July 18, 2007
The Progressive Movement and the
Transformation of American Politics
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Progressivism was the
reform movement that ran from the late 19th century through the first decades
of the 20th century, during which leading intellectuals and social reformers in
the United States sought to address the economic, political, and cultural
questions that had arisen in the context of the rapid changes brought with the
Industrial Revolution and the growth of modern capitalism in America. The
Progressives believed that these changes marked the end of the old order and
required the creation of a new order appropriate for the new industrial age.
There are, of course, many
different representations of Progressivism: the literature of Upton Sinclair,
the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, the history of Charles Beard, the
educational system of John Dewey. In politics and political thought, the
movement is associated with political leaders such as Woodrow Wilson and
Theodore Roosevelt and thinkers such as Herbert Croly and Charles Merriam.
While the Progressives differed
in their assessment of the problems and how to resolve them, they generally
shared in common the view that government at every level must be actively
involved in these reforms. The existing constitutional system was outdated and
must be made into a dynamic, evolving instrument of social change, aided by
scientific knowledge and the development of administrative bureaucracy.
At the same time, the old system
was to be opened up and made more democratic; hence, the direct elections of
Senators, the open primary, the initiative and referendum. It also had to be
made to provide for more revenue; hence, the Sixteenth Amendment and the
progressive income tax.
Presidential leadership would provide
the unity of direction -- the vision -- needed for true progressive government.
"All that progressives ask or desire," wrote Woodrow Wilson, "is
permission -- in an era when development, evolution, is a scientific word -- to
interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask
is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a
machine."
What follows is a discussion
about the effect that Progressivism has had -- and continues to have -- on
American politics and political thought. The remarks stem from the publication
of The
Progressive Revolution in Politics and Political Science (Rowman &
Littlefield, 2005), to which Dr. West contributed.
Remarks by Thomas G. West
The thesis of our book, The
Progressive Revolution in Politics and Political Science, is that
Progressivism transformed American politics. What was that transformation? It
was a total rejection in theory, and a partial rejection in practice, of the
principles and policies on which America had been founded and on the basis of
which the Civil War had been fought and won only a few years earlier. When I
speak of Progressivism, I mean the movement that rose to prominence between
about 1880 and 1920.
In a moment I will turn to the
content of the Progressive conception of politics and to the contrast between
that approach and the tradition, stemming from the founding, that it aimed to
replace. But I would like first to emphasize how different is the assessment of
Progressivism presented in our book, The Progressive Revolution, from
the understanding that prevails among most scholars. It is not much of an
exaggeration to say that few scholars, especially among students of American
political thought, regard the Progressive Era as having any lasting
significance in American history. In my own college and graduate student years,
I cannot recall any of the famous teachers with whom I studied saying anything
much about it. Among my teachers were some very impressive men: Walter Berns,
Allan Bloom, Harry Jaffa, Martin Diamond, Harry Neumann, and Leo Strauss.
Today, those who speak of the
formative influences that made America what it is today tend to endorse one of
three main explanations. Some emphasize material factors such as the closing of
the frontier, the Industrial Revolution, the rise of the modern corporation,
and accidental emergencies such as wars or the Great Depression, which in turn
led to the rise of the modern administrative state.
Second is the rational choice
explanation. Morris Fiorina and others argue that once government gets involved
in providing extensive services for the public, politicians see that growth in
government programs enables them to win elections. The more government does,
the easier it is for Congressmen to do favors for voters and donors.
Third, still other scholars
believe that the ideas of the American founding itself are responsible for
current developments. Among conservatives, Robert Bork's Slouching Toward
Gomorrah adopts the gloomy view that the Founders' devotion to the principles
of liberty and equality led inexorably to the excesses of today's welfare state
and cultural decay. Allan Bloom's best-selling The Closing of the American
Mind presents a more sophisticated version of Bork's argument. Liberals
like Gordon Wood agree, but they think that the change in question is good, not
bad. Wood writes that although the Founders themselves did not understand the
implications of the ideas of the Revolution, those ideas eventually "made
possible…all our current egalitarian thinking."
My own view is this: Although
the first two of the three mentioned causes (material circumstances and
politicians' self-interest) certainly played a part, the most important cause
was a change in the prevailing understanding of justice among leading American
intellectuals and, to a lesser extent, in the American people. Today's
liberalism and the policies that it has generated arose from a conscious
repudiation of the principles of the American founding.
If the contributors to The
Progressive Revolution are right, Bork and Bloom are entirely wrong in
their claim that contemporary liberalism is a logical outgrowth of the
principles of the founding. During the Progressive Era, a new theory of justice
took hold. Its power has been so great that Progressivism, as modified by later
developments within contemporary liberalism, has become the predominant view in
modern American education, media, popular culture, and politics. Today, people
who call themselves conservatives and liberals alike accept much of the Progressive
view of the world. Although few outside of the academy openly attack the
Founders, I know of no prominent politician, and only the tiniest minority of
scholars, who altogether support the Founders' principles.
The Progressive Rejection of the
Founding
Shortly after the end of the
Civil War, a large majority of Americans shared a set of beliefs concerning the
purpose of government, its structure, and its most important public policies.
Constitutional amendments were passed abolishing slavery and giving the
national government the authority to protect the basic civil rights of
everyone. Here was a legal foundation on which the promise of the American
Revolution could be realized in the South, beyond its already existing
implementation in the Northern and Western states. [This
is a rather superficial rendering of the Civil War amendments to the
Constitution. For example, an important example, some argue – and I think
rather persuasively – that the 14th amendment intended to
“nationalize” the bill of rights or overturn Chief Justice Marshall’s opinion
in Barron v. Baltimore that the bill of rights applied only to the national
government and not the state governments. Insofar as this was the case, it
amounted to a radical change in the character of the American political order –
as we can see today when in fact the bill of rights has been nationalized, much
to West’s irritation I would imagine.]
This post-Civil War consensus
was animated by the principles of the American founding. I will mention several
characteristic features of that approach to government and contrast them with
the new, Progressive approach. Between about 1880 and 1920, the earlier
orientation gradually began to be replaced by the new one. In the New Deal
period of the 1930s, and later even more decisively in the 1960s and '70s, the
Progressive view, increasingly radicalized by its transformation into
contemporary liberalism, became predominant.
