Posted on 01/10/2019 8:38:04 PM PST by aruanan
Every major social, economic, and political problem in the US was either created or deliberately exacerbated by the progressive socialist movement.
It all started in the late 1800s with the progressive socialists, newly arrived from Europe, setting their sights on taking over and taking down the United States from the ground up.
They weren’t anything new.
In their European form, they had long been known to the founding fathers. John Adams referred to their grands-pères in the French genesis of “ideology” as the “science of idiocy,” the art of sinking deeper than any diver had ever gone into the depths of government and never finding a bottom.
The depths of the US federal government of the last quarter of the 19th century, though, were very shallow compared to the present day, in spite of the effort required to mount and successfully prosecute the Civil War.
And most of what we now consider to be public or secular institutions existed back then but mostly as the creations of private citizens working together in voluntary association toward goals of mutual interest. The major universities had been started as seminaries by religious institutions. Most charitable organizations, social service organizations, orphanages, and hospitals had been established and run by religious institutions. Many schools were founded and operated by religious institutions or by groups of parents of children within a small region.
So when the progressive socialists first arrived on these shores after all the hard work of nation-building had already been done by others more intelligent, daring, and forthright than them, they found a place with a national government still far too shallow for their purposes, but a place far too robustly a challenge for them in the independence of its states, its businesses, its social institutions, and too hopeful in the upward mobility of its people, immigrant and native alike, to be allowed to continue giving the lie to their already laughable worldview that identified them, the progressive socialists, as the saviors of mankind.
I mean, as missionaries, what do you do when the natives you came to save already have a better life as the product of their own efforts than anything you could offer, already have a demonstrable hope for even more in the more immediate future than anything your social revolution could deliver, with the source of it all being the very thing that you claim to be the supreme evil oppressing them?
Do you say, “Hey, screw it! I must have been wrong,” then jettison your obviously wrong beliefs, go native, get naked, take up surfing, and enjoy a new and hitherto unexpected prosperous life or do you burrow into the system and use the system to destroy the system?
Given the social and psychological pathology that animates the members of this quasi-religious sect of progressive socialism, you will destroy anything, no matter how wonderful, no matter how much more fully it is actually delivering on what, as described by you and your fellow secular missionaries, is still but a future promise, the fulfillment of which depends on the eventual success of the revolution.
Why?
Because it means they already have what you are only promising. It means that your understanding of the world is deeply flawed. It means your group’s characterization of itself as the expression of the praxis of history and savior of mankind is ludicrously wrong. And, the cruelest blow of all, it means that nobody needs you. So you set about to seize control and make them need you, if only for nothing more than to prevent themselves from being harmed even more deeply by you needing them to need you.
But how do you even get started doing that when everything is so decentralized and distributed throughout society, every part pretty much independent of any central governmental authority that you could seize and use to control everything? Easy, you start gathering those widely distributed eggs and putting them into a series of ever larger administrative/regulatory baskets built by you to your own specifications and marketed as better, safer, more modern, and more moral.
And when that basket is big enough and contains enough of society’s precious eggs, then anything that threatens the basket you can claim threatens society and go on to promise that it’s not going to happen, not as long as you guys are around to defend the little guy, all the while hoping the little guy doesn’t catch on that it was you guys who put him into that spot in the first place: if he has you, he suffers; but if he doesn’t have you, you tell him he will be destroyed.
The question was just where to begin. Among a population that was mostly rural and had a low population density because it was spread out over a very large territory, that was lacking in easy ways to get around and to communicate, among all the towns and cities, among all the many social institutions, which locations and which tactics offered the greatest chance of success?
The personal environment that the progressive socialists found on arrival was a vastly different personal environment than today. “Personal entertainment” back then consisted mostly of things one actually had to do rather than passive viewing or listening. The only ways to communicate were by talking face to face or by written media. And though there was telegraphy, that was still only point-to-point, person-to-person communication.
