Progressives—Too Damned Successful

Paul Richardson 2011

To understand the Progressive’s philosophy you need to become
acquainted with Jean Jacques Rousseau, the Genevan
philosopher. Rousseau can be asserted to be the intellectual
father of modern progressive beliefs. His was an interesting life.
He was born and in his early years raised in Calvinist Geneva.
However, later he left Geneva and converted to Catholicism to
escape the original sin edicts of Calvinism among other reasons.
Later in life he converted back to Calvinism, likely so that he could
reclaim his Genevan citizenship.
He wrote extensively on music, philosophy, political science and
education. Thus, his impact on the actions of the progressives
foundational beliefs effects a very broad spectrum of human
existence. One of his most famous writings Discourse on the Arts
and Sciences, concluded that the arts and sciences contributed to
the moral degeneration of mankind, who were innately good by
nature. A quote is instructive;
The first man who had fenced in a piece of land, said "This is
mine," and found people naïve enough to believe him, that
man was the true founder of civil society. From how many
crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and
misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by
pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his
fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone
if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all,
and the earth itself to nobody. ”  
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 1754

Thus, Rousseau’s and indeed the Progressive’s ideal is pure

socialism. That is the collective must rule, individualism is not to
be permitted. The founding principles of America based on
Enlightenment philosophies are the natural enemy of the
Progressives. Therefore, starting primarily with Woodrow Wilson,
the first president with the temerity to attack the Constitution and
Declaration of Independence and continuing on to our current
situation, Progressives have worked hard and with amazing
tenacity to undermine our founding principles and drive us toward
a socialistic “nanny state.” They also believe in societal decisions
being made by “intellectual elites,” that is, with them running the
government. To explore the point further I will relate how the
progressives have achieved their goals in two impactful and
distinct areas; eugenics and education.

Eugenics
On eugenics it is important to know that it was a common belief
among progressives here and in Europe, especially England, that
the “inferior” classes of people were out breeding the better
classes and that something must be done to stop it. Eugenicists
believed that the lot of every citizen would be improved by actions
that benefited the entire group. They believed nations are like
bodies, and their problems are in some sense akin to diseases.
Thus, politics becomes a branch of medicine. By assigning
credibility to the Hegelian and Romantic view of nations as
organic beings, Darwinism became a license to treat social
problems like biological problems. The ills of modern society—
urban crowding, a rising population among the lower classes,
poor public hygiene, the dumbing down of mainstream masses—
now seemed curable through conscientious application of
biological principles.
American progressives were obsessed with the “racial health” of
the nation, which they saw as endangered by immigration plus
overpopulation by native-born Americans. Many of the
outstanding progressive projects, from Prohibition to the birth
control movement, were grounded in this quest to address the
demographic problem. Progressive intellectuals saw eugenics as
the primary approach to the ultimate goal of social control by them
as expert elites.
George Bernard Shaw to Harold Laski to Chief Justice Oliver
Wendell Holmes to John Maynard Keynes; all were great
supporters of eugenics as an answer to the fast breeding of
undesirables problem. Shaw said that we needed to abolish
marriage and replace it with a “human stud farm” where the best
males would service the best females. He also said the state
should be firm in its policy toward criminal and genetically
undesirable elements. “[W]ith many apologies and expressions of
sympathy, and some generosity in complying with their last
wishes,” he wrote with glee, we “should place them in the lethal
chamber and get rid of them.” Laski, JFK’s professor said, “The
different rates of fertility in the sound and pathological stocks
point to a future swamping of the better by the worse.” Holmes in
1927 wrote a letter to Harold Laski in which he proudly told his
friend, “I . . . delivered an opinion upholding the constitutionally of
a state law for sterilizing imbeciles the other day—and felt that I
was getting near the first principle of real reform.” He went on to
tell Laski how amused he was when his colleagues took
exception to his “rather brutal words . . . that made them mad.”
The eugenics movement went underground at the end of WWII
when Hitler’s experiments came to light. I say underground
because advocates like Margaret Sanger continued to support it
in clandestine ways. She sought to ban reproduction of the unfit
and regulate reproduction for everybody else. “More children
from the fit, less from the unfit—that is the chief issue of birth
control,” she wrote in her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization.
Sanger’s genius was to advance the campaign for social control
marrying the racist-eugenic campaign to sexual pleasure and
female liberation. In her “Code to Stop Overproduction of
Children,” published in 1934, she decreed that “no woman shall
have a legal right to bear a child without a permit . . . no permit
shall be valid for more than one child.”
She brilliantly used the language of liberation to convince women
that they weren’t going along with a collectivist scheme but were
in fact “speaking truth to power,” as it were. Sanger in effect
“bought off” women (and grateful men) by offering tolerance for
promiscuity in return for compliance with her hidden eugenic
schemes.
In 1939 Sanger created . . . [the] “Negro Project,” which aimed to
get blacks to adopt birth control. Through the Birth Control
Federation, she hired black ministers (including the Reverend
Adam Clayton Powell Sr.), doctors, and other leaders to help pare
down the supposedly surplus black population. The project’s
racist intent is beyond doubt. “The mass of significant Negroes,”
read the project’s report, “still breed carelessly and disastrously,
with the result that the increase among Negroes . . . is [in] that
portion of the population least intelligent and fit.” Sanger’s intent
is shocking today, but she recognized its extreme radicalism even
then. “We do not want word to go out,” she wrote to a colleague,
“that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the
minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever
occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”
So today you would have to say that Sanger was spectacularly
successful. Today’s abortion statistics are highest among blacks
which is just the result she was aiming toward. And the millions of
abortions across all races reduce the population she so wanted to
control especially for those whom she deemed less worthy of the
right to procreate.

