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The Progressive Movement &
The Transformation of American Politics
Thomas G. West & William A.
Schambra, The Heritage Foundation
Progressivism was
the reform movement that ran from the late 19th century through the first
decades of the 20th century, during which leading intellectuals and social
reformers in the United States sought to address the economic, political, and
cultural questions that had arisen in the context of the rapid changes brought
with the Industrial Revolution and the growth of modern capitalism in America.
The Progressives believed that these changes marked the end of the old order and
required the creation of a new order appropriate for the new industrial age.
There are, of course, many different representations of Progressivism: the
literature of Upton Sinclair, the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, the
history of Charles Beard, the educational system of John Dewey. In politics and
political thought, the movement is associated with political leaders such as
Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt and thinkers such as Herbert Croly and
Charles Merriam.
While the Progressives differed in their assessment of the problems and how to
resolve them, they generally shared in common the view that government at every
level must be actively involved in these reforms. The existing constitutional
system was outdated and must be made into a dynamic, evolving instrument of
social change, aided by scientific knowledge and the development of
administrative bureaucracy.
At the same time, the old system was to be opened up and made more democratic;
hence, the direct elections of Senators, the open primary, the initiative and
referendum. It also had to be made to provide for more revenue; hence, the
Sixteenth Amendment and the progressive income tax.
Presidential leadership would provide the unity of direction -- the vision --
needed for true progressive government. "All that progressives ask or desire,"
wrote Woodrow Wilson, "is permission -- in an era when development, evolution,
is a scientific word -- to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian
principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living
thing and not a machine."
What follows is a discussion about the effect that Progressivism has had --
and continues to have -- on American politics and political thought. The remarks
stem from the publication of The Progressive Revolution in Politics and
Political Science (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), to which Dr. West contributed.
Remarks by Thomas G. West
The thesis of our book, The
Progressive Revolution in Politics and Political Science, is that Progressivism
transformed American politics. What was that transformation? It was a total
rejection in theory, and a partial rejection in practice, of the principles and
policies on which America had been founded and on the basis of which the Civil
War had been fought and won only a few years earlier. When I speak of
Progressivism, I mean the movement that rose to prominence between about 1880
and 1920.
In a moment I will turn to the content of the Progressive conception of politics
and to the contrast between that approach and the tradition, stemming from the
founding, that it aimed to replace. But I would like first to emphasize how
different is the assessment of Progressivism presented in our book, The
Progressive Revolution, from the understanding that prevails among most
scholars. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that few scholars, especially
among students of American political thought, regard the Progressive Era as
having any lasting significance in American history. In my own college and
graduate student years, I cannot recall any of the famous teachers with whom I
studied saying anything much about it. Among my teachers were some very
impressive men: Walter Berns, Allan Bloom, Harry Jaffa, Martin Diamond, Harry
Neumann, and Leo Strauss.
Today, those who speak of the formative influences that made America what it is
today tend to endorse one of three main explanations. Some emphasize material
factors such as the closing of the frontier, the Industrial Revolution, the rise
of the modern corporation, and accidental emergencies such as wars or the Great
Depression, which in turn led to the rise of the modern administrative state.
Second is the rational choice explanation. Morris Fiorina and others argue that
once government gets involved in providing extensive services for the public,
politicians see that growth in government programs enables them to win
elections. The more government does, the easier it is for Congressmen to do
favors for voters and donors.
Third, still other scholars believe that the ideas of the American founding
itself are responsible for current developments. Among conservatives, Robert
Bork's Slouching Toward Gomorrah adopts the gloomy view that the Founders'
devotion to the principles of liberty and equality led inexorably to the
excesses of today's welfare state and cultural decay. Allan Bloom's best-selling
The Closing of the American Mind presents a more sophisticated version of Bork's
argument. Liberals like Gordon Wood agree, but they think that the change in
question is good, not bad. Wood writes that although the Founders themselves did
not understand the implications of the ideas of the Revolution, those ideas
eventually "made possible…all our current egalitarian thinking."
My own view is this: Although the first two of the three mentioned causes
(material circumstances and politicians' self-interest) certainly played a part,
the most important cause was a change in the prevailing understanding of justice
among leading American intellectuals and, to a lesser extent, in the American
people. Today's liberalism and the policies that it has generated arose from a
conscious repudiation of the principles of the American founding.
