THE END OF THE nineteenth century saw the rise of a movement thoroughly hostile to the underlying principles of the nation’s founding—the “Progressive Movement.” Although I argued in Liberty and Tyranny,1 Ameritopia,2 and elsewhere that the term Statist better describes the left and its multifarious ideological forms and manifestations, it is impossible to decipher, unravel, and highlight certain aspects of the “progressive” history and influence on Americanism, and reference at some length its ideological founders and activists, without referring to it and them by the usual and accepted term. Therefore, for the purposes of this book I must do so out of convenience and necessity, albeit reluctantly.
Progressivism was imported from Europe and would result in a radical break from America’s heritage. In fact, it is best described as an elitist-driven counterrevolution to the American Revolution, in which the sovereignty of the individual, natural law, natural rights, and the civil society—built on a foundation of thousands of years of enlightened thinking and human experience—would be drastically altered and even abandoned for an ideological agenda broadly characterized as “historical progress.”
Progressivism is the idea of the inevitability of historical progress and the perfectibility of man—and his self-realization—through the national community or collective. While its intellectual and political advocates clothe its core in populist terminology, and despite the existence of democratic institutions and cyclical voting, progressivism’s emphasis on material egalitarianism and societal engineering, and its insistence on concentrated, centralized administrative rule, lead inescapably to varying degrees of autocratic governance. Moreover, for progressives there are no absolute or permanent truths, only passing and distant historical events. Thus even values are said to be relative to time and circumstances; there is no eternal moral order—that is, what was true and good in 1776 and before is not necessarily true and good today. Consequently, the very purpose of America’s founding is debased.
To better understand this ideology, its refutation of the American heritage, and its enormous effect on modern American life, it is necessary to become acquainted with some of the most influential progressive intellectuals who, together with others, set the nation on this lamentable course. Given their prolific writings, it is neither possible nor necessary to delve into every manner of their thoughts or the differences among them in their brand of progressivism. For our purposes, it is enough to expose essential aspects of their arguments.
Herbert Croly (1869–1930) was among the leading academic and progressive thinkers. Croly cofounded the magazine The New Republic and authored The Promise of American Life (1909), an essential book among his fellow intellectuals, jurists, and certain powerful politicians, including Theodore Roosevelt. Among other things, Croly argued that “[t]o conceive the better American future as a consummation which will take care of itself,—as the necessary result of our customary conditions, institutions, and ideas,—persistence in such a conception is admirably designed to deprive American life of any promise at all. The better future which Americans propose to build is nothing if not an idea which must in certain essential respects emancipate them from their past. American history contains much matter for pride and congratulation, and much matter for regret and humiliation. . . . [Americans] must be prepared to sacrifice to that traditional vision even the traditional American ways of realizing it. Such a sacrifice is, I believe, coming to be demanded; and unless it is made, American life will gradually cease to have any specific Promise.”3
Hence the American heritage and founding principles must be thrust aside if there is to be human progress. They are dismissed as outmoded and obstructive, impeding the pursuit of utopian ends, for they are unconnected to the present. Man, society, and the political and governing systems must be pliable to meet the special conditions of the day, subject to the commands of a consolidated and amalgamated ruling class. This requires a far-reaching change in education, the culture, and the American mind-set. In particular, the sacred rights of the individual, paramount under the Declaration of Independence’s order, are said to be an old notion of individualism; they must give way to the new individualism—where the individual is subjugated to the mortal power of the state in the name of the general will and greater good.
Croly continued: “[T]he individual American will never obtain a sufficiently complete chance of self-expression, until the American nation has earnestly undertaken and measurably achieved the realization of its collective purpose. . . . [T]he cure for this individual sterility lies partly with the individual himself or rather with the man who proposes to become an individual; and under any plan of economic and social organization, the man who proposes to become an individual is a condition of the national as well as the individual improvement. It is none the less true that any success in the achievement of the national purpose will contribute positively to the liberation of the individual, both by diminishing his temptation, improving his opportunities, and by enveloping him in an invigorating rather than an enervating moral and intellectual atmosphere.”4
More than a century later, in remarks delivered on July 13, 2012, President Barack Obama echoed Croly’s sentiment: “[I]f you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. . . . I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something—there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires. So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together.”5
Of course, no one is suggesting that individuals live in a bubble; certainly not the Founders or the philosophers who informed them. On the contrary, their dread was the deprivation of individual liberty and human rights by tyrannical governments of any form, but especially of the historically familiar centralized form.
Moreover, Croly, like many before and since, tied historic progress and the modern state to the idea of material egalitarianism, a central tenet of Marxism. Croly wrote: “It is the economic individualism of our existing national system which inflicts the most serious damage on American individuality; and American individual achievement in politics and science and the arts will remain partially impoverished as long as our fellow countrymen neglect or refuse systematically to regulate the distribution of wealth in the national interest. I am aware, of course, that the prevailing American conviction is absolutely contradictory of the foregoing assertion. Americans have always associated individual freedom with the unlimited popular enjoyment of all available economic opportunities. Yet it would be far more true to say that the popular enjoyment of practically unrestricted economic opportunities is precisely the condition which makes for individual bondage. . . .”6
In order to clear the way for the new progressive state—the fundamental objectives of which are largely antithetical to the American founding—its principles and institutions and the Founders themselves must therefore be disemboweled. In his book, Progressive Democracy (1914), Croly was blunt: “As in the case of every great political edifice, the materials composing the American system are derived from many different sources, and are characterized by unequal values, both as to endurance and as to latent possibilities. The appearance of definiteness and finality which it derives from its embodiment in specific constitutional documents and other authoritative words is to a large extent illusory. . . . Both historically and theoretically the American system is based upon an affirmation of popular political authority. When the colonists proclaimed their independence of the British Crown and Parliament, the repudiated sovereign had to be replaced with a capable substitute; and this substitute could consist under the circumstances only of the supposed makers of the Revolution—the American people as a whole. After the Declaration of Independence, the people, whoever they were and however their power was to be organized and expressed, became the only source of righteous political authority in the emancipated nation.”7 Croly went on: “Emphatic, however, as was this assertion of its direct control over its own political institutions by the primitive American democracy, its willingness to restrict its own effective political power was no less definite and insistent. It did not show the slightest disposition to translate this supposedly effective popular control over the institutes of government into active popular control over governmental behavior. The democracy abdicated the continuing active exercise of effective power in the very act of affirming the reality of its own ultimate legal authority.”8
Besides, asserted Croly sarcastically, why should we revere the Founders, let alone surrender the present to their old and confining ideas and governmental designs? Not only were the Founders imperfect, they were reacting to unique events at the time. Therefore, allegiance to their dated notions and governing construct constrains the natural flow of historical progress. “These early American democratic law-givers had no misgivings as to their own ability to draw up such a code. Both the political experience of their own forbears and a radical analysis of the origin of the meaning of society demonstrated the existence of certain individual rights as incontestable, indefeasible and inalienable as the right of the people to institute and alter their form of government. . . . The sacred words must be deposited in the ark of the covenant, there to remain inviolate as long as the commonwealth shall endure.” Croly even raged against the Constitution’s Bill of Rights: “By attempting to define a code of righteous political behavior, which could be enforced as law and which should be morally and legally binding on the people, the constitution makers were by way of depriving the sovereign of his own and necessary discretionary power. They did not merely associate popular political authority with the ideal law, but they tended to subordinate popular authority to an actual law. . . . The human will in its collective aspect was made subservient to the mechanism of a legal system.”9
For Croly, the entire process of popular sovereignty exercised through representative republicanism, which led to the drafting, adoption, and ratification of the United States Constitution, was illegitimate, since it lacked direct popular voting. “In theory the fundamental Law should have been more completely the people’s law . . . ; but in practice, the people have never had much to say about it. It was framed by a convention, the members of which were never expressly elected for the purpose by popular vote. It was ratified, not directly by the electorate, but by conventions which often represented only a small minority even of the legally qualified voters. In seeking to amend it the popular will could not act directly, but must get expressed through Congress and through state legislators and conventions. . . . The whole Federal system was by way of being an able, deliberate, beneficent and finally acceptable imposition on the people rather than an actual popular possession.”10
Of course, the irony is that the kind of centralized administrative state Croly advocated, and which surrounds us today and is managed by a relative handful of architects, is all but immune from the popular will and completely impervious to direct popular sovereignty.
