Editor’s note: This commentary is by Tom Licata, who is a member of the Ethan Allen Institute’s Board of Directors and founder of Vermonters for Economic Health. He has run as an independent for the Vermont House and Senate and Burlington City Council.
[P]rogressivism – so pervasive in today’s Democratic Party – is the ideology of American suicide and specifically of American constitutionalism. This is the first in a series of writings dissecting and analyzing progressivism’s ideological beliefs and ideas, to which the just stated conclusion will become self-evident. “Suicide” is an emotive term but here I use its cognitive “self-inflicting” meaning. That is, the demise of American constitutionalism is coming almost entirely from internal or domestic sources, rather than external or foreign.
The frameworks of these writings are largely taken from James Burnham’s 1964 work, “Suicide of the West,” a detailed analysis of liberalism’s history and beliefs, which ends in the conclusion that “Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide.”
Mr. Burnham – who graduated atop of his Princeton class and became one of the great political theorists of the 20th century – knows this subject. As a Marxist in the 1930s, he was befriended by Leon Trotsky and became an influential leader in the American Trotskyite movement, after which he turned to the political right. During World War II, Mr. Burnham took leave from his professorship at NYU to work for the Office of Strategic Services (a forerunner of the CIA), where he lead the Political and Psychological Warfare division. President Ronald Reagan awarded Mr. Burnham the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983.
Before delving into progressivism’s ideological beliefs and ideas (what Mr. Burnham calls “liberalism,” I take liberty of updating to “progressivism”), it’s important to define just what an “ideology” is and what impact it has on one’s thinking.
An ideology is a systematic set of beliefs and ideas about society and the nature of man. An ideologue’s thinking calls for a commitment independent of specific facts, experience or even of reality. Ideologues cannot lose arguments because their answers are predetermined in advance. If there are conflicts between their doctrines and reality, then reality surrenders. The primary functions of ideologues like Vermont’s Progressive-Democrats – and this is very important – is not to state truths as much as to adjust attitudes.
Vermont’s Progressive-Democrats are much more interested in bending attitudes towards their ideological beliefs than in stating truths or reality.
This explains why reforming something like Vermont’s education and property tax Gordian knot of Act 60/68 or Vermont’s single-payer health care plan of Act 48 is so difficult: It’s bound up in all kinds of ideological beliefs and thinking, such as egalitarianism, rationalism and the nature of man’s perfectibility or “plasticity,” terms I’ll elaborate on in future writings. Vermont’s Progressive-Democrats are much more interested in bending attitudes towards their “ideological beliefs,” than in stating truths or reality.
Progressivism rejects both natural rights theory and the concept of man’s “creator-endowed” inalienable rights, found in our Declaration of Independence. Instead, Progressivism enshrines a new doctrine of socio-economic rights. These rights no longer attach to individuals, but to groups, such as to women, class, race, etc. Instead of rights springing from the individual (liberties as pre-existing claims against the government), rights are created by the state (liberties as grants of relief from government). Such government relief comes in the form of things such as food stamps, housing allowances, free college education, etc.
But don’t take my word for it; take the explicit words of this rejection from the “father” of Progressivism himself, President Woodrow Wilson, in 1908: “No doubt a great deal of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual. …” And the even more explicit words from his protégé, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in 1932: “The Declaration of Independence discusses the problem of Government in terms of a contract. … Under such a contract rulers were accorded power, and the people consented to that power on consideration that they be accorded certain rights. The task of statesmanship has always been the redefinition of these rights in terms of a changing and growing social order. …”
“Nonsense” about the inalienable rights of the individual? The Declaration of Independence as contract? Where would you find man’s “inalienable rights” written down in any contract, as they are “endowed by our Creator” and understood only in the “Laws of Nature”? And do we really want “rulers” rather the representatives governing us? And if the “task of statesmanship” is the “redefinition of [our] rights,” are we still a free people, ultimately accountable to both the rights and duties endowed to us by our creator?
Or are such inquires and questions too anachronistic or old-fashion to even ask anymore, in today’s so called modern society?
If it’s not already self-evident that Progressivism and American constitutionalism don’t go together and are mutually exclusive, then stay-tuned. Next up will be a dissection and analysis of progressivism’s ideological beliefs about the nature of man.