If the contributors to The Progressive Revolution are right, Bork and Bloom are
entirely wrong in their claim that contemporary liberalism is a logical
outgrowth of the principles of the founding. During the Progressive Era, a new
theory of justice took hold. Its power has been so great that Progressivism, as
modified by later developments within contemporary liberalism, has become the
predominant view in modern American education, media, popular culture, and
politics. Today, people who call themselves conservatives and liberals alike
accept much of the Progressive view of the world. Although few outside of the
academy openly attack the Founders, I know of no prominent politician, and only
the tiniest minority of scholars, who altogether support the Founders'
principles.
The Progressive Rejection of the Founding
Shortly after the end of the Civil War, a large majority of Americans shared a
set of beliefs concerning the purpose of government, its structure, and its most
important public policies. Constitutional amendments were passed abolishing
slavery and giving the national government the authority to protect the basic
civil rights of everyone. Here was a legal foundation on which the promise of
the American Revolution could be realized in the South, beyond its already
existing implementation in the Northern and Western states.
This post-Civil War consensus was animated by the principles of the American
founding. I will mention several characteristic features of that approach to
government and contrast them with the new, Progressive approach. Between about
1880 and 1920, the earlier orientation gradually began to be replaced by the new
one. In the New Deal period of the 1930s, and later even more decisively in the
1960s and '70s, the Progressive view, increasingly radicalized by its
transformation into contemporary liberalism, became predominant.
1. The Rejection of Nature and the Turn to History
The Founders believed that all men are created equal and that they have certain
inalienable rights. All are also obliged to obey the natural law, under which we
have not only rights but duties. We are obliged "to respect those rights in
others which we value in ourselves" (Jefferson). The main rights were thought to
be life and liberty, including the liberty to organize one's own church, to
associate at work or at home with whomever one pleases, and to use one's talents
to acquire and keep property. For the Founders, then, there is a natural moral
order -- rules discovered by human reason that promote human well-being, rules
that can and should guide human life and politics.
The Progressives rejected these claims as naive and unhistorical. In their view,
human beings are not born free. John Dewey, the most thoughtful of the
Progressives, wrote that freedom is not "something that individuals have as a
ready-made possession." It is "something to be achieved." In this view, freedom
is not a gift of God or nature. It is a product of human making, a gift of the
state. Man is a product of his own history, through which he collectively
creates himself. He is a social construct. Since human beings are not naturally
free, there can be no natural rights or natural law. Therefore, Dewey also
writes, "Natural rights and natural liberties exist only in the kingdom of
mythological social zoology."
Since the Progressives held that nature gives man little or nothing and that
everything of value to human life is made by man, they concluded that there are
no permanent standards of right. Dewey spoke of "historical relativity."
However, in one sense, the Progressives did believe that human beings are
oriented toward freedom, not by nature (which, as the merely primitive, contains
nothing human), but by the historical process, which has the character of
progressing toward increasing freedom. So the "relativity" in question means
that in all times, people have views of right and wrong that are tied to their
particular times, but in our time, the views of the most enlightened are true
because they are in conformity with where history is going.
2. The Purpose of Government
For the Founders, thinking about government began with the recognition that what
man is given by nature -- his capacity for reason and the moral law discovered
by reason -- is, in the most important respect, more valuable than anything
government can give him. Not that nature provides him with his needs. In fact,
the Founders thought that civilization is indispensable for human well-being.
Although government can be a threat to liberty, government is also necessary for
the security of liberty. As Madison wrote, "If men were angels, no government
would be necessary." But since men are not angels, without government, human
beings would live in "a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not
secured against the violence of the stronger." In the Founders' view, nature
does give human beings the most valuable things: their bodies and minds. These
are the basis of their talents, which they achieve by cultivating these natural
gifts but which would be impossible without those gifts.
For the Founders, then, the individual's existence and freedom in this crucial
respect are not a gift of government. They are a gift of God and nature.
Government is therefore always and fundamentally in the service of the
individual, not the other way around. The purpose of government, then, is to
enforce the natural law for the members of the political community by securing
the people's natural rights. It does so by preserving their lives and liberties
against the violence of others. In the founding, the liberty to be secured by
government is not freedom from necessity or poverty. It is freedom from the
despotic and predatory domination of some human beings over others.
Government's main duty for the Founders is to secure that freedom -- at home
through the making and enforcement of criminal and civil law, abroad through a
strong national defense. The protection of life and liberty is achieved through
vigorous prosecutions of crime against person and property or through civil
suits for recovery of damages, these cases being decided by a jury of one's
peers.