1. The Rejection of Nature and
the Turn to history
The Founders believed that all
men are created equal and that they have certain inalienable rights. All are
also obliged to obey the natural law, under which we have not only rights but
duties. We are obliged "to respect those rights in others which we value
in ourselves" (Jefferson). The main rights were thought to be life and
liberty, including the liberty to organize one's own church, to associate at
work or at home with whomever one pleases, and to use one's talents to acquire
and keep property. For the Founders, then, there is a natural moral order --
rules discovered by human reason that promote human well-being, rules that can
and should guide human life and politics. [It is
difficult for me to see this typically “West Coast Straussian” argument as
little more than a concoction to serve political purposes West and others think
needed. There is little room for the idea of “duties” in the idea of
inalienable natural rights as understood by Hobbes and Locke, for example. As
Storing argued in an essay on slavery and the American regime, the “duty” to free
one’s slaves is less than moral and, however far it might extend, is not even a
duty so long as the holding of slaves is necessary for preserving one’s rights
“to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” including of course
preserving those rights for one’s posterity. The rights of the slaveholders are
not compromised by their injustice to their slaves as all humans possess “equal
rights.” All humans, both just and unjust, possess these rights so much so, as
Hobbes’ said, that a convicted murderer has the right to kill his jailor and
escape, if necessary. And of course West passes over that at that time the
right “to acquire and keep property” included the right to acquire and keep
slaves! Details, details, details. The key question is, of course, did/do
modern natural rights point toward or support the idea that “there is a natural
moral order.” Locke emphasizes the essential importance of the legislature and,
hence, human, not natural, law as the basis for a decent society, so much so
that one must ask whether he believed there was anything that amounted to
“natural law,” other than a few, rather contingent items like, “preserve life
so much as one can without harming one’s own right to life, liberty, and
property.” In any case, there seems little in Hobbes or Locke to support the
idea of “a natural moral order.”]
The Progressives rejected these
claims as naive and unhistorical. In their view, human beings are not born
free. John Dewey, the most thoughtful of the Progressives, wrote that freedom
is not "something that individuals have as a ready-made possession."
It is "something to be achieved." [See the
above comments. How West can square his argument with, say, Locke’s argument
that all value in this world is due to human labor is beyond me.] In this
view, freedom is not a gift of God or nature. It is a product of human making,
a gift of the state. Man is a product of his own history, through which he
collectively creates himself. He is a social construct. [Locke and Hobbes prepare the way for the “history argument” that was
taken up by Rousseau who surely thought that humans are “social constructs,”
ala Emile!] Since human beings are not naturally free, there can be no
natural rights or natural law. Therefore, Dewey also writes, "Natural
rights and natural liberties exist only in the kingdom of mythological social
zoology."
Since the Progressives held that
nature gives man little or nothing and that everything of value to human life
is made by man, they concluded that there are no permanent standards of right.
Dewey spoke of "historical relativity." However, in one sense, the
Progressives did believe that human beings are oriented toward freedom, not by
nature (which, as the merely primitive, contains nothing human), but by the
historical process, which has the character of progressing toward increasing
freedom. So the "relativity" in question means that in all times,
people have views of right and wrong that are tied to their particular times,
but in our time, the views of the most enlightened are true because they are in
conformity with where history is going. [West is aware
that the progressives were quite certain that there were “permanent standards
of right.” TR said, e.g., “We stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord,” and
he believed that! This is not the rhetoric of a relativist. I do not know
enough about Dewey but I suspect that he too acted on the basis of his
convictions that “there are permanent standards of right.” So West is
ambivalent here but does not pursue why he is – because of course he is
committed to demonstrating that the progressives were and are “un-American.”]
2. The Purpose of Government
For the Founders, thinking about
government began with the recognition that what man is given by nature -- his
capacity for reason and the moral law discovered by reason -- is, in the most
important respect, more valuable than anything government can give him. Not
that nature provides him with his needs. In fact, the Founders thought that
civilization is indispensable for human well-being. Although government can be
a threat to liberty, government is also necessary for the security of liberty.
As Madison wrote, "If men were angels, no government would be
necessary." But since men are not angels, without government, human beings
would live in "a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not
secured against the violence of the stronger." In the Founders' view,
nature does give human beings the most valuable things: their bodies and minds.
These are the basis of their talents, which they achieve by cultivating these
natural gifts but which would be impossible without those gifts. [In almost the very place in the Federalist West quotes here,
Madison goes on to say “the first task of government is to control the
governed, and next to control itself.” NB: control of the governed is the first
task of any decent government! I believe Madison may have changed his mind
later as to whether this is or should be seen as the first task of government
when he opposed the Federalists and Hamilton and embraced Jefferson’s political
agenda. In any case, any progressive would have no problem endorsing Madison’s
assertion in Federalist #51. And, of course, it was a thought like this that
led to the creation, as I like to put it, of a [potentially] pervasively powerful
national government.]
For the Founders, then, the
individual's existence and freedom in this crucial respect are not a gift of
government. They are a gift of God and nature. Government is therefore always
and fundamentally in the service of the individual, not the other way around.
The purpose of government, then, is to enforce the natural law for the members
of the political community by securing the people's natural rights. [Except of course the slaves!] It does so by
preserving their lives and liberties against the violence of others. In the
founding, the liberty to be secured by government is not freedom from necessity
or poverty. It is freedom from the despotic and predatory domination of some
human beings over others. [Does West mean this to be a
dichotomy? That both of these tasks cannot be undertaken by a government? And
what if the poverty that exists is the result of “the despotic and predatory
domination of some human beings over others?” And what if the economic order
that exists by nature – as West sees things - leads to just this result? Adam
Smith saw just that possibility, if I am not mistaken.]
Government's main duty for the
Founders is to secure that freedom -- at home through the making and
enforcement of criminal and civil law, abroad through a strong national
defense. [Does “a strong national defense” require a
humongous, military-industrial complex as Eisenhower described it? And this
begs the question: A defense of what exactly? It also raises the question of
whether a republic is compatible with what West would call “a strong national
defense.’] The protection of life and liberty is achieved through
vigorous prosecutions of crime against person and property or through civil
suits for recovery of damages, these cases being decided by a jury of one's
peers.
The Progressives regarded the
Founders' scheme as defective because it took too benign a view of nature. As
Dewey remarked, they thought that the individual was ready-made by nature. The
Founders' supposed failure to recognize the crucial role of society led the
Progressives to disparage the Founders' insistence on limited government. The
Progressive goal of politics is freedom, now understood as freedom from the
limits imposed by nature and necessity. They rejected the Founders' conception
of freedom as useful for self-preservation for the sake of the individual
pursuit of happiness. For the Progressives, freedom is redefined as the
fulfillment of human capacities, which becomes the primary task of the state.
To this end, Dewey writes,
"the state has the responsibility for creating institutions under which
individuals can effectively realize the potentialities that are theirs."
