[detbuch]

Originally Posted by spence

Hmmmmm, bone colored parchment, about 24 by 29 inches, starts with a plural pronoun and has some really cool signatures.

The plural pronoun "We" (the people) in that parchment refers to the entire population of citizens. All the people will have their inalienable rights, whether natural or given by a creator, thus beyond the reach of government, protected from government overreach by the rest of the Constitution which follows that all inclusive pronoun.

The Progressive idea is that there are no natural or inalienable rights. "All" of the people's rights are given by government. The Progressive plural pronoun replaces the constitution's plural pronoun. Government and its administration is the provider and protector of "all" rights, not nature, or the Constitution. The operative "we" is the government bureaucracy. At best, re the citizens, the "people" are the 51% (or more) who create the appearance of popular power by voting to accept and give legitimacy to the administrators who rule them. The other 49% (or less) are not the "people." Their desire to own other rights or inalienable ones is denied. They don't count among the ruling we. They are merely loser persons.

The framework, or structure, of Progressive governance is not the Constitution. The essence of Progressive political philosophy is to move beyond the Constitution's founding principles, which it claims are outdated and too limited to serve present needs. The idea is to progress with history, to be responsive to the zeitgeist.

In his essay, "Liberalism and Social Action," (1935), one of the founders of the Progressive movement, John Dewey foreshadows a major technique that future Progressives would use to circumvent and basically destroy or make moot the Constitution. He inserts the notion that the Constitution provides, in the most general way, for "public welfare". He distorts the Constitution's words "general Welfare of the United States" by divorcing his notion of generalized welfare from the particular means of particular welfares stated in the enumerations that follow the clause. So the notion is created, simply by verbal magic, that the Federal Government is given license to legislate and spend money on all forms of "public" welfare. This notion would be followed with a vengeance by later Progressive administrations, sanctioned by like minded Justices, through the use of the "general Welfare" clause to legislate all manner of social welfare schemes including an entire "Great Society" boondoggle.

Dewey argues, in effect, for interpreting the "consequences" of legislation rather than its legal constitutionality. This leads directly to the Progressive school of jurisprudence which must not be stuck on interpreting the law, but considering, in the jurists' opinion, what would be the consequence of their decisions. Especially in light of current public opinion (presumably the 51% or more). Using various social and societal philosophies that followed Locke and are more "progressive," he debunks the whole notion of inalienable law, natural law, or any supernatural law.

In speaking of "earlier" (classical) liberals, Dewey says that their supposed (in his opinion) "disregard of history took its revenge. It blinded the eyes of liberals to the fact that their own special interpretations of liberty, individuality and intelligence were themselves historically conditioned, and were relevant to their own time. They put forward their ideas as immutable truths good at all times and places; they had no idea of historic relativity, either in general or in its application to themselves."

This all, of course, was a seminal idea that eventually expressed itself in the notion of a "living" Constitution. It also gives rise to the current idea that words must be "interpreted" in light of what they mean today. So, for example, what liberty meant to the Founders may not be a practical liberty today. It would not effectuate actual liberty by today's standards. He distinguishes between legal liberty and "effective" liberty. New conditions, he says, create the need for a new social organization.

He claims that "such a social order cannot be established by an unplanned and external convergence of the actions of separate individuals each of whom is bent on personal private advantage."

Dewey contends that the individual is "freed" by social planning. It obviously follows that social planning is the province of government. And expert government planners, not natural or inalienable rights, are the source of "effective" liberty.

Frank Goodnow, an earlier Progressive theorist, echoed similar references to history being the arbiter, the judge and jury of how society should be organized. He questions older notions of private rights. He says, in his essay "The American Conception of Liberty" (1916), "insistence on individual rights may have been a great advantage at a time when a social organization was not highly developed, it may become a menace when social rather than individual efficiency is the necessary prerequisite of progress. For social efficiency probably owes more to the common realization of social duties than to the general insistence on privileges based on individual private rights . . . the sphere of governmental action is continually widening and the actual content of individual private rights is being increasingly narrowed . . . The efficiency of the social group is taking on in our eyes a greater importance than it once had . . . We have come to the conclusion that man under modern conditions is primarily a member of society and that only as he recognizes his duties as a member of society can he secure the greatest opportunities as an individual."

