We’ve written about this before. “Progressive” is one of the most common tags for this blog. Why?
In the middle stages of President Obama’s run for the Presidency in 2008, he said during a speech in Powder Springs, GA:
“Look, let me talk about the broader issue, this whole notion that I am shifting to the center. The people who say this apparently haven’t been listening to me. I am someone who is no doubt progressive. I believe in universal health care and that government has a strong role to play in overseeing financial institutions and cracking down on abuses in bankruptcies and the like.”
No doubt, though, this is at least partly in response to his opponent for the nomination, his own Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, saying during a debate in 2007 that she is not a liberal but protesting that “I am a Progressive.” Speaking highly of Woodrow Wilson and others, she educates the audience on these founders and leaders of the Progressive cause in the early 20th century.
By their own reckoning, there are more than 80 declared members of congress, who are Progressives.
Just picking on Secretary Clinton’s debate words, the problem seems clear: she, like most modern Progressives doesn’t know the difference between Liberal in the classical sense (which is better equated with modern Libertarianism) and Modern Liberalism a.k.a. Socialism… Progressive is just a relabeling and is nothing more than marketing. If today’s Democrats were progressive, they should be progressing, moving towards something, but they’re only anti anything that is Capitalism, Libertarian or Conservative, seeing these as wrong-headed paths or ideologies.
President Obama, Secretary Clinton and other Democrat leaders of today were all educated in some of the most left-leaning of our country’s universities (Wellesley, Yale, Columbia and the like). Their knowledge of Wilson and other Progressive founders is bereft of historical context and full of anecdotes that merely cherry-pick facts and ideas to fit the left-leaning institutions and their teachers’ points of view.
They were unlikely to have learned about the basic disdain that Woodrow Wilson and other Progressives had for the U.S. constitution and our way of life. At liberal educational institutions they don’t bother teaching the context of history, why it’s useful to know the context and how to make it relevant to your thinking. They don’t prepare their students to defend our liberties against what Mark Levin calls “a movement to restore tyranny.” (Gotta love Levin’s willingness to choose provocative words).
In the WSJ today there were several articles about the turmoil in Europe and the so called Euro Zone. One was an editorial lamenting that when the EC states got together, there were two basic paths chosen by the member countries. Some, like Germany, used it as a time to clean up their fiscal house and ready themselves for a more open – and more competitive – Europe.
Indeed, in somewhat uniquely German fashion they prepared with a good level of cooperation between workers/unions and management in the private sector, showing it is possible for labor to both cooperate with – and benefit from – management of free and private enterprises. Today Germany, along with a few other EU countries such as Finland and the Netherlands are being called upon, due to their relative economic strength, to bail out the other member nations who chose a different path (Greece, Italy, Spain, perhaps even France). A second path that took advantage of the roaring times of the late 90′s and through the first 2/3′s of the first decade of the 21st century and ramped up already unsustainable spending, beyond their government revenues, on public sector provided social welfare largesse – financed with relatively low cost sovereign debt. We now know where those decisions on the second path have led. And yet the people and leaders of these second path countries clamor for more spending, digging the hole deeper, begging the “rich” member states to spread their wealth around to keep the lesser (wealthy, and less wise) states and their welfare states afloat.
Sounds all-too-familiar to the debate about to rage in 2012 when the election for President gets into full swing.
As mentioned above, our Progressive leaders today lack a true and textured understanding of history. As a small token to redress this, read this from “Notes on the State of Virginia”, in which Thomas Jefferson wrote:
But of all the views of this law, none is more important, none more legitimate, than that of rendering the people the safe, as they are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty. For this purpose the reading in the first stage, where they will receive their whole education, is proposed, as has been said, to be chiefly historical. History, by apprising them of the past, will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times, and other nations; it will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men; it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume: and knowing it, to defeat its views. In every Government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover, and wickedness insensibly open, cultivate, and improve. Every Government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree. This, indeed, is not all that is necessary, though it be essentially necessary. An amendment of our Constitution must here come in aid of the public education. The influence over Government must be shared among all the people. If every individual which composes their mass participates of the ultimate authority, the Government will be safe; because the corrupting the whole mass will exceed any private resources of wealth: and public ones cannot be provided but by levies on the people.”
