The Progressives’ Long March Targeting the Constitution’s guardrails against tyranny. by Bruce Thornton
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-progressives-long-march/
The “long march through the institutions” is the name given to the left’s turn towards Cultural Marxism as the means for taking control of the political order and shifting it to the left. For many conservatives, this movement in the Sixties accounts for the subsequent changes in political ideology, government policies, sexual mores, culture high and low, history, and revisions of school curricula from kindergarten to universities.
That narrative is accurate to a point, but it often suggests that before the Sixties our culture and politics were still firmly grounded in the Constitutional order, and Western culture defined by its Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian civilizational origins. But the way for the left’s “long march” was prepared by the Progressives’ “march” that began over a century ago. The Democrats’ policy platform unveiled during their convention and endorsed by Kamala Harris is a good starting point for seeing Progressivism’s continuity with the Marxist march to the modern center-left Democrat Party that has been taken over by their expanding and hardening leftist caucus.
The platform obviously endorses the Dems’ technocratic, hypertrophied Federal Government, and the greater centralization of power necessary for their utopian ambitions. As the Wall Street Journal puts it, “the platform is also a peek into an economic worldview in which the government is the answer, almost no matter the question. While private businesses are always ‘gouging’ or adding ‘junk fees,’ or otherwise trying to rip somebody off, Washington’s wise men are capable of providing for the American people, if only they have the power to pass the laws and regulations.”
Here is an item from the platform predicated on a Progressive idea more than a century old: “Health care should be a right in America, not a privilege,” the platform asserts. “We’ll never quit fighting to protect and expand the Affordable Care Act.” The ultimate goal is to completely nationalize healthcare, which will no doubt make doctors unionized public employees, and lead to worse outcomes costing trillions of taxpayer dollar––as Britain’s National Health Service and Obamacare serially demonstrate.
And, as the Journal points out, Kamala Harris is not kidding about this scheme: “In her debut speech as the presumptive nominee, she said she wants a country where ‘every person has affordable healthcare, affordable child care, and paid family leave.’’ We all know that “affordable” usually turns out to means “free” or heavily subsidized by taxpayers and employers.
The clearest link to the early Progressives is the statement that “health care should be a right.” This belief militates against the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence and their concept of “unalienable rights” created and bestowed not by flawed human beings, but by “Nature and Nature’s God,” as the Deist Thomas Jefferson put it. This idea is an important bulwark of our political freedom, and a check on nascent tyranny that creates new “rights” by means of political power controlled by imperfect, limited human beings vulnerable to corruption by power.
In pursuit of this aim, Progressives rejected the argument that true rights are innate to humans, and so cannot be justly limited or eliminated. As technocrats trusting in “science” and progress, they rejected tradition and common sense, which for centuries acknowledged a realist understanding of human nature driven by destructive passions and interests. In contrast, they argued that the technological changes and new knowledge discovered by “science” that arose with modernity, were creating new problems and challenges unforeseen by the Founders. Moreover, the progress of the “human science” had made tradition, faith, and the old realist view of human beings an anachronism from our benighted past.
Hence the attack on the philosophical foundations of the Constitution, which needed to yield to “science.” Particularly obstructive was the notion of “unalienable rights,” which inhere in individuals, not factions or classes. But in 1916 Progressives like Frank Johnson Goodnow, a law professor who taught at Columbia and became president of Johns Hopkins, considered that “unalienable rights” must yield to “different conceptions of private rights if society is to be advantageously carried on.”
Moreover, atavistic notions of individual rights “may become a menace when social rather than individual efficiency is a necessary prerequisite of progress.” Historian Charles Beard was blunter: in 1912 he wrote, “The doctrine that the individual has fundamental personal and property rights . . . can be sustained on no other theory than that of anarchy. It rests upon a notion as obsolete and indefensible as the doctrine of natural rights.”
Other Progressives also dismissed “unalienable rights” as impediments to progress and “social justice.” In 1918 social worker Mary Parker Follett proclaimed, “Man can have no rights apart from society or independent of society, or against society.” Individual rights granted by “Nature and Nature’s God” should be expanded by potentially unlimited “social rights”: “Our efforts are to be bent not upon guarding the rights which heaven has showered upon us, but in creating all the rights we shall ever have.”
This key feature of Progressivism and its anti-Constitutional bent came into full flower during FDR’s presidency. One tool he used to expand the Federal Government was to redefine and expand the scope of “unalienable rights” just as earlier Progressives had called for. In his 1932 speech at the Commonwealth Club, Roosevelt spoke of the “re-definition of these rights in terms of a changing and growing social order,” which in 1944 in his State of the Union address he called a “Second Bill of Rights.”
But these new “rights” are not “unalienable,” the boons of “Nature and Nature’s God” that flawed human beings could diminish or remove. They are instead good things people desire like a “useful and remunerative job,” or a “decent home,” or “adequate medical care,” or “a good education” ––the very same goods and services that the Kamala Harris is promising to provide, even though our national fisc is going broke by adding more new entitlements, or by expanding old ones. This near-century-long dynamic now is threatening––by bankruptcy or an underfunded military capability putting us at risk––to diminish even further our actual rights upon which our political freedom is founded.
Todays’ Democrats likewise are targeting the Constitution’s guardrails against tyranny of both the minority and the majority. On his way out the door, Joe Biden has proposed “reform” of the Supreme Court that would limit the tenure of justices to 18 years, and give the executive branch oversight of the Court, threatening the separation powers and the Justices’ independence. Another target is the Electoral College, which prevents the president from being chosen by a majority that would likely ignore or diminish the rights and interests of less populated states and regions.
Indeed, there already exists an organization called National Popular Vote, an interstate compact to which the Dems’ candidate for vice president Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota, has joined his state. As Trent England writes, “The New York Times (which supports it) has called the NPV compact ‘an end run on the Constitution’ and ‘a plan for states to skirt the Electoral College,’” both of which, given the “support” for the NPV, apparently do not trouble the Times’s editors. Other “reforms” the Democrats are pushing include eliminating the filibuster in the Senate, and apportioning Senators by population rather than by two seats per state.
Finally, the political philosophy of the Democrat Party is consistent with the early Progressives: scientistic technocracy, utopian goals, and a rejection of the underlying principles of the Constitution, which is part of a more general rejection of tradition, especially religion, and common sense. For today’s left, their foundational philosophy is “make it new,” the same guiding doctrine of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, when what he called “the four olds” ––“old thought, old culture, old customs, and old habits” ––were eliminated by mass murder.
For today’s progressive Democrats, the Constitution–– with its divided and balanced powers, Bill of Rights, and ordered liberty–– is the bulwark against the tyranny they seek to impose on their fellow citizens who resist their utopian delusions, and to expanded power toward which both “marches” have been advancing.
Whether they succeed, or are slowed down enough to change course back to our Constitution, will be determined in November.
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