The American Roots of Liberal Progressivism
The brilliant and personable R.J. Pestritto comments in today's Wall Street Journal on the connection between Glenn Beck's message and his own academic study of American Progressivism. I've chewed over the subject once in person with Prof. Pestritto and I'm excited to continue it here. In the Journal, Prof. Pestritto praises commentators like Beck and Jonah Goldberg who have reworked his critique of the Progressives for a popular audience. But contra Beck, Pestritto argues that Wilson, TR, and the rest of the American Progressives were not socialists. Actually, they saw socialism and democracy as two related expressions of a single principle. Pestritto quotes Wilson:
"In fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same. They both rest at bottom upon the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members.... Limits of wisdom and convenience to the public control there may be: limits of principle there are, upon strict analysis, none."
Given the clarity and force of these remarks, Pestritto continues, the Progressives -- and Progressivism today, alive and well -- are fair game. Here, there is no room for squishes. Pestritto singles out Ricochet's own Matt Continetti, who has written that "progressivism is a distinctly American tradition." "In fact," writes Pestritto, "it was anything but." Progressives, Pestritto quickly shows, borrowed whole cloth from European academia. Sure enough, the evidence is clear: Wilson and other Progressives gobbled up the transatlantic intellectualizing of French and German political and social theorists who cashed out their ideals in quasi-systematic terms.
But I'm not convinced that means liberal progressivism is alien to America. (You might see how this skepticism resonates with my comments earlier about how Obama's enemies can't understand him unless they understand his Americanness.) Tocqueville famously called Americans 'practical Cartesians' who didn't need to read Descartes because they were already living out his principles in everyday life. Whereas Europeans had to come up with theories about how to order society in a democratic age -- and then had to apply those theories to their people, using state power, from the top down -- America and democracy grew up naturally together. The American social order rose freely, from the bottom up. Rather than the enforced artifice of Cartesian philosophy, Americans enjoyed the organic social arrangements that pointed in the direction of Cartesian principles.
Living the American way of life, to generalize the point, made it possible for Americans to become conscious of their way of life -- what it was, what it implied, where it lead, and how to perfect it. Look back at certain trends in American thought from about 1830-1880, and you'll see how this worked with liberal progressivism, too. Before the Civil War, the Whigs advanced an agenda appealing to the professional classes and promoting government-driven cultural modernization, financial centralization, and economic development. After the Civil War, radical nationalist proto-progressives praised Lincoln for turning America into a single unit while downplaying his commitment to the ideals of the Founding. Meanwhile, transcendentalist Yankees, including Emerson and especially Whitman, wrote the founding texts of a romantic, almost religious faith in the democratic life that have given brainy progressivism a pulsing heart right up through the Obama era. These strands of distinctly American thought set the table for the formal Progressivism to follow.
Arguing that the Progressives pulled off a Europeanizing coup is akin to insisting that Americans were not a psychotherapeutic people before they discovered Freud. What the Progressives did do for the first time was succeed in politically institutionalizing the worldview they shared. That was the coup. But it's impossible to understand how they could have done so by focusing on the alien aspect of Progressive doctrine. And it's impossible to do the same today with Obama and his policies.
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Aug '10
Re: The American Roots of Liberal Progressivism
Food for thought. But regarding:
James Poulos, Ed.:
Actually, they saw socialism and democracy as two related expressions of a single principle. Pestritto quotes Wilson:
we are not a democracy, but a Constitutional republic. Even We the People do not have the absolute right to determine everything unless we shred the Constitution and start over (it is for this reason that passing Constitutional amendments is so hard, no?). The Constitution sets our limits of principle.
Or it ought to...
Edited on Sep 15, 2010 at 12:30pmJun '10
Re: The American Roots of Liberal Progressivism
The tension between the "more governmental power" solution (progressives/socialism) and the "more freedom for people to choose according to their conscience" solution (individual rights/capitalism) has been with us since the founding. The genius of the American Experiment is that it encoded the ideas of limited government and individual rights into the foundation of the law - the Constitution. The Enlightenment got codified.
When the French tried just a few decades later, they confused equality before the law (capitalism) and equality of results (progressivism).
Progressivism is not new to America, it was the force against which America was built to fight. Freedom, American style, is basically unique in human history, and goes against everything that humanity has known. We are pack animals, us humans, and we want to be taken care of and/or lead. It is not new. It is simply the most important battle there is to fight.
Aug '10
Re: The American Roots of Liberal Progressivism
If I'd been born in 1880, I would have been a Progressive. The squalor of New York and many other American cities was shocking. Rudyard Kipling - though he loved Americans and settled for awhile in Vermont - detested Manhattan and couldn't square American ideals with the misery he saw there.
As a child, Teddy Roosevelt visited the tenements of New York City with his father, directly aiding those most in need. The Roosevelts and other wealthy families funded charities to ameliorate the suffering, but TR came to believe it wasn't enough.
The Haymarket bombing in Chicago, 1886, served notice to Americans that anarchists and Marxist terrorists were alive and well. Radicals murdered an average of one head of state per year between 1894 and 1914; including the French President (1894); Empress of Austria (1898); King of Italy (1900); McKinley (1901, which put TR in power) and the President of Mexico (1913).
Along with the violent labor unrest in the country - Carnegie, Pullman - it was clear that laissez faire economics wasn't working well enough.
I think TR had it right, but Wilson was a duplicitous racist. Lied about WWI, and segregated the Army. From 1908, Progressives became tyrannical.