The Progressives regarded the Founders' scheme as defective because it took too
benign a view of nature. As Dewey remarked, they thought that the individual was
ready-made by nature. The Founders' supposed failure to recognize the crucial
role of society led the Progressives to disparage the Founders' insistence on
limited government. The Progressive goal of politics is freedom, now understood
as freedom from the limits imposed by nature and necessity. They rejected the
Founders' conception of freedom as useful for self-preservation for the sake of
the individual pursuit of happiness. For the Progressives, freedom is redefined
as the fulfillment of human capacities, which becomes the primary task of the
state.
To this end, Dewey writes, "the state has the responsibility for creating
institutions under which individuals can effectively realize the potentialities
that are theirs." So although "it is true that social arrangements, laws,
institutions are made for man, rather than that man is made for them," these
laws and institutions "are not means for obtaining something for individuals,
not even happiness. They are means of creating individuals…. Individuality in a
social and moral sense is something to be wrought out." "Creating individuals"
versus "protecting individuals": this sums up the difference between the
Founders' and the Progressives' conception of what government is for.
3. The Progressives' Rejection of Consent & Compact as the Basis of Society
In accordance with their conviction that all human beings are by nature free,
the Founders taught that political society is "formed by a voluntary association
of individuals: It is a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with
each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed
by certain laws for the common good" (Massachusetts Constitution of 1780).
For the Founders, the consent principle extended beyond the founding of society
into its ordinary operation. Government was to be conducted under laws, and laws
were to be made by locally elected officials, accountable through frequent
elections to those who chose them. The people would be directly involved in
governing through their participation in juries selected by lot.
The Progressives treated the social compact idea with scorn. Charles Merriam, a
leading Progressive political scientist, wrote:
The individualistic ideas of the "natural right" school of political theory,
indorsed in the Revolution, are discredited and repudiated…. The origin of the
state is regarded, not as the result of a deliberate agreement among men, but as
the result of historical development, instinctive rather than conscious; and
rights are considered to have their source not in nature, but in law.
For the Progressives, then, it was of no great importance whether or not
government begins in consent as long as it serves its proper end of remolding
man in such a way as to bring out his real capacities and aspirations. As
Merriam wrote, "it was the idea of the state that supplanted the social contract
as the ground of political right." Democracy and consent are not absolutely
rejected by the Progressives, but their importance is greatly diminished, as we
will see when we come to the Progressive conception of governmental structure.
4. God & Religion
In the founding, God was conceived in one of two ways. Christians and Jews
believed in the God of the Bible as the author of liberty but also as the author
of the moral law by which human beings are guided toward their duties and,
ultimately, toward their happiness. Nonbelievers (Washington called them "mere
politicians" in his Farewell Address) thought of God merely as a creative
principle or force behind the natural order of things.
Both sides agreed that there is a God of nature who endows men with natural
rights and assigns them duties under the law of nature. Believers added that the
God of nature is also the God of the Bible, while secular thinkers denied that
God was anything more than the God of nature. Everyone saw liberty as a "sacred
cause."
At least some of the Progressives redefined God as human freedom achieved
through the right political organization. Or else God was simply rejected as a
myth. For Hegel, whose philosophy strongly influenced the Progressives, "the
state is the divine idea as it exists on earth." John Burgess, a prominent
Progressive political scientist, wrote that the purpose of the state is the
"perfection of humanity, the civilization of the world; the perfect development
of the human reason and its attainment to universal command over individualism;
the apotheosis of man" (man becoming God). Progressive-Era theologians like
Walter Rauschenbusch redefined Christianity as the social gospel of progress.
5. Limits on Government & The Integrity of the Private Sphere
For the Founders, the purpose of government is to protect the private sphere,
which they regarded as the proper home of both the high and the low, of the
important and the merely urgent, of God, religion, and science, as well as
providing for the needs of the body. The experience of religious persecution had
convinced the Founders that government was incompetent at directing man in his
highest endeavors. The requirements of liberty, they thought, meant that
self-interested private associations had to be permitted, not because they are
good in themselves, but because depriving individuals of freedom of association
would deny the liberty that is necessary for the health of society and the
flourishing of the individual.
For the Founders, although government was grounded in divine law (i.e., the laws
of nature and of nature's God), government was seen as a merely human thing,
bound up with all the strengths and weaknesses of human nature. Government had
to be limited both because it was dangerous if it got too powerful and because
it was not supposed to provide for the highest things in life.
Because of the Progressives' tendency to view the state as divine and the
natural as low, they no longer looked upon the private sphere as that which was
to be protected by government. Instead, the realm of the private was seen as the
realm of selfishness and oppression. Private property was especially singled out
for criticism. Some Progressives openly or covertly spoke of themselves as
socialists.
