Part 4 on Progressive Socialism

Last time I promised that I would write about what political tools American progressives used to gain power and how they held on to and used that power try to achieve their goals. I also promised to briefly speculate both on why they have not succeeded and on why they face a growing challenge in the twenty-first century.

First progressives made common cause with and, in many cases, came to dominate long standing social reform movements. As they gained control of these movements they changed their character from movements that encouraged the individual to change his own behavior into movements that clamored for government to use its coercive power to force people to change their behavior. The classic example of this is the temperance movement. It had begun as a persuasive movement and had some success. As progressives moved into leadership roles in the movement, it began to try to harness the law making power. The ultimate result was the eighteenth amendment to the Constitution (Prohibition).

Progressives needed to make the new “non-political” bureaucracies, they hoped to control more important than the political parties and they needed to weaken the parties themselves. They did this through measures that seemed to favor more democracy but in fact lessened it. One of the most important of these was the creation of the political primary.

There was a time in this country when the political conventions were truly important. Party loyalists and workers got together to pick the candidates that they believed best upheld the ideals of their party and had the best chance of getting elected. The primary takes that choice out of their hands and weakened party discipline. No longer do the party labels mean as much as they once did.   Anyone who can collect enough signatures of registered voters can now become through the primary the party candidate, even if he or she believes in nothing that the party does. A perfect example was the candidacy of David Duke a few years back in Louisiana. The Republican Party loyalists even took out ads, urging voters to vote for the opposing party’s candidate because they so despised what Duke stood for. The poor people of Louisiana that year had their choice between a racist and a convicted felon.

Because they believe in centralized power, progressives also proposed the deceptively democratic seventeenth amendment. This amendment changed the way Senators are chosen. Senators, in the Constitution as originally written, were representatives of the state governments, chosen by the state legislatures. This gave the states some clout in Washington and a way to limit legal encroachments on their authority by the central government. The seventeenth amendment put in place the popular election of Senators and the states lost much of their power to oppose the central government.

Because their ultimate goal is government by bureaucracy, progressives knew the traditional sources of government revenue, from tariffs, the sale of western lands, and the sale of government bonds, would never be enough to support the size of government they wanted. This was remedied by the passage of the sixteenth amendment, the income tax. As originally worded, the Constitution strictly prohibited a tax on income. Founders like James Madison, father of the Constitution, viewed such a tax as tyranny. Progressives eased the way by promising that the top rate, paid by the very wealthiest, would never go above 4% and that middle class tax payers would never have to pay more than 1%. They lied.

We got our first progressive president accidentally. When President William McKinley was shot, Theodore Roosevelt became the youngest man to ever hold the office of president. Though some imagine him conservative, because of his belief in military strength, his domestic policies were progressive. In fact, when he finally split from the Republican Party in 1912, he named his own political party the Progressive Party and adopted as its symbol the Bull Moose. He favored all the progressive legislation eventually put in place by his presidential successors. Woodrow Wilson ran and was elected as a progressive.

Ever since that time, almost every American president has been a progressive. There have been some who were more moderate in their progressivism and some who, like Calvin Coolidge, were conservatives but did not do much to get rid of the gains made by the progressives.

Progressivism’s greatest opportunity came with the Great Depression. Because of the crisis they were able to put in many of their ideas with little effective opposition. Also for the first time many Americans began to believe the federal government should be responsible for their economic well being. Many Americans began to agree that most problems should have a federal government solution. America also began to get some of its first socialist legislation. Legislation that did such things as set a minimum wage. It also enacted its first permanent welfare legislation.

Progressivism would not face even a minimally successful challenge until Eisenhower and then not again until Reagan. But progressivism is in trouble today for the same reason the Soviet Union found itself in trouble. The promises of progressivism were extravagant and they have not been kept. The progressive welfare system was finally seen as fatally flawed in the 1980s and because of a brief resurgence of Republican control of Congress, finally received some modest pruning and reform from conservatives. It was perhaps the first sign of growing dissatisfaction with the progressives. A second blow has been the popularity of President George W. Bush’s tax cut. These seemed to me at the time to be at least the leading wedge of a scaling down of the progressive vision if not the beginnings of a reversal. Americans, I believed, were beginning to realize that the government hasn’t kept and perhaps can’t keep its promises.

All that changed with the recent election. What Progressive Socialism needed in this country was a charismatic figure. The extreme left seems to have found one in the person of Barack Obama. The more I read about this man, study his voting record, past associations, and pay attention to things he says in unguarded moments or in interviews that he thinks were long ago buried, or even what he now sometimes openly says, a tingle of fright runs through me. Leftists, because they refuse to make God central, often give that role in their lives to some fallible human and more often than not that fallible human abuses the power it gives him. This is what I fear America now faces in President-Elect Obama.

Much has been left out of this brief four part analysis. Perhaps, someday I will make this a book.