So although "it is true that social arrangements, laws, institutions are
made for man, rather than that man is made for them," these laws and
institutions "are not means for obtaining something for individuals, not
even happiness. They are means of creating individuals…. Individuality
in a social and moral sense is something to be wrought out."
"Creating individuals" versus "protecting individuals":
this sums up the difference between the Founders' and the Progressives'
conception of what government is for.
[Here West is,
finally, distinguishing the progressives and the framers, although his
distinction between “creating” and “protecting” individuals is somewhat
simplistic. For example, Jefferson and others, generally Anti-Federalists,
argued that a certain kind of human being, a citizen, was necessary if a
republic was to be created and maintained. And to get these kinds of human
beings, a certain kind of society was essential, e.g., a society that prized
and produces self-sufficient farmers. But whether farmers or those later called
“workers,” the key was self-sufficiency and this goal required planning and governmental
intervention to “create” a certain kind of human being.
But certainly with the
progressives this intervention was to be more pervasive than, say, that thought
desirable by Jefferson or the Anti-Federalists. Hence, the perceived need to
control the schools, the media, labor unions but also those “economic”
institutions we call corporations. However, to oppose this aspect of
progressivism requires that one embrace what I would call “small government,”
that is, small minded government, one that is content with not undertaking what
Hamilton described as extensive projects that would take a long time to
complete and that were meant to advance the public good and that required a
unitary and powerful executive resembling a monarchy.
But even “smallness”
requires that government concern itself with, say, the schools, the media, and
other institutional arrangements if it, smallness, is to be preserved or
fostered. I am thinking that the appropriate distinction is not between a “big”
or pervasive government and a “small” or libertarian government, but rather
between the ends that the government seeks to actualize. Is the goal, say, a
“high-toned” society, what the Anti-Federalists would call an “aristocratic”
[or inegalitarian] society, or a middle class society, that is, a society where
people actually aspire to be middle class rather than “upper class?” Or is the
goal an “empire” that seeks to impose itself on the world to “project its
power,” as is said today, throughout the world or is the goal an inward oriented
government, one more concerned with domestic than with foreign affairs?
It will be interesting
to see if West, in the final analysis, will embrace the kind of
society/government needed to make sense of the case for “small” or “limited”
government as he understands these things. I suspect he will not because of his
conviction that a politics of “leadership” and military might/manliness is
essential to the well-being of the nation and because his endorsement of what
he thinks is a “limited” or “libertarian” government is in the service of the
production of great wealth – and, therewith, of an inegalitarian society.]
3. The Progressives' Rejection
of consent and Compact as the Basis of Society
In accordance with their
conviction that all human beings are by nature free, the Founders taught that
political society is "formed by a voluntary association of individuals: It
is a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and
each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws
for the common good" (Massachusetts Constitution of 1780).
For the Founders, the consent
principle extended beyond the founding of society into its ordinary operation.
Government was to be conducted under laws, and laws were to be made by locally
elected officials, accountable through frequent elections to those who chose
them. The people would be directly involved in governing through their
participation in juries selected by lot. [West is
correct here if one identifies the founding with his description of the
founders’ agenda in writing the Constitution. However, if one sees the
Constitution as laying the groundwork for a pervasively powerful national
government, as seem more than plausible, then his argument - insofar as he
wants to distinguish the progressives and the framers - falls apart. He
mentions “frequent elections” but the Constitution did not include such
elections as they were known at the time, nor did it include any term limits at
all, which was another and even more important ingredient in the kind of
government West is describing here. And insofar as the newly created government
was to be, at least potentially, a pervasively powerful national government,
one should ask, “For what ends?” Certainly, such a government is not created
for small projects or small minded projects.]
The Progressives treated the
social compact idea with scorn. Charles Merriam, a leading Progressive
political scientist, wrote:
The individualistic ideas of the
"natural right" school of political theory, indorsed in the
Revolution, are discredited and repudiated…. The origin of the state is
regarded, not as the result of a deliberate agreement among men, but as the
result of historical development, instinctive rather than conscious; and rights
are considered to have their source not in nature, but in law.
For the Progressives, then, it
was of no great importance whether or not government begins in consent as long
as it serves its proper end of remolding man in such a way as to bring out his
real capacities and aspirations. As Merriam wrote, "it was the idea of the
state that supplanted the social contract as the ground of political
right." Democracy and consent are not absolutely rejected by the
Progressives, but their importance is greatly diminished, as we will see when
we come to the Progressive conception of governmental structure.
4. God and religion
In the founding, God was
conceived in one of two ways. Christians and Jews believed in the God of the
Bible as the author of liberty but also as the author of the moral law by which
human beings are guided toward their duties and, ultimately, toward their
happiness. Nonbelievers (Washington called them "mere politicians" in
his Farewell Address) thought of God merely as a creative principle or force behind
the natural order of things.
Both sides agreed that there is
a God of nature who endows men with natural rights and assigns them duties
under the law of nature. Believers added that the God of nature is also the God
of the Bible, while secular thinkers denied that God was anything more than the
God of nature. Everyone saw liberty as a "sacred cause."
At least some of the
Progressives redefined God as human freedom achieved through the right
political organization. Or else God was simply rejected as a myth. For Hegel,
whose philosophy strongly influenced the Progressives, "the state is the
divine idea as it exists on earth." John Burgess, a prominent Progressive
political scientist, wrote that the purpose of the state is the
"perfection of humanity, the civilization of the world; the perfect
development of the human reason and its attainment to universal command over
individualism; the apotheosis of man" (man becoming God).
Progressive-Era theologians like Walter Rauschenbusch redefined Christianity as
the social gospel of progress. [At least one
Federalist, in defending the Constitution, said that it would provide the
groundwork for undermining what he called “fable” and replace it with
“philosophy.” To wit:
“By 1787, however, the
opinion seemed to be growing that organized religion could be dispensed with or
taken for granted. This was, at any rate, the Anti-Federalist reading of the
situation. The indifference of the Constitution and its main defenders to
organized religion was striking. In the words of Federalist writer Elihu, ‘the
light of philosophy has arisen,’ and ‘mankind are no longer to be deluded with
fable.’ ‘Making the glory of God subservient to the temporal interest of men,
is a worn out trick….’” [Storing, What the Anti-Federalists Were For]
And, of course, West’s
account of the social milieu at the time of the founding with regard to
religion is about as simplistic as they come. He ignores, e.g., the
constitutional provision that “no religious test shall ever be required for
holding office under the United States,” which suggests that, politically
speaking, religion and religious belief are irrelevant. And it was pretty
clearly understood at the time that the separation of church and state was
intended to subordinate religion to politics or the religious realm to the
secular realm.]