Woodrow Wilson did so in an unpublished writing. A society like the Founders'
that limits itself to protecting life, liberty, and property was one in which,
as Wilson wrote with only slight exaggeration, "all that government had to do
was to put on a policeman's uniform and say, 'Now don't anybody hurt anybody
else.'" Wilson thought that such a society was unable to deal with the
conditions of modern times.
Wilson rejected the earlier view that "the ideal of government was for every man
to be left alone and not interfered with, except when he interfered with
somebody else; and that the best government was the government that did as
little governing as possible." A government of this kind is unjust because it
leaves men at the mercy of predatory corporations. Without government management
of those corporations, Wilson thought, the poor would be destined to indefinite
victimization by the wealthy. Previous limits on government power must be
abolished. Accordingly, Progressive political scientist Theodore Woolsey wrote,
"The sphere of the state may reach as far as the nature and needs of man and of
men reach, including intellectual and aesthetic wants of the individual, and the
religious and moral nature of its citizens."
However, this transformation is still in the future, for Progress takes place
through historical development. A sign of the Progressives' unlimited trust in
unlimited political authority is Dewey's remark in his "Ethics of Democracy"
that Plato's Republic presents us with the "perfect man in the perfect state."
What Plato's Socrates had presented as a thought experiment to expose the nature
and limits of political life is taken by Dewey to be a laudable obliteration of
the private sphere by government mandate. In a remark that the Founders would
have found repugnant, Progressive political scientist John Burgess wrote that
"the most fundamental and indispensable mark of statehood" was "the original,
absolute, unlimited, universal power over the individual subject, and all
associations of subjects."
6. Domestic Policy
For the Founders, domestic policy, as we have seen, concentrated on securing the
persons and properties of the people against violence by means of a tough
criminal law against murder, rape, robbery, and so on. Further, the civil law
had to provide for the poor to have access to acquiring property by allowing the
buying and selling of labor and property through voluntary contracts and a legal
means of establishing undisputed ownership. The burden of proof was on
government if there was to be any limitation on the free use of that property.
Thus, licensing and zoning were rare.
Laws regulating sexual conduct aimed at the formation of lasting marriages so
that children would be born and provided for by those whose interest and love
was most likely to lead to their proper care, with minimal government
involvement needed because most families would be intact.
Finally, the Founders tried to promote the moral conditions of an independent,
hard-working citizenry by laws and educational institutions that would encourage
such virtues as honesty, moderation, justice, patriotism, courage, frugality,
and industry. Government support of religion (typically generic Protestantism)
was generally practiced with a view to these ends. One can see the Founders'
view of the connection between religion and morality in such early laws as the
Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which said that government should promote education
because "[r]eligion, morality, and knowledge [are] necessary to good government
and the happiness of mankind."
In Progressivism, the domestic policy of government had two main concerns.
First, government must protect the poor and other victims of capitalism through
redistribution of resources, anti-trust laws, government control over the
details of commerce and production: i.e., dictating at what prices things must
be sold, methods of manufacture, government participation in the banking system,
and so on.
Second, government must become involved in the "spiritual" development of its
citizens -- not, of course, through promotion of religion, but through
protecting the environment ("conservation"), education (understood as education
to personal creativity), and spiritual uplift through subsidy and promotion of
the arts and culture.
7. Foreign Policy
For the Founders, foreign and domestic policy were supposed to serve the same
end: the security of the people in their person and property. Therefore, foreign
policy was conceived primarily as defensive. Foreign attack was to be deterred
by having strong arms or repulsed by force. Alliances were to be entered into
with the understanding that a self-governing nation must keep itself aloof from
the quarrels of other nations, except as needed for national defense. Government
had no right to spend the taxes or lives of its own citizens to spread democracy
to other nations or to engage in enterprises aiming at imperialistic hegemony.
The Progressives believed that a historical process was leading all mankind to
freedom, or at least the advanced nations. Following Hegel, they thought of the
march of freedom in history as having a geographical basis. It was in Europe,
not Asia or Africa, where modern science and the modern state had made their
greatest advances. The nations where modern science had properly informed the
political order were thought to be the proper leaders of the world.
The Progressives also believed that the scientifically educated leaders of the
advanced nations (especially America, Britain, and France) should not hesitate
to rule the less advanced nations in the interest of ultimately bringing the
world into freedom, assuming that supposedly inferior peoples could be brought
into the modern world at all. Political scientist Charles Merriam openly called
for a policy of colonialism on a racial basis:
[T]he Teutonic races must civilize the politically uncivilized. They must
have a colonial policy. Barbaric races, if incapable, may be swept away…. On the
same principle, interference with the affairs of states not wholly barbaric, but
nevertheless incapable of effecting political organization for themselves, is
fully justified.