In a recurring theme among progressives, Croly condemned the Constitution’s separation of powers, a doctrine essential to averting centralized tyranny, as the main obstacle to progress. “If the people are to be divided against themselves in order that righteousness may rule, still more must the government be divided against itself. It must be separated into departments each one of which must act independently of the others. . . . The government was prevented from doing harm, but in order that it might not do harm it was deliberately and effectively weakened. The people were protected from the government; but quite as much was the government protected from the people. In dividing the government against itself by such high and rigid barriers, an equally substantial barrier was raised against the exercise by the people of any easy and sufficient control over their government. It was only a very strong and persistent popular majority which could make its will prevail, and if the rule of a majority was discouraged, the rule of a minority was equally encouraged. But the rulers, whether representing a majority or a minority, could not and were not supposed to accomplish much. It was an organization of obstacles and precautions—based at bottom on a profound suspicion of human nature.”11
Furthermore, Croly was frustrated by legal restraints generally on governing as he continued to confound the unalienable rights of the individual (the supposed “old individualism” of the Declaration of Independence) with the liberating government authority of the state (the supposed “new individualism” manifested through the collective and general will). “Thus was instituted a system of representation by Law. Inasmuch as the ultimate popular political power was trustworthy only in case it were exercised, not merely through the medium of regular forms, but under rigid and effective limitations, the trustworthy agents of that power were not representative men exercising discretionary power, but principles of right which subordinated all officials to definite and binding restrictions. When the sovereign itself have implicitly surrendered its discretion to the Law, the personal agents of the sovereign can scarcely expect to retain theirs. The domination of the Law came to mean in practice a system in which the discretionary discriminatory purposive action of the human will in politics, whether collective or individual was suspect and should be reduced to the lowest practicable terms. The active government was divided, weakened, confined and deprived of integrity and effective responsibility, in order that a pre-established and authoritative Law might be exalted, confirmed and placed beyond the reach of danger.”12
Consequently, Croly was not actually an advocate of popular sovereignty so much as he was an opponent of genuine individualism and constitutional republicanism, the latter two being obstacles to a centralized state in which it is claimed that governing authority exists at the behest of the people and for the good of the people. Let us remember, for the progressive, historical progress is said to be a process of never-ending cultural and societal adjustments intended to address the unique circumstances of the time, the ultimate goal of which is economic egalitarianism and the material liberation of “the masses.” Unlike most of Europe, the American attitude, experience, and governing system were not compatible with the progressive ideology. Although Croly lamented the lack of direct democracy in America’s founding, despite the open and active participation of the citizenry, he conveniently ignored that the people were never formally consulted or asked to approve the all-embracing counterrevolution and societal mutation of his progressive movement.
Like other progressives, Croly proclaimed a new secular “science,” a political and social science in which politicians, bureaucrats, academics, and experts harness the power of the state to indoctrinate and rule over the individual, and attempt to remake his nature and society in general through constant experimentation and manipulation. This is said to be progress. Croly also argued that the American mind-set—the view of the “all-around man”—must be altered. The people must be conditioned to accept and then demand the kind of centralized administrative state he advocated. This is accomplished not only by demonizing the successful individual and, as he explained, demonstrating the benefits of administrative governance, but by producing like-minded believers through higher education. Croly wrote:
Another condition must also be satisfied before an expert administration can expect to obtain popular confidence. Its authority will depend, as we have seen, on its ability to apply scientific knowledge to the realization of social purposes; and if a social science is unattainable or does not command popular respect, popular opinion will be reluctant to grant to the administration its necessary independent authority. Now in what way can a body of social knowledge be made to command popular respect? In the long run, doubtless, by increasing demonstration that social knowledge is the fruit of a binding and formative social ideal and that it is really serviceable for the accomplishment of a social program. But is such a demonstration sufficient? Is there not another and equally necessary method of increasing popular confidence in the expert—the method of giving a much larger number of people the chance of acquiring a better intellectual training? Is it fair to ask millions of democrats to have a profound respect for scientific accomplishments whose possession is denied to them by the prevailing social and educational organization? It can hardly be claimed that the greater proportion of the millions who are insufficiently educated are not just as capable of being better educated as the thousands to whom science comes to have a real meaning. Society has merely deprived them of the opportunity. There may be certain good reasons for this negligence on the part of society; but as long as it exists, it must be recognized as in itself a good reason for the unpopularity of experts. The best way to popularize scientific administration, and to enable the democracy to consider highly educated officials as representatives, is to popularize the higher education. An expert administration cannot be sufficiently representative until it comes to represent a better educated constituency.13
Croly also condemned capitalism and private property rights. Writing in The New Republic on October 27, 1920, he asserted: “The unanswerable indictment against capitalism as an American institution is not that enterprising businessmen seized and exploited the opportunities and power which society placed at their disposal. It was natural and even necessary that they should organize production and distribution on a basis more profitable to themselves than to society. The offense against the American national welfare with which they are indictable is of a different kind. It is their blindness to the social penalties of their methods of hiring, firing and playing labor and their refusal to make the technical and social education of their employees a charge upon business or upon the businessman’s state. . . .”14 In this regard, Croly expressed the view held by all progressives, Democrat and Republican, in his era and since, that industrial America and, therefore, capitalism create an economic and social class system, different in specifics but not necessarily in kind to that described by Karl Marx (Marx’s ideology to be discussed briefly later). Indeed, in condemning the progressivism of both major political parties as too tame, and encouraging support for a third party, the Farmer-Labor Party (essentially a socialist-workers’ party), Croly complained that “[p]ractically all of the educational groundwork in public opinion for a Farmer-Labor party still remains to be done. Marxism Socialism has the advantage both of a definite creed and a Bible [The Communist Manifesto] which focuses the convictions and emotions of its adherents. . . .”15 The overlap in the progressive and Marxist mind-set is simply inescapable.
Like most progressives, then and now, Croly became increasingly frustrated with the supposed slow pace of the nation’s transformation.