5. Limits on Government and the
Integrity of the Private Sphere
For the Founders, the purpose of
government is to protect the private sphere, which they regarded as the proper
home of both the high and the low, of the important and the merely urgent, of
God, religion, and science, as well as providing for the needs of the body. The
experience of religious persecution had convinced the Founders that government
was incompetent at directing man in his highest endeavors. The requirements of
liberty, they thought, meant that self-interested private associations had to
be permitted, not because they are good in themselves, but because depriving
individuals of freedom of association would deny the liberty that is necessary for
the health of society and the flourishing of the individual.
For the Founders, although
government was grounded in divine law (i.e., the laws of nature and of nature's
God), [WOW! I WOULD LOVE TO SEE THE EVIDENCE FOR THIS
ASSERTION.] government was seen as a merely human thing, bound up with
all the strengths and weaknesses of human nature. Government had to be limited
both because it was dangerous if it got too powerful and because it was not
supposed to provide for the highest things in life.
Because of the Progressives'
tendency to view the state as divine and the natural as low, they no longer
looked upon the private sphere as that which was to be protected by government.
Instead, the realm of the private was seen as the realm of selfishness and oppression.
Private property was especially singled out for criticism. Some Progressives
openly or covertly spoke of themselves as socialists. [OMG!
What ever are we to do? “Socialists?” Really, Tom, really?]
Woodrow Wilson did so in an
unpublished writing. A society like the Founders' that limits itself to
protecting life, liberty, and property was one in which, as Wilson wrote with
only slight exaggeration, "all that government had to do was to put on a
policeman's uniform and say, 'Now don't anybody hurt anybody else.'"
Wilson thought that such a society was unable to deal with the conditions of
modern times.
Wilson rejected the earlier view
that "the ideal of government was for every man to be left alone and not
interfered with, except when he interfered with somebody else; and that the
best government was the government that did as little governing as
possible." A government of this kind is unjust because it leaves men at
the mercy of predatory corporations. Without government management of those
corporations, Wilson thought, the poor would be destined to indefinite
victimization by the wealthy. Previous limits on government power must be
abolished. Accordingly, Progressive political scientist Theodore Woolsey wrote,
"The sphere of the state may reach as far as the nature and needs of man
and of men reach, including intellectual and aesthetic wants of the individual,
and the religious and moral nature of its citizens." [Of course, Wilson’s take on the “earlier view” of an ideal
government was not shared by those to whom he attributed it, the framers of the
Constitution. It was merely the product of Wilson’s imagination that served his
own agenda.]
However, this transformation is
still in the future, for Progress takes place through historical development. A
sign of the Progressives' unlimited trust in unlimited political authority is
Dewey's remark in his "Ethics of Democracy" that Plato's Republic
presents us with the "perfect man in the perfect state." What Plato's
Socrates had presented as a thought experiment to expose the nature and limits
of political life is taken by Dewey to be a laudable obliteration of the
private sphere by government mandate. In a remark that the Founders would have
found repugnant, Progressive political scientist John Burgess wrote that
"the most fundamental and indispensable mark of statehood" was
"the original, absolute, unlimited, universal power over the individual
subject, and all associations of subjects." [West
is no doubt correct here but there is that statement by Madison that “the first
task of government is to control the governed,” with few if any limits to how
this control is to be achieved. And I wonder if West sees any danger in the
response of the government to 9/11, e.g., the Patriot Act? This remains to be
seen.]
6. Domestic Policy
For the Founders, domestic
policy, as we have seen, concentrated on securing the persons and properties of
the people against violence by means of a tough criminal law against murder,
rape, robbery, and so on. Further, the civil law had to provide for the poor to
have access to acquiring property by allowing the buying and selling of labor
and property through voluntary contracts and a legal means of establishing
undisputed ownership. The burden of proof was on government if there was to be any
limitation on the free use of that property. Thus, licensing and zoning were
rare. [The issue is not decided by saying that
licensing and zoning were rare; rather, the issue is how that generation
understood licensing and zoning, whether such laws were legitimate or not. There
is little evidence to suggest that such laws were considered suspect by that
generation, to say nothing of more intrusive laws and institutions such as the
creation of penitentiaries which were totalitarian institutions that sought to
re-make human beings by means of conversion. These institutions were what
Tocqueville came to study when he came to the U.S.]
Laws regulating sexual conduct
aimed at the formation of lasting marriages so that children would be born and
provided for by those whose interest and love was most likely to lead to their
proper care, with minimal government involvement needed because most families
would be intact. [If I am not mistaken, there were
virtually no laws regulating sexual conduct, as West notes. But he does not
note that there were laws regulating the rights or lack thereof of women in
marriage, meaning that it was not considered illegitimate for government to
intrude into the private sphere of marriage.]
Finally, the Founders tried to
promote the moral conditions of an independent, hard-working citizenry by laws
and educational institutions that would encourage such virtues as honesty,
moderation, justice, patriotism, courage, frugality, and industry. Government
support of religion (typically generic Protestantism) was generally practiced
with a view to these ends. One can see the Founders' view of the connection
between religion and morality in such early laws as the Northwest Ordinance of
1787, which said that government should promote education because
"[r]eligion, morality, and knowledge [are] necessary to good government
and the happiness of mankind."
In Progressivism, the domestic
policy of government had two main concerns.
First, government must protect the
poor and other victims of capitalism through redistribution of resources,
anti-trust laws, government control over the details of commerce and
production: i.e., dictating at what prices things must be sold, methods of
manufacture, government participation in the banking system, and so on.
Second, government must become involved
in the "spiritual" development of its citizens -- not, of course,
through promotion of religion, but through protecting the environment
("conservation"), education (understood as education to personal creativity),
and spiritual uplift through subsidy and promotion of the arts and culture.
7. Foreign Policy
For the Founders, foreign and
domestic policy were supposed to serve the same end: the security of the people
in their person and property. Therefore, foreign policy was conceived primarily
as defensive. Foreign attack was to be deterred by having strong arms or
repulsed by force. Alliances were to be entered into with the understanding
that a self-governing nation must keep itself aloof from the quarrels of other
nations, except as needed for national defense. Government had no right to
spend the taxes or lives of its own citizens to spread democracy to other
nations or to engage in enterprises aiming at imperialistic hegemony.
The Progressives believed that a
historical process was leading all mankind to freedom, or at least the advanced
nations. Following Hegel, they thought of the march of freedom in history as
having a geographical basis. It was in Europe, not Asia or Africa, where modern
science and the modern state had made their greatest advances. The nations
where modern science had properly informed the political order were thought to
be the proper leaders of the world.