Progressives therefore embraced a much more active and indeed imperialistic
foreign policy than the Founders did. In "Expansion and Peace" (1899), Theodore
Roosevelt wrote that the best policy is imperialism on a global scale: "every
expansion of a great civilized power means a victory for law, order, and
righteousness." Thus, the American occupation of the Philippines, T.R. believed,
would enable "one more fair spot of the world's surface" to be "snatched from
the forces of darkness. Fundamentally the cause of expansion is the cause of
peace."
Woodrow Wilson advocated American entry into World War I, boasting that
America's national interest had nothing to do with it. Wilson had no difficulty
sending American troops to die in order to make the world safe for democracy,
regardless of whether or not it would make America more safe or less. The trend
to turn power over to multinational organizations also begins in this period, as
may be seen in Wilson's plan for a League of Nations, under whose rules America
would have delegated control over the deployment of its own armed forces to that
body.
8. Who Should Rule, Experts or Representatives?
The Founders thought that laws should be made by a body of elected officials
with roots in local communities. They should not be "experts," but they should
have "most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the
society" (Madison). The wisdom in question was the kind on display in The
Federalist, which relentlessly dissected the political errors of the previous
decade in terms accessible to any person of intelligence and common sense.
The Progressives wanted to sweep away what they regarded as this amateurism in
politics. They had confidence that modern science had superseded the perspective
of the liberally educated statesman. Only those educated in the top
universities, preferably in the social sciences, were thought to be capable of
governing. Politics was regarded as too complex for common sense to cope with.
Government had taken on the vast responsibility not merely of protecting the
people against injuries, but of managing the entire economy as well as providing
for the people's spiritual well-being. Only government agencies staffed by
experts informed by the most advanced modern science could manage tasks
previously handled within the private sphere. Government, it was thought, needed
to be led by those who see where history is going, who understand the
ever-evolving idea of human dignity.
The Progressives did not intend to abolish democracy, to be sure. They wanted
the people's will to be more efficiently translated into government policy. But
what democracy meant for the Progressives is that the people would take power
out of the hands of locally elected officials and political parties and place it
instead into the hands of the central government, which would in turn establish
administrative agencies run by neutral experts, scientifically trained, to
translate the people's inchoate will into concrete policies. Local politicians
would be replaced by neutral city managers presiding over technically trained
staffs. Politics in the sense of favoritism and self-interest would disappear
and be replaced by the universal rule of enlightened bureaucracy.
Progressivism and Today's Liberalism
This should be enough to show how radically the Progressives broke with the
earlier tradition. Of what relevance is all of this today?
Most obviously, the roots of the liberalism with which we are familiar lie in
the Progressive Era. It is not hard to see the connections between the eight
features of Progressivism that I have just sketched and later developments. This
is true not only for the New Deal period of Franklin Roosevelt, but above all
for the major institutional and policy changes that were initiated between 1965
and 1975. Whether one regards the transformation of American politics over the
past century as good or bad, the foundations of that transformation were laid in
the Progressive Era. Today's liberals, or the teachers of today's liberals,
learned to reject the principles of the founding from their teachers, the
Progressives.
Nevertheless, in some respects, the Progressives were closer to the founding
than they are to today's liberalism. So let us conclude by briefly considering
the differences between our current liberalism and Progressivism. We may sum up
these differences in three words: science, sex, and progress.
First, in regard to science, today's liberals have a far more ambivalent
attitude than the Progressives did. The latter had no doubt that science either
had all the answers or was on the road to discovering them. Today, although the
prestige of science remains great, it has been greatly diminished by the
multicultural perspective that sees science as just another point of view.
Two decades ago, in a widely publicized report of the American Council of
Learned Societies, several leading professors in the humanities proclaimed that
the "ideal of objectivity and disinterest," which "has been essential to the
development of science," has been totally rejected by "the consensus of most of
the dominant theories" of today. Instead, today's consensus holds that "all
thought does, indeed, develop from particular standpoints, perspectives,
interests." So science is just a Western perspective on reality, no more or less
valid than the folk magic believed in by an African or Pacific Island tribe that
has never been exposed to modern science.
Second, liberalism today has become preoccupied with sex. Sexual activity is to
be freed from all traditional restraints. In the Founders' view, sex was
something that had to be regulated by government because of its tie to the
production and raising of children. Practices such as abortion and homosexual
conduct -- the choice for which was recently equated by the Supreme Court with
the right "to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the
universe, and of the mystery of human life" -- are considered fundamental
rights.
