Explains a lot, not only how we got here, but what we’re facing. Communist Progressives…..that explains why we are seeing so much blatant anti-Americanism. Right now, doesn’t look like good odds for our side to wrench this back.

We see a lot of that in recent events; the SEIU mob at a private citizen’s house, accompanied by a police escort. The head of ICE declaring they may not prosecute AZ immigration cases, professors preaching sedition and invasion from below the southern border without consequence, the water that was refused to a California valley to the point that it is now a dust bowl, and more.

We are being hounded and harassed. The slightest thing in a person’s life becomes some sort of major political play because if we don’t agree there are plenty of goons around the corner to change our minds.

Someone, in the comments on another post, mentioned Krystalnacht. The more incidences of terrorizing mobs that we hear about, the more inclined I am to agree with that person.

when compared to to Bambi and his crew.

Now FDR, with his Blue Eagle price controls and production controls. . . he showed the way. The Supremes eventually slapped him down for it.

Maybe Bambi will get around to trying a little court packing and succeed where FDR failed. Probably a stretch, even for teh One.

I’d put Wilson in a different category from the Teddy Roosevelt or William Jennings Bryan type of progressive, though: whereas TR was generally about trust-busting and reining in the abuses of unrestricted capitalism (we can question the effectiveness of his policies), and a muscular foreign policy, Wilson was a different breed: his open disdain of the American Constitutional system, oscillating between a preference for the British parliamentary system and dictatorial government, remains unrivaled by few leftists even today. His unbridled populist government, blackballing of minorities, and silencing of the press, for all its vaunted “intellectualism”, was just window dressing for what at its heart resembled a flaccid Latin American junta more than anything else. While he definitely had the perfectibility thing down (he was an honorary Yankee at heart), he wasn’t much for the “humane” part of progressivism, preferring the “common good”, left undefined (even FDR was more in the vein of old-school progressive thought than Wilson). Though not directly analogous to fascism, I’d say his government is the closest brush we’ve had with that ideology.

Wilson did not hate American, or blame America first, but he did repudiate the principles of the Declaration and the Constitution. He was one of the early “political science” students at Johns Hopkins–who all studied Hegelianism from Germans or German-educated Americans. The consensus among these first “political scientists” was that there were no “natural rights” in the sense of the Founders, and that the American system of federalism, separation of powers, limited government was woefully inferior to Prussian and other continental models. These “Progressives” established the basic template for modern American “liberalism.”

Who did more to build this city than any Democrat, was called a progressive by the author of his latest biography. I’m not sure, but he was a big fan of TR. He did a lot of things that ticked off the financiers paying to build the city. They couldn’t see the reason why you should build a sewage lines to the Sound, instead of dumping it into Lake Washington. When he insisted on using a closed pipe to bring water to the city, instead of an open fluive, he was called a communist. James Ross had to work on him for a few years to make the electric supply for the street and home lighting a municipal structure instead of private. he thought it smacked of socialism, but eventually relented. Glad he did, the savings are passed on to Seattle citizens, and we pay very little.

Dirty job, but someone needed to say it. Beck is way too broad. TR and his ilk were “cultural” progressives, of the noblesse oblige sort, more helpful than harmful, and more optimistic than craven. Chesterton had a lot to say about them. Wilson was the forbear of what we’re seeing today, socialism hiding under the skirts of academic elitism….which I believe is its final manifestation.

Beck misses that. Why I can’t say, exuberance? trying to create a unified theory out of whole cloth? I don’t know.

But he has gotten America to reading again, and that’s a very good thing.

The hippies seemed to be the first fully visible manifestation of the radical line of progressivism. There was no behind-the-scenes infiltration of unions here, no insinuation of radical ideas through academic lectures. It was a full, frontal, very frightening, in-your-face articulation of the radical progressive agenda. They savagely attacked Johnson, whom your post identifies with the older, pro-American line of progressivism. They were violent, anti-American barbarians, and at first their antics backfired. Humphrey lost in ’68, due in large part to the radical progressives’ disruption of the Chicago convention, and McGovern was obliterated after he fully embraced their agenda. But, as your post says, they went stealth, and many went on to pollute the minds of future generations in universities across America. And they worked on the roots of the Demcratic party, tearing out its earlier, Roosevelt progressive shoots and fully replacing them with the purer, radical strain of progessivism.

They benefited from the sympathy that the media and older academics had for them. Both those groups worked hard to clean up the hippies’ image. TV shows from MASH to 30something and almost every movie from the past 40 years beat their agenda into the minds of the American public. They were, with few exceptions, treated as heroes and the bearers of truth, justice and compassion. Those who held a different point of view were invariably buffoons or goons. And the drip, drip, drip of this relentless propaganda on the minds of the American people had the intended effect. In addition, the more civilized and patriotic Americans who had been appalled by — and had first-hand recollection of — their antics began to die off.

So when the hippies fully re-emerged in the Clinton candidacy, the country was worn down enough where one of their own could actually get elected President, albeit with only a plurality of the vote. And those who knew better had been browbeaten enough where they didn’t offer much resistance. George H. W. Bush refused to even attack Clinton for his draft dodging. He acted as if the values of his generation were a losing hand that it would be best not to play at all.

Clinton turned out to be little more than the radical progressives’ John the Baptist. Their actual messiah, of course, is Barak Obama. He is a second generation hippie, though unlike his forbears he wears a suit well and has close-cropped hair and a wife who dresses like a fashion model. Unlike Clinton, he received a majority of the popular vote. And the right has been so browbeaten that John McCain, whose suffering in the Hanoi Hilton was aggravated in no small part due to the antics of the hippies, could not bring himself to criticize Obama for his links with a 60s radical and attending a church run by a raving progressive lunatic. Republicans offered no criticism of his putting a 9-11 truther in his cabinet. The radical progressives have become fully mainstreamed.

with his radio show and TV show from ” his” Libertarian beliefs. I believe he is more anti federal government than limited federal government. That would paint almost every president, that oversaw the passage of “any” government programs as being anti-constitution, or for those he really hates, WW and FDR as anti-American. When you start with pre-conceived notions, you can always find the path to prove your point. That is what Beck does.

Look at his latest flap over giving Shazad (sp) Miranda rights. He believes that Shazad was/is an American citizen, and therefore has every Miranda right. He said that to do otherwise would be to trample on our Constitution. Beck doesn’t take into account the fact that Shazad just became an American citizen during 2009. He discounts the latest intelligence reports that Shazad has been a sleeper terriorist since long before that, and somehow falsely gained American citizenship. Of course the new tone in the O’s admin. is to even give Miranda rights to terriorists on the battlefield, even when they are not our citizens.

Beck, who is trying his hardest to be a man of “principle and integrity” sometimes allows his purist attitudes to overtake what should be seen as good common sense. He is conflicted.

Yes he is using a shotgun where he should be sighting in a 30-’06. Yes he looks like a frustrated professor wannabe with that chalkboard. Yes he’s kind of mixing some streams of history. But: he’s pointing in the right direction. He’s crying Wolf when there really is a Wolfpack out there. He’s getting millions of reading populace to look closely at the breeding ground and kennel papers behind Dems for the last century, not just what they say today . He is catching unbelievable (and som e illegal) resistance from the left and even the White House, from outright lies, calumny and slander to threats of physical assault or much worse against him and his family. More than Rush, more than Savage, certainly more than O’Reilly (If a man can be judged by the enemies he keeps, Beck must rate high in our appreciation on this account alone.) Honestly, I look at his face the rare times I am able to watch his show see a new expression I didnt see before; I see how he brought in his friend Pat to help him & lend some moral support, I am not sure how much longer he can go on, because of the pressure he’s catching –for calling out Soros, Obama and a multiple of RINOs, many times over. I think O’Reilly pulled him out on that tour just to give him a break from NYC. Just some thoughts.

Progressivism was not some form of dour Presbyterians, nor was Wilson some sort of cut out of his religion.

Let me offer a quote to begin with.

“All that progressives ask or desire,” wrote Woodrow Wilson, “is permission — in an era when development, evolution, is a scientific word — to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.”

Please highlight in your mind the idea that Wilson wished to interpret the constitution according the Darwinian principle. Only a liberal Protestant who had embraced Darwin over God could have ever, ever thought this way.

It is something Jennings would never have thought, let alone allowed to have come out of his mouth. And to believe that the main conflict in theology in the 19th century was the conflict between perfectibility of man or of society is a gross simplification.This quote highlights specifically the difference between Progressives and the founders, not to mention it directly speaks to Wilsons very twisted view of the Constitution.

Wilson is the man who re- segregated Washington DC, who embraced the film “Birth of a Nation”, whose adviser Col. House anonymously wrote a book about a character who becomes dictator of the country in order to save it. During WWI it became a crime to be critical of the government. As a highlight of what that meant there was a case in which government representatives were going door to door to sell war bonds and a man who not only didn’t want to buy those bonds but told the govn’t man that the government could in fact go to hell, was later sentenced to 15 years in jail for that statement.

It should not be missed that Wilson’s policies radicalized a huge number of people. It is during those years one sees the policital split between socialists and communists, Despite the propaganda by the Communists, they were not socialist, they were Communists. Norman Thomas spent a lifetime trying to get people to understand that. The later Progressives like Wilson embraced much of what was socialism’s platform, but very actively fought against Soviet Communism, Wilson in fact sending and keeping American troops in Russia to fight the Communists there that had taken over the country at the end of WWI.

It was Wilson’s embrace of anti-Constitutional ideals that allowed those to morph into a turn towards a more distinct form of socialism and eventually a left that supported and endorsed Soviet style Communism as good for America.

Wilson embraced the book by Herbert Croly called “The Promise of American Life” Croly was a founder of the New Republic magazine, and it should not be missed that he really meant a New Republic, out with the old and in with the new, French oriented version. Does that make you scratch your head? It should. Nearly everyone speaks of Hegel but Auguste Comte is nearly forgotten. Yet it is Comte’s philosophy that completely informed Croly’s life. He was in fact baptized into the Church of Humanity that Comte started.

The essence of that philosophy was that society should be run by experts in a scientific manner. It is where the term social science comes from and it is Comte who coined the word Sociology.

It is Wilson’s administration in which modern liberalism rests on. You might say he thoughly embraced the same thought process that John Dewey did.

“Natural rights and natural liberties exist only in the kingdom of mythological social zoology.” John Dewey

After all the Constitution needs to be interpreted in a Darwinian manner.

Had you better reading comprehension skills, you would have comprehended that there was an American progressivism that stemed from classical liberal and statist lines, and there was another that stemmed from Communist stock. Wilson was a lot of things, and a lot of them bad to a conservative’s way of thinking, but he was an American who believed in American exceptionalism and he was not a communist. That was the whole point of the piece but it did give you an opportunity to have your little exercise in intellectual masturbation. Gee, you’re really smart – right up to where you totally missed the point.

It wasn’t a perfect arrangement, and I won’t try to defend it. But the roots of the argument definitely lay in and around 1895-1920. With the growth of powerful nation states, America was caught between a lot of ideological, economic, and military forces. Most had been born in simpler times, in a beautiful America. Republicans had absolutely dominated D’s for half a century.
When Teddy Roosevelt came into the picture, any state legislature could be bought, and regularly was. Teddy himself was born into wealth, but despised his class, and the deeds they did. Upon his wife and mother dying within a few hours of each other, he was devastated. He went out West to find himself. He did. When he returned back east, he was a different man. He found more value in the West than just how much of a valuable mineral could be extracted. His idea of setting aside land as the peoples property, rather than just spoils for the wealthy financiers was a great one. As was the tradition of Republicans, the intent was to allow free land to be acquired, even within the national forests. TR did invent the idea of using government in a pro-active way. Dems were shocked he could do this. Once they realized it could be done, they had other ideas they wanted to implement by the same method. President Obama uses many of the political inventions of President Bush. TR was anathema to the then current crop of Republicans, but the people adored him, and for good reason.
The first half of the 20th century was an extremely complicated and difficult time. Art is absolutely right to carefully split issues. As far as Wilson, he was caught in the crosscurrents of many issues. I don’t know that he had a lot of good options. Obviously his mistakes were many and clear. I hope we continue this discussion in future diaries.

Or perhaps you simply need better writing skills. The headline indicates that “we” need to get Progressivism right, something that Beck in your opinion does not. You then inform us that Woodrow Wilson wasn’t as bad as Obama. I beg to differ with you, and do so strongly. At this point in time Obamas admin, has yet to throw anyone in jail for speaking out against him and his policies, Woodrow Wilson should be demonized, often and loudly.

Next, let me quote from what you wrote-

“But somewhere in the 1920s and ’30s another line of progressivism intersected the American Progressivism, Soviet Communism.”

I’m fairly sure I’m not having any difficulty comprehending what you wrote here. You are stating that Communism was simply another stream of Progressivism and that is simply untrue. On the American left there was Progressivism, and many who called themselves Christian Socialists(many those Presbyterians and Quakers you briefly introduced) who embraced Progressivism, there were socialists like Eugene Debs,there were anarchists like Emma Goldman who the Wilson admin had deported and there were Communists.

Woodrow Wilson’s policies radicalized these various factions on the left and the American Communist Party grew from the left wing of the Socialist Party when in 1919 Lenin invited that left wing of the Socialist party to join the Communist International. This wing was in large part buoyed by eastern European immigrants in much the same way Socialism had been buoyed by the fleeing of Germans to America after the failed revolutions in Europe in 1848.

By the 1920′s various movers and shakers on the left political spectrum were embracing the Soviet Revolution and what they believed would come from it. People as diverse as Emma Goldman and John Dewey, both leftists, but neither with the same means to the end. Goldman ended up disillusioned, Dewey enthusiastic. Lincoln Steffens, John Reid and even Helen Keller embraced Soviet style Communism. In 1919 Wilson had appointed A. Mitchell Palmer as US Attorney General, and Palmer used the 1918 Sedition Law that was also used to jail those who criticized the government, to drive the official Communist party underground.

After which many who supported Communism never actively joined the party but certainly remained Communists, and many of those show up repeatedly in the FDR administration. You are, of course, aware that Rex Tugwell the economic planner who became part of FDRs brain trust visited the Soviet Union in 1927. it was claimed he and the others he went with, including Roger Baldwin of ACLU fame, believed it had all been arranged by a NON communist labor union. And I believe Progressives are just like Thomas Jefferson too.

Progressives did with Communism the same as they did with Socialism, they picked out from a similar leftist ideology what they wanted and discarded the rest. Wilson did so with Socialism, going so far as to equate Democracy with Socialism, though I can’t find the quote at the moment, and FDR did so with Communism.

You wish to put forth that up until Obama Progressives believed in America and American exceptionalism, I dispute that to a large extent. They believed in their version of America and their version of Democracy, which was not the same as the founders. Wilson makes this clear in his criticism of the American Constitution, he felt a more European type Parliament would have been preferable. It is an embrace of European thought processes that is near universal among Progressives, modern liberals or latter day Progressives. Call them what you will. They do not embrace American exceptionalism which flows from the embrace of Constitutional beliefs. They embrace the leftist version.

You use a great deal of blanket statements such as southerners embraced original sin and how imperfect man could only be saved by faith, while northerners were all about perfectibility and works. It is not me who is incapable of reading what you wrote, I comprehend it fine. I simply take umbrage to your extremely simplistic painting of the cause of the Civil War. And I do mean extremely simplistic, as is the entire article.

We do need to get Progressivism and it’s evils right. We need to do so often, loudly and ACCURATELY. You fail to do so, while being critical of those who are far more accurate in their assessment than you are.

Your bombastic rejoin that I simply can’t comprehend your genius writing skills does nothing to shore up your original premise that Beck, and I presume others, just don’t get it. The title of your piece is like a statement of what is to come, yet you do not state what Beck is getting wrong. The closest you come is that Wilson is being demonized by some diary writer but Obama is worse. Then you attempt to use a very simplistic history and lose the thread of your original statement. You fail to grasp that Wilson and his administration IN PARTICULAR are what modern liberalism/Progressivism was built on.

Wilson was not a Communist, perhaps you missed the part about his sending troops to Russia to fight the Communists that I noted, being too busy fantasying about masturbation and all, but he also was not a committed believer of Constitutional boundaries and therein lies the rub. No leftists are.

I believe knowledge is power, and the more knowledge one has of the facts of Progressivism the better. You are obviously very vested in your opinion, so much so that you become insulting when challenged.

That is the hallmark of a small mind unwilling to consider they might not have all the answers.

Your arrogance might be a bit more palatable if you could use simple computer commands. And you still haven’t addressed the fundamental distinction between a more “homegrown” statism and communism. I don’t like or much defend WW, though some of his actions that may be viewed as excessive may also be viewed as dictated by wartime exigency, e.g., the nationalization of the railroads.

Wilson’s only pattern in American thought for both using government to “improve” conditions or to use the resouces of government to fight a major war was the American Civil War, and you’ll find that most of his actions had antecedents in, especially, US actions during that war, e.g., suppressing dissent, taking control of railroads. I see only a difference in scale, really, between WW’s wartime actions and Lincoln’s. And there was plenty of precedent in Wilson’s Southern upbringing for state action to address all sorts of social and economic ills; the antebellum South as well as the CS government was not at all averse to state action to address social and economic needs or to engage in purely state run activities such as manufacturing. One of the greatest examples of state industry was right where Wilson spent much of his young life, Augusta, GA, where the CS government built what was at the time the largest gunpowder mill in the World. He also had the example of the State of Georgia’s ownership and subsidization of railroads. The South only found its “small government” frugality after the Civil War because it was so poverty stricken and racially divided that it couldn’t or wouldn’t use the resources of government for social purposes.

Again, there is much unlikeable about WW and his policies but he and his policies were drawn from the American experience, just from portions of it that some here may not approve of. Comrade Obama and his ilk while they may be American by birth are foreign by nature. So, now I tire of you.