The Progressives also believed
that the scientifically educated leaders of the advanced nations (especially
America, Britain, and France) should not hesitate to rule the less advanced
nations in the interest of ultimately bringing the world into freedom, assuming
that supposedly inferior peoples could be brought into the modern world at all.
Political scientist Charles Merriam openly called for a policy of colonialism
on a racial basis:
[T]he Teutonic races must civilize the
politically uncivilized. They must have a colonial policy. Barbaric races, if
incapable, may be swept away…. On the same principle, interference with the
affairs of states not wholly barbaric, but nevertheless incapable of effecting
political organization for themselves, is fully justified.
Progressives therefore embraced
a much more active and indeed imperialistic foreign policy than the Founders
did. [Does this mean that the framers, in West’s mind,
also embraced an “active and imperialistic foreign policy?” From this, it is
unclear where West stands on this issue. But it does seem important in
determining how far the progressives strayed from the framers’ understanding of
the Constitution.] In "Expansion and Peace" (1899), Theodore
Roosevelt wrote that the best policy is imperialism on a global scale:
"every expansion of a great civilized power means a victory for law,
order, and righteousness." Thus, the American occupation of the
Philippines, T.R. believed, would enable "one more fair spot of the
world's surface" to be "snatched from the forces of darkness.
Fundamentally the cause of expansion is the cause of peace."
Woodrow Wilson advocated
American entry into World War I, boasting that America's national interest had
nothing to do with it. Wilson had no difficulty sending American troops to die
in order to make the world safe for democracy, regardless of whether or not it
would make America more safe or less. The trend to turn power over to
multinational organizations also begins in this period, as may be seen in
Wilson's plan for a League of Nations, under whose rules America would have
delegated control over the deployment of its own armed forces to that body.
8. Who Should Rule, Experts or
Representatives?
The Founders thought that laws
should be made by a body of elected officials with roots in local communities.
They should not be "experts," but they should have "most wisdom to
discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society"
(Madison). The wisdom in question was the kind on display in The Federalist,
which relentlessly dissected the political errors of the previous decade in
terms accessible to any person of intelligence and common sense.
The Progressives wanted to sweep
away what they regarded as this amateurism in politics. [If the framers were proponents of “amateurism in politics” why did they
jettison, across the board, term limits? No office created by the Constitution
had a limited tenure. From the perspective of the times in 1787, the
Constitution was “radical” in that it not only jettisoned term limits but also
jettisoned, with one exception, the practice of direct popular elections. It is
even possible to say that the Constitution redefines the definition of
“republican government” when Publius argues, for example, that the Supreme
Court is a “republican” institution despite the facts that the justices are
appointed and are appointed for “life.”] They had confidence that modern
science had superseded the perspective of the liberally educated statesman.
Only those educated in the top universities, preferably in the social sciences,
were thought to be capable of governing. Politics was regarded as too complex
for common sense to cope with. Government had taken on the vast responsibility
not merely of protecting the people against injuries, but of managing the
entire economy as well as providing for the people's spiritual well-being. Only
government agencies staffed by experts informed by the most advanced modern
science could manage tasks previously handled within the private sphere.
Government, it was thought, needed to be led by those who see where history is
going, who understand the ever-evolving idea of human dignity. [West would have a better argument if he distinguished not
between the framers’ alleged endorsement of amateur politics and the
progressives’ endorsement of expert government but between the latter and the
framers’ reliance – they hoped – on those men who were seen as most capable by
their communities, representing “the better classes,” as it were, who could
discern the public interest. The framers were “elitist” but the elite they
endorsed were not characterized by “expertise,” as endorsed by the
progressives.]
The Progressives did not intend
to abolish democracy, to be sure. They wanted the people's will to be more
efficiently translated into government policy. [This
assertion, I submit, is just plain wrong. It is what the progressives said they
wanted, but it wasn’t “the people’s will” that would be “more efficiently
translated into government policy” but rather the people’s will as the
progressives thought it should be. West, like so many others, fails to see that
the progressives’ reforms were a two way street, at least, by which the
progressives could mold public opinion – and I would argue that “public
opinion” is little more than “the people’s will” recast as the predominant
class wants it to be – to suit their purposes.]But what democracy meant
for the Progressives is that the people would take power out of the hands of
locally elected officials and political parties and place it instead into the
hands of the central government, which would in turn establish administrative
agencies run by neutral experts, scientifically trained, to translate the
people's inchoate will into concrete policies. Local politicians would be
replaced by neutral city managers presiding over technically trained staffs.
Politics in the sense of favoritism and self-interest would disappear and be
replaced by the universal rule of enlightened bureaucracy. [I don’t think I have to add much here as West himself
illustrates that the progressives were not much interested in ‘democracy,’ only
he seems to think that this only applied at the local level. But the
progressive goal was to replace “politicians” understood as those who take
their bearings from their constituents, rather than from, say, the dictates of
“progress.”]
Progressivism and Today's
liberalism
This should be enough to show
how radically the Progressives broke with the earlier tradition. Of what
relevance is all of this today?
[Yes, they did break
with “the earlier tradition” but West’s account of that tradition leaves a lot
to be desired, leading me to think that this concern with the progressives is actually
concerned with remaking that “earlier tradition” to suit the purposes of West
and other “conservatives.” This is important insofar as it goes to how we
assess the work of the framers. If in fact West’s take on the framers is
inaccurate and if this means that there is more commonality between the framers
and the progressives, and if both of these options are defective, then it is
necessary to look for an alternative to both of them. That is, we cannot simply
recur to “the earlier tradition” if we wish to repair the defects of our way of
being in the world. Perhaps this is what West is doing, but disguising his
remaking of “the earlier tradition” as a recurrence thereto. A problem though
is that insofar as West is making up “a tradition,” he is building on sand, as
it were, and his edifice will probably come crashing down. There is, though, a
tradition that is not made up but needs recovery, and this is what Storing was
about with the Anti-Federalists and his argument that they were part of the
founding along with the Federalists, that they provide not only a perceptive
critique of the Federalists’ conception of politics and government but even
offer corrections to, modifications of the defective political order created by
the Constitution. Hence, the title of his volume: What Were the Anti-Federalists For. But we cannot access the
Anti-Federalists and their thought until we get beyond the prejudice that the
political order created in 1787 is without defect and that our defects today
are due to, say, the allegedly radical break created by the progressives. Our
politics is defective but, as Benjamin Franklin saw so clearly, some of these
defects are attributable to the Constitution itself and should not be blamed on
alleged subversives like the progressives.]
