Progressivism: An Arrogant and Deadly Worldview

September 26, 2024 by J.B. Shurk

Call me crazy, but I don’t trust government officials who believe that population growth (AKA “our carbon footprint”) is the most pressing problem on the planet.  If we had bureaucrats who were encouraging us to get married early and have lots of children, I might listen to what they have to say.  If we had politicians who spoke endlessly of cheap energy, rising wages, higher standards of living, and the potential for all hard workers to become wealthy, I’d probably throw an attaboy in their general direction.  But why would I follow anyone who wants to control what I eat, confiscate what I earn, regulate how I live, and leave me with nothing?  When “authorities” tell us that too many people are alive today, we should probably see their words as a threat worth taking seriously.

That’s why I don’t trust the experimental “vaccines” that the government’s favorite pharmaceutical companies managed to manufacture in record time (shortening a process that normally takes fifteen or more years into a miraculously innovative seven or eight months).  “Here, take this injection.  It will save your life.”  Uh, you first.  Why don’t we see how your health fares before we start playing Russian roulette with the global population?

It’s nothing personal.  Maybe there are some good, decent scientists out there who actually want to fight disease.  But there are a whole lot of other scientists who talk quite openly about why humanity must cull the herd.  “Sustainable growth” sounds hunky-dory until you realize that you are the unsustainable growth that the “experts” want to stem.  Once a person has that epiphany, the magic juice in those COVID syringes looks a little less magical.  So you’re saying you want to save my friends and me today, so that you can depopulate the planet tomorrow?  Never mind, I’m good.  I just remembered that I have to be somewhere...far away.

Last week I wrote about Ned Ryun’s excellent new book, American Leviathan, in which he recounts the rise of the unconstitutional administrative state.  In describing how “Progressive Statists” took over the U.S. government, Ryun examines not only how an unaccountable bureaucracy replaced the Founders’ designs for limited government, but also how cancerous ideologies animated powerful Americans to repudiate the Constitution’s constraints against government overreach.  

Woodrow Wilson and his ilk detested “popular sovereignty” — the idea that ordinary people should be the arbiters of how their nation runs — and demanded that “the best boys from the best colleges” be in charge.  In their arrogant and prejudicial minds, early-twentieth-century “progressives” believed that it was absurd for lowly, less educated Americans to be entrusted with any say over the operations of the federal government.  The experts are meant to rule, and the riffraff are meant to obey!  That un-American motto became the government’s guiding principle to this day.

As Ryun repeatedly points out in his book, Wilson saw the U.S. Constitution as an “outdated” and “defective” document that prevented the best people from doing what they knew to be best for the nation.  (Sound familiar?)  “Living political constitutions,” Wilson insisted, “must be Darwinian in structure and practice” — which is to say that the meaning of the Constitution must “evolve” according to the needs of the bureaucrats running things.

Wilson and his acolytes wanted to build a government that operated beyond the reach of politics (and, therefore, beyond the reach of the American people).  They wanted to fill this government with bureaucrats who had been scientifically trained to diagnose and address the nation’s “evolving” challenges.  And they wanted to provide these unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats with independent powers that allowed them to do what they thought best at any given time.  In this way, the original “progressives” claimed, the business of government would be conducted efficiently and scientifically.

No doubt today’s “progressives” would still cheer Woodrow Wilson’s words as their own, but after a century of unconstitutional bureaucracy run amok, ask yourself this simple question: would anyone call any part of the federal government “efficient” today?  On the contrary, government efficiency is a punch line to a common joke: if you want something done in twice the time and with ten times the cost, then let the government build it.  

After Lyndon Johnson declared “war on poverty,” the federal government spent trillions of dollars only to make Americans relatively poorer while greatly increasing wealth inequality.  Four decades after the creation of the Department of Education, American children have never performed so poorly on standardized tests.  Barack Obama and the Democrats insisted on “saving” Americans from high medical costs by nationalizing health care — only to give us a broken hospital system that is even more costly.  

Anything the government touches turns into an inefficient and poorly run enterprise, which is why so many Americans correctly feared that Obamacare would create the medical equivalent of the U.S. Postal Service or the local DMV.  In turn, “the best boys from the best colleges” have turned postal employees and Department of Motor Vehicle personnel into essential workers for registering voters and collecting ballots.  Nothing gives Americans confidence in the security of their elections like putting bureaucrats associated with incompetence in charge of processing votes.  Instead of building a government renowned for its “scientific efficiency,” the “Progressive Statists” have constructed a broken-down system synonymous with ineptitude and corruption.

By putting blind faith in the discriminatory idea that some Americans deserve to govern others, “progressives” have spent the last century dismantling the Constitution’s safeguards for limited government, individual rights, and economic freedom.  In their place, we have a bureaucratic “blob” that does what it wants without regard for the citizenry.  Because, after all, the blob knows best.

As Ryun articulates in American Leviathan, “Progressive Statists” have not only given us bad government but also an army of bureaucrats who place dogmatic faith in the inerrant promulgations of “Science.”  “Trust the Science” is not a modern mantra.  Wilson and his lot implored early-twentieth-century Americans to do the same.  

In a chapter entitled “When False Gods Ring Hollow,” Ryun quotes Michael Crichton: “Imagine that there is a new scientific theory that warns of an impending crisis, and points to a way out.  This theory quickly draws support from leading scientists, politicians, and celebrities around the world.  Research is funded by distinguished philanthropies, and carried out at prestigious universities.  The crisis is reported frequently in the media.  The science is taught in college and high school classrooms.”  As Ryun makes clear, Crichton wasn’t writing about COVID or “global warming.”  He was describing “progressivism’s” love affair with the “science” of eugenics and the U.S. government’s dalliance with forced sterilization of “inferior” races.  Wilson and his “progressive” tribe were huge fans.

If the administrative state is filled with the “best boys from the best colleges,” and those “best boys” all decide that some kind of “science” is “true,” then objections from the people must be ignored.  After all, as Ryun states poignantly, if the State’s primary goal is scientific efficiency, then “there is no individualism, no individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all, and no Creator that has endowed life in all forms.  There is the state and society, which ultimately deem who and what are necessary for the health of the whole if mankind is to reach the state of apotheosis.  And for the whole to be healthy, to progress to a higher plane, anyone or anything deemed parasitical must be ejected.  Any imperfection that might slow progress and lead to inefficiency must be dealt with.”

Last century’s so-called “experts” believed in eugenics.  Today’s so-called experts believe in mandatory injections with experimental “vaccines,” anthropogenic “climate change,” and the “virtues” of depopulation.  “Progressive” government is inefficient folly; “progressive” science, however, is just plain deadly.