Socialist, communist, marxist, progressive, lefty. It is all pretty much the same to me. I never met a single one that had a good idea or a noble thought.

A very good read.
you got my reco +

the fact that progressivism splintered into some truly horific groups doesn’t diminish the statist objectives/dreams of WW. As you point out, both WW and LBJ both believed in the exceptionalism of the US, but both were nonetheless very effective in bringing about big government. Both were preferable to BHO, but I suspect that if they could time travel to the present, they would become modern leftists pretty quickly.

WW was an elitist snob of a model that is very common know. He was also probably the most racist US President since the Civil War, and maybe ever.

So much of what is wrong in 2010 as a seed that WW planted back in the day. League of Nations anyone?

Part of what makes marxist statism so dangerous is that there are lots of baby steps that people of good will can accept as good things.

Is like asking who was the worst dictator? Hitler, Stalin or Mao. Trying to rank progressiveness requires including Progressive Republicans, Bush I and II, McCain, etc.

A Progressive is a Progressive.

the Progressives got most of what they wanted by 1915. Woman’s vote, The Fed, Prohibition. Many of the states had enacted worker protections. Woodrow Wilson called himself a Progressive because it was popular and easy, beside the fact that he was. After he was done blowing the crap out of the world, it wasn’t cool anymore to be progressive, so pols stop using the term.. Liberal had has nice ring….
Most of the progressivism was designed to protect people from financial/industrial avarice. When the man who worked with his hands for a living, started to benefit from rising wages, the Industrialists put out new ads for labor in foreign countries that didn’t speak English. Hillary and Obama picked up on using the term progressive, because no one knew what it meant anymore. Besides, it has a nice ring…..

Great post. I agree that while we can find fault with the progressivism of WW for not respecting the founding documents, he at least strove for a better America. Obama and the current crop of progressives seek to destroy both America and its founding documents. They are a clear and present danger to the republic.

I’ll try not to threadjack and mention wine this time although I just got back from Napa and Sonoma, Art. I’ll save some observations from that trip for another time.

I think you have this about right. Where I disagree, and it may be more form over substance, is here:

“The Progressives of the late-19th Century through to JFK and LBJ were Americans who believed in America and American exceptionalism. They were as religious as cynics can be, but they believed in a fundamental notion that man was, should be, and could be perfected and government was an instrument of that perfection.”

I don’t think the late 19th Century and early 20th Century Progressives believed in America as a political entity and therefore they did not believe in American exceptionalism because our system had yet to be perfected. Bismark was adored, for example, because he was the antithesis of American capitalism. Wilson and Crowley and that cabal were worse than Beck could describe on his best day. At one point WW had almost a million political prisoners. And, yes, most were socialists or Marxists. Obviously the latter would have done the same to the former if the opportunity had been there.

The Progressives, with their full frontal assaults on constitutional government and American traditions and their adoration of the Strong Man, laid the groundwork for the Marxists who would follow them and become the force they are today in academia, the media, and the government itself. You are right that the Progressives were not Marxist in orientation but what you describe as an intersection I see more as a hostile takeover of a watered down but somewhat like-minded movement dedicated to state manipulation of the individual.

The damage Wilson and the Progressives did to respect for constitutional government paved the way for the totalitarians to slither into position and bide their time until our national traditions were so disrespected even socialism is viewed as superior. Was Wilson closer to Obama than to Coolidge? He was in their shared devotion to statism and devaluation of individual liberties. And it is hard to dispute that but/for Wilson and the Progressive movement someone as radical and out of the mainstream of American thought and tradition as Obama would have been accepted and elected president.

Otherwise, you are right about the tendency to lump these movements together. Analogies of Progressivism to fascism and communism fall flat because the former was to perfect man via the state, as you point out, and the latter to perfect the state via mankind. It is hardly a difference without a distinction as the killing fields of Cambodia, for example, bear testament.

Great blog.

want control of the wealth and they want to tell you how to live and what you can and cannot do.
In the beginning it was by government control only but the disease has evolved from separating religion by vilifying it to assimilating religion into the collective and using it as another way to convince people that the government is only looking out for every one’s best interest.

I don’t see where you have shown Beck to be incorrect. The new strand of Progressivism incorporates all of the evil and all of our enemies into one movement that has co-opted and revised enough of our culture that they were very close to succeeding with their plan. They have learned from past mistakes and with the aid of the media have had control of the narrative for a very long time.

The League of Nations was the seed that had been dormant until the apparatus was in place to enable the transition to the “International Order”

Beck still is the only high level media person who is even reporting on this and he has done us all a huge favor in reminding us of the true history of these people.

The more people talking about it the better.