PROGRESSIVISM: A RADICAL, ALIEN AND DESTRUCTIVE FORCE

THE PENDULUM CLOCK

Friday, 8:00 AM.  60 degrees F, wind SSW, calm with light gusts  The sky is partly cloudy with some overcast but the sun is shinning through.  The humidity has risen to 88% and the barometer has peaked, now at 30.03".  It should be a nice day leading up to several days of unsettled weather.  Buddy is recovering nicely from his incident and is very happy to be home.  He still has to wear his "lampshade" another week at least, at which time the stitches will be taken out.
   I have lately done a lot of reading concerning the Progressive movement in our country, and since I have friends and acquaintances that at least nominally consider themselves Progressives, for what it is worth I present some analysis and personal opinion below.

PROGRESSIVES AND THE PENDULUM 

   Progressivism as we know it started as a turn of the 20th Century movement in the Republican party.  It's chief early Republican proponent was Theodore Roosevelt, although the movement began before his presidency, and there were many other well-known Progressives in politics on both the national and state levels. The principles of Progressivism are designed to enable pure democracy in government through eliminating or ignoring the United States Constitution, with its system of checks and balances,  and its concept of limited and divided government.  In this respect Progressivism is far more radical than Liberalism, which generally works within the bounds of the Constitution.
   TR was a dangerous president, always governing on the fringes of the Constitution and who tended toward populism, imperialism and even dictatorship.  He was succeeded by the liberal but far more cautious Republican, William Howard Taft, whom TR rejected as too conservative, running against Taft in 1912, and seeking a functional, and unprecedented, third term after having been out of office for four years.  TR split the Republican vote by founding his own Bull Moose Party, which ensured the election of another radical Progressive, the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson.
   The radical Progressives, disrespectful of the Constitution, have all tended towards populism, imperialism, socialism and war, and the movement founded in the Republican party subsequently found a long term home in the Democratic party with Wilson.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom we can see in retrospect as an avowed radical, imperial, and socialist Progressive, was elected to four terms,  the first president since Washington to serve more than two terms.  Lyndon Johnson, a classic Progressive, championed not only civil rights (a very necessary advancement in American society) but also the Great Society with its proliferation of big government, huge deficits, intrusive federal agencies, and the Vietnam War.  In many ways Republican President George W. Bush brought progressivism back into the Republican Party through championing ill-advised wars and other foreign adventures, big government, radical economics and hapless nation building.
  President Barrack Obama has turned the Progressive movement even further to the left, towards an imperial and dictatorial populism, very much in the image of the late Cezar Chavez of Venezuela, ignoring or over-riding not only the Constitution but Congress, all representative government and the  rights and duties of the states as well.  His assault on the Constitution, and particularly the Bill of Rights, is unprecedented.
   Progressivism has brought us a plethora of changes, both good and bad.  The popular election of senators, women's suffrage, anti-trust legislation, civil rights and the war on poverty, and the progressive income tax, all were arguably legitimate undertakings in their time; but it has brought us as well the Spanish American War, World War I, World War II,  and the Vietnam, Iraq,  and Afghan wars.  America may have been destined to be dragged into some of those conflicts, but it is significant that they all occurred under Progressive presidents, and half of them without a declaration of war by Congress.
   Well-meaning Progressivism has led to wars and other foreign adventures that end badly; to imperialism,  to out of control and intrusive government, to overwhelming national debt and, ultimately, crippling inflation and the loss of individual liberty and prosperity.
   If one likens our government and its constitution to a pendulum clock, Progressivism is like a naive tinker who destroys the pendulum, the action of which regulates the measured, predictable advance of the hands of the clock; and without it the delicate mechanism of springs and wheels and cogs runs amuck and the clock can no longer perform a useful function.
   Without the regulating pendulum of the Constitution, with its checks and balances, democracy runs amuck and the government cannot perform its necessary functions.  When that happens we will no longer be a republic nor even a democracy, but a dangerous and useless mob, controllable only by the iron fist of a dictator, one of which is always waiting in the wings (think "The dictatorship of the proletariat,'" or "National Socialism").  One need only look to history and current events to affirm this prediction.
   At best, true Progressives are well-meaning tinkerers who do not understand the mechanics of constitutional government and will destroy it and our civil society with their dangerous meddling. At worst they are communists and fascists hell-bent on the destruction of the United States of America and all it stands for.
   Liberal and conservative concepts and actions, working within the constraints of the the pendulum of the Constitution,  have balanced each other in the course of our history and led to measured,  unprecedented social progress.
   True Progressivism is a radical, alien and destructive force.