The connection between sexual liberation and Progressivism is indirect, for the
Progressives, who tended to follow Hegel in such matters, were rather
old-fashioned in this regard. But there was one premise within Progressivism
that may be said to have led to the current liberal understanding of sex. That
is the disparagement of nature and the celebration of human will, the idea that
everything of value in life is created by man's choice, not by nature or
necessity.
Once sexual conduct comes under the scrutiny of such a concern, it is not hard
to see that limiting sexual expression to marriage -- where it is clearly tied
to nature's concern for reproduction -- could easily be seen as a kind of
limitation of human liberty. Once self-realization (Dewey's term, for whom it
was still tied to reason and science) is transmuted into self-expression
(today's term), all barriers to one's sexual idiosyncrasies must appear
arbitrary and tyrannical.
Third, contemporary liberals no longer believe in progress. The Progressives'
faith in progress was rooted in their faith in science, as one can see
especially in the European thinkers whom they admired, such as Hegel and Comte.
When science is seen as just one perspective among many, then progress itself
comes into question.
The idea of progress presupposes that the end result is superior to the point of
departure, but contemporary liberals are generally wary of expressing any sense
of the superiority of the West, whether intellectually, politically, or in any
other way. They are therefore disinclined to support any foreign policy venture
that contributes to the strength of America or of the West.
Liberal domestic policy follows the same principle. It tends to elevate the
"other" to moral superiority over against those whom the Founders would have
called the decent and the honorable, the men of wisdom and virtue. The more a
person is lacking, the greater is his or her moral claim on society. The deaf,
the blind, the disabled, the stupid, the improvident, the ignorant, and even (in
a 1984 speech of presidential candidate Walter Mondale) the sad -- those who are
lowest are extolled as the sacred other.
Surprisingly, although Progressivism, supplemented by the more recent
liberalism, has transformed America in some respects, the Founders' approach to
politics is still alive in some areas of American life. One has merely to attend
a jury trial over a murder, rape, robbery, or theft in a state court to see the
older system of the rule of law at work. Perhaps this is one reason why America
seems so conservative to the rest of the Western world. Among ordinary
Americans, as opposed to the political, academic, professional, and
entertainment elites, there is still a strong attachment to property rights,
self-reliance, and heterosexual marriage; a wariness of university-certified
"experts"; and an unapologetic willingness to use armed forces in defense of
their country.
The first great battle for the American soul was settled in the Civil War. The
second battle for America's soul, initiated over a century ago, is still raging.
The choice for the Founders' constitutionalism or the Progressive-liberal
administrative state is yet to be fully resolved.
Thomas G. West is a Professor of Politics at the University of Dallas, a
Director and Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute, and author of Vindicating
the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America (Rowman
and Littlefield, 1997).
Commentary by William A. Schambra
Like the volume to which he has contributed, Tom West's remarks reflect a
pessimism about the decisively debilitating effect of Progressivism on American
politics. The essayists are insufficiently self-aware -- about their own
contributions and those of their distinguished teachers. That is, they are not
sufficiently aware that they themselves are part of an increasingly vibrant and
aggressive movement to recover the Founders' constitutionalism -- a movement
that could only have been dreamt of when I entered graduate school in the early
'70s.
To be sure, the Progressive project accurately described herein did indeed seize
and come to control major segments of American cultural and political life. It
certainly came to dominate the first modern foundations, the universities,
journalism, and most other institutions of American intellectual life. But, as
Mr. West suggests, it nonetheless failed in its effort to change entirely the
way everyday American political life plays itself out.
As much as the Progressives succeeded in challenging the intellectual
underpinnings of the American constitutional system, they nonetheless faced the
difficulty that the system itself -- the large commercial republic and a
separation of powers, reflecting and cultivating individual self-interest and
ambition -- remained in place. As their early modern designers hoped and
predicted, these institutions continued to generate a certain kind of political
behavior in accord with presuppositions of the Founders even as Progressive
elites continued for the past 100 years to denounce that behavior as
self-centered, materialistic, and insufficiently community-minded and
public-spirited.
The Progressive Foothold
The Progressive system managed to gain a foothold in American politics only when
it made major compromises with the Founders' constitutionalism. The best example
is the Social Security system: Had the Progressives managed to install a "pure,"
community-minded system, it would have been an altruistic transfer of wealth
from the rich to the vulnerable aged in the name of preserving the sense of
national oneness or national community. It would have reflected the enduring
Progressive conviction that we're all in this together -- all part of one
national family, as former New York Governor Mario Cuomo once put it.
