Declaring Dependence: Progressivism and Modern Liberalism
By Jonah Goldberg
O
n February 12, 2008, Barack Obama won the Maryland,
District of Columbia, and Virginia Democratic primaries,
putting him on a glide path to the nomination. That night,
he held a massive rally at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
“Where better,” Obama asked, “to affirm our ideals than here in
Wisconsin, where a century ago the Progressive movement was born?”
Where better indeed.
There’s a special irony to Obama’s question given that the “Wisconsin School” progressives he invoked were almost uniformly
racists and eugenicists who would have blanched at the suggestion
that a black man named Barack Hussein Obama could be president
of the United States.
President Obama is hardly alone in unreflective reverence for
the progressives. For decades, leading Democratic politicians—and
some Republican ones—have invoked the progressives as their
inspiration. In a Democratic primary debate in 2007, then-senator
Hillary Clinton was asked if she was a liberal. She responded, “I
prefer the word ‘progressive,’ which has a real American meaning, going back to the progressive era at the beginning of the 20th
century. I consider myself a modern progressive.” David Obey,
Wisconsin Democrat and—until recently—longtime chair of the
House Appropriations Committee, titled his memoir Raising Hell
for Justice: The Washington Battles of a Heartland Progressive. In
it, he makes the case that he is, well, a heartland progressive. One
could go on like this for a while.
The point isn’t simply to note that leading liberal politicians call
themselves “progressive.” That should be obvious. Sometimes it
seems everyone does that. “Progressive” is one of those words that
means “good,” “advanced,” and “enlightened.” Oh, it’s progressive
coffee? Well, it must be good coffee then. It’s a progressive rock
band? Gee, I better listen to the lyrics more closely. We say “progressive” as a placeholder for all current trends. Today, products are
progressive if they are sustainable or organic or fair trade. Tomorrow, progressive might mean “not made by robots.” Who knows?
Even leading liberals acknowledge their indebtedness to the
progressives of the late 19th and early 20th century. The question is
whether they understand and appreciate what that acknowledgement means.
THE ROOTS OF PROGRESSIVISM: FRANCE
P
rogressive thought, like all leftist thought, has diverse roots,
but one common place to start is 18th-century France (indeed,
it was in the French états généraux that the terms “left” and
“right” were born). Jean-Jacques Rousseau advanced the idea of the
“general will,” which held that the group is more important than the
individual, that our rights come not from God but from the state,
and that the collective will—as expressed through the state—has final say on what is in citizens’ best interest. This may sound vaguely
like democracy, except Rousseau had contempt for the formal
mechanisms of democracy, like elections. Such procedures are
“hardly ever necessary where the government is well-intentioned,”
wrote Rousseau. “For the rulers well know that the general will is always on the side which is most favorable to the public interest, that
is to say, the most equitable; so that it is needful only to act justly to
be certain of following the general will.” Here is the idea that rulers
can represent the people’s interests while not actually representing
the people. Here is also the idea that the individual’s conformity to
the general will is the most authentic form of freedom. The general
will is the greater good; it is the soul of progress and deserves a
deeper allegiance than the popular will. It’s an argument that has
been used to rationalize tyrannies of every flavor, from petty bureaucracies and politically corrupt campuses to totalitarian regimes
and theocratic societies.
“JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU ADVANCED THE IDEA OF THE ‘GENERAL
WILL,’ WHICH HELD THAT THE GROUP IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN
THE INDIVIDUAL, THAT OUR RIGHTS COME NOT FROM GOD BUT
FROM THE STATE…”
Of course, decent public servants can be loyal to the “greater
good” without becoming tyrants. Indeed, the duties of public service do not always require a popular vote, even if they do demand
popular assent. But what is born in the Rousseauian vision is the
idea that the state can and should bend the people to its will. Total
equality, for Rousseau, can be achieved only through a totalitarian
state. The people are a lagging indicator in the progress of mankind;
the state—empowered by the “general will” —is the driver of social
evolution. Hence, Rousseau’s view that enlightenment and liberty
are states of mind dependent on how readily you fall in line with
the agenda of the state. Men, he insisted, must be “forced to be free.”
