- Politics and Social Issues
The Progressive Movement
The Progressive Movement
The Progressive Movement began late in the 19th Century. Its Central Tenets are Statism, Income Redistribution, Unionism, Government Management of the Economy, womb to tomb provision for its citizens, and a Libertine Social Policy. To accomplish these aims, The Progressive Movement believes in State Ownership of Businesses—instead of Entrepreneurial Free Enterprise; Central Planning by the Government of the supply of goods and services, including fixing prices of wages, and of goods and services—instead of Free Market Capitalism; That all Citizens should have equal wealth except for the Elite Rulers; And that Sovereignty does not belong to Individual Citizens—but that the People only exist for the benefit of the National State. Various large parts of this Ideology are identical to Socialism and Fascism, including the ideas that the use of courts, bureaucracies—even the police and military—should be used to accomplish goals that would never be approved by a Democracy or a Republic (such as The United States of America under its current Constitution).
The Father of the Progressive Movement
The Father of The Progressive Movement was H.G. Wells, the noted science fiction author. Wells was a devotee of Darwinism and part of his mission was to reassign human beings from the spiritual to the natural world. The best way to get to know the Father of the Progressive Movement is to read his own quotes: "People of quality must be ascendant not democracy"; "Base and servile types are little more than a leaping, glittering confusion of shoaling mackerel on a sunlit afternoon." "The State that most resolutely picks over, educates, sterilizes or poisons its People of the Abyss will be most successful." "Death would merely end the bitterness of their failure." "It should be their lot to die out and disappear . . . since they are born of unrestrained lusts . . . and multiplying through sheer incontinence and stupidity." "Idiots, drunkards, criminals, lunatics, invalids, and the diseased would spoil the world for others." He believed we should prevent people below a certain intelligence and income from reproducing. At the least they should isolated for their failures on a island. "Remove the unfit so we have no need for jails or prisons." Abolish democracy because the "common uneducated man is a violent fool in social and political affairs." What was required was a "great central organization that would dictate what would be done here, there and everywhere . . . imposing its will upon a recalcitrant race." He called his own political philosophy "Liberal Fascism." Wells said of Joseph Stalin "I have never met a man more candid, fair and honest." Wells was a big booster of eugenics, which is based solidly on Darwinism, of course—that unfortunately found its full flower in Nazi Germany with mass extermination.
John Dewey was the most influential reformer of the public education system in the United States in the 20th Century. As a major player in The Progressive Movement, he completely rejected belief in God. If you ever wonder why high school graduates can't read, can't make change, and do not believe in objective truth, look no further.
Progressives are Moral Relativists, meaning, that concrete right and wrong do not exist; that nothing substantive can be said about morality. This can lead to obvious problems since Hitler, Stalin and Mao all thought the rampant murder of millions of people was perfectly moral—providing it served the interests of the National State.
Another member of The Progressive Movement was Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. It was Judge Holmes who made the Philosophy of Legal Positivism—that there is no connection between the law and ethics or morality; that the truth is whatever gives people satisfaction—popular in the legal profession. This school of thought dominated our courts in the latter 20th Century with the unfortunate effect of leading to a collapse of our once common moral language. Judge Holmes famously said, as he ordered the forced sterilization of a woman, "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind . . . three generations of imbeciles are enough."
Another prominent Progressive was the Founder of Planned
Parenthood, Margaret Sanger. Here a few
of her words from her books or speeches:
"The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant
members is to kill it." Regarding blacks, immigrants and indigents she said this, "Human weeds, reckless breeders,
spawning . . . human beings who never should have been born." Concerning the rights of the handicapped and mentally ill, and racial minorities: "More children from the fit, less
from the unfit -- that is the chief aim of birth control."On
the extermination of blacks: "We do
not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population if it
ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members." In her "Plan for Peace," Sanger
outlined her strategy for eradication of those she deemed "feebleminded." Sanger espoused the thinking of eugenicists
-- similar to Darwin's "survival of the fittest" -- but related the
concept to human society, saying the genetic makeup of the poor, and
minorities, for example, was inferior.
One of Sanger's greatest influences, sexologist/eugenicist Dr. Havelock
Ellis (with whom she had an affair, leading to her divorce from her first husband),
urged mandatory sterilization of the poor as a prerequisite to receiving any
The goal of eugenicists is "to prevent the multiplication of bad stocks," wrote Dr. Ernst Rudin in the April 1933 Birth Control Review (of which Sanger was editor). Another article exhorted Americans to "restrict the propagation of those physically, mentally and socially inadequate." Regarding adultery, "A woman's physical satisfaction was more important than any marriage vow," Sanger believed.
The Ultimate Progressive
The Progressive newspaper the New York Times employed—and the Progressive Pulitzer Prize was awarded to—one Walter Duranty. Duranty was posted in Moscow for 15 years to report back to the American people what was going on over there. He was so caught up in The Progressive Movement that he described Joseph Stalin as a "decent and clean-living man and a great leader." Duranty reported that there was no famine in the USSR—though it is clear from his notes and letters that he was lying through his teeth, and that he knew full well the scale of the calamity, and even knew the USSR was deliberately starving millions of its own people. He also defended Stalin's notoriously phony show trials that resulted in the execution of millions of innocent people.
A more recent champion of The Progressive Movement is Saul Alinsky. Alinsky is the father of the modern community organizing movement, of which ACORN is a prominent example. One of his key philosophies is for a community organization to claim non-partisanship, in order to receive grants from the government (of monies confiscated from taxpayers) that are illegal to be given to a partisan group. This is obviously a sham, since none of their stated goals could be remotely described as Conservative, and their members vote for Democrats in elections virtually 100%. In effect, they use the wages of Conservatives to fight against them and everything they believe in. Here is a quote from Alinsky, "Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history, the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom—Lucifer." Another of his famous quotes is this, "There's another reason for working inside the system. Taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future." And finally this, "Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and the way of life of the middle class."
The Enemy of Progressives
Today's Progressives have singled out the Boy Scouts as a target for their wrath, repeatedly filing lawsuits against this organization—that has helped a multitude of boys become fine men—to prevent them from having a building in which to meet. This is understandable since the entire philosophy of the Boy Scouts is sickening to The Progressive Movement. The best evidence of this is that ominous Boy Scout Oath: "On my honor, I will do my best; To do my duty To God and my country; And to obey the Scout Law; To help other people at all times; To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight." Scouts must promise to be honorable, loyal, useful, friendly, dutiful, courteous, thrifty, cheerful, kind to animals, and clean in thought, word and deed. Rather subversive ideas.
Brave New World
In closing, I will share with you some thoughts of a voice crying in wilderness long ago, warning us of the dangers of The Progressive Movement. In 1932, in his classic book, "Brave New World," Huxley wrote, "All members of society are conditioned in childhood to hold the values that the World State idealizes. Constant consumption is the bedrock of stability Recreational heterosexual sex is an integral part of society. In The World State, sex is a social activity rather than a means of reproduction and is encouraged from early childhood; the few women who can reproduce are conditioned to take birth control. The maxim "everyone belongs to everyone else" is repeated often, and the idea of a "family" is repellent. As a result, sexual competition and emotional, romantic relationships are obsolete. Marriage, natural birth, the notion of being a parent, and pregnancy are considered too obscene to be mentioned in casual conversation."
And I will leave you with forecasts Huxley made in two interviews. In 1949 he said that sometime in the future, "I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." And in 1959 he said, "And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing ... a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods."