The “Truths” They Hold: What Progressives Believe

By Paul Kengor

1 We must redistribute the wealth. Wealth is concentrated in the hands of a fortunate few but should be equal and common—like a big pot of stew. It is the job of the federal government to dole out each citizen’s fair share of the wealth.

In the words of Howard Dean, former chair of the Democratic National Committee: “That’s what governments do—is redistribute. The argument is not whether they should redistribute or not, the question is how much we should redistribute.” Unlike the radicals of the French and Russian revolutions, leftists in America have not tried to seize all the “means of production” at once by force. Instead, they aspire to share the fruits of production according to their notions of what is fair. The primary method for doing this in the United States has been the “progressive” income tax—whose rates get progressively higher as incomes go up. When this tax was first enacted by constitutional amendment in 1913, it taxed a tiny percentage of the income of the superrich. Within just thirty years, under FDR, the IRS claimed a full 94% of upper incomes. That proved such a disincentive to hard work that the rate fell to 70% under Lyndon Johnson, then 28% under Ronald Reagan, before rising to 39.6% under Bill Clinton. It was reduced to 35% under George W. Bush. But the Obama administration ratcheted it back up to 39.6%—in the name of “fairness.”

 

2 We need a managerial class to govern the economy and solve our day-to-day problems. Individuals, families, and civil society are incapable of fairly and wisely directing resources and affairs; they need guidance from central planners and experts.

A century ago, federal government spending consumed 3% of the national wealth; today it consumes 25%. This massive shift didn’t occur by happenstance. Our vast managerial class is the fruit of a hundred-year crusade waged by idealistic liberals. In the late nineteenth century, a scholar named Woodrow Wilson called for a new “science of administration,” one that empowered bureaucratic experts to make the “right” reforms based on “modern ideas and conditions.” Wilson was elected president in 1912 and began making this “science of administration” a reality. Like Wilson, progressives today believe that government bureaucrats are best qualified to make countless decisions affecting Americans’ day-to-day lives.

3The economy cannot prosper or function stably without regular interventions by the federal government. It requires regular “stimulus” to avoid severe downturns and even a repeat of the Great Depression.

The Keynesian theory that has dominated liberal thinking since FDR states that the cause of recessions and depressions is not bad investments but lack of demand—people don’t want enough things and aren’t borrowing enough money to go out and buy them. Instead of leaving people alone to save their wealth or wisely invest it, Keynesians print more money and pump it into the economy so Americans can spend their way into prosperity—thus “creating jobs.” President Obama said back in 2009: “It is only government that can break the vicious cycle where lost jobs lead to people spending less money, which leads to even more layoffs.”

4The most critical areas of life are precisely where we most need government help—for instance, in guaranteeing health care.

Progressives have been trying to implement “universal health care” since 1912; those very words appeared in that year’s Progressive Party platform. Under President Obama, they seem to have finally pulled it off. Obamacare subjects one-sixth of the U.S. economy to ever-expanding federal regulation, which will likely lead to a single-payer, government-monopoly health system such as exists throughout most of Europe. Attempting to undo this massive program will be like trying to unscramble eggs. Unfortunately, health care is only one example of the paternalism that drives progressives.

 

5The government should rectify perceived injustices in public and private life, and ensure an ever-expanding list of “rights”—which are discovered and promoted by enlightened, progressive thinkers and then enacted into law.

The list of basic rights claimed by adults and urged by governing progressives keeps getting longer. Now it appears to include the right to “free” contraceptives. Private institutions that violate these rights ought to be punished and, if need be, shut down. The Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has issued a mandate that even Catholic institutions must pay for contraception, sterilization, and abortifacient drugs or face enormous fines that could bankrupt them.

This federal fiat is a stark sign of things to come. It reflects the progressive view that the government can and should target any corner of civil society that resists the expansion of “rights” until the opponent cooperates or dissolves. Never mind that these newly minted “rights” often conflict with liberties enshrined in the Constitution, such as the right to the free exercise of religion.

6Society’s most important moral arbiter is the government. Other institutions, such as the family, can be redefined or reinvented by government, as progressive opinion dictates.

An assertion of raw state power lies behind the liberal drive for same-sex “marriage.” Just twenty years ago, the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, supported the Defense of Marriage Act, which merely reflected the definition of marriage prevailing in Western culture for at least three thousand years: one man and one woman, ordered toward the potential procreation and rearing of children. Now activists have largely dismantled that definition and are using the government to impose a radical new meaning of marriage as the temporary sexual partnership of two individual adults—full stop. In Britain, there is already talk among government ministers of forcing churches to perform same-sex marriages or face “discrimination” lawsuits.

The Founders recognized general (and unchanging) moral precepts—“the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” as the Declaration of Independence puts it. But progressivism insists that government be the moral arbiter, with decisions made on the basis of the “modern ideas and conditions” of which Woodrow Wilson wrote.

 

7 Americans should not be bound to their country’s repressive past and unjust institutions but should look forward and in every generation reinvent what it means to be an American.

For conservatives, the Judeo-Christian tradition is right about what mankind is, and the American Founders were right about how we should govern ourselves. Progressives are not so sure. They look to the inconsistencies and hypocrisies that prevailed in the past and judge them by twenty-first-century standards. So they learn to look at our forefathers not with an appropriate reverence and respect but often with a moralizing condescension. They see (and teach) the past not as a wellspring of wisdom about unchanging human nature but as a chronicle of injustices and the struggle to overcome them—a struggle that will never end. As Woodrow Wilson once announced: “The modern idea is to leave the past and to press onward to something new.”

 

8 The courts, especially the Supreme Court, are the voices of the “living Constitution,” and it is their job to expand our rights to suit contemporary opinion, whatever the dead letters of the Constitution’s text might actually say.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade (1973) famously manufactured a right to abortion on demand in America, ultimately through all nine months of pregnancy. That “right” had to be read into the Constitution at the expense of sections guaranteeing a right to life, such as the Fourteenth Amendment, which states, “nor shall any State deprive any person of life.” To the contrary, abortion was conjured out of the “right to privacy,” a phrase that appears nowhere in the Constitution. This is only the most famous example of progressives’ employing the courts to impose legislation they could not otherwise pass. Many more are sure to come—such is the process of progressivism. It quite literally does not know where to stop.

 

Paul Kengor is professor of political science and executive director of the Center for Vision and Values at Grove City College. His books include The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis, the Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor and Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century.