In fairness to Rousseau, there are other interpretations of his
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is “a science that can foresee the progress of humankind, direct it,
and accelerate it.” The French philosopher Auguste Comte—who
coined such terms as “sociology” and “positivism”—founded a
whole religion of humanity, which he saw as a science-based faith
that replaced God with Humanity as the object of worship. Herbert
Croly—an intellectual godfather to both Woodrow Wilson and
Teddy Roosevelt, the author of the Promise of American Life, the
bible of American progressivism, and the founding editor of The
New Republic, which still remains the flagship of American liberalism—was literally baptized into the Religion of Humanity as a child
in an elaborate ceremony conducted by his parents who were, needless to say, also disciples of Comte’s invented faith.
This may sound a bit far fetched, but it’s worth noting that such
convictions and sentiments are not unknown today. According to
a profile in The New Yorker, self-described progressive columnist
and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman became an economist because
he read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy as a child. He became
“obsessed” (The New Yorker’s words) with the central character Hari
Seldon, a “psychohistorian” (Asimov’s fictional term for a scientist
with such total comprehension of the mechanics of human society
he could predict mankind’s behavior thousands of years into the
future, saving it from needless bloodshed).
THE ROOTS OF PROGRESSIVISM: GERMANY
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
thought. Indeed many scholars, even some on the political right,
contend that his general will is little more than the rule of law. I’ll
leave that for others to debate. What seems indisputable is that,
intentionally or not, Rousseau bequeathed to radicals and revolutionaries a new vocabulary of totalitarianism. The Jacobins believed
they were taking Rousseau to heart when they mercilessly endeavored to impose a new general will on the people for their own good.
(Similarly, Marxists routinely insist that the Soviet Union, Maoist
China, North Korea and other Marxist regimes all managed to get
Marx wrong. Perhaps that’s true. But it is irrefutable that there is
something in Marxism that encourages such “misunderstandings.”)
Some 50,000 people died in the terror of the French Revolution,
many in political show trials historian Simon Schama describes as
the “founding charter of totalitarian justice.” The famously “incorruptible” Rousseauian revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre
summed up the totalitarian logic of the revolution: “There are only
two parties in France: the people and its enemies. We must exterminate those miserable villains who are eternally conspiring against
the rights of man. . . . We must exterminate all our enemies.” In
other words, those who will not be “forced to be free” must be done
away with. This is the core logic of all totalitarian regimes.
While progressivism is well within the leftist tradition, it does
not fall neatly into the revolutionary tradition. It is more staid. It
does not seek to topple from below, but to impose from above.
Progressives tolerate—even celebrate—radical protest politics (be
it the prairie populism of the late 19th century or the Occupy Wall
Street movement today) on the grounds that such demonstrations
of passion will create a political climate that empowers dispassionate social planners. But progressivism is more comfortable behind
a desk than behind a bullhorn.
The progressive ideological tradition begins with the idea—one
might even say the article of faith—that politics and sociology,
like physics or biology, are disciplines that can be mastered. The
French theorist Nicolas de Condorcet advanced the idea that there
T
he idea humankind can be understood and directed was most
fully developed in 19th-century Germany under what is often
referred to as the German “Historical School.” Much of the
German historicists’ philosophy can be quite confusing because of
the many seeming contradictions (and because it is in German).
Borrowing heavily from Darwinian evolutionary theory and Hegel’s
theories of historical development, German historicists believed
there was a scientific discernable pattern to the course of history.
Like Condorcet, they were convinced this pattern could be accelerated and perfected if the right experts were running things.
For the German historicists, as it was for the French philosophes
before them, the state was the essential engine of progress. The
“state is the actually existing, realized moral life. . . . The divine idea
as it exists on earth,” Hegel declared in The Philosophy of History.
“All worth which the human being possesses—all spiritual reality,
he possesses only through the state.” The movement of the state
“EVOLUTION AND RELATIVITY ARE ESSENTIAL TOOLS IN THE
PROGRESSIVE TOOLBOX. IF EVERYTHING CHANGES AND
EVERYTHING IS RELATIVE, IT’S SILLY TO HAVE FIXED RULES THAT
CAN BIND SOCIAL PLANNERS.”
through time was the “march of God on earth.”
