Quote:
Originally Posted by scottw
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"Changing social norms
is the progressive agenda."
Will is correct, and that has, against the original progressive idea, happened. I can remember when my generation's parents considered accepting dole as a stigma. It is now considered a right by those who receive it, and a duty by those who give it.
Woodrow Wilson, a father of American progressivism, brushed aside anti-progressive criticism by claiming that replacing our constitutional order with a Bismarkian administrative state would not collaterally damage American bottom-up liberty with European top-down despotism simply because we would Americanize it. American character would not be changed or abolished, our exceptional character would prevail over a despotic system and "Americanize" it.
He was, apparently, wrong.
In his exuberance over "progressive" reform, he did not take into account that American liberty was an expression of our uniquely American character. Inalienable liberty and American exceptionalism were essentially tied together as the social norm. Transforming the inalienable part of that liberty into liberties or rights granted by government would
require a different social norm. Rather than "Americanizing" the new progressive form of government, that form would require the destruction of the American norm in order to be accepted. And that destruction would necessarily be replaced with the very Euro-norm that Wilson thought could not happen.
As the progressive transformation continues to develop, we continue to be Europeanized. Our progression into socialism, as is pointed out in Will's article, progressively transforms the more modern American mobile class system into the old rigid European class structure from which more and more are not able to escape. And the progressive administrative state continues to mold us into dependence rather than self-reliance--into wards of the state rather than masters of the state.
It is amazing how the statistical numbers of the growing welfare state are looked upon as an accomplishment by progressives, rather than as evidence of destruction.