As to state initiatives, I see them more as a response to the concentration of power in the state bureaucracies. Personally, I don’t like them. But if the govt wasn’t trying to micro manage everything I imagine we wouldn’t see that much. It is also important to understand that the States retain a level of power over domestic activities that doesn’t exist in the Federal Constitution.
March 1st, 2010 at 5:54 am
March 1st, 2010 at 6:00 am
JEM wrote:
Well, you can call it “hung up.” I believe that we – conservatives including Glenn Beck – have been and should be recuperating original progressivism, that that’s in large part what drives the so-called Progressives insane about Sarah Palin and the Tea Parties, and that taking the very name away from the Progressives while proving that they’ve betrayed their own honored legacy would be a coup de grâce.
@ adam:
Jane Addams’ statements in the 1912 article suggests that she had something like that – popular affection for the welfare state – in mind, but that her understanding of what that meant in America included a healthy respect for the uniqueness of our political culture. It’s also interesting that someone like Bryan, and people around him among the Progressives, quite clearly enunciated their discomfort with the adoption of direct democracy on a national level, and that even TR, who appears to have grown obsessed with the idea over the course of the campaign, tried to explain what he was after in conservative terms.
Tyrants do love the rigged plebiscite. It’s one of their favorite tools. But there’s an argument – made in visionary terms in “No More Secondhand God” – that a national populace with the ability to rule itself through direct secret ballot would approach it with much greater responsibility than assumed by those afraid of “mob rule.” Do any of us doubt how “the mob” would vote today on Obamacare? It seems to me that in all of our wars since the advent of mass media, despite the propaganda, the electorate has been much steadier than the politicians about prosecuting them to the finish.
Just some thoughts, not a proposal.
March 1st, 2010 at 8:21 am
But politically their legacy is not one of honor. Original progressivism is the utilization of state power to bring about utopia on earth. They need to understand that their birthright is one of totalitarian impulses and in some cases – outright tyranny.
March 1st, 2010 at 10:02 am
CK – I have done a quick read of the article, and I need to go back and dig more deeply, but I am amused by two thoughts right off the bat. One, they do whitewash the racist bent of the progressive movement, they were for eugenics and the elimination of the lower classes, which they acknowledged were highly populated with the black race who they felt inferior and should be mostly bred out of existance. (This would show up somewhere else a few decades later in a particular European country as I remember) Two, in their discussion of the direct power of the people, they fail to note who actually uses this power of the people – it sounds like the communist party of the Soviets. Power to the People!! (but some people are more important).
More later.
March 1st, 2010 at 10:13 am
JEM wrote:
There’s nothing tyrannical or totalitarian about anti-trust laws, women’s suffrage, direct democracy, or settlement houses. You can disagree with other aspects of Progressive Era reform or the directions that leading Progressives took the movement, but you’re making up history and misusing language to suit your prejudices and your rhetorical preferences, while refusing to examine the actual history as described by qualified historians who share most of your political values and in the end your political judgments.
March 1st, 2010 at 10:17 am
JEM wrote:
Social Darwinism and eugenics were important strains within the Progressive Movement, without a doubt, but do not characterize the entirety of the Progressive Movement or a unity position. Racism was characteristic of the age.
Direct democracy and much of the rest of the regulatory and socially ameliorative thrust of the Progressive Movement, all the way up to the present day, existed as a conservative alternative to Marxism and other revolutionary or social democratic ideologies. Re-read the top post. In the meantime, implicitly comparing TR to Stalin and Hitler is obscene. You might as well blame George Washington for the Holocaust and World War, since, after all, he also believed in national government, the military, and a version of “power to the people.” In the midnight of extremism all cats are gray.
March 1st, 2010 at 10:36 am
It’s not that it’s illegitimate to talk about Beck and Paul in conjunction with each other, as Gerson does. But it is illegitimate to treat one of their few areas of key agreement — an effective foreign policy of isolationism — as if it’s inseparable from their more constitutional view of America’s domestic order. (From what I can tell, Beck’s view is more nuanced than Paul’s on foreign policy too.)
I don’t agree with Ron Paul that the Constitution restricts our activities overseas to two categories: “war” and the conclusion of treaty agreements.
I also don’t agree with the sloppy — exceedingly sloppy — but common view of America’s greater foreign engagement in the 20th century as a “Wilsonian,” or inherently Progressive, phenomenon. Wilson’s signature -ism was international collectivism. As a particular type of Progressive, he favored the quasi-Kantian view that the nations were groping toward a form of global polity, in which the same idea of benign statism that inspired Wilsonian Progressives in the US would gain sway over the collective behavior of nations.
Wilsonianism is little in sympathy with preemptive war, especially if it’s undertaken without an explicit writ from a collective international body. Wilson’s true legacy was the concept of collective enforcement behind the Versailles Treaty, and, of course, the League of Nations. Wilson was not an advocate or practitioner of the therapeutic approach of nation-building, and for him, preemption would always have been subordinated to the collective body’s approval. That principle was higher than any individual nation’s perception of the requirements for self-defense.
When Bushes I and II sought a UN commission to fight Iraq, they were being Wilsonian. When Bush I executed the UN commission to the letter, and did not go beyond it (e.g., overthrow Saddam in 1991), he was being Wilsonian. When Bush II decided, after the UN declined to give him a commission in Iraq, to take the Coalition into it in combat in 2003, he was being the opposite of Wilsonian. When he decided in late 2006 to shift from Rumsfeldian place-holding to actively pacifying Iraq, he was being the opposite of Wilsonian. Wilson wasn’t a nation-builder, he was a collective-body-instituter.
The point here is not who’s “good” and who’s “bad,” it’s that the common practice of attributing any sort of activism in our foreign policy to “Wilsonianism” is sloppy, ahistorical, and almost always wrong. I see a lot of conservative writers doing it — plenty of them called Bush’s interventionist posture on Iraq “Wilsonian” — and with respect to them, they’re simply wrong. Wilson isn’t the father of preemptive foreign activism by the US.
The type for which he does deserve credit — the idea of international collectivism — wasn’t the motivating principle behind the major forms of preemption and intervention since WWII, such as the Truman Doctrine, the wars in Korea and Vietnam, the Reagan reversal (of 35 years of prior policy), and the GWOT. Those were all the product of a very different view of national defense, one that assumed a national responsibility and authority independent of a collectivist idea.
(Truman, like Bush I in Iraq, leveraged the UN for a charter to cover the intervention in Korea — and notably, both situations turned out the same afterward, requiring the maintenance of military force to keep an armistice in place. The data points on collectivist intervention everywhere, from Cyprus to the Balkans to Haiti to Somalia, demonstrate that the limited aims on which all can agree are insufficient to end the underlying conflicts. Where there is collectivist intervention, there will be unending troop deployments to maintain a dysfunctional status quo.)
The bottom line is that I don’t buy Gerson’s grouping of principles here. The grouping is valid for Ron Paul, and less so but not by any means unrecognizable for Beck. But it’s easily possible to think outside the box Gerson draws by focusing on those two. Agreeing with Beck that Progressivism is statism, and is antithetical to limited-government constitutionalism, doesn’t fate any of us to agree with Ron Paul that saying “France” out loud amounts to an unconstitutional foreign entanglement.
March 1st, 2010 at 11:41 am
The more I read about TR and his evolution, the more I think your comparison is more accurate than what people might think. I am never going to argue that TR was Hitler. I am going to argue that the basis of their political philosophies was rooted in a common principle in the rallying of state power for the improvement of the state at the expense of the individual. And you would be surprised at the amazing alignment of their policy prescriptions – actually more in comparison to Wilson and FDR probably, than Teddy.