You can see why Darwinian theory meshed so easily with Hegelianism in the progressive mind. According to Hegel, the state is
not a static thing but an evolving concept that carries and guides
mankind forward. For the Darwinians (though not necessarily for
Darwin), the nation or the society was an organic whole, a living
creature that evolved over time.
Evolution and relativity are essential tools in the progressive
toolbox. If everything changes and everything is relative, it’s silly
to have fixed rules that can bind social planners. Rulers—whether
monarchs or parliaments, chancellors or bureaucrats—need to be
freed from binding laws and dogmas. This conviction was a natural
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consequence of the scientific age. Darwin’s theory of evolution—
and, later, Einstein’s theory of relativity—seemed to provide scientific confirmation of what the intellectuals had long believed: we
live in a “new age” where the old rules don’t apply. Richard Ely, the
founder of the American Economic Association and the leader of
the Wisconsin Progressives, studied at the University of Heidelberg
in the late 19th century, a hotbed of historicist thought. He wrote,
“The most fundamental things in our minds were on the one hand
the idea of evolution, and on the other hand, the idea of relativity.”
Ely also wrote, “The nation in its economic life is an organism in
which individuals, families, and groups . . . form parts.” This meant
competition and self-interest are generally bad things working
against the tide of progress. After all, organs in the human body do
not compete against one another; why should organs of the body
politic? History, like evolution, was moving toward greater social
cooperation and it fell to experts to decide how to advance that
process. “A new world was coming into existence,” Ely wrote, “and
if this world was to be a better world we knew that we must have a
new economics to go along with it.”
Free-market economics were part of the “old order.” The notion
that there is an “invisible hand” guiding commercial transactions
and that there are immutable laws governing economics is anathema to progressive intellectuals. Why? Because if such laws exist, the
power of experts to guide, shape and advance “progress” are greatly
limited. If things can be left to the market, what’s a social engineer
going to tinker with?
This theory needed some practical application. The German Historicists found exactly that with the help of an unlikely figure: Otto
Von Bismarck, the Prussian “Iron Chancellor.” Bismarck, who ruled
Germany at the behest of the Kaiser, was the foremost progenitor of
“top-down socialism.” An authoritarian by nature and philosophy,
Bismarck had little patience for democracy. Socialism, however,
had its uses. In the 1870s and 1880s, a newly unified Germany
was beset by revolutionary and democratic movements. Bismarck,
with memories of the 1848 revolutions fresh in his mind, despised
such movements but understood that they needed to be placated
to avoid revolutionary turmoil. He did exactly that. He bought off
the public with a slew of social insurance programs—today we’d call
them entitlements—most notably a pension plan that became the
model for America’s Social Security system two generations later.
Interestingly, when Bismarck presented his pension plan to the
German parliament he addressed the charge that he was embracing
socialism. He shrugged, “Call it socialism or whatever you like. It is
the same to me.”
In the short term, Bismarck’s co-option of the middle class was a
masterstroke, albeit with horrible long-term consequences. Rather
than see democracy as the path to enlightened social policies, the
average German came to believe fidelity to the state was the shortest
route to so-called social justice. Simultaneously, by giving the left
what it wanted without letting the left “earn” it, Bismarck delegitimized democratic forces in Germany.
This strategy of buying off the people by making them clients of
the state remains one of the core tenets of progressivism and social
democracy around the world. It has helped convince generations
of people that their rights are best understood as gifts from the
government. Over time, both the left and right in Germany became
statist ideologies, and the two sides fought over who would get to
impose its vision on society. Meanwhile classical liberalism, defined
as an ideology of individual freedom and democratic government,
slowly atrophied and died in Germany because Bismarck denied
it a popular constituency. A generation later, when the democratic
center was besieged by the forces of totalitarianism, it lacked the
institutional strength and the popular support necessary to withstand the onslaught. The center did not hold. But that is a tale for
another time.
AMERICAN PROGRESSIVISM
N
ow we must jump across the Atlantic to the United States,
where Bismarckian statism had a surprisingly large number of fans. Germany at the end of the 19th century was a
source of both envy and concern among American intellectuals and
policymakers, much as China is today (and Japan was in the 1980s).
In the eyes of social planners, German militarism was admirably
efficient at organizing the people. Its bureaucracies, likewise, were
models of Prussian precision. Throw in the “success” of Bismarck’s
nondemocratic reforms, and you can see why statists in all countries might admire it.
Indeed, both Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt were fans of
German statism. In college, Wilson wrote a fawning essay in which
he dubbed Prussia’s the most “admirable system . . . the most studied and most nearly perfected.” As for Bismarck, he was a “commanding genius” who united the “moral force of Cromwell and the
political shrewdness of Richelieu; the comprehensive intellect of
Burke . . . the diplomatic ability of Talleyrand, without his coldness.”
Wilson goes on about the Iron Chancellor’s “keenness of insight,
clearness of judgment, and promptness of decision,” and ends wistfully, “Prussia will not soon find another Bismarck.” The esteemed
liberal historian Eric Goldman writes in his history of the reform
movement in America, Rendezvous with Destiny, that Bismarck’s
Germany was “a catalytic of American progressive thought.”
“NEARLY EVERY PROGRESSIVE POLITICAL THEORIST AND
INTELLECTUAL AGREED THAT THE VISION OF THE FOUNDERS
HAD OUTLIVED ITS RELEVANCE.”
Indeed, the American academic and public-policy establishment
during the progressive era was largely an admiration society for
Germany in particular and Europe in general. When Richard Ely
founded the American Economic Association (still America’s foremost academic economic organization, though no longer devoted
to explicitly progressive public policies), five of the first six officers
and at least 20 of its first 26 presidents had studied in Germany. In
1906, a professor at Yale polled the top 116 economists and social
scientists in America; more than half had studied in Germany for at
least a year. W. E. B. DuBois, Charles Beard, Walter Weyl, Nicholas
Murray Butler, and countless other founders of modern American
liberalism were among the 9,000 Americans who studied in German universities during the 19th century.
This was the dawn of the age of the “social engineer,” a term that
had no negative connotation in the progressive era. The explosive
wealth creation that marked the so-called Gilded Age also came
with new problems experts believed required new solutions. This
was hardly an absurd or unfounded conviction. Urbanization,
industrialization and immigration on a massive scale did create
new challenges. Most Americans were farmers in the 19th century.
Their poverty was in many respects concealed by their lifestyles.
Poor farmers may be poor, but they eat, have a place to sleep and
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are generally out of sight. A million poor people concentrated in
cities are far more noticeable and worrisome, even if they are getting wealthier. In short, the rise of “mass man” seemed to justify the
ambitions and schemes of the new generation of social engineers.
“Who will be the prophets and pilots of the Good Society?” Herbert Croly asked in 1925. Speaking for an entire generation of progressive intellectuals, Croly announced that a “better future would
derive from the beneficent activities of expert social engineers who
would bring to the service of social ideals all the technical resources
which research could discover and ingenuity could devise.” Five
years earlier, Croly noted in The New Republic that the practitioners of the “scientific method” would need to join with the “ideologists” of Christ to “plan and effect a redeeming transformation”
of society whereby men would look for “deliverance from choice
between unredeemed capitalism and revolutionary salvation.”
“WILSON WAS THE FIRST PRESIDENT TO OPENLY DISPARAGE
THE BILL OF RIGHTS AS IRRELEVANT. HE PREFERRED A ‘LIVING
CONSTITUTION’ WHOSE MEANING WAS ALWAYS OPEN TO THE
INTERPRETATIONS OF PROGRESSIVE JUDGES, BUREAUCRATS
AND POLITICIANS.”
Croly and his peers were serious about the need for “revolutionary salvation.” As Ronald J. Pestritto, William J. Atto, Thomas
West, Matthew Spalding and other scholars of Progressivism have
described with great eloquence, the core ambition of intellectual
progressivism was to overturn the principles of the American
Founding.
Nearly every progressive political theorist and intellectual agreed
that the vision of the founders had outlived its relevance. In their
minds, the evidence was overwhelming. The forces pushing the old
order into the dustbin of history were too numerous to count (and
are certainly too numerous to discuss at any length here). Evolutionary theory, relativity, the internal-combustion engine, eugenic
“science,” economic central planning, the superiority of military
mobilization, industrialization, urbanization: these and many other
ideas and trends were simply things the founders could not have
envisioned, and, therefore, the founders’ Constitution had exceeded
its expiration date.
Woodrow Wilson was the foremost popularizer of this view. He
believed the old notion that we are born with inalienable rights
amounted to little more than corny “Fourth of July sentiments.” In
a speech dedicated to honoring Thomas Jefferson, Wilson told an
audience that “if you want to understand the real Declaration of
Independence, do not repeat the preface.” Never mind that it is the
preface that proclaims that our natural, inalienable rights are the
rock upon which the whole American experiment rests. “We are
not bound to adhere to the doctrines held by the signers of the Declaration of Independence,” he explained. Rather, when we celebrate
the Fourth of July it should be a “time for examining our standards,
our purposes, for determining afresh what principles, what forms of
power we think most likely to affect our safety and happiness.”
Wilson was the first president to speak of imposing a “vision” on
the United States. At the core of that vision was the belief that the
individual must “marry his interests to the state.” Wilson was the
first president to openly disparage the Bill of Rights as irrelevant.
He preferred a “living constitution” whose meaning was always
open to the interpretations of progressive judges, bureaucrats and
politicians. Wilson was deeply influenced by the ideas he imbibed
at Johns Hopkins University (the first American university founded
on the German model), where he earned his Ph.D. A committed
Hegelian, he even quoted the German philosopher in a love letter
to his wife. “Government is not a machine, but a living thing,”
Wilson wrote in Congressional Government. “It falls not under the
[Newtonian] theory of the universe, but under the [Darwinian]
theory of organic life.” Wilson saw the ever-expanding power of the
state as entirely natural. Along with the vast majority of progressive
intellectuals, he believed the increase in state power was akin to
an inevitable evolutionary process. Governmental “experimentation”—the watchword of progressive intellectuals from Dewey and
Wilson to FDR—was the social analogue to evolutionary adaptation. Constitutional democracy, as the founders understood it, was
a momentary phase in this progression. It was time for the state to
ascend to the next plateau. “Government,” Wilson wrote approvingly in The State, “does now whatever experience permits or the
times demand.”
Broadly speaking, the progressives were united by their shared
status as members of the cult of unity. They believed all the problems of the mass age required mass solutions. Jane Adams insisted
in 1902, “We 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.” Walter Rauschenbusch, the leading progressive religious leader of his
day, declared, “New forms of association must be created. . . . Our
disorganized competitive life must pass into an organic cooperative
life.” Elsewhere, Rauschenbusch put it more simply: “Individualism
means tyranny.”
WORLD WAR I
F
rom the 1890s to the outset of World War I, it was understood
that American progressives were fighting the same fight as the
various socialist and “new liberal” movements of Europe. William Allen White, famed Kansas progressive, declared in 1911, “We
were parts, one of another, in the United States and Europe. Something was welding us into one social and economic whole with local
political variations. It was Stubbs in Kansas, Jaurès in Paris, the
Social Democrats [that is, the Socialists] in Germany, the Socialists
in Belgium, and I should say the whole people in Holland, fighting
a common cause.” When Jane Addams seconded Teddy Roosevelt’s nomination at the Progressive Party Convention in 1912, she
declared, “The new party has become the American exponent of a
world-wide movement toward juster social conditions, a movement
which the United States, lagging behind other great nations, has
been unaccountably slow to embody in political action.” World War I is the great landmark in the history of progressivism. It provided the progressives a great opportunity to put into
practice the ideas they’d been developing for a quarter century.
In 1906, philosopher William James delivered a speech—which
became an essay by the same name—arguing that society needed
a new “moral equivalent of war.” James argued war is terrible, but
it brings out what is best in us. What we need is a replacement for
war that allows men to drop their petty associations and interests
and rally around the state for big causes. Politicians have spoken of
treating this or that as the “moral equivalent of war” since, though
these days “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste” is the more popular
version of the idea.