As a progressive democrat whose faith survives the contemporary eclipse of progressivism, I am not willing to impute the triumph of unreformed and unrepentant party politics and economic privilege to the superior reality of their principles. It is due rather to the unreality which liberals have allowed to pervade liberalism. They have not studied the meaning of their experience and failures during the last twenty-five years. They have not as the result of this experience divined the need of adopting a more radical and realistic view of the nature and object of a liberal agitation under the conditions of American democracy. They accepted in the beginning and continue to accept certain assumptions about the seat of effective power in the American commonwealth and the relation between the state and social progress which condemn them to remain either the uneasy accomplices or the impotent enemies of the powers that be in American society. Progressives have assumed that the American commonwealth, as now instituted and operated, is a complete and essentially classless democracy whose citizens can cure its ailments and adjust its conflicts by virtue exclusively of political action, agitation and education. This assumption they share with their adversaries. It has falsified and will continue to falsify the American progressive movement. If progressives wish to vindicate their claim to serve as indispensable agents of American national fulfillment they will need to consciously abandon it.16
As will become clear, Croly was not alone in this outlook.
Incredibly, Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), America’s twenty-sixth president (1901–1909), was a Croly admirer. Post-presidency, he was especially influenced by Croly’s 1909 book, The Promise of American Life, which apparently was first drawn to his attention by Learned Hand, a very influential federal district judge, progressive, and a disciple of Croly’s work. Hand wrote to Roosevelt: “I hope that you will find in it as comprehensive and progressive a statement of American Political ideas and ideals as I have found. I think that Croly has succeeded in stating more adequately than anyone else,—certainly of those writers whom I know,—the bases and prospective growth of the set of political ideas which can be fairly described as Neo-Hamilton, and whose promise is due more to you, as I believe, than to anyone else.”17
On January 21, 1911, Roosevelt published an essay in the Outlook, where he was an associate editor, in which he wrote: “In Mr. Herbert Croly’s Promise of American Life, the most profound and illuminating study of our National conditions which has appeared for many years, a special emphasis is laid on the assertion that the whole point of our governmental experiment lies in the fact that it is a genuine effort to achieve true democracy—both political and industrial. The existence of this Nation has no real significance, from the standpoint of humanity at large, unless it means the rule of the people, and the achievement of a greater measure of widely diffused popular well-being than has ever before obtained on a like scale. . . .”18
A few months earlier, on August 31, 1910, Roosevelt gave his well-known “The New Nationalism” speech, widely admired and cited by modern progressives. The phrase—new nationalism—was actually coined not by Roosevelt but Croly.19
Like Croly and other progressives, Roosevelt dismantled and reinterpreted the Declaration of Independence, for he understood its principles stood as obstacles to the progressive mission. “In name we had the Declaration of Independence in 1776; but we gave the lie by our acts to the words of the Declaration of Independence until 1865; and words count for nothing except in so far as they represent acts. . . .”20 Unlike an earlier Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, at no time during his speech did Roosevelt actually mention, let alone discuss, the Declaration’s principles and their application to the nation and the Constitution. Nothing about “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind,” or that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Nor did Roosevelt note that Lincoln used the Declaration’s principles, morality, and language as a foremost justification for prosecuting the Civil War and emancipating the slaves. In other words, the Declaration was the basis for moral and humane action. Had Roosevelt bothered to read from the Declaration’s text, his distortion of the document as some kind of grant of or validation for immense federal governing authority would have collapsed.
In reality, Roosevelt attempted to both downplay the relevance of history, typical of the progressive approach, and use Lincoln and the Civil War to justify almost boundless modern interventions by the federal government in private life, especially the economy. “I do not speak of this struggle of the past merely from the historic standpoint. Our interest is primarily in the application today of the lessons taught by the contest of half a century ago. It is of little use for us to pay lip-loyalty to the mighty men of the past unless we sincerely endeavor to apply to the problems of the present precisely the qualities which in other crises enable the men of that day to meet those crises. It is half melancholy and half amusing to see the way in which well-meaning people gather to do honor to the man who, in company with John Brown, and under the lead of Abraham Lincoln, faced and solved the great problems of the nineteenth century, while, at the same time, these same good people nervously shrink from, or frantically denounce, those who are trying to meet the problems of the twentieth century in the spirit which was accountable for the successful solution of the problems of Lincoln’s time.”21
Of course, the new nationalism must dispose of the “old” federalism since the latter was to be a safeguard against exactly the kind of central authority Roosevelt boosted. Again, the progressive emphasizes simultaneously the “popular will” of the people and the centralization of governing power. “The New Nationalism puts the national need before sectional or personal advantage. It is impatient of the utter confusion that results from local legislatures attempting to treat national issues as local issues. It is still more impatient of the impotence which springs from overdivision of governmental powers, the impotence which makes it possible for local selfishness or for legal cunning, hired by wealthy special interests, to bring national activities to a deadlock. This New Nationalism regards the executive power as the steward of the public welfare. It demands of the judiciary that it shall be interested primarily in human welfare rather than in property, just as it demands that the representative body shall represent all the people rather than any one class or section of the people.”22
And the concentration of governing authority has, as its purpose, the general welfare of the people. “The object of government is the welfare of the people. The material progress and prosperity of a nation are desirable chiefly so far as they lead to the moral and material welfare of all good citizens. Just in proportion as the average man and woman are honest, capable of sound judgment and high ideals, active in public affairs—but, first of all, sound in their home life, and the father and mother of healthy children whom they bring up well—just so far, and no farther, we may count our civilization a success. We must have—I believe we have already—a genuine and permanent moral awakening, without which no wisdom of legislation or administration really means anything; and, on the other hand, we must try to secure the social and economic legislation without which any improvement due to purely moral agitation is necessarily evanescent. Let me again illustrate by a reference to the Grand Army. You could not have won simply as a disorderly and disorganized mob. You needed generals; you needed careful administration of the most advanced type; and a good commissary—the cracker line. You well remember that success was necessary in many different lines in order to bring about general success.”23
Roosevelt’s attack on federalism, couched in populism, was both consistent and constant. For example, earlier, on August 29, 1910, speaking before the Colorado legislature, Roosevelt stated: “Unfortunately, the course of governmental construction by the courts, as also the course of governmental action by legislator and executive, has not kept pace in this nation during the last forty years with the extraordinarily complex industrial development. We have changed from what was predominately an agricultural people, where all were on planes of livelihood not far apart, and where business was simple, into a complex industrial community with a great development of corporations, and with conditions such that by steam and electricity the business of the nation has become completely nationalized. . . . Remember that I believe in state’s rights wherever state’s rights mean the people’s rights. On the other hand, I believe in national rights wherever national rights mean the people’s rights; and, above all, I believe in every part of our complicated social fabric there must be either national or state control, and that it is ruinous to permit governmental action . . . which prevents the exercise of such control. I am for a fact, not a formula; I am for the rights of the people first and foremost, and for the ‘rights’ of the nation or state, in any given series of cases, just in proportion as insistence upon them helps in securing popular rights.”24
In 1912, after failing to win the Republican Party’s nomination for president, Roosevelt formed a third party—the Progressive Party. Its platform stated, in part: “The Progressive Party, believing that a free people should have the power from time to time to amend their fundamental law so as to adapt it progressively to the changing needs of the people, pledges itself to provide a more easy and expeditious method of amending the Federal Constitution.” “Up to the limit of the Constitution, and later by amendment of the Constitution, if found necessary, we advocate bringing under effective national jurisdiction those problems which have expanded beyond reach of the individual states.” Moreover, it included a laundry list of proposed federal programs and policies covering health care, a minimum wage, retirement, education, etc.25
In the three-way presidential contest, Democrat Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) was victorious, becoming the nation’s twenty-eighth president, having won a plurality of the vote and a majority of the Electoral College vote. However, before ascending to the Oval Office, Wilson was one of the nation’s leading intellectual proponents of progressivism and its counterrevolution. In his writings and speeches, Wilson repeatedly took aim at the Declaration of Independence’s stated principles, but with even greater force and contempt than Roosevelt.