Women’s sufferage was nothing other than a decision to empower another group with voting rights. I hardly think it is progressive or not. I do believe the anti-trust laws were a direct assault on the right of private property and I am debating in my mind whether they did any good or not. Like everything else, they created a reaction that some would argue was worse.
As to racism, yes it was of the age, but the eugenics movement was central to the notion that smart centralized bureaucracy types could directly create a more enlightened society directly by extinguishing the lower classes – I think I needed another comma in my remark back then as it might have said they only wanted to wipe out blacks – they wanted to wipe out the lower class; their prejudice of the time was that blacks were inferior and in the lower class predominately.
Direct democracy is an anathema to the founding documents, so your support for it doesn’t really phase me much – I have noted I don’t think much of them – and I believe, though for this you can absolutely accuse me of merely embracing my own opinion, that direct democracy advocates are essentially used by types who wish to channel that power, direct it so to speak, with their own hands. I guess I see that as a path to tyranny and used in unison with the progressive creed. Saul Alinsky’s book would suggest the need to rally public opinion against something or someone. That is direct democracy. We have a representative republic.
Your default is that govt can make a difference for good. My default is that the difference it makes is almost always suspect, frequently bad, and results in a bad situation made worse more often than not. I cannot defend anything on purely republican or progressive grounds because we all know that nothing is pure in reality. I am sure we could both find some things we find in the common. But I still feel you are getting caught up on the relationship of progressivism to other less idealistic political thought, such as Nazism. They both take to heart the value of state power intruding in the private matters of the governed.
As I said, I am going to reread, and more carefully, this link. I would suggest you pick up Jonah Goldberg’s book and read the chapter on Hitler. I think you would be surprised how much of the progressive’s agenda he supported – he was one.
March 1st, 2010 at 11:52 am
CKM — you and JEM have talked this one over pretty thoroughly, but the deal on Progressivism at the end of the day is that what it’s about, as a political movement in the US, is the state intervening in human life to coerce lengthening lists of outcomes.
When you say you’d like to reclaim “progressivism,” I’m not clear on what you’re talking about. JEM has given several examples of how the Progressive idea of a technocratic civil service has made end-runs around the limitations conservatives believe the Constitution imposes on our federal government. But I’m looking now for examples from you of what you consider “progressivist” that we (conservatives, presumably) need to reclaim.
The problem for me with the things you’ve said so far is that you seem to suggest that child labor laws were advocated exclusively by Progressives (or “progressives,” or progressives) — when in fact, Christians and Jews with no affiliation with the Progressive movement were the principal advocates of the child labor laws adopted at the municipal and state level across America between the 1830s and 1890s.
By the time the national Fair Labor Standards Act was adopted (I think it was in 1938) — unquestionably a Progressivist piece of legislation — you couldn’t find child labor going on in America. There were a variety of reasons for that, but one was that the increase in communications media between 1900 and 1930 gave people an unprecedented commonality of knowledge and immediacy of understanding. Child labor, used in violation of the law, couldn’t hide from view in 1925 as it could in 1875. The introduction of the motor car and telephone gave law enforcement an epic boost during this period as well. One reason the 1920s and ’30s was such a bloody period for law enforcement versus syndicates and gangs was that law enforcement was much more likely to arrive on scene and confront the bad guys than it had been 20 or 40 years before.
It certainly didn’t take the Progressives’ signature measures — a national act of Congress, the creation of a federal Department of Labor, and the trend of jurisprudence after 1910 which allowed Congress to exceed the charter of the Constitution — to get child labor stopped in the USA. By the time the Progressives got the conditions they wanted, the child labor problem was already in the rearview mirror.
So I’m looking for something from Progressivism that you believe we should reclaim. I don’t see such items in the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Department of Labor, or the weakening of constitutional federalism. Being pragmatic and living with these aspects of the poltical environment is one thing, but they are nevertheless destructive to both political and economic liberty — only a little, perhaps, in isolation, but in conjunction with everything else instituted by Progressive principle, the effect becomes more and more momentous and inescapable.