What appealed to the progressives about war was not war per se,
but the ability to mobilize society (though there was no shortage of
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war lovers, such as Teddy Roosevelt). War fomented a conception
of the general will that encouraged the sort of social cooperation
and coordination for which progressives yearned.
This is why so many progressives supported the war not for
reasons of national security, foreign policy or even morality, but
because it would finally grant them the power to tear down the old
order of liberal democratic capitalism and replace it with a new one
of planning and social control. In the words of John Dewey, the
leading progressive philosopher of the early 20th century, these were
the “social possibilities of war.” Dewey hoped the war would require
Americans “to give up much of our economic freedom. . . . We shall
have to lay by our good-natured individualism and march in step.”
If the war went well, it would constrain “the individualistic tradition” and convince Americans of “the supremacy of public need
over private possessions.” Another progressive claimed that the
war produced a single united hope among progressive academics:
“Laissez-faire is dead! Long live social control!” Randolph Bourne,
one of the very few progressives to dissent from the war hysteria,
noted the “peculiar congeniality between the war and these men”
who raced to Washington to control the country. “It is as if the war
and they had been waiting for each other,” he concluded.
For a time, it worked—a little. America has never come closer
to totalitarianism than it did during World War I. The Wilson
administration arrested political dissidents with abandon. It censored newspapers and magazines. Wilson kept political prisoners
on a frightening scale (it fell to Warren Harding to finally release
the last of them, including Socialist presidential candidate Eugene
V. Debbs). The Committee for Public Information was the first
sophisticated propaganda ministry in the developed world. Under
Wilson’s “war socialism,” big business and big government became
intertwined. The government even deployed a goon squad—the
American Protective League—which played a similar role to that of
the Brown Shirts in Hitler’s Germany.
Then the war ended. Americans in their basic goodness and
decency said, “Enough.” The Republicans were elected on a promise
of a “return to normalcy.” Political prisoners were released. Rationing ended. War socialism was dismantled and, particularly with
the arrival of the Coolidge presidency, America enjoyed a roaring
economic recovery.
To this day, liberal intellectuals consider the return to normalcy
a terrible departure from the path on which the 20th century should
have stayed. (“If history were to repeat itself and we were to return
to the so-called ‘normalcy’ of the 1920’s,” FDR proclaimed in his
1944 State of the Union message to Congress, “then it is certain that
even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of Fascism here at
home.”) The progressives of the 1920s agreed. They could not accept that the country had turned its back on the planners who ran
the country during the war. “We planned in war!” became a rallying
cry and a whine all at once.
In their frustration and ambition, many progressives again
looked to Europe. They found proof in the Soviet Union, Mussolini’s Italy and, in a few instances, even in Hitler’s Germany—that
planning was working. The muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens
famously captured the spirit of the times when he famously visited
the Soviet Union and returned to declare that he’d been to see the
future, “and it works!” It’s somewhat more forgotten that a year
earlier he’d visited Mussolini’s Italy and returned with similarly
ecstatic reviews.
FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT AND THE NEW DEAL
T
he election of 1932 presented progressives with another bite
at the apple. Hoover’s policies had failed to end the Depression that followed the crash of 1929. Contrary to generations
of myth building, Hoover—an engineer by training and someone
viscerally sympathetic to applying engineering methods to social
problems—was not a devoted laissez-faire liquiditionationist in
his response to the Depression. Federal outlays tripled from 1930
to 1933. Indeed, there was more continuity between Hoover and
Roosevelt than fans of either want to admit. In his nominating address at the 1928 Republican convention, Hoover assailed “destructive competition” between farmers and bragged about his work to
“build up a system of cooperation between the government and
business” as Secretary of Commerce. This is hardly the stuff of a
laissez-faire hardliner.
Regardless, FDR, a veteran of the Wilson administration, ran
on the explicit promise to restore the policies of World War I,
only this time he would aim them at the Depression. Essential to
his campaign was rebranding himself. Employing the language of
philosophical pragmatism, FDR insisted that he was simply eager to
do “what works”—a refrain echoed often by President Obama. He
would merely “experiment” with solutions and if they didn’t work,
he’d admit it and move on. This concealed his ideological agenda
behind a mask of reasonableness.