In 1907, in a Fourth of July address about the Declaration, Wilson, then president of Princeton University, wrote:
It is common to think of the Declaration of Independence as a highly speculative document; but no one can think it so who has read it. It is a strong, rhetorical statement of grievances against the English government. It does indeed open with the assertion that all men are equal and that they have certain inalienable rights, among them the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It asserts that governments were instituted to secure these rights, and can derive their just powers only from the consent of the governed; and it solemnly declares that “whenever any government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundations in such principles, and organizing its powers in such forms, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.” But this would not afford a general theory of government to formulate policies upon. No doubt we are meant to have liberty, but each generation must form its own conception of what liberty is. No doubt we shall always wish to be given leave to pursue happiness as we will, but we are not yet sure where or by what method we shall find it. That we are free to adjust government to these ends we know. But Mr. Jefferson and his colleagues in the Continental Congress prescribed the law of adjustment for no generation but their own. They left us to say whether we thought the government they had set up was founded on “such principles,” its powers organized in “such forms” as seemed to us most likely to effect our safety and happiness. They did not attempt to dictate the aims and objects of any generation but their own. . . .26
Wilson added:
So far as the Declaration of Independence was a theoretical document, that is its theory. Do we still hold it? Does the doctrine of the Declaration of Independence still live in our principles of action, in the things we do, in the purposes we applaud, in the measures we approve? It is not a question of piety. We are not bound to adhere to the doctrines held by the signers of the Declaration of Independence; we are as free as they were to make and unmake governments. We are not here to worship men or a document. But neither are we here to indulge in a mere rhetorical and uncritical eulogy. Every Fourth of July should be a time for examining our standards, our purposes, for determining afresh what principles, what forms of power we think most likely to effect our safety and happiness. That and that alone is the obligation the Declaration lays upon us. It is no fetish; its words lay no compulsion upon the thought of any free man; but it was drawn by men who thought, and it obliges those who receive its benefits to think likewise. . . .27
In May 1908, Wilson authored a paper titled “Constitutional Government in the United States.” He flatly denounced the principles both explicit and inherit in America’s founding. He declared: “No doubt a great deal of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual, and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle.”28
On May 12, 1911, Wilson spoke to the Jefferson Club of Los Angeles, where he again voiced his contempt for the essence of America’s founding document: “I am constantly reminding audiences . . . that the rhetorical introduction of the Declaration of Independence is the least part of it. That was the theoretical expression of the views of which the rest of the document was meant to give teeth and substance to. The Declaration . . . is a long enumeration of the issues of the year 1776, of exactly the things that were then supposed to be radical matters of discontent among the people living in America—the things which they meant to remedy in the spirit of the introductory paragraphs, but which the introductory paragraphs themselves did not contain. . . .”29
On July 4, 1914, when actually speaking at Independence Hall, then-president Wilson declared:
Have you ever read the Declaration of Independence or attended with close comprehension to the real character of it when you have heard it read? If you have, you will know that it is not a Fourth of July oration. The Declaration of Independence was a document preliminary to war. It was a vital piece of practical business, not a piece of rhetoric; and if you will pass beyond those preliminary passages which we are accustomed to quote about the rights of men and read into the heart of the document you will see that it is very express and detailed, that it consists of a series of definite specifications concerning actual public business of the day. Not the business of our day, for the matter with which it deals is past, but the business of that first revolution by which the Nation was set up, the business of 1776. Its general statements, its general declarations cannot mean anything to us unless we append to it a similar specific body of particulars as to what we consider the essential business of our own day. . . .
Liberty does not consist, my fellow-citizens, in mere general declarations of the rights of man. It consists in the translation of those declarations into definite action. Therefore, standing here where the declaration was adopted, reading its businesslike sentences, we ought to ask ourselves what there is in it for us. There is nothing in it for us unless we can translate it into the terms of our own conditions and of our own lives. We must reduce it to what the lawyers call a bill of particulars. It contains a bill of particulars, but the bill of particulars of 1776. If we would keep it alive, we must fill it with a bill of particulars of the year 1914. . . .
In one sense the Declaration of Independence has lost its significance. It has lost its significance as a declaration of national independence. Nobody outside of America believed when it was uttered that we could make good our independence; now nobody anywhere would dare to doubt that we are independent and can maintain our independence. As a declaration of independence, therefore, it is a mere historic document. Our independence is a fact so stupendous that it can be measured only by the size and energy and variety and wealth and power of one of the greatest nations in the world. But it is one thing to be independent and it is another thing to know what to do with your independence.30
As if directly admonishing the late Wilson, on July 5, 1926, the thirtieth president, Calvin Coolidge, delivered his own speech in Philadelphia about the Declaration’s meaning. He stated:
The American Revolution represented the informed and mature convictions of a great mass of independent, liberty loving, God-fearing people who knew their rights, and possessed the courage to dare to maintain them. . . .
The Continental Congress was not only composed of great men, but it represented a great people. While its Members did not fail to exercise a remarkable leadership, they were equally observant of their representative capacity. They were industrious in encouraging their constituents to instruct them to support independence. But until such instructions were given they were inclined to withhold action. . . .
A spring will cease to flow if its source be dried up; a tree will wither if its roots be destroyed. In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man—these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in the religious convictions. They belong to the unseen world. Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish. We cannot continue to enjoy the result if we neglect and abandon the cause.
We are too prone to overlook another conclusion. Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments. This is both historically and logically true. Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create institutions through which they can be the better observed, but their source by their very nature is in the people. The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government. It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates the character of a nation.
About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning cannot be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers. . . .31
The danger of rejecting America’s founding principles is illustrated best in this instance by Wilson himself. As is well documented, Wilson was an open racist who, among other things, as president resegregated the federal bureaucracy.32
Therefore, while Lincoln embraced the Declaration of Independence before and during the Civil War to justify both prosecuting the war and abolishing slavery, Wilson denounced the same principles and language in the Declaration as nonsense or dismissed them as relevant only to the American Revolution, insisting that to treat them as the Founders intended served as an impediment to communal progress.
