Originally Posted by spence
I see, so the majority doesn't want stronger gun control because it's a rationally thought out position...but because their feeble minds have been controlled. Nice...
I don't know what you think I was responding to, but it was to your "If the goal is total control over the people I think you'd want them as fat and sickly diabetic as possible." Ergo my note on soft despotism and the Wilsonian quotes. And so how soft tyranny would not "want them as fat and sickly diabetic as possible."
It's interesting you've quoted Wilson as some thought leader in progressive manipulation as casually as ScottW likes to trot out Saul Alinksy.
I have quoted other founders of the progressive movement, and none of it was casual. Nor do I think ScottW casually "trot" out Saul Alinsky. He does so with thoughtful application. Your attempt to marginalize by ridicule is Alinsky-like.
I have quoted Wilson, Dewey, Goodnow, and Croly, because they were intellectual and philosophical founders of the progressive movement. And especially Wilson because he was the most influental, especially as President.
I like the text that precedes your quote:
The text you cite speaks about public opinion ruling and reforms being slow and full of compromises. So what follows (and that which I quote) explains why it is necessary to bend popular opinion to that which would fit the desire of "whoever would effect a change . . ." Wilson was all about changing opinion about our system of government, and knew it would be difficult because it was so entrenched in the American mind. He said in the next paragraph of the same essay:
"Institutions which one generation regards as only a makeshift approximation to the realization of a principle, the next generation honors as the nearest possible approximation to that principle, and the next worships as the principle itself. It takes scarcely three generations for the apotheosis."
He was not an admirer of the common man's intellect, and was an elitist (as well as what liberals would now consider a racist). But he was, as were most progressives of the era, a moralist and a church goer, and was also, when he wrote "The Study of Administration," a believer in maintaining Americanism and its Constitution. Except that the Constitution was to be transformed into a living document, and government was also to be a living organism not merely a static structure.
But he also evolved into a lesser admirer of the Constitution, especially as President when he attempted to apply his progressive ideology. It was in his 1913 essay "What is Progress?" that he expounded his idea of a living Constitution that must evolve with time in a Darwinian fashion and that progress called for the elimination of obstacles such as checks and balances which interfered with the efficient administration of Central governance.
The progressives of today have evolved beyond Wilson and the early founders of the movement. They are not so careful of trying to maintain Americanism, or even a Darwinian Constitution. Quoting the progressives after Wilson would remove the idealism of progressive thought and expose it to be simply a hypocritical massive power grab by central authorities, ostensibly with the same ideal as service to the people, but not with the honor to American principles that Woodrow Wilson thought he espoused. His first disciple to achieve the presidency, FDR, governed in a way that Wilson disapproved. In his 1908 essay "The President of the United States" Wilson said:
"There are illegitimate means by which the President may influence the action of Congress. He may bargain with members, not only with regard to appointments, but also with regard to legislative measures. He may use his local patronage to assist members to get or retain their seats. He may interpose his powerful influence, in one covert way or another, in contests for places in the Senate. He may also overbear Congress by arbitrary acts which ignore the laws or virtually override them. He may even substitute his own orders for acts of Congress which he wants but cannot get. Such things are not only deeply immoral, they are destructive of the fundamental understandings of constitutional government, and, therefor, of constitutional government itself. . . . Nothing in a system like ours can be constitutional which is immoral or which touches the good faith of those who have sworn to obey the fundamental law."
It is in exactly these immoral ways that FDR brought into concrete existence the administrative state that Wilson so wanted, and the ways that president's, even more so progressive presidents, have ruled since. Wilson had too much faith in the progress of history which he believed had arrived at a point where we no longer had to fear powerful centralized government such as had existed under monarchies and ancient tyrannies. He said, also in "The Study of Administration,": "There is no danger in power, if only it be not irresponsible." And that it would be forced to be responsible the more it was centralized rather than dispersed because dispersion would hide it and centralizing it would make it "more easily watched and brought to book." It seems now, on the contrary, that blatant immorally unconstitutional actions by central authority are either not noticed or accepted as the way it should be.
That he favored central control of governance above constitutional checks and balances is also evident in his essay "Socialism and Democracy." In it he is approbative of socialism and he says:
"The thesis of the state socialist is, 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. . . For it is very clear that in fundamental 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."
It is that socialistic strain that engenders the need for central authority and which has remained and expanded in progressive ideology. And not only is power not to be feared but neither is there fear of taint by implanting a powerful foreign 19th century German/French administrative system of governance into the American constitutional way. He said "We borrowed rice but we do not eat it with chopsticks." But governing is not like eating rice. You don't have to eat rice. But you cannot resist a government that is more powerful than you and is decreed by a "living Constitution" to do for you rather than being constrained by a legal Constitution which decrees what it must not do.
The progressives of today have evolved far beyond Wilson's vision, taking on that of FDR and becoming the foreign thing that Wilson thought was not possible. The benevolent central state operates in the way he said was immoral and by a more ancient top down authoritarian way that is antithetical to the Founders "American" way. And in this manner we have been progressively governed from FDR to his disciple Obama. And, like Wilson, we refer to ourselves as a Democracy not a Republic. And, as Wilson said, "in fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same." That minute distinction "not quite" has diminished even further. And progressives are now becoming more open about not just adhering to a "living" Constitution, but about discarding the hypocrisy by openly abandoning constitutional shackles , as the constitutional law professor Seidman proposed in his NY Times op ed.
Context is important here as at the time Alexander III was brutally cracking down on dissent against the will of the people.
-spence
|