Progressivism Has Always Been Authoritarian, Anti-Democratic, and Reactionary
Former President Donald Trump has survived yet another assassination attempt less than two weeks after a judge postponed his sentencing on thirty-four felony convictions related to hush money paid to Stormy Daniels. For the moment, all obstacles to Trump standing for the November presidential election seemed to be cleared away.
Trump’s supporters are reeling from what they perceive as the unprecedented assault on America’s republican norms. That’s understandable given the relative stability of electoral politics in the decades before Trump came on the scene. However, those of us who grew up in the 1970s remember the assassination attempts on Presidents Ford and Reagan just a few years after the successful assassinations of both President John Kennedy and his brother.
People of my generation considered being shot at a normal part of the job for U.S. presidents and presidential candidates.
Nor are deep state machinations to remove a sitting president anything unprecedented. President Nixon was removed from office by a Naval intelligence officer posing as a reporter working with the number two man at the FBI. As with Trump, the media dutifully swayed the public against the popular president for reprisals that would be considered minor today, post-Snowden.
But many Americans believe something is fundamentally different about today’s Democratic Party establishment. Even some prominent Democrats see the party as breaking from its core values by repressing speech and undermining the democratic primaries to install Kamala Harris as its nominee.
Ironically, the truth is stranger than this fiction. The progressive movement has always been authoritarian, anti-democratic, and reactionary.
Since “save our democracy” is the call to arms (literally, for some of its deranged supporters) of today’s progressives, let us begin with progressivism being anti-democratic. Since the beginning of the movement, when it was led by Republicans, progressives have attempted to transfer power away from elected assemblies and to unelected bureaucrats or judges.
This began with the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. Although passed by Congress, it empowered an unelected board of commissioners to both set rates and conduct quasi-judicial proceedings to settle disputes. It set the precedent for Congress to unconstitutionally transfer both its own exclusive power to legislate and the judicial power to the executive.
The New Deal massively expanded on that precedent in creating myriad executive branch regulatory agencies that effectively usurped most legislative power from the elected Congress. This trend has metastasized ever since. Thus, when President Biden wanted to mandate Covid vaccines, he didn’t even bother to approach Congress. He went straight to a regulatory agency of unelected bureaucrats and directed it to write a new rule. No democracy needed.
Throughout the 20th century, progressives were fervent supporters of Supreme Court decisions that similarly usurped legislative power from the elected Congress. Where the Constitution clearly required an amendment for the federal government to exercise a new power, the unelected Supreme Court dutifully found that power hiding between the lines. This was just another way to avoid putting progressive ideas to a popular vote.
None of this is to say democracy is any guarantee of individual liberty. But it is preferable to the autocratic rule of an unelected oligarchy.
As far as being authoritarian, all political movements suffer from that defect, but the progressive movement particularly so. Apart from the obvious enormities of jailing journalists and political opponents during WWI and imprisoning Japanese Americans in concentration camps during WWII, progressivism is more fundamentally authoritarian in its modus operandi for achieving all its societal goals. Without exception, progressives seek to forcibly override the personal choices of individuals and replace them with regulations imposed by the state.
Where Thomas Jefferson famously defined liberty as “unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others,” Woodrow Wilson took a perverse turn on the “unobstructed” idea. In The New Freedom, he answers the question, “What is liberty?” as follows:
“You say of the locomotive that it runs free. What do you mean? You mean that its parts are so assembled and adjusted that friction is reduced to a minimum, and that it has perfect adjustment. We say of a boat skimming the water with light foot, "How free she runs," when we mean, how perfectly she is adjusted to the force of the wind, how perfectly she obeys the great breath out of the heavens that fills her sails. Throw her head up into the wind and see how she will halt and stagger, how every sheet will shiver and her whole frame be shaken, how instantly she is "in irons," in the expressive phrase of the sea. She is free only when you have let her fall off again and have recovered once more her nice adjustment to the forces she must obey and cannot defy.
Human freedom consists in perfect adjustments of human interests and human activities and human energies.”
Where Jefferson saw government as the obstructor of liberty, Wilson saw it as the “adjuster” of human activity. This “adjustment,” of course, is regardless of the individual’s will or rights. Only by allowing the government to adjust your activities can you truly be free.
Monstrous.
That progressivism is reactionary would probably surprise Americans the most. But it is nonetheless true. Calling the movement “progressive” follows the proud American tradition of giving your party or movement a name opposite to its nature. The Federalists weren’t in favor of federalism; they were nationalists. The Anti-Federalists were in favor of federalism. The Whig Party were quite the opposite of the British party after which they were named. And progressivism isn’t about progress; it’s about returning to an earlier, illiberal past.
