“Progressivism”is a reform movement that began in the 1890’s and has remained activeto this day. At times it has had a lower profile but it has been anactive force in American politics for over 100 years.
So what is my beef with “Progressives” ? In part 1, I gave you thehistory of the movement and the names of some of its’ current members.For the second part of the answer I offer you a compilation of theProgressives in their own words:
Early Progressives/Socialists:
NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI, ITALIAN PHILOSOPHER & FATHER OF MODERN POLITICS:
“Whoever desires to found a state and give it laws, must start withassuming that all men are bad and ever ready to display their viciousnature, whenever they may find occasion for it.”
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, NOBEL PRIZE WINNER & PLAYWRIGHT:
“The moment we face it frankly we are driven to the conclusion thatthe community has a right to put a price on the right to live in it …If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions.If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way. Is it anywonder that some of us are driven to prescribe the lethal chamber asthe solution for the hard cases which are at present made the excusefor dragging all the other cases down to their level, and the onlysolution that will create a sense of full social responsibility inmodern populations?”
“I don’t want to punish anybody. (But there are) an extraordinarynumber of people whom I want to kill. I think it would be a good thingto make everybody come before a properly-appointed board, just as theymight come before the income tax commissioner, and say every fiveyears, or every seven years, just put them there, and say, “Sir, ormadam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence?”
If you’re not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a littlemore, then, clearly, we cannot use the big organizations of our societyfor the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does notbenefit us and it can’t be of very much use to yourself.
JOHN DEWY, AMERICAN PHILOSPHER, PSYCHOLOGIST & EDUCATIONAL REFORMER:
“Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony ofthe collective society which is coming where everyone isinterdependent.”
SIR FRANCIS GALTON, ANTHROPOLOGIST & EUGENICIST (He invented the term Eugenics):
“It has now become a serious necessity to better the breed of thehuman race. The average citizen is too base for the everyday work ofmodern civilization.”
“(Eugenics) must be introduced into the national conscience, like anew religion. It has, indeed, strong claim to become an orthodoxreligious tenet for the future, for Eugenics co-operates with theworkings of Nature by securing that humanity shall be represented bythe fittest races. What Nature does blindly, slowly and ruthlessly, manmust do providently, quickly and kindly.”
WOODROW WILSON, 28th U.S. PRESIDENT:
“The President is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be asbig a man as he can. His capacity will set the limit; and if Congressbe overborne by him, it will be no fault of the makers of theConstitution … but only because the President has the nation behind himand Congress has not.”
“Government does now whatever experience permits or the times demand.”
“All that progressives ask or desire is permission–in an era whendevelopment, evolution, is a scientific word–to interpret theConstitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask isrecognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not amachine.”
STUART CHASE, AMERICAN ECONOMIST & ENGINEER (Credited with coining the term The New Deal used by FDR):
“The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague.”
“Why should the Russians have all the fun remaking a world.”
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, 19th CENTURY GERMAN PHILOSPHER:
“There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.”
“After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.”
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, 32nd U.S. PRESIDENT
“Throughout the nation men and women, forgotten in the politicalphilosophy of the Government, look to us here for guidance and for moreequitable opportunity to share in the distribution of national wealth…I pledge you, I pledge myself to a New Deal for the American people…This is more than a political campaign. It is a call to arms.”
“A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward.”
“Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.”
“If I went to work in a factory the first thing I’d do is join a union.”
“As new commander in chief under the oath to which you are stillbound, I reserve the right to command you in any phase of the situationwhich now confronts us.”
MARGARET SANGER, AMERICAN FOUNDER OF THE BIRTH CONTROL MOVEMENT:
“We are failing to segregate morons who are increasingly multiplying… a dead weight of human waste… an ever-increasing spawning class ofhuman beings who should never have been born at all.”
OTHERS:
“I believe that now and always the conscious selection of the bestfor reproduction will be impossible; that to propose it is to display afundamental misunderstanding of what individuality implies. Theway of nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is stillno other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmostbeing born. It is in the sterilization of failure, and not in theselection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of animprovement of the human stock lies.”
“The case for government by elites is irrefutable.” – Senator William Fulbright
Modern/Current Progressives:
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK, AUSTRIAN BORN ECONOMIST & PHILOSOPHER:
“Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human lifewhich can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the meansfor all our ends. And whoever has sole control of the means must alsodetermine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rateshigher and which lower, in short, what men should believe and strivefor.”
“Let me now state what seems to me the decisive objection to anyconservatism which deserves to be called such. It is that by its verynature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we aremoving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies inslowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicateanother direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, forthis reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be draggedalong a path not of its own choosing. The tug of war betweenconservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not thedirection, of contemporary developments.”
LYNDON JOHNSON, U.S. PRESIDENT:
“I am concerned about the whole man. I am concerned about what thepeople, using their government as an instrument and a tool, can dotoward building the whole man, which will mean a better society and abetter world.”