Aug '10
Re: The American Roots of Liberal Progressivism
River, even at that time, we didn't have laissez faire. Big industry and government had already started shacking up -- hence the railway "robber barons" who were no more free-market than GM is today. Furthermore, the labor movement was already being used to exclude immigrants, nonwhites, and even women from the work force. Is it surprising, then, that these groups may not have had the opportunity to find decent jobs and hence a better living standard when racist Labor was shutting them out. Even so, the period between the Civil War and WWI saw the greatest growth in prosperity in the US, because even with the restrictions I mentioned, the US was more laissez faire than it is now. Moreover, many immigrants chose to live in poor housing -- slums -- in order to save for the future. It may seem a strange choice to us
Aug '10
Re: The American Roots of Liberal Progressivism
... but it was a *choice* for many. They could have afforded better housing, but they chose to save instead. Also remember that the vast majority of human experience has probably never risen above those poor slums in health, safety, and comfort. As shocking as those conditions are to those of us who have been more fortunate, in the larger scheme of thing, they were probably fairly normal, historically, and the wonder is that so many people have been lifted up from that state by market growth.
Aug '10
Re: The American Roots of Liberal Progressivism
Midget, by insisting on an extreme definition of laissez faire, you're attempting to reduce my thesis to insignificance. It won't work. Compared to today, the economies of the late 19th Century were laissez faire; that is almost entirely unregulated. Using the term "robber barons" shows your bias.
Great scholarship since then has proven that those so-called "robber barons" accomplished near miracles of progress in railroads, oil and steel production, urban and civil construction, bridge building, the electrical grid... the list is long and honorable. It was ONE writer who invented the "robber barons" moniker: Matthew Josephson, 1934, and he had an agenda to slander the great and powerful.
Were they voracious men? Yes, they always are, and so are our most productive and fruitful captains of industry today. Bill Gates comes to mind. Would the U.S. be poorer without Microsoft? I think so.
Those times were freer by far. You're taking a little bit of truth and twisting it to make it appear far different than what it is. The federal government was fractionally as strong as now. Senators were appointed by state legislatures; answerable to them. Wall Street managed the nation's money supply....
Aug '10
Re: The American Roots of Liberal Progressivism
River, perhaps I should reconsider the use of "robber barons", however I would also like to point out that it wan't a term I learned from "extreme" free-marketers, but from the US history teachers in public school who embraced the progressive agenda. Please notice that I did say those times were freer by far. I do not feel I am blowing a small amount of truth out of proportion, but rather adding in some important facts that are often missed in the "mainstream" narrative of US history, a narrative shaped by progressives themselves and often taught in the public schools without question or counter narrative. Exchanging narratives is not a bad way to increase understanding. Obviously, you and I differ on what was really causing the problems back then, and how fast it is possible for the poor to be uplifted. So, we have different narratives. Fine. But I do not consider my view extreme. If you want,"extreme", look to the Randians or anarchy-capitalists, but not to me.
Aug '10
Re: The American Roots of Liberal Progressivism
Grr... The automatic spell changed anarcho-capitalists on anarchy-capitalists on me. I meant anarcho-.
Aug '10
Re: The American Roots of Liberal Progressivism
Yet again another typo. Should be "to", not "on". Sorry about this. I neither get to see all I write nor can I edit on the machine I'm using now.
Aug '10
Re: The American Roots of Liberal Progressivism
Your point is well taken. My eyes were closed for many years by U.S. History teachers also, and it's endemic to the generations since FDR, who shamelessly demonized "the malefactors of great wealth". It was only recently - as a result of some writing and research - that I learned the full degree of my ignorance of that period. I'm open to new information.
Aug '10
Re: The American Roots of Liberal Progressivism
Thank you, River. If I was using a more contentious tone than usual to make my point, I apologize. I've been a bit out of sorts today, and some of my frustrations with the technical problems I've had posting comments might have migrated into my tone.
Jul '10
Re: The American Roots of Liberal Progressivism
This argument (not to sound too Obama-ish) is a bit of a false argument. The beauty of federalist republicanism is that it allows "the will of the people" to be heard - at the best, most localized, level of power. The degree to which this power is delegated upwards is the key question. Progressives, socialists and other statists have as their common objective the gathering of as muchg of that power as possible at the highest level possible, with the common goal of telling as many people as possible how to live their lives.
Dress it up with as many historical allusions as you wish, that is the bottom line.
Do we trust our fellow citizens to make reasonable decisions, or not?
Aug '10
Re: The American Roots of Liberal Progressivism
Yes... to a point. The primary aim of small-r republicanism is to avoid the extreme policies and instability endemic to pure democracies. Which is just a fancy way to say "avoid mob rule".
I'd argue this necessary, built-in distrust is a key feature of American democracy: we trust citizens to run the government, but not to affect our lives in a systemic way. The critical corollary is that, since the politicians are just ordinary citizens and not a separate aristocracy or class (in the European sense of the words), we don't trust the government to run our lives either.
Re: The American Roots of Liberal Progressivism
BlueAnt
Yes... to a point. The primary aim of small-r republicanism is to avoid the extreme policies and instability endemic to pure democracies. Which is just a fancy way to say "avoid mob rule".
I'd argue this necessary, built-in distrust is a key feature of American democracy: we trust citizens to run the government, but not to affect our lives in a systemic way. The critical corollary is that, since the politicians are just ordinary citizens and not a separate aristocracy or class (in the European sense of the words), we don't trust the government to run our lives either.
Benjamin Constant: "the people who, in order to enjoy the liberty which suits them, resort to the representative system, must exercise an active and constant surveillance over their representatives, and reserve for themselves, at times which should not be separated by too lengthy intervals, the right to discard them if they betray their trust, and to revoke the powers which they might have abused. [...] Let them confine themselves to being just. We shall assume the responsibility of being happy for ourselves."