Education

Rousseau, a deteriorationist, proposed that, except perhaps for

brief moments of balance, at or near its inception, when a relative
equality among men prevailed, human civilization has always
been artificial, creating inequality, envy, and unnatural desires.
Note his belief can be summarized that nature is wonderful but
add humans and it is as if you added a pollutant to the mix.
Rousseau never suggests that humans in the state of nature are
moral; in fact, terms such as "justice" or "wickedness" are
inapplicable to prepolitical society as Rousseau understands it.
Morality proper, i.e., self restraint, can only develop through
careful education in a civil state.

John Dewey was influenced by both Rousseau and Hegel.

Dewey continually argues that education and learning are social
and interactive processes, and thus the school itself is a social
institution through which social reform can and should take place.
Dewey advocated for an education system that was to teach
students how to believe, that is, that social reform (per the
Progressive agenda) is very important. In addition, he believed
that students thrive in an environment where they are allowed to
experience and interact with the curriculum, and all students
should have the opportunity to take part in their own learning.
Because he was extremely successful in selling his vision for
education; the experiential, hands on, approach along with tacit
brainwashing of students in anti-enlightenment themes consistent
with the Progressive drive to expand elite expert control of our
“democracy.”

Dewey and other accomplices took a very effective approach to

take control of the American education process. They advocated
“upgrading” the Normal Schools which were in place to train
teachers to become four year colleges and universities. They
took advantage of the American reverence for higher education
and put together four year programs for educating teachers that
emphasized pedagogy (their idea of the education process) to the
virtual exclusion of subject knowledge which had been a strength
of the Normal schools. They effectively controlled education
schools by creating clones of the original Columbia Teachers
College which they designed as the prototype. This enabled them
to take effective control of the education philosophy throughout
America.

By the mid-1960s the great majority of all graduating twelfth

graders had been taught in their whole career by teachers taught
in the process only, content-free manner in the education schools.
The result of the Progressive takeover of the American K-12
school systems was that SAT scores plummeted and overall we
became less competitive with many foreign nations in teaching
our students. This should be no surprise since acquiring
knowledge is the primary goal of education systems around the
world. By eschewing subject knowledge in their approach, the
Progressive approach ignored that reality. While billions and
billions of dollars have been thrown at the problem since then the
results have not improved.

Some would say that the Progressive plan, their high sounding
statements notwithstanding, was doing exactly what it was
designed to do. That is, create a credulous citizenry which would
be more easily convinced to follow the “leadership” of the elite
political experts the Progressives wanted to run the government.
A tragic result of the progressive approach is that research has
shown the content-free, wandering-in-the-wilderness, discovery
approach is most harmful to poor and minority students. If you
were cynical you could conclude that this further supports the
Sanger effort to reduce numbers of minority births by making sure
that it is very difficult for the poor and minority students to use
education as a ticket to a higher quality life.