Sound familiar?
Progressives, meanwhile, were filling in whatever gaps existed in the fear factor game: food and drug safety (were you being poisoned?), workplace safety (were the bosses deliberately working women and children to death? would workers lose limbs or even their lives?), economic security (would the unemployed or the elderly starve?), big business (were the big guys squeezing out the little guys and jacking up your prices?), big-city corruption (what were those Irish saloon keepers up to in the political back rooms?).
It’s no accident that among the most memorable phrases in all American rhetoric is Franklin Roosevelt’s “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.”
FDR may not have been a great economist, but he was a brilliant politician. Most politicians will subtly (or maybe not so subtly) play upon your fears. But in Roosevelt’s case, he laid it all on the line:
You’re scared silly. You’re afraid of losing your jobs, your savings, your homes. You’re scared of empty pots and starving children. I will save you from hunger. I will save you from bankers. I will save you from the saber-toothed cat! Just hand over your gold and your future income, and let me plan your retirement for you.
And so, before a terrified America even knew it, FDR (who was soon about to frighten radio audiences with talk of “high finance” and the “malefactors of great wealth”) produced the CCC, the AAA, the WPA, the PWA, the NYA, the NLRB, Social Security, Medicare, and on and on and on.
Fear + Progressives = Government Control.
The progressive cure to your problems always involves giving more power to them. Always. They are the experts. They know best. They know just how big a business should be allowed to get before it becomes dangerous. They will write regulations and collect taxes and generate debt to pay for their programs. They know just how much of your income you should be allowed to keep. The free market, the free individual, operates recklessly and wastefully, creates imbalances and unfairness. Freedom of choice should be feared because some people, most people, will choose badly. They will run things scientifically, nonideologically. And whatever their new programs might cost, somehow they will all magically cost less—and even more magically, someone else will pay for them.
Trust them. They’re from the government, and they’re here to help.
Or maybe not. More than a century later, after more than a hundred years of progressive “solutions” (Square Deal, New Freedom, New Deal, Fair Deal, New Frontier, Great Society, Hope/Change), progressives are still sounding the alarm about basically the very same fears. We’ve moved from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle to genetically modified foods, from outlawing booze to banning Big Gulps, from the Sixteenth Amendment to bashing the one percent. From banning the word sauerkraut in World War I to censoring “offensive” speech on today’s college campuses. It never ends, the same cycle of fear on the one hand and salvation-can-be-yours on the other.
The three parts of this book will present progressives, from the left and the right, and help you understand them—their stories, experiences, and motivations—more deeply and completely than any book has done before.
Part I discusses the history of the progressive movement in America from the early days of William Jennings Bryan through four pivotal “waves” of progressivism led by Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Barack Obama. It also includes profiles of some key figures during those eras who adopted the damaging progressive mindset as a means to protect themselves from personal traumas. For example, you’ll see how the deep depression and losses that Eleanor Roosevelt suffered as a child emboldened her to support a movement that hoped to bequeath to all Americans the parents she never had.
Part II examines some of the lies that progressives like to tell would-be recruits, for example, that progressivism means being open-minded and supporting freedom and diversity.
Part III discusses the future of the progressive movement while also laying bare its playbook. Most important, it gives us a road map for how to finally wake people up and convince them that fear is their friend. It doesn’t need to be defeated—especially by lying, power-hungry politicians—it needs to be harnessed.
The saber-toothed cat may look a lot different today from how it looked seven million years ago, but it can still be defeated in the same way: not by cowering in our caves but by pledging our lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to one another. Reliance on our creator, ourselves, our families, and our communities is what’s kept people safe and hopeful and happy since the beginning of time. Putting your faith in government and politicians instead is chasing fool’s gold.
I hope that by the end of this book, you’ll realize that FDR was mostly right but he left one important thing out. There is nothing to fear except fear itself . . . and the progressives who exploit it.
1
Roots:
Hegel, Marx, and the Making of Heaven on Earth
Looking into the future we can contemplate a society . . . in which men shall work together for a common purpose, and in which the wholesale cooperation shall take place largely through government.
We have reason to believe that we shall yet see great national undertakings with the property of the nation, and managed by the nation, through agents who appreciate the glory of true public service, and feel that it is God’s work which they are doing, because church and state are as one.
—EARLY AMERICAN PROGRESSIVE RICHARD T. ELY, 1894
Chicago Coliseum
July 9, 1896
Moses ascended the mountaintop.
Mount Sinai was the podium rising above a sea of delegates. The two stone tablets decreed that the U.S. government’s monetary supply be backed with reserves of silver instead of gold, along with a zealous commitment to heal the wounds that America’s “one percent” had inflicted on everyone else. Greedy idolaters had worshipped capitalism’s golden calf for far too long.
That’s why God, in his infinite mercy and wisdom, had finally sent a prophet.
Thirty-six years old, his name was William Jennings Bryan.
