Former President Donald Trump has survived yet another assassination attempt less than two weeks after a judge postponed his sentencing on thirty-four felony convictions related to hush money paid to Stormy Daniels. For the moment, all obstacles to Trump standing for the November presidential election seemed to be cleared away.
Trump’s supporters are reeling from what they perceive as the unprecedented assault on America’s republican norms. That’s understandable given the relative stability of electoral politics in the decades before Trump came on the scene. However, those of us who grew up in the 1970s remember the assassination attempts on Presidents Ford and Reagan just a few years after the successful assassinations of both President John Kennedy and his brother.
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People of my generation considered being shot at a normal part of the job for U.S. presidents and presidential candidates.
Nor are deep state machinations to remove a sitting president anything unprecedented. President Nixon was removed from office by a Naval intelligence officer posing as a reporter working with the number two man at the FBI. As with Trump, the media dutifully swayed the public against the popular president for reprisals that would be considered minor today, post-Snowden.
But many Americans believe something is fundamentally different about today’s Democratic Party establishment. Even some prominent Democrats see the party as breaking from its core values by repressing speech and undermining the democratic primaries to install Kamala Harris as its nominee.
Ironically, the truth is stranger than this fiction. The progressive movement has always been authoritarian, anti-democratic, and reactionary.
Since “save our democracy” is the call to arms (literally, for some of its deranged supporters) of today’s progressives, let us begin with progressivism being anti-democratic. Since the beginning of the movement, when it was led by Republicans, progressives have attempted to transfer power away from elected assemblies and to unelected bureaucrats or judges.
This began with the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. Although passed by Congress, it empowered an unelected board of commissioners to both set rates and conduct quasi-judicial proceedings to settle disputes. It set the precedent for Congress to unconstitutionally transfer both its own exclusive power to legislate and the judicial power to the executive.
The New Deal massively expanded on that precedent in creating myriad executive branch regulatory agencies that effectively usurped most legislative power from the elected Congress. This trend has metastasized ever since. Thus, when President Biden wanted to mandate Covid vaccines, he didn’t even bother to approach Congress. He went straight to a regulatory agency of unelected bureaucrats and directed it to write a new rule. No democracy needed.
Throughout the 20th century, progressives were fervent supporters of Supreme Court decisions that similarly usurped legislative power from the elected Congress. Where the Constitution clearly required an amendment for the federal government to exercise a new power, the unelected Supreme Court dutifully found that power hiding between the lines. This was just another way to avoid putting progressive ideas to a popular vote.
None of this is to say democracy is any guarantee of individual liberty. But it is preferable to the autocratic rule of an unelected oligarchy.
As far as being authoritarian, all political movements suffer from that defect, but the progressive movement particularly so. Apart from the obvious enormities of jailing journalists and political opponents during WWI and imprisoning Japanese Americans in concentration camps during WWII, progressivism is more fundamentally authoritarian in its modus operandi for achieving all its societal goals. Without exception, progressives seek to forcibly override the personal choices of individuals and replace them with regulations imposed by the state.
Where Thomas Jefferson famously defined liberty as “unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others,” Woodrow Wilson took a perverse turn on the “unobstructed” idea. In The New Freedom, he answers the question, “What is liberty?” as follows:
“You say of the locomotive that it runs free. What do you mean? You mean that its parts are so assembled and adjusted that friction is reduced to a minimum, and that it has perfect adjustment. We say of a boat skimming the water with light foot, “How free she runs,” when we mean, how perfectly she is adjusted to the force of the wind, how perfectly she obeys the great breath out of the heavens that fills her sails. Throw her head up into the wind and see how she will halt and stagger, how every sheet will shiver and her whole frame be shaken, how instantly she is “in irons,” in the expressive phrase of the sea. She is free only when you have let her fall off again and have recovered once more her nice adjustment to the forces she must obey and cannot defy.
Human freedom consists in perfect adjustments of human interests and human activities and human energies.”
Where Jefferson saw government as the obstructor of liberty, Wilson saw it as the “adjuster” of human activity. This “adjustment,” of course, is regardless of the individual’s will or rights. Only by allowing the government to adjust your activities can you truly be free.
Monstrous.
That progressivism is reactionary would probably surprise Americans the most. But it is nonetheless true. Calling the movement “progressive” follows the proud American tradition of giving your party or movement a name opposite to its nature. The Federalists weren’t in favor of federalism; they were nationalists. The Anti-Federalists were in favor of federalism. The Whig Party were quite the opposite of the British party after which they were named. And progressivism isn’t about progress; it’s about returning to an earlier, illiberal past.
Read the rest on Tom’s Substack…
Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?