In 1913, Wilson wrote The New Freedom, in which he proclaimed, “We are in the presence of a new organization of society. Our life has broken away from the past. The life of America is not the life that it was twenty years ago; it is not the life that it was ten years ago. We have changed our economic conditions, absolutely, from top to bottom; and, with our economic society, the organization of our life. The old political formulas do not fit the present problems; they read now like documents taken from a forgotten age. The older cries sound as if they belonged to a past age which men have almost forgotten. . . .”33 “We used to think in the old-fashioned days when life was very simple that all that government had to do was to put on a policeman’s uniform, and say, ‘Now don’t anybody hurt anybody else.’ We used to say that the idea 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. That was the idea that obtained in Jefferson’s time. But we are coming now to realize that life is so complicated that we are not dealing with the old conditions, and that the law has to step in and create new conditions under which we may live, the conditions which will make it tolerable for us to live.”34
America is more complex and thus the federal government should become more complex? Life is more complicated, compelling a more complicated federal government? And the more complex and complicated life and society, the greater justification for centralized governmental decision making? This is a common theme among progressive intellectuals, past and present. However, is this approach not counterintuitive given the long and cruel history of authoritarianism? Wilson added: “I am, therefore, forced to be a progressive, if for no other reason, because we have not kept up with our changes of conditions, either in the economic field or in the political field. We have not kept up as well as other nations have. We have not kept our practices adjusted to the facts of the case, and until we do, and unless we do, the facts of the case will always have the better argument; because if you do not adjust your laws to the facts, so much the worse for the law, not for the facts, because law trails along after the facts. Only that law is unsafe which runs ahead of the facts and beckons to it and make it follow the will-o’-the-wisps of imaginative projects.”35
Again, what are the limits of the progressive’s government? Wilson saw few. “I believe the time has come when the governments of this country, both state and national, have to set the stage, and set it very minutely and carefully, for the doing of justice to men in every relationship of life. It has been free and easy with us so far; it has been go as you please; it has been every man look out for himself; and we have continued to assume, up to this year when every man is dealing, not with another man, in most cases, but with a body of men whom he has not seen, that the relationships of property are the same that they always were. We have great tasks before us, and we must enter on them as befits men charged with the responsibility of shaping a new era.”36
The goal is nothing less than the perfectibility of man, above all his economic condition (meaning, equitable distribution of wealth), through unbounded activist government. “Human freedom consists in perfect adjustments of human interests and human activities and human energies. Now, the adjustments necessary between individuals, between individuals and the complex institutions amidst which they live, and between those institutions and the government, are infinitely more intricate today than ever before. No doubt this is a tiresome and roundabout way of saying the same thing, yet perhaps it is worthwhile to get somewhat clearly in our mind what makes all the trouble today. Life has become complex; there are many more elements, more parts, to it than ever before. And, therefore, it is harder to keep everything adjusted,—and harder to find out where the trouble lies when the machine gets out of order.”37
Wilson’s distrust of republican government, and his belief in rule by a trained centralized bureaucracy, independent from the genuine consent of the governed and constitutional constraints, should come as no surprise. In 1886, while teaching at Bryn Mawr College, Wilson penned an essay titled “Study of Public Administration.” He declared that debates about “who shall make the law, and what shall that law be” was simply “the philosophy of any time is, as [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel says, ‘nothing but the spirit of that time expressed in abstract thought’; and political philosophy, like philosophy of every other kind, had only held up the mirror to contemporary affairs. . . . There was little or no trouble about administration—at least little that was heeded by administrators.”38 Again, for Wilson and the progressives, the American founding was simply a historical event distinct to its own moment and condition. Progress requires that America not get stuck in its own history. “In brief, if difficulties of governmental action are to be seen gathering in other centuries, they are to be seen culminating in our own. This is the reason why administrative tasks have nowadays to be so studiously and systematically adjusted to carefully tested standards of policy, the reason why we are having now what we never had before, a science of administration. The weightier debates of constitutional principle are even yet by no means concluded; but they are no longer of more immediate practical moment than questions of administration. It is getting to be harder to run a constitution than to frame one.”39
Where are we to find this science of administration? It is to be imported from Europe. “It has found its doctors in Europe. It is not of our making; it is a foreign science, speaking very little of the language of English or American principle. It employs only foreign tongues; it utters none but what are to our minds alien ideas. Its aims, its examples, its conditions, are almost exclusively grounded in the histories of foreign races, in the precedents of foreign systems, in the lessons of foreign revolutions. It has been developed by French and German professors, and is consequently in all parts adapted to the needs of a compact state, and made to fit highly centralized forms of government. . . . If we employ it, we must Americanize it, and that not formally, in language merely, but radically, in thought, principle, and aim as well. . . .”40
And the people cannot be bothered with administration, for not only are they too busy, but they are simply unfit for and incapable of such a momentous task. It must be left to a relative handful of sensible and learned professionals. “In government, as in virtue, the hardest of hard things is to make progress. Formerly the reason for this was that the single person who was sovereign was generally selfish, ignorant, timid, or a fool—albeit there was now and again one who was wise. Nowadays the reason is that the many, the people, who are sovereign have no single ear which one can approach, and are selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish with the selfishnesses, the ignorances, the stubbornesses, the timidities, or the follies of several thousand persons—albeit there are hundreds who are wise.”41 “The bulk of mankind is rigidly unphilosophical, and nowadays the bulk of mankind votes.”42
Moreover, the bureaucracy will be of the noblest and most virtuous sort, with no personal, political, or ideological agenda, motivated solely and completely by its technical know-how in and public-spiritedness for the general good and welfare. “It will be necessary to organize democracy by sending up to the competitive examinations for civil service men definitely prepared for standing liberal tests as to technical knowledge. A technically schooled civil service will presently have become indispensable. I know that a corps of civil servants prepared by a special schooling and drilled, after appointment, into a perfected organization, with appropriate hierarchy and characteristic discipline, seems to a great many very thoughtful persons to contain elements which might combine to make an offensive official class. . . . But to fear the creation of a domineering illiberal officialism as a result of the studies I am here proposing is to miss altogether the principle upon which I wish most to insist. That principle is, that administration in the United States must be at all points sensitive to public opinion. . . .” At the same time, however, Wilson insisted that “[s]teady, hearty allegiance to the policy of government they serve will constitute good behavior. That policy will have no taint of officialdom about it. . . . Bureaucracy can exist only where the whole service of the state is removed from the common political life of the people, its chiefs as well as its rank and file. Its motives, its objects, its policy, its standards, must be bureaucratic. . . .”43
Unsurprisingly, but significantly, Wilson insisted that the centralized administrative state must, by logic and necessity, replace or thoroughly alter the constitutional structure—particularly the Framers’ incorporation of Charles de Montesquieu’s separation-of-powers doctrine, essential to curtailing the likelihood of concentrated tyranny, which must be abandoned in principle. Otherwise there can be no real historical progress. “The study of administration, philosophically viewed, is closely connected with the study of the proper distribution of constitutional authority. . . . If administrative study can discover the best principles upon which to base such distribution, it will have done constitutional study an invaluable service. Montesquieu did not, I am convinced, say the last word on this head.”44 Hence the administrative state is to effectively replace the constitutional state, the latter being old and immovable.