Most obviously, the roots of the
liberalism with which we are familiar lie in the Progressive Era. It is not
hard to see the connections between the eight features of Progressivism that I
have just sketched and later developments. This is true not only for the New
Deal period of Franklin Roosevelt, but above all for the major institutional
and policy changes that were initiated between 1965 and 1975. Whether one
regards the transformation of American politics over the past century as good
or bad, the foundations of that transformation were laid in the Progressive
Era. Today's liberals, or the teachers of today's liberals, learned to reject
the principles of the founding from their teachers, the Progressives.
Nevertheless, in some respects,
the Progressives were closer to the founding than they are to today's
liberalism. So let us conclude by briefly considering the differences between
our current liberalism and Progressivism. We may sum up these differences in
three words: science, sex, and progress.
First, in regard to science, today's
liberals have a far more ambivalent attitude than the Progressives did. The
latter had no doubt that science either had all the answers or was on the road
to discovering them. Today, although the prestige of science remains great, it
has been greatly diminished by the multicultural perspective that sees science
as just another point of view. [Wow! So modern science
has been undermined not by some its ambiguous accomplishments, such as nuclear
weapons and power, but by the ravings of ideologues! And this says nothing of
the growing suspicions that the “modern project,” underwritten by modern
science, is unsustainable.]
Two decades ago, in a widely
publicized report of the American Council of Learned Societies, several leading
professors in the humanities proclaimed that the "ideal of objectivity and
disinterest," which "has been essential to the development of
science," has been totally rejected by "the consensus of most of the
dominant theories" of today. Instead, today's consensus holds that
"all thought does, indeed, develop from particular standpoints,
perspectives, interests." So science is just a Western perspective on
reality, no more or less valid than the folk magic believed in by an African or
Pacific Island tribe that has never been exposed to modern science.
Second, liberalism today has become
preoccupied with sex. Sexual activity is to be freed from all traditional
restraints. In the Founders' view, sex was something that had to be regulated
by government because of its tie to the production and raising of children.
Practices such as abortion and homosexual conduct -- the choice for which was
recently equated by the Supreme Court with the right "to define one's own
concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human
life" -- are considered fundamental rights.
The connection between sexual
liberation and Progressivism is indirect, for the Progressives, who tended to
follow Hegel in such matters, were rather old-fashioned in this regard. [This assertion is just plain wrong because the progressives
were not “old-fashioned” insofar as they embraced eugenics and they were the
ones who, for reasons including that of protecting the status of the medical
establishment, initiated the regulation of abortions. It is hard to think of
more intrusive policies with regard to sex and its consequences. And despite
what West says immediately below, it is clear that the progressives did not
“celebrate” choice and, certainly, did not celebrate choice for those deemed to
be “inferior,” whether these “inferiors” were found at home or abroad.] But
there was one premise within Progressivism that may be said to have led to the
current liberal understanding of sex. That is the disparagement of nature and
the celebration of human will, the idea that everything of value in life is
created by man's choice, not by nature or necessity.
Once sexual conduct comes under
the scrutiny of such a concern, it is not hard to see that limiting sexual
expression to marriage -- where it is clearly tied to nature's concern for
reproduction -- could easily be seen as a kind of limitation of human liberty.
Once self-realization (Dewey's term, for whom it was still tied to reason and
science) is transmuted into self-expression (today's term), all barriers to
one's sexual idiosyncrasies must appear arbitrary and tyrannical.
Third, contemporary liberals no longer
believe in progress. The Progressives' faith in progress was rooted in their
faith in science, as one can see especially in the European thinkers whom they
admired, such as Hegel and Comte. When science is seen as just one perspective
among many, then progress itself comes into question.
The idea of progress presupposes
that the end result is superior to the point of departure, but contemporary
liberals are generally wary of expressing any sense of the superiority of the
West, whether intellectually, politically, or in any other way. They are
therefore disinclined to support any foreign policy venture that contributes to
the strength of America or of the West.
Liberal domestic policy follows
the same principle. It tends to elevate the "other" to moral
superiority over against those whom the Founders would have called the decent
and the honorable, the men of wisdom and virtue. The more a person is lacking,
the greater is his or her moral claim on society. The deaf, the blind, the
disabled, the stupid, the improvident, the ignorant, and even (in a 1984 speech
of presidential candidate Walter Mondale) the sad -- those who are lowest are
extolled as the sacred other. [Of course, almost anyone
with knowledge of how our institutions serving these “others” work in reality
could destroy West’s argument that our political order has “elevated the
‘other’” above those deemed to be “decent and honorable, the men of wisdom and
virtue.” And I cannot help noting that for West, “the deaf, the blind, [and]
the disabled” are equated with “the stupid” and “the improvident.” Little else
is needed to illustrate the reasonableness of my rejoinder to West here.]
Surprisingly, although
Progressivism, supplemented by the more recent liberalism, has transformed
America in some respects, the Founders' approach to politics is still alive in
some areas of American life. One has merely to attend a jury trial over a
murder, rape, robbery, or theft in a state court to see the older system of the
rule of law at work. Perhaps this is one reason why America seems so
conservative to the rest of the Western world. Among ordinary Americans, as
opposed to the political, academic, professional, and entertainment elites,
there is still a strong attachment to property rights, self-reliance, and
heterosexual marriage; a wariness of university-certified "experts";
and an unapologetic willingness to use armed forces in defense of their
country.
The first great battle for the
American soul was settled in the Civil War. The second battle for America's
soul, initiated over a century ago, is still raging. The choice for the
Founders' constitutionalism or the Progressive-liberal administrative state is
yet to be fully resolved.
Thomas G. West is a Professor of
Politics at the University of Dallas, a Director and Senior Fellow of the
Claremont Institute, and author of Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in
the Origins of America (Rowman and Littlefield, 1997).
Commentary by William A.
Schambra
[Generally speaking,
Schambra, like West, is all too convinced that the framers’ Constitution and
the political order it helped create is without defect or without significant
defect. Unlike West, Schambra merely asserts that that constitutional order has
not been overwhelmed by the progressives and their political project. Hence,
the issue as I see it then, is not joined here and this exchange resembles,
therefore, an episode of The Capitol Hill Gang or some such TV show where the
intensity of the rhetoric belies the agreement that underlies the alleged
antagonists.
As Schambra puts it:
As Schambra puts it:
“As much as the
Progressives succeeded in challenging the intellectual underpinnings of the
American constitutional system, they nonetheless faced the difficulty that the
system itself -- the large commercial republic and a separation of powers,
reflecting and cultivating individual self-interest and ambition -- remained in
place. As their early modern designers hoped and predicted, these institutions
continued to generate a certain kind of political behavior in accord with
presuppositions of the Founders even as Progressive elites continued for the
past 100 years to denounce that behavior as self-centered, materialistic, and
insufficiently community-minded and public-spirited.”
