“Progressives” = Fascist Nannies
Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 2:33 pm by Neal
We told you it was going to be a Nanny State kind of day around here.
There’s more.
Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, Jonah Goldberg has a great piece on the history of the “Progressive movement” entitled You want a more ‘progressive’ America? Careful what you wish for. You really need to read this. Goldberg, after all, knows what he’s talking about, and this column pulls heavily from the research and facts in his bestselling blockbuster book, Liberal Fascism.
You should really read that book, by the way.
From the article,
I’m thinking of an American president who demonized ethnic groups as enemies of the state, censored the press, imprisoned dissidents, bullied political opponents, spewed propaganda, often expressed contempt for the Constitution, approved warrantless searches and eavesdropping, and pursued his policies with a blind, religious certainty. …
President Wilson is mostly remembered today as the first modern liberal president, the first (and only) POTUS with a PhD, and the only political scientist to occupy the Oval Office. He was the champion of “self determination” and the author of the idealistic but doomed “Fourteen Points” – his vision of peace for Europe and his hope for a League of Nations. But the nature of his presidency has largely been forgotten.
That’s a shame, because Wilson’s two terms in office provide the clearest historical window into the soul of progressivism. Wilson’s racism, his ideological rigidity, and his antipathy toward the Constitution were all products of the progressive worldview. And since “progressivism” is suddenly in vogue – today’s leading Democrats proudly wear the label – it’s worth actually reviewing what progressivism was and what actually happened under the last full-throated progressive president. …
“Government,” Wilson wrote approvingly in his magnum opus, “The State,” “does now whatever experience permits or the times demand.” “No doubt,” he wrote elsewhere, taking dead aim at the Declaration of Independence, “a lot 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.”
In his 1890 essay, “Leaders of Men,” Wilson explained that a “true leader” uses the masses like “tools.” He must inflame their passions with little heed for the facts. “Men are as clay in the hands of the consummate leader.”
Wilson once told a black delegation, that “segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.” But his racism wasn’t just a product of his Southern roots; it was often of a piece with the reigning progressive obsession with eugenics, the pseudoscience that strove to perfect society through better breeding.
Again, Wilson was merely one voice in the progressive chorus of the age. “[W]e must demand that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement, and shall be content to realize his activity only in connection to the activity of the many,” declared the progressive social activist Jane Addams.
“New forms of association must be created,” explained Walter Rauschenbusch, a leading progressive theologian of the Social Gospel movement, in 1896. “Our disorganized competitive life must pass into an organic cooperative life.” Elsewhere, Rauschenbusch put it more simply: “Individualism means tyranny.”
Read the whole thing here.
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UPDATE: A reminder. If you haven’t been reading Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism blog, give it a shot. It’s chock full of good stuff.