March 1st, 2010 at 12:11 pm
@ J.E. Dyer:
Good points and some excellent distinctions. I’m leaning toward consolidating this discussion on the new thread, so will respond only briefly to the last comment. Maybe we can keep this one going specifically for the sake of responses to Gerson and adam’s main points – including the relationship to foreign and security policy.
You make some important distinctions, but I recall a discussion, I think also involving adam, at NZC around the time of the ’08 election, possibly in the aftermath, when we explored the contradictions between an anti-statist conservatism and the demands of the security state, though I believe we used different terms. I think it’s at least questionable whether we could sustain a defense establishment like our current one simultaneously with a rigorous reduction of the state in most or all other aspects. How long could we expect a “small” or shrinking or devolving government to sustain itself next to a “big” military? Something would give sooner or later.
One might also suggest that, though the Petraeus effort in Iraq wasn’t precisely Wilsonian, it was in many respects very progressive. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the military is being asked to force progress, to institute new Progressive Eras, and of a very statist (state building) variety, overseas.
Even if we could sustain these and other apparent imbalance and contradictions, I think the position raises difficulties for your other position – that we need to eradicate progressivism down to the last cell, as in Beck’s unfortunate metaphor. As I asked above, how is it that we can’t in theory afford one speck of the EPA or Medicare, but can survive the existence of the Pentagon and all that it entails? I think it may be too facile to suggest that there’s something about the military intrinsically – just by the magic of Constitutional exception – that makes its institutions and the assumptions required to sustain them uniquely benign.
As for what elements of Progressivism I’d like to see maintain, I think I’ve given numerous indications both on this thread, and in the new post. I’d invite you to look at the summary list that fuster provided (leaving aside its questionable dating of the Era), as a starting point, and tell me whether there’s anything on it that you wouldn’t be willing to dispense with – no hesitations, no second thoughts, no remainders.
I also think it’s too easy to declare whatever you like about progressivism – maybe Women’s Suffrage – as something someone else would have thought of or done. When dealing with a phenomenon as broad and ill-defined as progressivism, it’s easy for those speaking on its behalf to designate everything they like or are wiling to defend the “real” thing, everything else a false imposition – and for those on the other side to perform the opposite operation.
March 1st, 2010 at 6:05 pm
JEM wrote:
What about Lincoln?
As for Women’s Suffrage – see my end comments on the reply to JED: It’s easy to take this, that, or the other non-revisable Progressive Era reform off the table if you’ve already defined Progressive as everything you don’t like that was done in its name, and every good thing authentically someone else’s.
Obviously, the Suffragettes didn’t think that it was a small thing, and the idea of extending the franchise was part and parcel of the first wave Progressive re-assessment of democracy. They had all sorts of ideas about what giving women the vote might do. It was noted in the 1912 article that Jane Addams was the first woman to nominate a presidential candidate – I just don’t think you can argue women’s rights, including the franchise, as an arbitrary or merely happenstantial part of progressivism. Birth control wasn’t only justified on the basis of eugenics and racism – it was also integral to a feminist freedom agenda, and the argument hasn’t changed much today in outline.
Let’s leave Hitler and Goldberg’s description of Nazism to another day. I’ll just say here that Hitler was a lot of things.
March 1st, 2010 at 6:18 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
Sorry I haven’t had more time to give to this, CKM. Regarding the different weight on our liberties of maintaining a military versus creating federal agencies to regulate us, it seems to me quite obvious why the two are different — the military doesn’t regulate our daily behavior.
It’s (the military) a finite, per-purpose cost, rather than an open-ended, per-transaction cost, as regulation is. It (having a military) doesn’t, merely by fulfilling its charter, make the prices of goods and services go up. The military doesn’t restrict our economic activity on a selective basis, as the EPA does. The military doesn’t levy fees on us as a percentage of economic transactions. Etc, etc.