Now, it seems to me
that for Schambra, if in fact the original scheme is still in place, if the
center has held, then all is well with the republic. And as a result, Schambra
does not have to actually confront the progressives’ critique of that scheme as
creating a politics that is “self-centered, materialistic, and insufficiently
community-minded and public-spirited” because it, the original scheme, was all
of those things from the time of its creation.
Apparently, all that
is needed is to recover “the Founders’ constitutionalism” and to do this all we
need do is to follow the lead of the likes of Leo Strauss, “Harry Jaffa,
Herbert Storing, Martin Diamond, Harry Clor, Allan Bloom, [and] Irving
Kristol.” And if we do this, we will, all of us, arrive at certain conclusions,
listed by Schambra, the jist of which is that all is well.
For example:
For example:
“Speaking of Hamilton, his essays in The Federalist suggesting
the need for a powerful executive branch that would lead America into a
position of international prominence sustained conservatism's new understanding
of America's role in the world, severing it from the isolationism that had
previously marred conservative doctrine.”
Well, there you have it. Cite Hamilton’s argument for “a powerful
executive branch” that would make the U.S. a world power and there is no need
to confront or even mention the Anti-Federalist argument that “charged. . .the
Federalists [with] more or less deliberately using an argument about means to
enlarge the ends of government, shifting their gaze from individual liberty to
visions of national empire and glory. . . .Indeed the stress place by
Federalists on national defense and a vigorous commercial policy often seemed
to mask a radical shift in direction from the protection of individual liberty
to the pursuit of national riches and glory. . . .The Anti-Federalists
generally held to what Hamilton scornfully called ‘the novel and absurd
experiment in politics of tying up the hands of government from offensive war
founded upon reasons of state’; and they saw in Hamilton’s scorn dangerous
dreams of national glory.” [What the
Anti-Federalist Were For, pp. 29, 30, 31]
As Storing makes clear here, the debate between the Federalists and
the Anti-Federalists was ultimately a debate about the ends of government,
about whether a republic should or could pursue “dangerous dreams of national
glory” or whether it should pursue individual liberty. The “isolationism” that
Schambra says “marred conservative doctrine” is a reflection of the
Anti-Federalist concern that a political order seeking “national riches and
glory” cannot be or long remain a republic. And only the most obtuse today would
deny that this is a real issue, an issue whose resolution has significant
implications for the character of a political order.
This illustrates the danger of both West’s and Schambra’s arguments,
the danger of thinking that all we need do is recur to founders’ Constitution.
Because by doing so, we blind ourselves to issues, real issues, issues that
divided the founding generation and still divide us or should divide us today.
And by putting these blinders on, we cannot see how we got to where we are, to
say nothing of seeing where we should be going. It is an interesting state of
affairs.]
Like the volume to which he has
contributed, Tom West's remarks reflect a pessimism about the decisively
debilitating effect of Progressivism on American politics. The essayists are
insufficiently self-aware -- about their own contributions and those of their
distinguished teachers. That is, they are not sufficiently aware that they
themselves are part of an increasingly vibrant and aggressive movement to
recover the Founders' constitutionalism -- a movement that could only have been
dreamt of when I entered graduate school in the early '70s.
To be sure, the Progressive
project accurately described herein did indeed seize and come to control major
segments of American cultural and political life. It certainly came to dominate
the first modern foundations, the universities, journalism, and most other
institutions of American intellectual life. But, as Mr. West suggests, it
nonetheless failed in its effort to change entirely the way everyday American
political life plays itself out.
As much as the Progressives
succeeded in challenging the intellectual underpinnings of the American
constitutional system, they nonetheless faced the difficulty that the system
itself -- the large commercial republic and a separation of powers, reflecting
and cultivating individual self-interest and ambition -- remained in place. As
their early modern designers hoped and predicted, these institutions continued
to generate a certain kind of political behavior in accord with presuppositions
of the Founders even as Progressive elites continued for the past 100 years to
denounce that behavior as self-centered, materialistic, and insufficiently
community-minded and public-spirited.
The Progressive Foothold
The Progressive system managed
to gain a foothold in American politics only when it made major compromises
with the Founders' constitutionalism. The best example is the Social Security
system: Had the Progressives managed to install a "pure," community-minded
system, it would have been an altruistic transfer of wealth from the rich to
the vulnerable aged in the name of preserving the sense of national oneness or
national community. It would have reflected the enduring Progressive conviction
that we're all in this together -- all part of one national family, as former
New York Governor Mario Cuomo once put it.
Indeed, modern liberals do often
defend Social Security in those terms. But in fact, FDR knew the American
political system well enough to rely on other than altruistic impulses to
preserve Social Security past the New Deal. The fact that it's based on the
myth of individual accounts -- the myth that Social Security is only returning
to me what I put in -- is what has made this part of the 20th century's liberal
project almost completely unassailable politically. As FDR intended, Social
Security endures because it draws as much on self-interested individualism as
on self-forgetting community-mindedness.
As this illustrates, the New
Deal, for all its Progressive roots, is in some sense less purely Progressive
than LBJ's Great Society. In the Great Society, we had more explicit and direct
an application of the Progressive commitment to rule by social science experts,
largely unmitigated initially by political considerations.
That was precisely Daniel
Patrick Moynihan's insight in Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding. Almost
overnight, an obscure, untested academic theory about the cause of juvenile
delinquency -- namely, Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin's structure of
opportunity theory -- leapt from the pages of the social science journals into
the laws waging a war on poverty.
Indeed, the entire point of the
Great Society was to reshape the behavior of the poor -- to move them off the
welfare rolls by transforming their behavior according to what social sciences
had taught us about such undertakings. It was explicitly a project of social
engineering in the best Progressive tradition. Sober liberal friends of the
Great Society would later admit that a central reason for its failure was
precisely the fact that it was an expertise-driven engineering project, which
had never sought the support or even the acquiescence of popular majorities.
The engineering excesses of the
Great Society and the popular reaction against them meant that the 1960s were
the beginning of the first serious challenge to the Progressive model for
America -- a challenge that the New Deal hadn't precipitated earlier because it
had carefully accommodated itself to the Founders' political system. Certainly
the New Left took aim at the Great Society's distant, inhumane, patronizing,
bureaucratic social engineering; but for our purposes, this marked as well the
beginning of the modern conservative response to Progressivism, which has
subsequently enjoyed some success, occupying the presidency, both houses of
Congress, and perhaps soon the Supreme Court.
Curiously, for Mr. West, this is
precisely the moment -- he settles on the year 1965 -- at which Progressivism
achieves near complete dominance of American politics.