The seething mass of humanity inside Chicago’s enormous, brand-new coliseum looked up at Bryan, the Democratic Party’s nomination for President of the United States, whose imposing height, massive head, aquiline nose, and piercing brown eyes made him a striking figure. As Bryan held forth on the Democrats’ proposed national platform, they shouted and cheered, frantically waving red bandanas in a sign of solidarity with the global workers’ movement that had been sweeping Europe for decades.
For the first time at this convention the delegates saw a man of presidential timber on the stage above them.
And, for the first time in generations, they saw a savior.
The sweltering Chicago heat and the stench of thousands of sweating bodies inside the convention hall threatened to overcome him, but Bryan steadied himself for his moment atop Sinai. His knuckles turned white as he grabbed the sides of the lectern. He had never lacked for confidence, so now that thousands of eyes among the party faithful were upon him, now that reporters were furiously scribbling his every word in their notebooks, now that the moment he’d been waiting for all his life was upon him, William Jennings Bryan knew he would not falter.
Bryan had arrived in Chicago uncertain of his chances of becoming his party’s presidential nominee. But as his speech progressed he became convinced that victory was his. A new monetary policy based on the coinage of silver—“free silver”—had proven to be an even more enticing message than he’d expected. The new supply of money would relieve crippling debts for the farmers and other impoverished voters Bryan sought to mobilize.
As he neared the climax of his remarks he mustered every last ounce of energy he could and unleashed some of the most famous lines in American political rhetoric. “If they dare to come out in the open field,” he thundered, “and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and
the world. Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses.”
Bryan paused, raised his hands above his head, and continued, “We shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them: you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns.”
He brought his hands down around his head, as if he were placing an imaginary crown on top. Then he stretched his arms out to his sides, palms toward the delegates, took a deep breath, and bellowed, “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!”
Moses had now morphed into Jesus, and the multitude assembled thought they were witnessing the Second Coming. Their shouts thundered through the coliseum, shaking its steel girders and echoing down city blocks in every direction. “Bedlam broke loose,” exclaimed a stunned Washington Post correspondent. “Delirium reigned supreme. In the spoken word of the orator thousands of great men had heard the unexpressed sentiments and hopes of their own inmost souls.”
♣
With that speech, William Jennings Bryan—“The Great Commoner”—ignited the first progressive moment in American history. His speech transformed Thomas Jefferson’s and Andrew Jackson’s Democratic Party—a party famously skeptical of the federal government—into a vehicle for massively expanding the state and making it responsible for redistributing wealth, breaking up businesses, assailing private property, and providing all manner of aid to the poor.
Bryan was America’s first prophet of progressivism, an ideology that would go on to redefine the Democratic Party for generations and ultimately destroy the experiment in limited government that had begun with the founding of the Republic.
But Bryan’s progressivism, while new to Americans and antithetical to the American system, was not a new movement at all. In fact, it originated from the very place the Founders had fled: the authoritarian-ruled nations of Europe.
GEORG HEGEL: THE BIRTH OF “PROGRESS”
* * *
Ninety years before William Jennings Bryan’s rapturous reception in Chicago, a German university professor cast his eyes on an emperor. Maybe it was because the commanding figure on horseback contrasted so starkly with his own bent and bookish posture, but the image impressed Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel more than anything he had ever seen.
It was October 1806, and Napoleon Bonaparte, the self-declared emperor of France, was on his way to battle outside Jena, where Professor Hegel taught. Napoleon’s forces slaughtered tens of thousands of Hegel’s Prussian countrymen, defeating their kingdom’s army once and for all. But his nation’s humiliation hardly lessened Hegel’s admiration for the French tyrant. If anything, it increased it.
Napoleon sought to build an empire, a vast, ambitious government of planners and administrators. He was, in Hegel’s view, an energetic man bringing progress—bloodstained progress, perhaps, but progress nonetheless—to a land that desperately needed it. He believed this was the kind of strong, forward-thinking leader Europe had been waiting for.
FEAR AND SELF-LOATHING
The boy lay trembling in his bed, the sheets around him damp with sweat. Near his head, a cool cloth meant to provide relief from the fever had long ago fallen away as he lay half-dreaming.
He woke with a start. The room was dimly lit, with the fingers of dawn creeping through the curtains. The house was quiet, eerily so. He wondered if he might still be dreaming. At his bedside sat a bedpan and an untouched cup of tea from the night before. Wearily, he tried to sit up, his body weak, fever still sapping his strength.
He willed himself up, sitting on the edge of his bed for a moment to steady himself. “Mother?” he said softly into the darkness of the hallway. No answer, just the silence. The boy stood, shaky on his feet. A chill ran through him as he gathered his bedclothes in fists at his sides. He took a few timid steps, his vision blurry in the pale light. Down the hall, he saw the doorway to his parents’ bedroom was open.
