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 The existing constitutional system was outdated and must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