''Woodrow Wilson, on the campaign trail in 1912, told voters that it was time for the federal government to be liberated from its outmoded eighteenth-century scheme of checks and balances.''
Why 'liberate' government???
''Government, Wilson said, was a living organism, “accountable to Darwin, not to Newton.” Since no living thing can survive when its organs work against one another, a government must be free to adapt to its times, or else it will perish. The adaptation Wilson had in mind was to neutralize Congress and consolidate power in a vigorous executive.''
What? Neutralize congress! Free will for officials and none for people?
''It was a plan he had been elaborating and revising for more than thirty years, an early version of which, Congressional Government, he completed while still a graduate student at Johns Hopkins.''
Freedom of humans to freedom for government. Wow!
How did 'liberal' (meaning allowing each human to manage and exercise his own free will) change to the demand that all individuals submit to the control of experts and government? Leonard provides a chilling answer.
This is a review of how the 'progressives' moved into the ruling class and removed freedom from American culture in the name of 'Science'. Fascinating!
PART I
The Progressive Ascendancy
Redeeming American Economic Life
Turning Illiberal
Becoming Experts
Efficiency in Business and Public Administration
PART II
The Progressive Paradox
Valuing Labor: What Should Labor Get?
Darwinism in Economic Reform
Eugenics and Race in Economic Reform
Excluding the Unemployable
Excluding Immigrants and the Unproductive
Excluding Women
Epilogue
From the prologue - ''The progressives combined their extravagant faith in science and the state with an outsized confidence in their own expertise as a reliable, even necessary, guide to the public good. They were so sure of their own expertise as a necessary guide to the public good, so convinced of the righteousness of their crusade to redeem America, that they rarely considered the unintended consequences of ambitious but untried reforms.
Even more so, they failed to confront the reality that the experts—no less than the partisans, bosses, and industrialists they aimed to unseat—could have interests and biases of their own.''
''It is important to understand that the progressive campaign to exclude the inferior from employment was not (merely) the product of an unreflective prejudice. Progressive arguments warning of inferiority were deeply informed by elaborate scientific discourses of heredity. Darwinism, eugenics, and race science recast spiritual or moral failure as biological inferiority and offered scientific legitimacy to established American hierarchies of race, gender, class, and intellect.
Economic progressives were profoundly influenced by Darwin and other evolutionists. Chapter 6 shows how the economic progressives (and their critics) drew deeply on evolutionary science’s conceptions of heredity, progress, competition, selection, fitness, organism, and the role of human beings in controlling nature. Chapter 7 shows the uses economic progressives made of race science and eugenics, the social control of human breeding.
Among other things, biological ideas offered Progressivism a conceptual scheme capable of accommodating the great contradiction at the heart of Progressive Era reform—its view of the poor as victims deserving state uplift and as threats requiring state restraint."
''Eugenics and race science are today discredited. But the progressive vision of how to govern scientifically under industrial capitalism lives on. Expertise in the service of an administrative state, what progressives called social control, has survived the discredited notions once used to uphold it. Indeed, it has thrived.'' Chilling.
''Government, Wilson said, was a living organism, “accountable to Darwin, not to Newton.” Since no living thing can survive when its organs work against one another, a government must be free to adapt to its times, or else it will perish. The adaptation Wilson had in mind was to neutralize Congress and consolidate power in a vigorous executive.'' (65)
Government is alive in a more important way than individuals. Germany, Russia both adopted this belief at this time. Hitler, Stalin destroyed (30 million? 65 million?) in service to this concept.
A stunning theme - ''THE MENACE OF THE UNEMPLOYABLE''
''The term “unemployable,” popularized by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, was a misnomer, for many of the unemployable were, in fact, employed and others desperately wanted to be. The Webbs used the term to describe people incapable of work, as well as those who could work but who accepted wages below a standard reformers judged acceptable. The latter group posed the threat.''
Sacrifice people to heartless theory. What theory?
''Of all ways of dealing with these unfortunate parasites, the Webbs opined, “the most ruinous to the community is to allow them unrestrainedly to compete as wage earners.” For the unemployable class, “unemployment is not a mark of social disease, but actually of social health.” When New York state established America’s first industrial labor colony in 1911, it was applauded by the AALL as a scientific and humane method of keeping the unemployable out of labor markets, thus improving employment prospects for the worthy poor.''
This is done as ''Science''!
The last three paragraphs express Leonard's considered conclusions -
''Progressivism reconstructed American liberalism by dismantling the free market of classical liberalism and erecting in its place the welfare state of modern liberalism. The new liberalism discarded economic liberties as archaic impediments to necessary improvements to society’s health, welfare, and morals. It is well known that modern liberalism permanently demoted economic liberties. Few twenty-first-century progressives think that minimum wages or maximum hours or occupational licensing unjustly infringe upon a worker’s right to freely contract on her own behalf. But the original progressives’ illiberal turn did not stop at property and contract rights.''
This attack Liberty did not end.
''They assaulted political and civil liberties, too, trampling on individual rights to person, to free movement, to free expression, to marriage and to reproduction. The progressives denied millions these basic freedoms, on grounds that their inferiority threatened America’s economic and hereditary security.''
''They were wrong on both counts. That did not stop them, nor has it stopped those who, unaware of the history, repeat the same false claims today.''
Leonard writes in a rational, analytical style. Nevertheless, this history is stunning. The emotional impact can/should be profound.
Around seven-hundred footnotes. Provides insight into the present by looking into the past.
''The past is not dead, it is not even past''
(See also - ''The Sacred Project of American Sociolgy'' - Christian Smith; ''Progress and Anarchy in Modern America'' - Robert Nisbet; ''Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning'', by Jonah Goldberg; the New Work by Arthur Herman “1917 - Wilson and Lenin’’, great!)
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- Monocled LibertarianReviewed in Canada on October 31, 2016
this is a great resource to learn about it
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