“Mother?” he tried again. Silence again rebuffed him. He slowly worked his way down the hall, occasionally reaching out to the wall for balance.
He reached the doorway and peered in. The window was open, curtains swayed slightly in a gentle breeze, but otherwise the room was silent. “Mother?” The query was louder this time, as the form of his parents still under blankets annoyed him. “Father?” No movement.
He stepped into the room and took a few steps toward the bed. Steadying himself for a moment, he shook the bedpost to wake them. He walked around the edge of the bed and reached up to touch his mother’s shoulder.
“Mother?”
The coldness of her skin jolted him. He stepped back from the bed, his breath stuck in his throat. Fear washed over him, freezing him in place for a moment. Then he stepped forward and shook her roughly.
“Mother! Mother!”
His cries were raspy but loud. He was desperate to wake her, even though he already knew she would never wake up. Fever had claimed her in the night, just as it had claimed so many others in their village and throughout Germany.
Fear turned to nausea and ran through him. He cried and ran around the bed to the other side, where his father lay just as silent. He reached out in terror, tears starting to blur his vision. He touched his father’s cheek, expecting the same coldness from the grayish skin. But as he touched him, his father stirred with a slight moan.
He was still alive.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, thirteen years old, sank his head into the blanket, relief overwhelming him. He and his father had both survived the fever—but barely. His relief soon gave way to anger, however. Why had God abandoned them? The priest had put a blessing on their house. Georg had prayed every single day, pleading with God to spare his family.
But God hadn’t listened. Or maybe he had listened but couldn’t do anything about it.
Either way, it didn’t matter. Georg decided then and there that no other family should have to go through that. If God couldn’t help, then he would.
The French Revolution that culminated in Napoleon’s reign differed wildly from the American Revolution that preceded it by a mere thirteen years. The colonists who challenged an empire were rebelling against the way things had been done for centuries. They were tossing out monarchs who claimed to have a “divine right,” a mandate from God to rule their citizens. Their movement championed the inalienable rights of the individual over the government. It defended the governed against their governors. Americans had created a government of elections and the rule of law: classical liberalism. The French preached democracy and liberty, but they birthed something else entirely: a reign of terror, culminating with an emperor who wielded near-total power.
How did these two revolutions meet such vastly different ends? Perhaps because, in the Americans’ case, the Framers of the Constitution were keen observers of human nature. As a result, they enacted checks against one man and one party amassing too much power, a careful balance of forces that trusted individuals more than it trusted the state and protected the people from too much centralized control. The architects of this new government possessed no illusions that they were creating a utopia ruled by perfect people—just the opposite, in fact. They believed man had fallen because he was naturally too self-interested and sinful.
Across the Atlantic, a growing movement of philosophers and academics had different ideas about the nature of man and what the future held, most notably the young university professor so entranced by the sight of Napoleon’s majesty: Hegel, the father of the progressive movement.
Hegel, whose own father was a senior government official working for one of Germany’s dukes, understood the importance of administrators from a very early age. As he worked on his PhD, Hegel found a new way of looking at history and mankind’s role in it by drawing on the writings of Jakob Böhme, a German Christian mystic, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a French writer.
Böhme believed that the fall of Adam and Eve was a first necessary stage so that mankind could achieve self-awareness. Man was separated
from God, but through evolution over centuries, he could eventually achieve perfect knowledge with science and education. Rousseau, on the other hand, coined a concept he dubbed the “general will” of the people as a whole. The will of the individual, he proclaimed, was far less important than that of the collective. It was the government’s responsibility to identify and carry out that collective will.
Hegel believed that the history of humankind was the story of man becoming more and more rational and “achieving consciousness.” To “perfect” humanity, all that was needed was a government that tamed the impulses of human nature for the greater good. This was Hegel’s revolutionary idea of progress.
Like many progressives who followed in his wake, Hegel also dabbled in race theory to explain why some societies seemed to “progress” better or faster than others. According to Hegel, it was “the German nations” who “were the first to attain the consciousness that man, as man, is free.” Inferior genes, he believed, were the only way to explain why other parts of the world remained economically backward.
Hegel concluded that the world now stood at one of the most advanced stages of human history and that experts and knowledgeable persons should rule with the most perfect government and unlimited authority over the individual. Through the state and its rulers, in Hegel’s “philosophy of history,” man essentially became God on earth. This was the foundational principle of what eventually became known as progressivism.
With his belief in scientific training, Hegel helped create the modern research university system. Modeling this on the Prussian style of education, he envisioned universities that churned out administrators trained in the science of governing men and women—an idea they called “social science.” Prussian education reforms extended down to young children as well, with the establishment of free, compulsory education by the state, starting with a mandatory “kindergarten” and national tests to track childhood learning. Hegel believed that this “scientific” approach to governance and progressive reforms would ultimately lead to a well-managed administrative state of experts.