Lately I’ve been thinking about the Progressive Era in the United States — that time between roughly 1890 and 1920, which saw so many reforms to industry and politics.
Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle about the meat packing industry, and that brought us the USDA and child labor laws. Lincoln Steffens wrote Shame of the Cities and we got political reform.
These Progressive Era reforms brought needed changes, but Progressivism can be taken too far.
Progressive ideology contends that government is the best way to drive social change. Laws are passed with the idea of changing people’s behavior for the better. That works pretty well, but only in small doses. It seems that whenever government gets too much power it abuses it.
That is why we have the Constitution.
Constitutions do not grant rights to citizens. We are born with rights. That’s what Thomas Jefferson meant when he wrote that people are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” in the Declaration of Independence. Today we call these “human rights” and violations are “crimes against humanity”.
The purpose of the Constitution is to formalize rules limiting government power, not to grant rights to citizens.
The United States is a liberal democracy.
In this case “liberal” is a political philosophy concept alluding to freedom, particularly freedom from excessive government constraints that violate natural law. A liberal democracy is one that gives special protections to personal liberties, such as those guaranteed by our Bill of Rights. This is the traditional meaning of liberal, and one of the bedrock principles of the Libertarian political philosophy.
Fascism has three major characteristics…
First, the view that people exist to serve the needs of government rather than government existing to serve the needs of people.
Next, very tight connections between government and industry. Industry becomes a tool advancing government policy.
Finally, disregard for individual sovereignty and decision making. Violating those natural rights we are born with, usually through authoritarianism.
The Founders of the United States wrote protections against the over reach of political power into the Constitution. Slowly those protections have worn away.
This is where the dark side of Progressivism begins to emerge…
For example, Oregon school District 24 J turns over to police names of students who school officials believe may be having sex. Imagine school boards giving themselves the power to police the sex lives of teenagers! This is especially ironic given that schools can’t seem accomplish their prime duty of teaching reading, writing and arithmetic.
In the 1980’s a flurry of new Progressive laws intended to prevent children from economic exploitation in agriculture went into effect. Now one of the unintended consequences — low teen employment — is becoming an issue. Teenagers not only face grim employment prospects, now they face criticism for not knowing how to work once they make it into the labor force. At one time, summer jobs on farms taught teens about work.
Although the Founders argued against “standing armies” and the use of the military to enforce civil laws our militarized police force amount to just that. Inner cities inplaces like Baltimore and Chicago are under military occupation in the form of police with military weapons, military equipment and military tactics. Essentially a military force.
Progressivism and authoritarianism go hand in hand.
Glaring examples of this is the trend towards insulating police from laws the rest of us must obey. It is illegal for us to lie to a police officer, but it is not illegal for the police office to lie to us. In fact, they are trained to do just that. You may recall the FBI attempt to dupe Richard Jewel, the hero of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, into making a “training film” documenting scripted self-incriminating statements.
The controversy and court cases arising out of the police use of Stingray is another example of how Progressivism is perverted into Fascism by powerful government…
Stingray is a device about the size of a briefcase that acts as a surveillance device by disguising itself as a cell tower and sucking up all cell phone traffic in the immediate area. The police claim to limit themselves to targeting only individuals under investigation. Yet they use a non-disclosure agreement with the manufacturer of Stingray to evade public records laws that require them to disclose details of who they are eavesdropping upon.
This is nothing new. Attorney General John Ashcroft told Congress the Patriot Act would target only international terrorist suspects. Within eighteen months, the FBI used it to seize financial records of a Las Vegas nudie bar.
As if all this is not enough, the Supreme Court continues to issue rulings further insulating police and prosecutors from legal consequences when they lie, cheat and kill.
Birth control was a Progressive idea originally intended to end poverty, but government uses it to violate the bodily integrity of its citizens…
Margret Sanger’s goal was to convince poor people to limit the number of kids they had so there would not be as many people impoverished.
That might seem like a laudable goal, but when government gets involved with birth control things quickly degenerate into Fascism. Twenty one states allow themselves to involuntarily sterilize people it deems mentally ill or mentally retarded.
China forced the use of birth control on their population as part of their One Child Policy for a generation and now faces a host of unintended consequences.
Birth control does not always mean limiting births. Sometimes it means creating babies. The right kind of babies. In Nazi Germany, the government took birth control to the logical extreme with Lebensborn, a government program assisting people considered genetically elite to mate and produce children.
Sincere Progressive goals lend themselves to the emergence of Fascism by this process.
It is not as if a democracy accidentally elects a Fascist leader, then repeats that mistake until the entire government becomes Fascist. It is bureaucracies — organizations that, by design, are undemocratic and run by unelected officials — pushing their mission of executing government policy to Fascist extremes.
Like school districts reporting sexually active students to law enforcement.
Or the Justice Department promising restraint when using the Patriot Act, then directing their agents to use it to go after owners of topless bars.
And birth control — intended to mitigate poverty — used by government agencies for eugenics and genocide.
Here are a few things to keep in mind when thinking about how Progressivism leads to Fascism.
First, Fascism is just another form of government like any other. It is not inherently evil, but it allows evil to flourish.
Fascism is dedicated to social unity and harmony. Anything threatening those social goals are ruthlessly suppressed. Like conservative speakers at Progressive universities or Populist organizations meeting in Progressive cities.
This lack of tolerance for the expression of social or political speech shows how Fascism depends on bureaucracies to squelch competing ideas.
Bureaucracies create endless rules that generally carry the force of law. Bureaucracies create and cite these rules to violate individual rights such as social conscience. A dramatic example is threatening high school teachers with career ending and possibly criminal sanctions if they do not report sexually active students.
Next, Fascism features very tight relationships between government and business. Like the military industrial complex, or the ObamaCare medical industrial complex. (For a chilling documented example, see Conspiracy, a recreation of The Wannsee Conference — German military leaders and industrialists planning the logistics of the Final Solution.)
Finally, instead of the government existing for the good of the people, Fascism holds that people exist for the good of the government. Hence, it is permissible for police to shoot innocent civilians in the name of “officer safety” because the safety of government agents is more important than civilian lives. (Even to the extent of ordering a man to get naked, crawl on his hands and knees while begging for his life and then machine-gunning him in the back.)
So that’s a little about Progressivism and Fascism. I hope that by writing this I can encourage more rational thought and less emotion into discussions about the role of government in social policy.
Read more at VicNapier.com and my Medium.com page.
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