Virtually the entire New Deal was built from the blueprints of
the war years of the Wilson administration. The famous “alphabet
soup” was mostly a restoration of the various boards and committees set up 15 years earlier. The National Recovery Administration
was explicitly modeled on the War Industries Board of World War
I. The Securities and Exchange Commission was an extension of the
Capital Issues Committee of the Federal Reserve Board. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation was an updated version of the War
Finance Corporation. FDR’s public housing initiative was run by
the architect of World War I–era housing policies. During the war,
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public housing had been a necessity for war laborers. Under FDR,
everyone became, in effect, a war laborer.
The New Deal represented the convergence of numerous streams
within progressivism. It was explicitly a “moral equivalent of war”
enterprise. (Indeed, anyone who wants a “new New Deal” is making
a “moral equivalent of war” argument whether he realizes it or not).
The ethos of “we’re all in together” most of us associate with World
War II was actually forged during the New Deal. For some reason,
shared misery is seen as preferable to unequally shared prosperity.
The effort to turn citizens into clients of the state, first championed
by Bismarck, finally took hold in the United States under Roosevelt
and became the basis of the Roosevelt coalition for a generation
(and the rationale for LBJ’s Great Society). Indeed, in the same 1944
speech in which FDR said that normalcy—that is, limited government and free markets—amounted to fascism, he proclaimed that
America needed a “new economic bill of rights” to supplant the
old one.
PHILOSOPHERS SAY THE DARNEST THINGS
“All worth which the human being possesses—all spiritual
reality, he possesses only through the state.”
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
“. . . better future would derive from the beneficent activities
of expert social engineers who would bring to the service of
social ideals all the technical resources which research could
discover and ingenuity could devise.”
Herbert Croly
“. . . to give up much of our economic freedom. . . We shall
have to lay by our good-natured individualism and march in
step.”
John Dewey
“THE NEW DEAL IS WHAT GAVE AMERICA A ‘STATE’ RATHER
THAN A MERE GOVERNMENT THAT DEFERRED TO THE
SOVEREIGNTY OF THE PEOPLE.”
The New Deal was hailed—and denounced—as the blow that
finally broke the back of American exceptionalism. Progressive
intellectuals and others viewed the New Deal as an explicit effort for
America to catch-up with Europe’s more advanced systems. It was
an effort, in the words of historian Daniel Boorstin, to “assimilate
the American into the ‘European’ political experience.” In a brilliant
essay, the dean of FDR historians, William Leuchtenburg, describes
1929–50 as the “‘Europeanization’ of America.” He argues that until
the New Deal, the United States never had any set of institutions
that, together, amounted to what a European would recognize as
“the state.” The New Deal is what gave America a “state” rather than
a mere government that deferred to the sovereignty of the people.
There’s one last point to be made about FDR’s project, beginning
with the election of 1932. The word “progressive” had taken on a
very negative connotation with the American people during the
1920s, for understandable reasons. The progressives under Wilson
delivered social chaos, war and misery, even as they preached order,
peace and prosperity. Also, the hard pro-Communist left had taken
over the label as its own. So progressives like FDR needed a new
label. FDR shrewdly began referring to himself not as a progressive but as a modern “liberal.” At the time, “liberal” didn’t have an
explicitly leftwing connotation—even conservatives like Robert Taft
used the term positively into the late 1940s and early 1950s. FDR’s
rebranding worked to denote a philosophy that stressed economic
and social liberty, equality of all people before the law, and the supremacy of the individual. Statists abandoned the progressive label
and moved to the Trojan horse of “liberalism.” They ran with it for
two generations until they exhausted that word’s utility, too.
Thus, it is ironic liberals like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton
are trying to reclaim the word “progressive.” When Clinton says
she prefers “progressive” to “liberal” because the word “progressive”
“has a real American meaning, going back to the progressive era at
the beginning of the 20th century,” she’s right.
It was at the beginning of the 20th century when intellectual
craftsman started importing the tools they needed to dismantle the
idea of American exceptionalism.
END
WE THE PEOPLE • Volume 1, Episode 3