EPA regulation makes all our economic transactions cost more than they would otherwise. All the expenses of compliance are passed on to consumers in the prices of goods and services. Having a military doesn’t produce this effect. We are taxed to pay for the military; we pay for having an EPA both through taxes to fund the agency (the smaller bite) and through the increased cost of living incident to regulation.
We can add to this the opportunity cost — the business formation, job creation, and income-generation foregone — due to restrictions imposed on the public’s options by EPA regulation. It’s each person’s choice how he sees the right-wrong, good-bad breakdown of EPA regulation, but no matter how you see it, it still imposes these costs. Being in favor of Regulation A doesn’t make it cost-free.
To invoke JEM’s example, for another perspective, it’s in the EPA’s charter to interest itself in where we set our thermostats in our private homes. That’s what we have an EPA for. That’s not what we have the military for, and the military doesn’t do that.
Another dimension of the differing weights of the military versus civilian agencies is the size of their funding bite. The EPA is just one civilian agency. All together, the civilian agencies — including HHS, Education, and SSA — account for 75% of the federal budget. At the state level the similar agencies account for that percentage or more. 75% of those months’ worth of work Americans do for the federal government each year goes to the civilian agencies and their various programs. The overall bite in that 5 months — federal, state, and local taxes — is skewed even more to civilian agencies. Less than 25% of all the taxes we pay goes to funding the military.
The military’s share of the national debt is also small, and vanishingly so in the context of total debt and unfunded entitlements. In that $70 trillion+ figure, virtually all from Social Security and Medicare obligations, it takes a microscope to find the military spending. The military-spending debt isn’t from force maintenance anyway; it mounts up from prosecuting wars.
Social Security and Medicare dwarf all other forms of government expenditure. They withhold 13% from workers’ paychecks, a substantial amount that can’t help affecting the financial decisions of citizens. When I was a teenager, it was standard exhortation that everyone should automatically save a minimum of 10% of his pay. SS and Medicare take more than that before you even see your money. Paying for a military simply doesn’t have that effect on the populace, in either theory or fact.
This is a short list of reasons why maintaining a military doesn’t have the same effect on our liberties that regulating ourselves and mandating entitlements does.
Regarding the things Progressives have on their credit list, I don’t have the time to spend on each one, so will make these two points.
1. Instituting procedural changes and government programs does not equal fixing, or even addressing, problems. The whole problem with Progressivism is that it postulates such an equation. There is none. In fact, there is a long and noteworthy history of the “problems” being more and more un-fixed, becoming more pervasive, and requiring more and more state intervention and greater funding for agencies and bureaucrats, the more the Progressive remedy of government is applied to them.
2. It is not the case that the statist view of Progressivism was necessary to effect honest government or women’s suffrage. The two are not inseparable, nor is limited-government constitutionalism antithetical to honest government or the extension of suffrage (see my comment at the Greenroom for my use of “antithesis”). So, yes, I would dispense with every single one of the items listed as being the legacy of Progressivism, secure in the belief that others without the state-interventionst view of Progressives would have endorsed and gotten implemented some of them — the ones that are not explicitly statist — anyway.
A note about civil service. In 2010, it is not possible for a sane person to say we are better off having millions of half-employed people on the government payroll merely because their ranks have been professionalized. Things like patronage in government employment are a historical hazard of government in any form; they are not peculiar to any philosophy or style of government. The mushrooming of the charter and ranks of civil service, which now includes everything from natural-resource planners to mental health professionals, is, however, peculiar to the Progressivist idea of government.
Those ranks are now heavily unionized as well, and the links between SEIU and many Democrats, including Obama, have developed into a back-scratching situation that might as well be Tammany Hall. It was naive for anyone to think that “professionalizing” the civil service would organize all moral hazards out of the equation. But assuming that a civil service, once installed, will never let itself be eliminated or undercut — that’s simple common sense.