Indeed, modern liberals do often defend Social Security in those terms. But in
fact, FDR knew the American political system well enough to rely on other than
altruistic impulses to preserve Social Security past the New Deal. The fact that
it's based on the myth of individual accounts -- the myth that Social Security
is only returning to me what I put in -- is what has made this part of the 20th
century's liberal project almost completely unassailable politically. As FDR
intended, Social Security endures because it draws as much on self-interested
individualism as on self-forgetting community-mindedness.
As this illustrates, the New Deal, for all its Progressive roots, is in some
sense less purely Progressive than LBJ's Great Society. In the Great Society, we
had more explicit and direct an application of the Progressive commitment to
rule by social science experts, largely unmitigated initially by political
considerations.
That was precisely Daniel Patrick Moynihan's insight in Maximum Feasible
Misunderstanding. Almost overnight, an obscure, untested academic theory about
the cause of juvenile delinquency -- namely, Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin's
structure of opportunity theory -- leapt from the pages of the social science
journals into the laws waging a war on poverty.
Indeed, the entire point of the Great Society was to reshape the behavior of the
poor -- to move them off the welfare rolls by transforming their behavior
according to what social sciences had taught us about such undertakings. It was
explicitly a project of social engineering in the best Progressive tradition.
Sober liberal friends of the Great Society would later admit that a central
reason for its failure was precisely the fact that it was an expertise-driven
engineering project, which had never sought the support or even the acquiescence
of popular majorities.
The engineering excesses of the Great Society and the popular reaction against
them meant that the 1960s were the beginning of the first serious challenge to
the Progressive model for America -- a challenge that the New Deal hadn't
precipitated earlier because it had carefully accommodated itself to the
Founders' political system. Certainly the New Left took aim at the Great
Society's distant, inhumane, patronizing, bureaucratic social engineering; but
for our purposes, this marked as well the beginning of the modern conservative
response to Progressivism, which has subsequently enjoyed some success,
occupying the presidency, both houses of Congress, and perhaps soon the Supreme
Court.
Curiously, for Mr. West, this is precisely the moment -- he settles on the year
1965 -- at which Progressivism achieves near complete dominance of American
politics.
Recovering the Founders' Constitutionalism
Central to the modern conservative response, I would suggest, is precisely a
recovery of the Founders' constitutionalism -- serious attention to the
"truth-claims" of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and The
Federalist Papers. This had begun in the mid-1950s but really gathered steam in
the '60s. It was above all a result, as John Marini's essay in The Progressive
Revolution in Politics and Political Science suggests, of Leo Strauss's
acknowledgement that the constitutional democracies of the West, no matter how
weakened by the internal critique of Progressive elites, had alone managed to
resist modern totalitarianism and were worthy of a spirited intellectual
defense.
Suddenly, the founding documents, which had long been consigned to the dustbin
of history, came once again to be studied seriously, not as reflection of some
passing historical moment of the late 18th century, but rather as potential
sources of truth about politics, government, and human nature. Harry Jaffa,
Herbert Storing, Martin Diamond, Harry Clor, Allan Bloom, Irving Kristol, and so
forth all devoted at least some of their efforts to serious study of the
Founders' thought -- a process that the volume before us continues.
I would argue that linking the conservative resurgence to a recovery of the
Constitution was in fact a critical part of its ability to flourish in a way
that conservatism had not otherwise managed earlier in the 20th century.
▪ Attention to constitutionalism sustained conservatism's appreciation for the
central place of individual liberty in American political life, but now tempered
by other principles that prevent it from flying off to the extremes of
libertarianism, with its rather abstract theoretical commitment to individual
liberty to the exclusion of all else.
▪ The constitutional idea of equality helped us resist the liberal shift from
equality of opportunity to equality of results, but it also severed the new
conservatism from past versions of itself which had unhappily emphasized class,
status, and hierarchy -- notions which had never taken hold in America.
▪ Attention to the concept of the commercial republic shored up the idea of free
markets but without relapsing into a simplistic worship of the marketplace,
given Hamilton's view of the need for an active federal government in creating
and preserving a large national common market.
▪ Speaking of Hamilton, his essays in The Federalist suggesting the need for a
powerful executive branch that would lead America into a position of
international prominence sustained conservatism's new understanding of America's
role in the world, severing it from the isolationism that had previously marred
conservative doctrine.