This brings us to John Dewey (1859–1952), among the foremost progressive thinkers. Dewey, like Croly and Wilson, among others, claimed that progressivism was, in essence, a science-based pragmatism. Like most progressives, he also argued that there is no timeless, absolute truth since all things are subject to change and situation. Therefore, he also unremittingly condemned John Locke and the Declaration of Independence, and the idea of permanent truths, a transcendent moral order, and individual natural rights. In his 1935 book, Liberalism and Social Action, Dewey wrote:
The outstanding points of Locke’s version of liberalism are that governments are instituted to protect the rights that belong to individuals prior to political organization and social relations. The rights are those summed up a century later in the American Declaration of Independence: the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. . . . The whole temper of this philosophy is individualistic in the sense in which individualism is opposed to organized social action. It held to the primacy of the individual over the state not only in time but in moral authority. It defined the individual in terms of liberties of thought and action already possessed by him in some mysterious ready-made fashion, and which it was the sole business of the state to safeguard. Reason was also made an inherent endowment of the individual, expressed in men’s moral relations to one another, but not sustained and developed because of these relations. It followed that the great enemy of individual liberty was thought to be government because of its tendency to encroach upon the innate liberties of individuals. Later liberalism inherited this conception of a natural antagonism between the individual and organized society. There still lingers in the minds of some the notion that there are two different “spheres” of action and of rightful claims; that of political society and that of the individual, and that in the interest of the latter the former must be as contracted as possible. Not till the second half of the nineteenth century did the idea arise that government might and should be an instrument for securing and extending the liberties of individuals. . . .45
Further dismissing the purpose of the founding, with its emphasis on the individual, Dewey continued: “The ideas of Locke embodied in the Declaration of Independence were congenial to our pioneer conditions that gave individuals the opportunity to carve out their own careers. Political action was lightly thought of by those who lived in frontier conditions. A political career was very largely annexed as an adjunct to the action of individuals in carving their own careers.”46
Moreover, Dewey was a stern critic of capitalism and private property rights, which he condemned as a relic of early American principles reinforced in current times by the political party structure. On March 18, 1931, in The New Republic, Dewey wrote: “I do not mean that the whole alliance of the [political] parties with organized business is consciously sinister and corrupt, though it is easily demonstrable that this is somewhat true. I mean rather that both old parties represent that stage of American life when the American people as a whole felt that society was to advance by means of industrial inventions and their application; by the development of manufacturing, of railways and commerce. It was that stage of American life when all but a few took for granted the natural control of industry and trade by the profit motive and the necessity of accumulating money capital. This idea may once have played a part in the development of the country. It has now ceased to be anything but an obstruction. . . .”47
In his 1930 book, Individualism Old and New, Dewey acknowledged Marx’s influence on him and progressivism: “[T]he issue which [Marx] raised—the relation of the economic structure to political operations—is one that actively persists. Indeed, it forms the only basis of present political questions. An intelligent and experienced observer of affairs at Washington has said that all political questions which he has heard discussed in Washington come back ultimately to problems connected with the distribution of income. Wealth, property and processes of manufacturing and distribution—down to retail trade through the chain system—can hardly be socialized in outward effect without political repercussion. It constitutes an ultimate issue which must be faced by new and existing political parties. There is still enough vitality in the older individualism to offer a very serious handicap to any party or program which calls itself by the name of Socialism. . . .”48 “We are in for some kind of socialism, call it by whatever name we please, and no matter what it will be called when it is realized. Economic determinism is now a fact, not a theory. But there is a difference and a choice between a blind, chaotic and unplanned determinism, issuing from business conducted for pecuniary profit, and the determination of a socially planned and ordered development. It is the difference and the choice between a socialism that is public and one that is capitalistic.”49
Dewey criticized Marx’s call for the violent overthrow of the status quo. However, Dewey insisted that the present attachment to the principles and values of the American founding must be repudiated and replaced with the new scientific approach, which he argued addresses the modern social conditions of the collective. “The scientific attitude is experimental as well as intrinsically communicative. If it were generally applied, it would liberate us from the heavy burden imposed by dogmas and external standards. Experimental method is something other than the use of blow-pipes, retorts and reagents. It is the foe of every belief that permits habit and wont to dominate invention and discovery, and ready-made system to override verifiable fact. Constant revision is the work of experimental inquiry. By revision of knowledge and ideas, power to effect transformation is given us. This attitude, once incarnated in the individual mind, would find an operative outlet. If dogmas and institutions tremble when a new idea appears, this shiver is nothing to what would happen if the idea were armed with the means for the continuous discovery of new truth and the criticism of old belief. To ‘acquiesce’ in science is dangerous only for those who would maintain affairs in the existing social order unchanged because of lazy habit or self-interest. For the scientific attitude demands faithfulness to whatever is discovered and steadfastness in adhering to new truth.”50
Dewey’s appeal to and faith in the social sciences is akin to a religious fundamentalism. “The destructive effect of science upon beliefs long cherished and values once prized is, and quite naturally so, a great cause of dread of science and its application in life. The law of inertia holds of the imagination and its loyalties as truly as of physical things. I do not suppose that it is possible to turn suddenly from these negative effects to possible positive and constructive ones. But as long as we refuse to make an effort to change the direction which imagination looks at the world, as long as we remain unwilling to reexamine old standards and values, science will continue to wear its negative aspect. Take science . . . for what it is, and we shall begin to envisage it as a potential creator of new values and ends. We shall have an intimation, on a wide and generous scale, of the release, the increased initiative, independence and inventiveness, which science now brings in its own specialized fields to the individual scientist. It will be seen as a means of originality and individual variation. . . .”51
Acceptance of the social sciences and experimentation, without the inhibitions of old beliefs, is intended to achieve a new individuality with real freedom, shaped by present events and surroundings. “Individuality is at first spontaneous and unshaped; it is a potentiality, a capacity of development. Even so, it is a unique manner of acting in and with a world of objects and persons. It is not something complete in itself. . . . Since individuality is a distinctive way of feeling the impacts of the world and of showing a preferential bias in response to these impacts, it develops into shape and form only through interaction with actual conditions; it is no more complete in itself than is a painter’s tube of paint without relation to a canvas. . . . In its determination, the potential individuality of the artist takes on visible and enduring forms. The imposition of individuality as something made in advance always gives evidence of a mannerism, not a manner; something formed in the very process of creation of other things. The future is always unpredictable. Ideals, including that of a new and effective individuality, must themselves be framed out of the possibilities of existing conditions, even if these be the conditions that constitute a corporate and industrial age. The ideals take shape and gain a content as they operate in remaking conditions. We may, in order to have continuity of direction, plan a program of action in anticipation of occasions as they emerge. But a program of ends and ideals if kept apart from sensitive and flexible method becomes an encumbrance. For its hard and rigid character assumes a fixed world and a static individual; and neither of these things exists. It implies that we can prophesy the future—an attempt which terminates, as someone has said, in prophesying the past or in its reduplication.”52
In 1934, Dewey delivered a speech, “The Future of Liberalism,” in which he declared: “The commitment of liberalism to experimental procedure carries with it the idea of continuous reconstruction of the ideas of individuality and of liberty, in their intimate connection with changes in social relations. It is enough to refer to the changes in productivity and distribution since the time when the earlier liberalism was formulated, and the effect of these transformations, due to science and technology, upon the terms on which men associate together. An experimental method is the recognition of this temporal change in ideas and policies so that the latter may coordinate with the facts, instead of being opposed to them. Any other view maintains a rigid conceptualism, and implies that facts should conform to concepts that are framed independently of temporal or historical change.”53
The work of the social scientists—in and out of government—is inexhaustible. Social experimentation is continuous and, if need be, sweeping.