March 2nd, 2010 at 10:09 pm
@ J.E. Dyer:
The comparison between unfunded obligations to SS & Medicare and the cost of the entire defense establishment can be viewed in different ways. The unfunded obligations numbers express a commitment decades into the future based on current assumptions – i.e., not including “stroke of a pen” alterations like raising the retirement age, means-testing, and other modifications, much less the big stroke of a big pen alteration of saying “never mind.”
These obligations (see above link) come out to around 2.8% of projected GDP for Medicare, and 1.3% of GDP for SS. The Defense budget has hovered in recent years around 4% of GDP. In a big war, it could balloon far beyond that, as during WWII. In a future of Friskies-level wonder and enchantment, it might shrink significantly, but, given the state of the world, the richer we are, the more others will want what we have, AND the more expensive it will be to protect it (costs per soldier US vs costs per soldier AQ).
Regardless of how and where the money is generated or costs are financed, the defense establishment, for now, puts a roughly commensurate demand on our economy. It also represents a tremendous diversion of talent and capital from the economy and society.
I am not arguing that it’s a bad investment or an investment without return, though I wouldn’t reduce entitlements to “bad investment-full stop” either. I am simply arguing that the defense establishment, including the ROI, also including the massive support structure, also including the web of connections to the civilian economy, is a big magilla. Purely as a budgetary matter, extended into the future at current investments over the same timeline as the paying up of unfunded obligations of entitlements programs, defense also represents a multi-multi-trillion “promise.”
It’s also untrue, as I’m sure you well know even if your own military career included a lot of travel (and reading while off duty, one suspects), that all of the costs of the military and all of its impact on the economy are outside the U.S.
The Beck formulation, which you’ve echoed, is that we can’t survive even one cell of progressivism, which latter you and he also identify with statism. Even if the military doesn’t regulate economic transactions on a broad field, it broadly impacts economy and culture, and always stands in the background offering a potential very significant impact on politics. The statist footprint of the above military establishment far exceeds “one cell.”
The burden of the Beck-extremist position is to demonstrate that “one cell” or “one speck” of the EPA is too much – cannot be survived. In my opinion, that also implies that the security state must be destroyed to the last cell- but Beck doesn’t think through the implications of his position (Ron Paul does a better job of that, and it tends to reveal him as a fantasist). That to me is absurd, but, then, my position is that Beck’s formulation is absurd – demagogy in the form of paranoid insanity – and that your echoing formulation tends to an unsupportable absolutism.
That formulation, taken literally, would place a burden on you not to demonstrate that the entire EPA or the entire regulatory apparatus is burdensome and threatening to freedom, but that it must be extinguished without remainder, down to the last cell – even while we preserve the full-grown organism of defense in perpetuity.
If we can survive millions of bright, well-supplied, active and fit, extremely well-armed, highly trained and organized adults in our midst, in perpetuity, then we can survive one speck of the EPA – maybe the nice lady who operates the new copying machine in Room 222 of the old building…
March 3rd, 2010 at 9:13 am
You are really being dense, the EPA is well outside the major obligations
of government as mandated in the constitution, now one could read ‘general welfare’ as covering Medicare and Social Security, look how
Commerce has encompassed everything
March 3rd, 2010 at 9:19 am
@ narciso:
Irrelevant to the argument, narc. I addressed at the very beginning the notion that Constitutional exception magically relieves the security establishment of its statist tendencies. The Constitution itself is a statist document – the Founding was the founding of a state, followed by a scramble (the Bill of Rights) to circumscribe the implications. It is anti-statist relative to despotism, but it is statist relative to anarchy or even to the directly preceding condition under the Articles of Confederation. Throughout the Revolutionary War, the colonists operated a dwarf state – implicit in the Declaration of Independence. Even seen as a temporary alliance of separate states – though it had to be more than that in order to operate an army, print money, regulate affairs generally – it would represent a statism.
March 3rd, 2010 at 9:50 am
pie, anyone?
http://www.warresisters.org/pages/piechart.htm
March 3rd, 2010 at 2:29 pm
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