▪ Finally, a recovery of the Constitution's concept of decentralist federalism
informed conservatism's defense of family, neighborhood, local community, and
local house of worship; that is, it gave us a way to defend local community
against Progressivism's doctrine of national community but within a strong
national framework, without falling into anarchic doctrines of "township
sovereignty" or concurrent majorities.
In other words, to some degree, modern conservatism owes its success to a
recovery of and an effort to root itself in the Founders' constitutionalism.
Frank Meyer was famous for his doctrine of fusionism -- a fusing of libertarian
individualism with religious traditionalism. The real fusionism for contemporary
conservatism, I would suggest, is supplied by its effort to recover the
Founders' constitutionalism, which was itself an effort to fuse or blend
critical American political principles like liberty and equality, competent
governance and majority rule.
As noted, the Founders' constitutionalism had continued to shape American
politics and public opinion in a subterranean fashion throughout the 20th
century out of sight of, and in defiance of, the intellectual doctrines and
utopian expectations of American Progressive intellectuals. Modern conservatism
"re-theorizes," so to speak, the constitutional substructure and creates a
political movement that, unlike Progressivism, is sailing with rather than
against the prevailing winds of American political life. That surely makes for
smoother sailing.
Mr. West and his co-authors are all children of this conservative resurgence and
are themselves obviously hoping to link it to a recovery of constitutionalism.
So perhaps it is just modesty that leads them to profess that their efforts and
those of their teachers have come to naught and to insist that Progressivism has
succeeded in destroying America after all.
The Early Constitutionalists
This volume's pessimism also neglects the critical moment in American history
which provided the indispensable basis for today's effort to recover the
Founders' constitutionalism. As you may know, in the Republican primaries of
1912, Theodore Roosevelt campaigned for the presidency on a platform of radical
constitutional reform enunciated in his "Charter of Democracy" speech, delivered
in Columbus in February 1912. There and subsequently, he endorsed the full range
of Progressive constitutional reforms: the initiative, referendum, and recall,
including the recall of judges and judicial decisions.
Had Roosevelt managed to win the nomination of his party as he came close to
doing, it is likely that it would have put its weight behind these reforms and
others that appeared later in the platform of the Progressive Party, including,
critically, a more expeditious method of amending the Constitution. That would
probably have meant amendment by a majority of the popular vote in a majority of
the states, as Robert LaFollette suggested. Had that happened -- had the
Constitution come down to us today amended and re-amended, burdened with all the
quick fixes and gimmicks that, at one point or another over the 20th century,
captured fleeting majorities -- the effort to recover the Founders'
constitutionalism and reorient American politics toward it would obviously have
been a much, much trickier proposition.
This is precisely what William Howard Taft, Henry Cabot Lodge, Elihu Root, and
other conservatives understood. So they stood against Roosevelt, in spite of
deep friendships and in spite of the certainty of splitting the party and losing
the election. For they believed that the preservation of the Constitution as it
came to them from the Founders had to be their first priority, and they believed
that this question would be settled decisively in the Taft-Roosevelt contest of
1912. When the constitutionalists succeeded in keeping the magnificent electoral
machinery of the Republican Party out of Roosevelt's hands, they were able to
tell themselves that they had done the one thing needful.
And they were right, I would argue. In spite of the fact that Progressivism
would go on to seize the commanding intellectual heights of the past century --
in spite of the fact that law schools, political science departments, high-brow
journals, and foundations alike told us to transcend and forget about the
Founders' Constitution -- it was still there beneath it all, still there largely
intact, waiting for rediscovery, still the official charter of the Republic, no
matter how abused and ridiculed.
This aspect of the election of 1912 -- that is, the contest within the
Republican Party between Taft and Roosevelt about preserving the Constitution --
is almost entirely forgotten today. Shelves and shelves of dissertations and
books have been done on Progressivism and socialism in that election, but
virtually nothing about conservatism. As we try to recover an understanding of
the Founders' Constitution, so also conservatives need to recover our own
history, which has otherwise been completely ignored by the Progressive academy.
Anyway, let us not neglect the sacrificial struggles of men like Root, Taft, and
Lodge in seeing to it that we have a constitutional tradition to recover -- or,
rather, seeing to it that the recovery is worthwhile, because the written
Constitution has come down to us largely as it emerged from the pens of the
Founders and still commands popular allegiance.
William A. Schambra is Director of the Hudson Institute's Bradley Center for
Philanthropy and Civic Renewal and editor of As Far as Republican Principles
Will Admit: Collected Essays of Martin Diamond (American Enterprise Institute,
1992).
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