Experimental method is not just messing around nor doing a little of this and a little of that in the hope that things will improve. Just as in the physical sciences, it implies a coherent body of ideas, a theory, that gives direction to effort. What is implied, in contrast to every form of absolutism is that the ideas and theory be taken as methods of action tested and continuously revised by the consequences they produce in actual social conditions. Since they are operational in nature, they modify conditions, while the first requirement, that of basing policies upon realistic study of actual conditions, brings about their continuous reconstruction. It follows finally that there is no opposition in principle between liberalism as social philosophy and radicalism in action, if by radicalism is signified the adoption of policies that bring about drastic, instead of piecemeal, social change. It is all a question of what kind of procedures an intelligent study of changing conditions discloses. These changes have been so tremendous in the last century, yes, in the last forty years, that it looks to me as if radical methods were now necessary. But all that the argument here requires is recognition of the fact that there is nothing in the nature of liberalism that makes it a milk-water doctrine, committed to compromise and minor “reforms.” It is worth noting that the earlier liberals were regarded in their day as subversive radicals.54
Indeed, Dewey insisted that the progressive ideology is more than a governing ideology. It must reverberate throughout all corners of society. “[T]he full freedom of the human spirit and of individuality can be achieved only as there is effective opportunity to share in the cultural resources of civilization. No economic state of affairs is merely economic. It has a profound effect upon the presence or absence of cultural freedom. Any liberalism that does not make full cultural freedom supreme and that does not see the relation between it and genuine industrial freedom as a way of life is a degenerate and delusive liberalism.”55
In fact, Dewey was an early advocate of reconstructing education to comport with his notions of progressivism and integrate his ideology into the public school system. He was a renowned education “innovator” whose influence throughout academia remains considerable to this day. Dewey argued against merely teaching basic academic coursework, which both teacher and student are to transcend. Instead, education is to emphasize the general consciousness for the social community and collective, focusing on the student’s (whom he called “the immature”) psychological development in this regard—cognition not of individual thought but groupthink. Of course, the student is discouraged from absorbing the truths, traditions, and customs of the past and rather is encouraged to be pragmatic, flexible, and experimental. In his 1916 book, Democracy and Education, Dewey argued:
It remains only to point out . . . that the reconstruction of experience may be social as well as personal. For purposes of simplification we have spoken . . . as if the education of the immature which fills them with the spirit of the social group to which they belong, were a sort of catching up of the child with the aptitudes and resources of the adult group. In static societies, societies which make the maintenance of established custom their measure of value, this conception applies in the main. But not in progressive communities. They endeavor to shape the experiences of the young so that instead of reproducing current habits, better habits shall be formed, and thus the future adult society be an improvement on their own. Men have long had some intimation of the extent to which education may be consciously used to eliminate obvious social evils through starting the young on paths which shall not produce these ills, and some idea of the extent in which education may be made an instrument of realizing the better hopes of men. But we are doubtless far from realizing the potential efficacy of education as a constructive agency of improving society, from realizing that it represents not only a development of children and youth but also of the future society of which they will be the constituents.56
Dewey condemned the existing approach to education for lacking socialization and the scientific inquiry he demanded:
The pupil learns symbols without the key to their meaning. He acquires a technical body of information without ability to trace its connections with the objects and operations with which he is familiar—often he acquires simply a peculiar vocabulary. There is a strong temptation to assume that presenting subject matter in its perfected form provides a royal road to learning. What more natural than to suppose that the immature can be saved time and energy, and be protected from needless error by commencing where competent inquirers have left off? The outcome is written large in the history of education. Pupils begin their study of science with texts in which the subject is organized into topics according to the order of the specialist. Technical concepts, with their definitions, are introduced at the outset. Laws are introduced at a very early stage, with at best a few indications of the way in which they were arrived at. The pupils learn a “science” instead of learning the scientific way of treating familiar material of ordinary experience. The method of the advanced student dominates college teaching; the approach of the college is transferred into the high school, and so down the line, with such omissions as may make the subject easier. . . .57
What, then, should students be taught? “The problem of an education use of science is then to create an intelligence pregnant with belief in the possibility of the direction of human affairs by itself. The method of science engrained through education in habit means emancipation from rule of thumb and from the routine generated by rule of thumb procedure. . . . Under the influence of conditions created by the non-existence of experimental science, experience was opposed in all the ruling philosophies of the past to reason and the truly rational. Empirical knowledge meant the knowledge accumulated by a multitude of past instances without intelligent insight into the principles of any of them. . . . Science is experience becoming rational. The effect of science is thus to change men’s idea of the nature and inherent possibilities of experience. . . . Science carries on its working over of prior subject matter on a large scale. It aims to free an experience from all which is purely personal and strictly immediate; it aims to detach whatever it has in common with the subject matter of other experiences, and which, being common, may be saved for further use. It is, thus, an indispensable factor in social progress. In any experience just as it occurs there is much which, while it may be of precious import to the individual implicated in the experience, is peculiar and unreduplicable. From the standpoint of science, this material is accidental, while the features which are widely shared are essential. . . . In emancipating an idea from the particular context in which it originated and giving it a wider reference the results of the experience of any individual are put at the disposal of all men. Thus ultimately and philosophically, science is the organ of general social progress. . . .”58
Dewey’s advocacy of education as a means to socialize a nation’s youth toward a collectivist social and economic mentality was in keeping with his glowing critique of the Soviet Union’s approach to education a few years earlier. After visiting the Soviet Union, on December 5, 1928, Dewey wrote in The New Republic that “in the ‘transitional’ state of Russia chief significance attaches to the mental and moral (pace the Marxians) change that is taking place; that while in the end this transformation is supposed to be a means to economic and political change, for the present it is the other way around. This consideration is equivalent to saying that the import of all institutions is educational in the broad sense—that of their effects upon disposition and attitude. Their function is to create habits so that persons will act cooperatively and collectively as readily as now in capitalistic countries they act ‘individualistically.’ The same consideration defines the importance and the purpose of the narrower education agencies, the schools. They represent a direct and concentrated effort to obtain the effect which other institutions develop in a diffused and roundabout manner. The schools are, in current phase, the ‘ideological arm of the Revolution.’ In consequence, the activities of the schools dovetail in the most extraordinary way, both in administrative organization and in aim and spirit, into all other social agencies and interests.”59 Dewey continued: “During the transitional regime, the school cannot count upon the larger education to create in any single and whole-hearted way the required collective and cooperative mentality. The traditional customs and institutions of the peasant, his small tracts, his three-system farming, the influence of home and Church, all work automatically to create in him an individualistic ideology. In spite of the greater inclination of the city worker towards collectivism, even his social environment works adversely in many respects. Hence the great task of the school is to counteract and transform those domestic and neighborhood tendencies that are still so strong, even in a nominally collectivist regime.”60
Walter Weyl (1873–1919) was another dominant progressive voice and strong nationalist. He opened his 1912 book, The New Democracy, with a withering attack on early-twentieth-century America, followed by a cynical manipulation of the American founding. “America today is in a somber, soul-questioning mood. We are in a period of clamor, of bewilderment, of an almost tremulous unrest. We are hastily revising all our social conceptions. We are hastily testing all our political ideals. We are profoundly disenchanted with the fruits of a century of dependence. . . . It is in this moment of misgiving, when men are beginning to doubt the all-efficiency of our old-time democracy, that a new democracy is born. It is a new spirit, critical, concrete, insurgent. A clear-eyed discontent is abroad in the land. . . .”61
