The Progressive Foothold The Progressive system managed to gain a foothold in American politics only when it made major compromises with the Founders constitutionalism. The best example is the Social Security system: Had the Progressives managed to install a pure, community-minded system, it would have been an altruistic transfer of wealth from the rich to the vulnerable aged in the name of preserving the sense of national oneness or national community. It would have reflected the enduring Progressive conviction that were all in this together -- all part of one national family, as former New York Governor Mario Cuomo once put it. Indeed, modern liberals do often defend Social Security in those terms. But in fact, FDR knew the American political system well enough to rely on other than altruistic impulses to preserve Social Security past the New Deal. The fact that its based on the myth of individual accounts -- the myth that Social Security is only returning to me what I put in -- is what has made this part of the 20th centurys liberal project almost completely unassailable politically. As FDR intended, Social Security endures because it draws as much on self-interested individualism as on self-forgetting community-mindedness. As this illustrates, the New Deal, for all its Progressive roots, is in some sense less purely Progressive than LBJs Great Society. In the Great Society, we had more explicit and direct an application of the Progressive commitment to rule by social science experts, largely unmitigated initially by political considerations. That was precisely Daniel Patrick Moynihans insight in Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding. Almost overnight, an obscure, untested academic theory about the cause of juvenile delinquency -- namely, Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlins structure of opportunity theory -- leapt from the pages of the social science journals into the laws waging a war on poverty. Indeed, the entire point of the Great Society was to reshape the behavior of the poor -- to move them off the welfare rolls by transforming their behavior according to what social sciences had taught us about such undertakings. It was explicitly a project of social engineering in the best Progressive tradition. Sober liberal friends of the Great Society would later admit that a central reason for its failure was precisely the fact that it was an expertise-driven engineering project, which had never sought the support or even the acquiescence of popular majorities. The engineering excesses of the Great Society and the popular reaction against them meant that the 1960s were the beginning of the first serious challenge to the Progressive model for America -- a challenge that the New Deal hadnt precipitated earlier because it had carefully accommodated itself to the Founders political system. Certainly the New Left took aim at the Great Societys distant, inhumane, patronizing, bureaucratic social engineering; but for our purposes, this marked as well the beginning of the modern conservative response to Progressivism, which has subsequently enjoyed some success, occupying the presidency, both houses of Congress, and perhaps soon the Supreme Court. Curiously, for Mr. West, this is precisely the moment -- he settles on the year 1965 -- at which Progressivism achieves near complete dominance of American politics.
Posted on: Sat, 26 Jul 2014 20:11:28 +0000
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