Goodnow, president of John Hopkins University at the time, recognized that educating the people about his concepts of social organization would be the task of the American educational system. In his essay he says "we teachers are in a measure responsible for the thoughts of the coming generation . . if . . . it is the social group rather than the individual which is increasing in importance, if it is true that greater emphasis should be laid on social duties and less on individual rights, it is the duty of the University to call the attention of the student to this fact, and it is the duty of the student when he goes out into the world to do what in him lies to bring this truth home to his fellows."

Goodnow shaped the model for our latter day university activist teachers and students.

At the same time but a bit earlier, Woodrow Wilson, our second Progressive President, noted that the Constitution was founded, in his opinion, on a static rather than a changing view of law, government, or society. He was an early proponent of government, and society, and even the Constitution, being living organisms. As such, he was against the Constitution's system of checks and balances as in his notion that "No living thing can have its organs offset against each other as checks and live." And "All that progressives ask or desire is permission to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle." He believed "that no line can be drawn between private and public affairs which the State may not cross at will; that omnipotence of legislation is the first postulate of all just political theory . . . socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same. They both rest at bottom upon the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members. Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals . . . limits of principle there are, upon strict analysis, none."

Wilson said stuff like this about the future under his progressive notion of societal and governmental structure where "there will be the family [of citizens] in a great building whose noble architecture will at last be disclosed, where men can live as a single community, cooperative as in a perfected, coordinated beehive".

He questioned how it would come to be--"But the means? The question with me is not whether the community has power to act as it may please in these matters, but how it can act with practical advantage--a question of policy. A question of policy primarily, but also a question of organization, that is to say of administration."

That is to say, what we have become--an unconstitutional administrative State. And the brute force of such a State was thoroughly realized in the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

But the irony of that Progressive "success" is that it was not a result of the historical progress that was supposed to have happened. The Great Depression, contrary to the notion that Progressive administration would cure economic ills, lasted throughout the FDR regime and was supposedly ended by the very thing Progressives had claimed was their reason to unshackle government from its founding limtations--war against a tyrannical, bloodthirsty government. History was supposed to have arrived at a time when the people did not have to fear government. The previous great war was supposed to be the one to end all wars. Even the despotic Russian czarist regime was toppled by a people's revolution of social justice after that war. A revolution that Progressives applauded. After FDR's anti-constitutional imposition of political administration over the constitutional rule by elected representation, the Progressive era waned and seemed to come to an end under the force of its own misconceptions of history and humanity.

But it's back now with new shiny hopes and transformations. And its assault on the Constitution is as strong or stronger than ever. And its honest promoters absolutely admit their animosity to that ancient, "outdated" parchment you speak of. They have written and continue to write books and articles espousing the abandonment of the Constitution. One of FDR's "Brain Trust," Rexford Tugwell, admitted that their creation and administration of the New Deal was accomplished and validated by a Progressive Court through torturing and twisting the "meaning" of the Constitution out of all recognition. He even wrote a lengthy new constitution that could replace the old one. It was mostly a detailed list of administrative duties and powers of a Progressive administrative State. Justice Ginsburg said that for countries which want to write a constitution she would not recommend the U.S. Constitution as a model. A few years back Scottw posted an article by a constitutional law professor, Louis Seidman, advocating constitutional disobedience. David A. Strauss wrote a book that questioned whether the Constitution is necessary. There are several other books and articles on the same theme. They admit that the Constution is, basically, not followed anymore. But who reads such books?

The idea that the Constitution is the foundation, with its principals and legal framework, of Progressive government is ridiculous.

In truth, the Progressive belief that historical relativity is a foundation contradicts the meaning of words such as "foundation" or "principle." History, as Progressives see it and use it, abolishes all foundations, and political notions of relativity debunk all principles.

Your attempt at answering my question "Can someone name or describe what is the foundation, with its principals and legal framework, of Progressive government?" is either a troll or just plain ignorance. Or maybe you swallow the wrong color pill.