Recovering the Founders'
constitutionalism
Central to the modern
conservative response, I would suggest, is precisely a recovery of the
Founders' constitutionalism -- serious attention to the
"truth-claims" of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution,
and The Federalist Papers. This had begun in the mid-1950s but
really gathered steam in the '60s. It was above all a result, as John Marini's
essay in The Progressive Revolution in Politics and Political Science
suggests, of Leo Strauss's acknowledgement that the constitutional democracies
of the West, no matter how weakened by the internal critique of Progressive
elites, had alone managed to resist modern totalitarianism and were worthy of a
spirited intellectual defense.
Suddenly, the founding
documents, which had long been consigned to the dustbin of history, came once
again to be studied seriously, not as reflection of some passing historical
moment of the late 18th century, but rather as potential sources of truth about
politics, government, and human nature. Harry Jaffa, Herbert Storing, Martin
Diamond, Harry Clor, Allan Bloom, Irving Kristol, and so forth all devoted at
least some of their efforts to serious study of the Founders' thought -- a
process that the volume before us continues.
I would argue that linking the
conservative resurgence to a recovery of the Constitution was in fact a
critical part of its ability to flourish in a way that conservatism had not
otherwise managed earlier in the 20th century.
- Attention to constitutionalism sustained conservatism's appreciation for the central place of individual liberty in American political life, but now tempered by other principles that prevent it from flying off to the extremes of libertarianism, with its rather abstract theoretical commitment to individual liberty to the exclusion of all else.
- The constitutional idea of equality helped us resist the liberal shift from equality of opportunity to equality of results, but it also severed the new conservatism from past versions of itself which had unhappily emphasized class, status, and hierarchy -- notions which had never taken hold in America.
- Attention to the concept of the commercial republic shored up the idea of free markets but without relapsing into a simplistic worship of the marketplace, given Hamilton's view of the need for an active federal government in creating and preserving a large national common market.
- Speaking of Hamilton, his essays in The Federalist suggesting the need for a powerful executive branch that would lead America into a position of international prominence sustained conservatism's new understanding of America's role in the world, severing it from the isolationism that had previously marred conservative doctrine.
- Finally, a recovery of the Constitution's concept of decentralist federalism informed conservatism's defense of family, neighborhood, local community, and local house of worship; that is, it gave us a way to defend local community against Progressivism's doctrine of national community but within a strong national framework, without falling into anarchic doctrines of "township sovereignty" or concurrent majorities.
In other words, to some degree,
modern conservatism owes its success to a recovery of and an effort to root
itself in the Founders' constitutionalism. Frank Meyer was famous for his
doctrine of fusionism -- a fusing of libertarian individualism with religious
traditionalism. The real fusionism for contemporary conservatism, I would
suggest, is supplied by its effort to recover the Founders' constitutionalism,
which was itself an effort to fuse or blend critical American political
principles like liberty and equality, competent governance and majority rule.
As noted, the Founders'
constitutionalism had continued to shape American politics and public opinion
in a subterranean fashion throughout the 20th century out of sight of, and in
defiance of, the intellectual doctrines and utopian expectations of American
Progressive intellectuals. Modern conservatism "re-theorizes," so to
speak, the constitutional substructure and creates a political movement that,
unlike Progressivism, is sailing with rather than against the prevailing winds
of American political life. That surely makes for smoother sailing.
Mr. West and his co-authors are
all children of this conservative resurgence and are themselves obviously
hoping to link it to a recovery of constitutionalism. So perhaps it is just
modesty that leads them to profess that their efforts and those of their
teachers have come to naught and to insist that Progressivism has succeeded in
destroying America after all.
The Early Constitutionalists
This volume's pessimism also
neglects the critical moment in American history which provided the
indispensable basis for today's effort to recover the Founders' constitutionalism.
As you may know, in the Republican primaries of 1912, Theodore Roosevelt
campaigned for the presidency on a platform of radical constitutional reform
enunciated in his "Charter of Democracy" speech, delivered in
Columbus in February 1912. There and subsequently, he endorsed the full range
of Progressive constitutional reforms: the initiative, referendum, and recall,
including the recall of judges and judicial decisions.
Had Roosevelt managed to win the
nomination of his party as he came close to doing, it is likely that it would
have put its weight behind these reforms and others that appeared later in the
platform of the Progressive Party, including, critically, a more expeditious
method of amending the Constitution. That would probably have meant amendment
by a majority of the popular vote in a majority of the states, as Robert
LaFollette suggested. Had that happened -- had the Constitution come down to us
today amended and re-amended, burdened with all the quick fixes and gimmicks
that, at one point or another over the 20th century, captured fleeting
majorities -- the effort to recover the Founders' constitutionalism and
reorient American politics toward it would obviously have been a much, much
trickier proposition.
This is precisely what William
Howard Taft, Henry Cabot Lodge, Elihu Root, and other conservatives understood.
So they stood against Roosevelt, in spite of deep friendships and in spite of
the certainty of splitting the party and losing the election. For they believed
that the preservation of the Constitution as it came to them from the Founders
had to be their first priority, and they believed that this question would be
settled decisively in the Taft-Roosevelt contest of 1912. When the
constitutionalists succeeded in keeping the magnificent electoral machinery of
the Republican Party out of Roosevelt's hands, they were able to tell
themselves that they had done the one thing needful.
And they were right, I would
argue. In spite of the fact that Progressivism would go on to seize the
commanding intellectual heights of the past century -- in spite of the fact
that law schools, political science departments, high-brow journals, and
foundations alike told us to transcend and forget about the Founders'
Constitution -- it was still there beneath it all, still there largely intact,
waiting for rediscovery, still the official charter of the Republic, no matter
how abused and ridiculed.
This aspect of the election of
1912 -- that is, the contest within the Republican Party between Taft and Roosevelt
about preserving the Constitution -- is almost entirely forgotten today.
Shelves and shelves of dissertations and books have been done on Progressivism
and socialism in that election, but virtually nothing about conservatism. As we
try to recover an understanding of the Founders' Constitution, so also
conservatives need to recover our own history, which has otherwise been
completely ignored by the Progressive academy.
Anyway, let us not neglect the
sacrificial struggles of men like Root, Taft, and Lodge in seeing to it that we
have a constitutional tradition to recover -- or, rather, seeing to it that the
recovery is worthwhile, because the written Constitution has come down to us
largely as it emerged from the pens of the Founders and still commands popular
allegiance.
William A. Schambra is Director
of the Hudson Institute's Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal and
editor of As
Far as Republican Principles Will Admit: Collected Essays of Martin Diamond (American
Enterprise Institute, 1992).
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