Weyl continued: “In reality the democracy of 1776 was by no means perfect. The Declaration of Independence was not an organic law, but an appeal—a very special and adroit appeal—to the ‘natural right’ of revolution. It was a beautiful ideal, as wonderfully poised in mid-air as is today the golden rule among the thrice-armed nations of Europe. The average American was not a true believer in its doctrines. The ‘better classes,’ tainted with an interested loyalty to King George, could not abide rebels, petitioners, and ‘agitators,’ and among the signers were many conservative men who feared ‘too much democracy,’ although they saw the advantage of issuing a ‘platform,’ and of hanging together to avoid ‘hanging separately.’ ”62 “America in 1776 was not a democracy. It was not even a democracy on paper. It was at best a shadow-democracy. Nor was the substance of democracy conferred by the federal Constitution. If our modern ideal of democracy does not lead back to the noble eloquence of the Declaration, still less does it revert to the federal Constitution, as it issued, in 1787, fresh from the Philadelphia Convention. Our newer democracy demands, not that the people forever conform to a rigid, hard-charging Constitution, but that the Constitution change to conform to the people. The Constitution is the political wisdom of dead America.”63
In fact, wrote Weyl: “So intimately has this Constitution been bound up with our dearest national ideals and with our very sense of national unity, so many have been the gentle traditions which have clustered about this venerable document, that one hesitates to apply to it the ordinary canons of political criticism. For over a century we have piously exclaimed that our Constitution is the last and noblest expression of democracy. But, in truth, the Constitution is not democratic. It was, in intention, and is, in essence, undemocratic. It was conceived in violent distrust of the common people. . . .”64 “The greatest merit—and the greatest defect—of the Constitution is that it has survived. It might be well if the American people would recast their Constitution every generation. We would assuredly do better in 1911 with a twentieth century organic law than with an almost unchangeable constitution, which antedated the railroad, the steamboat, and the French Revolution, and was contemporary with George the Third, Marie Antoinette, and the flintlock muskets. In the early days, however, when the States were jealous, exigent, and eternally over vigilant, any bond of union, if only strong enough, was good. . . .”65
Again and again, the goal of the progressives is to unmoor the individual and society from America’s heritage with populist tirades, prodding, and indoctrination, the purpose of which is to build popular support for a muscular centralized government ruled by a self-aggrandizing intellectual elite through an extraconstitutional and autocratic administrative Leviathan. Moreover, the individual is to be denuded of his personal traits, “primitive nature,” and “old beliefs,” since his true liberty, satisfaction, and realization are said to be tied to the universality of the state. The government, through “science” and administration—unencumbered by ancient and archaic eternal truths—can alter society in ways that supposedly modernize and improve it. Furthermore, the individual’s focus on self rather than community, and his old habits, beliefs, and traditions, must be altered through socializing education and training, thereby making him the kind of person and citizen whose behavior better conforms to the egalitarian purposes and general welfare of the overall society.
Of course, this is the death of individualism and republicanism. Administrative-state tyranny is precisely the kind of tyranny Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), an iconic French thinker and philosopher, feared for America when he wrote his luminous two-volume book, Democracy in America, in 1835 and 1840.66
As in the past, I turn to his prescient observations about democracy and America during his travels in this country. Tocqueville wrote, in part: “Nothing is more striking to a European traveler in the United States than the absence of what we term the government, of the administration. Written laws exist in America, and one sees the daily execution of them; but although everything moves regularly, the mover can nowhere be discovered. The hand that directs the social machine is invisible. Nevertheless, as all persons must have recourse to certain grammatical forms, which are the foundation of human language, in order to express their thoughts; so all communities are obliged to secure their existence by submitting to a certain amount of authority, without which they fall into anarchy. . . .”67 “The administrative power in the United States presents nothing either centralized or hierarchical in its constitution; this accounts for its passing unperceived. The power exists, but its representative is nowhere seen.”68 “In the American republics the central government has never as yet busied itself except with a small number of objects, sufficiently prominent to attract its attention. The secondary affairs of society have never been regulated by its authority; and nothing has hitherto betrayed its desire of even interfering in them. The majority has become more and more absolute, but has not increased the prerogatives of the central government; those great prerogatives have been confined to a certain sphere; and although the despotism of the majority may be galling upon one point, it cannot be said to extend to all.”69
As if sensing the onset of the American Progressive Era, Tocqueville amplified further: “This point deserves attention; if a democratic republic, similar to that of the United States, were ever founded in a country where the power of one man had previously established a centralized administration and had sunk it deep into the habits and the laws of the people, I do not hesitate to assert that in such a republic a more insufferable despotism would prevail than in any of the absolute monarchies of Europe; or, indeed, than any that could be found on this side of Asia.”70 The despotism of which Tocqueville spoke was of politically misapplied or imposed equality of social and economic conditions (in this he was not rejecting human equality and equal justice, which he vigorously advocated, but the sort of administrative social engineering of the individual and his environment that seeks conformity over individuality). Tocqueville explained: “[T]he vices which despotism produces are precisely those which equality fosters. These two things perniciously complete and assist each other. . . .”71 “The Americans have combated, by free institutions the tendency of equality to keep men asunder, and they have subdued it. . . . The general affairs of a country engage the attention only of leading politicians, who assemble from time to time in the same places; and as they often lose sight of each other afterwards, no lasting ties are established between them. But if the object be to have the local affairs of a district conducted by the men who reside there, the same persons are always in contact, and they are, in a manner, forced to be acquainted and to adapt themselves to one another.” “Thus far more may be done by entrusting to the citizens the administration of minor affairs than by surrendering them in the public welfare and convincing them that they constantly stand in need of one another in order to provide for it. . . . Local freedom, then, which leads a great number of citizens to value the affection of their neighbors and of their kindred, perpetually brings men together and forces them to help one another in spite of the propensities that sever them.”72
And then Tocqueville warned that “the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world; our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. . . . I have no fear that [the people] will meet tyrants in their rulers, but rather with their guardians.”73 “The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.”74
By stripping the individual of his uniqueness and spirit, the democracy transitions into an omnipresent state. “Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances; what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things; it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.”75
As if describing the progressive’s ideological plan, Tocqueville added: “After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”76 Moreover, Tocqueville understood how this form of oppression would be sold to the American people. “I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people.”77
What is left, then, is administrative-state tyranny. “Subjection in minor affairs breaks out every day and is felt by the whole community indiscriminately. It does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to surrender the exercise of their own will. Thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated; whereas that obedience which is exacted on a few important but rare occasions only exhibits servitude at certain intervals and throws the burden of it upon a small number of men. It is in vain to summon a people who have been rendered so dependent on the central power to choose from time to time the representatives of that power; this rare and brief exercise of their free choice, however important it may be, will not prevent them from gradually losing the faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves, and thus gradually falling below the level of humanity.”78
Thus, while claiming to extend true democracy, the people are made subservient to their guardians and the state. “The democratic nations that have introduced freedom into their political constitution at the very time when they were augmenting the despotism of their administrative constitution have been led into strange paradoxes. To manage those minor affairs in which good sense is all that is wanted, the people are held to be unequal to the task; but when the government of the country is at stake, the people are invested with immense powers; they are alternately made the playthings of their ruler, and his masters, more than kings and less than men. . . . It is indeed difficult to conceive how men who have entirely given up the habit of self-government should succeed in making a proper choice of those by whom they are to be governed; and no one will ever believe that a liberal, wise, and energetic government can spring from the suffrages of a subservient people.”79