“There is but one way for a president to deal with the Congress, andthat is continuously, incessantly, and without interruption. If it’sreally going to work, the relationship between the president and theCongress has got to be almost incestuous.”
“No member of our generation who wasn’t a Communist or a dropout in the thirties is worth a ****.”
“It is the genius of our Constitution that under its shelter ofenduring institutions and rooted principles there is ample room for therich fertility of American political invention.”
JIMMY CARTER, 39th U.S. PRESIDENT:
“Republicans are men of narrow vision, who are afraid of the future.”
“What has happened at Guantanamo Bay… does not represent the will ofthe American people. I’m embarrassed about it, I think its wrong. Ithink it does give terrorists an unwarranted excuse to use thedespicable means to hurt innocent people.”
MICHELLE OBAMA, U.S. FIRST LADY:
“The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care anda revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up apiece of their pie so that someone else can have more.”
BARACK OBAMA, 44th U.S. PRESIDENT:
“It’s not that I want to punish your success. I just want to makesure everybody who is behind you, that they have got a chance atsuccess, too. I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good foreverybody.”
“We need to steer clear of this poverty of ambition, where peoplewant to drive fancy cars and wear nice clothes and live in niceapartments but don’t want to work hard to accomplish these things.Everyone should try to realize their full potential.”
“It’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns orreligion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrantsentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain theirfrustrations.”
“But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues ofredistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political andeconomic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as Ithink people tried to characterize the Warren court, it wasn’t thatradical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that wereplaced by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’sbeen interpreted, and Warren court interpreted it in the same way thatgenerally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, sayswhat the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’tdo to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the stategovernment must do on your behalf. … one of the, I think the tragediesof the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movementbecame so court-focused, I think that there was a tendency to losetrack of the political and community organizing activities on theground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of powerthrough which you bring about redistributive change.”
BILL FLETCHER, JR., SENIOR SCHOLAR – INSTITUTE FOR POLICY STUDIES’:
In this sense, comrades, I am here to not only speak to you aboutthe subject of this panel, but to put before you a challenge. Too manyof us on the Left act as if we have all the time in the world to makechanges. If it does not happen in our lifetimes, too many of us think,it will inevitably happen in the next. No! History demonstrates exactlythe opposite. There are no guarantees.
“DSA is needed as a major force to transform the Left and compel theentire Left to recognize that ours must be a struggle for power; astruggle for a progressive politics; a struggle to create anational-popular bloc capable of truly altering the priorities of thiscountry…and this necessitates theory and it necessitates organization.
Remember the words of A. Philip Randolph that I think are so applicable to this moment:
“At the banquet table of nature there are no reserved seats. You getwhat you can take, and you keep what you can hold. If you can’t takeanything, you won’t get anything; and if you can’t hold anything, youwon’t keep anything. And you can’t take anything without organization.”What more needs to be said!
MANY OTHERS:
“Two of my favorite political philosophers, Mao Zedong and MotherTeresa.” – Anita Dunn, former Obama White House Communications Director
“You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by thatit’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” –Rahm Emanuel, Obama White House Chief of Staff
“[A]lmost all gun control legislation is constitutionally fine. Andif the Court is right, then fundamentalism does not justify the viewthat the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms. ”– Cass Sunstein, Obama Regulatory Czar
“ In Venezuela, with Chavez, really an incredible revolution — aDemocratic revolution — to begin to put in place saying that we’regoing to have impact on the people of Venezuela…” – Mark Lloyd, FCCDiversity Officer
“Capitalism is a stupid system, a backward system.” Stokely Carmichael, African American Activist
“Capitalism and the market are presented as synonymous, but they arenot. Capitalism is both the enemy of the market and democracy.” – DavidKorten, Member of the Club of Rome
“Capitalism works better from every perspective when the economicdecision makers are forced to share power with those who will beaffected by those decisions.” – Barney Frank, Rep. U.S. House ofRepresentatives, (MA)
“Generally speaking we get the joke. We know that the free market isnonsense. We know that the whole point is to game the system, to beatthe market or at least find someone who will pay you a lot of moneybecause they are convinced that there is a free lunch. We know this islargely about power, that it’s an adults only, no limit game. We kindof agree with Mao that political power comes largely from the barrel ofa gun.” – Ron Bloom, Obama’s Manufacturing Czar
“I think ultimately the rate of growth of material consumption isgoing to have to come down and there’s going to have to be a degree ofredistribution of how much we consume in terms of energy and materialresources in order to leave room for people who are poor to become moreprosperous.” – John Holdren, Obama’s Science Czar
There is a consistent set of themes running through their comments:
- more government
- individual freedoms are secondary
- the government knows best
- use of what ever means necessary
- the Constitution is outdated
- capitalism is bad
- “social justice”
- redistribution of wealth
- global government
So this is where it starts – the question is where would it end?These people are radicals who want to reengineer our society and ournation. Open your eyes America, the Constitution and the American wayof life are under attack! You must fight back, the threat is real.There are “progressives” in our government who want to “fundamentallytransform America”. This transformation is underway. Will you help stopit?