Does Progressivism Mean Progress?

Progressive is a term you will hear more often in the coming months and as long as Obama is President. It is a positive–sounding word because it sounds like “progress” or “change” which are words that most of us like, whereas, conservative sounds like “stuck in the past”, traditional, and those boring images. This is where semantics can be deceiving. Remember when “liberal” was very positive, now it’s somewhat of a liability if you are a politician, thus the word progressive. We should learn to understand words in the context they are used, before we make judgments as to what they really mean.

Progressivism in our domestic politics started at the turn of the century; and Woodrow Wilson was our first progressive President. Wilson believed that our Constitution was anachronistic, mired in the past, and irrelevant to modern times. In fact, he felt we should not bother with the Declaration of Independence because it was just a list of grievances against King George III. Wilson put the State before the people and was an elitist as well as a dedicated racist. He even re-segregated our military, and as a believer in the redistribution of wealth, gave us the progressive income tax that we have today. He was a co-founder of the League of Nations which was a precursor to the United Nations, and we all know how those ideas worked out.

Like Wilson, modern progressives do not believe in natural rights but believe that people can be made more perfect by a strong central government, but when left to their own designs will go astray. The founding fathers believed that man is flawed, but they also believed that power corrupts and therefore they set up a system of checks and balances to insure that control is not delegated to a select few.

Progressives also have a strong interest in eugenics as a means to improve the masses. This is the science dealing with the improvement of hereditary qualities by forced selection. One can see this in some of the progressive language in Obamacare, where the elderly are given less preference in health care than the “more productive” segment of the population.

Progressives are found in both parties, with Wilson, Roosevelt, and now Obama being the most extreme Democrats and Teddy Roosevelt a Republican example. In fact, I would include John McCain as one of our contemporary Republican progressives. Progressivism is different from Communism, in that, it does not promote violence or revolution but believes that evolution is the preferred route to transformation. I think you should look at progressives as conservative Socialists, but clearly at the opposite end of the spectrum from our constitutional values of small federal government, rewarding individual initiative, and God-given natural rights.

We need to ponder what the influence of progressivism will be to a centrist nation like us, should progressives continue their dominance of the Democratic Party during Obama’s tenure. Will it affect our social values, our economic growth, our rule of law, and our global status?

More on this later.