As Murray Rothbard documents in his exhaustive Conceived in Liberty, America was ruled during the colonial period by a system with principles identical to those of today’s progressives. Throughout the turbulent 17th century, the American colonies were in a state of almost constant rebellion due to the crown or their quasi-feudal proprietors imposing the same regime upon them as do modern progressives upon today’s Americans.
The colonists continuously sought self government through elected assemblies, many guaranteed by their colonial charters. The king or the proprietors would attempt to circumvent or dissolve assemblies and instead impose taxes and regulations through appointed governors, councils, or boards.
Over the course of the 16th century, the aristocratic Lords of Trade evolved into the bureaucratic Board of Trade, as an entire new bureaucratic class was born to administer the king’s prerogatives. These came not from the nobility but from the commonfolk and were characterized by middling abilities combined with uncompromising loyalty to the regime. Sound familiar?
As does modern American regulation, regulation of trade by unelected bureaucrats in colonial America just happened to benefit connected business interests at the expense of their competitors and consumers. But it was much more honest back then. Often, the king or proprietor would simply grant an outright monopoly on trade in tobacco or wool or some other commodity, often directly benefiting the regulator himself, rather than peddle the fiction it was for the good of the victims.
Charges of sedition and treason were commonplace. These could be over political or religious heresies. Colonists were jailed for being in any way critical of the government, even when merely pointing out how it was violating the colony’s written charter. But religious heresies were punished most severely. One could be banished from the colony merely for using the words “thee” and “thou,” indicating one was a Quaker. Return after banishment was punishable by being “whipped through the town” or, in some cases, hanging.
Today’s progressives might try to argue they have rejected such theocracy; that indeed it is today’s MAGA movement that is attempting reimpose the theocratic rule they have defeated. But Rothbard’s work in The Progressive Era puts the lie to this claim. Indeed, the same marriage between religious fanaticism and economic authoritarianism that characterized the 17th century Puritans was alive and well in their descendants in late 19th and early 20th century America.
Along with ridding the economic markets of competitors troublesome to the wealthy trusts, the early progressives also believed it was their duty to save the population from sin and impurity, using the force of government to do so. The women’s suffrage movement began as a single-issue movement to legally ban alcohol, although they eventually added gambling, smoking, and other vices to their self-righteous agenda.
Even this was a throwback to the animosity of some English kings against tobacco and tea as corruptible influences on the people. King James I, for example, wrote a treatise expressing his opposition to tobacco use called A Counterblaste to Tobacco which decried the deleterious health effects of tobacco use, including through what we would now call “secondhand smoke.” Based upon this, he put a heavy tax on tobacco that was disastrous for the colonial economy. Modern residents of New York State understand this story implicitly.
The king and his proprietors also tried to impose compulsory public schooling on the colonies for the express purpose of indoctrinating children into the correct religious and political ideas. The colonists of the time had the good sense to resist these efforts, often with guns, recognizing public schooling for the tyranny it was.
Again, today’s progressives would claim they oppose religious indoctrination in public schools. But public schooling in America began with the early progressives’ own stated goal of “Christianizing the Catholics,” referring to largely immigrant groups of Americans who were not the right kind of Christians.
Yes, Christianity has been banished from the public school system, but not religion. Progressives have merely swapped out Christianity for their new religion, DEI, which has crowded out even basic instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic. Today’s high school graduates couldn’t pass the entrance exam for grammar school one hundred years ago, but they have mastered unqualified obedience to and rabid defense of the omnipotent state.
Nothing has really changed in terms of suppressing speech and dissident opinion, either. The forbidden words are no longer “thee” or “thou” but “he” or “she” said to the “nonbinary.” Rather than denying Calvinist predestination, the new heresy is denying anthropomorphic global warming. The obsessions have changed but the fanatical, authoritarian impulses are the same.
As opposed to some new, unprecedented threat, Americans today face the same old program they eventually rebelled against to form the United States of America. Now, as then, it combines parasitical economic authoritarianism with fanatical micromanagement of their personal behavior, ostensibly to “save” them from themselves.
It is this inability to leave people alone to pursue their separate interests that drives modern progressive foreign policy. Their mad dream to “make the world safe for democracy led to a century of war that cost tens of millions of lives. This same obsession could lead to the death of billions should they manage to involve the great powers in a nuclear confrontation. They must be stopped.
Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?