The principal venues of human interaction were the home, the school, the job, the church, or recreation. Recreation or sports among adults, though, as a result of a couple centuries of Puritanism, was only just beginning to come into popularity. And there was nothing geographically or temporally immediate that was done at a distance any greater than one’s own voice could carry.
The most prevalent forms of mass communication took place in church services, classroom instruction, political rallies, public lectures, and plays. The only anonymous forms of mass communication were books, newspapers, and tracts.
So there were only a limited number of places that the progressive socialists could have significant personal contact, a necessary degree of anonymity to conceal motives, and a sufficiently great audience, to start their attempted takeover of US society. Those places were the churches, the schools, and the workplace.
Of those three, only the church simultaneously combined the largest numbers of people from the highest levels of business and society with direct access to major social institutions that reached an even greater percentage of the “oppressed” population who could be persuaded that they were yearning for liberation.
The primary religion of the United States was Christianity. The primary Christian churches were Protestant. And the captains of industry and the most influential people of society, regardless of whether they actually believed any of it, were to be found in the large, well-established Protestant churches. Through the social gospel movement, the progressive socialists infiltrated and co-opted major Protestant churches.
This had both organizational and propagandistic advantages.
Organizationally, the Protestant churches opened a way for the progressive socialists to gain control of the largest charitable and social service organizations in the nation, which in turn gave them access to the downtrodden to whom those services were offered.
Propagandistically, through the seminaries supplying pastors and other religious workers, it enabled them an expeditious way of disseminating to the church-going public the modernist reinterpretations of classic Biblical doctrines, the primary one being the Marxist view of the eschaton, the meaning and focus of all human history. It was something that was right here and now instead of somewhere in the sky, by and by.
And the true apocalypse was not some far-off future spiritual battle waged by heavenly armies against a supernatural foe. It was the present day campaign against that new church of mammon, of materialism and greed that was crucifying the poor on a cross of gold.
And it called out for a new generation of reformers who could use their social power, influence, and wealth to fight for those oppressed by the godless pursuit of filthy lucre, you know, the same way that Martin Luther, John Calvin, and other reformers, such as John and Charles Wesley, sought to liberate the common man from the suffocating spiritual oppression of ancient organized religion (or as their members-only characterization put it: the destruction of the existing order of capitalist oppression of the masses to be carried out by human social revolutionaries—and not too much later their version of school teachers would be referring to themselves as ‘change agents’). And did not Jesus, himself, tell them in the gospels that their future judgment would depend on how they treated “the least of these,” the naked, the poor, and the imprisoned, in the here and now?
This was still on display about seventy-five years later in the gala thrown by the National Council of Churches and the City of New York to honor Ozzie Davis for his humanitarian accomplishments, attended by a multitude of everyone who was anyone, featuring a live jazz combo, hot hors d'oeuvres, and a great open bar before the dinner of roast beef, green bean almandine, and interminable laudatory speeches leading up a slightly less interminable speech expressing heartfelt gratitude at having been so honored by these deeply compassionate people whose only goal was to lessen human suffering and desperation through a variety of enlightened, intelligently designed, and publicly-funded social programs concerning which he, Ozzie Davis, considered himself so blessed and fortunate to have been allowed to be such a small part of it all.
Since Marxism itself was a reactionary, derivative, and fairly unimaginative reworking of the most common Judeo-Christian social and historical myths and because church attendance back then was very common, the progressive socialist message could still easily be linked thematically to helping the poor, giving oneself in sacrifice, fulfilling the law of Christ, ministering to the afflicted, setting the captives free, loving one’s enemies, and doing unto others blah blah blah blah, all perceived as noble, humanitarian, and moral goods.
This ready-made thematic resonance between Marxist-lite progressive socialist-reworked Christian eschatology and a large section of at least nominally Christian society, especially the wealthier and more powerful individuals of society, offered the progressive socialists an immediate and advantageous venue to start altering the self-identity of large numbers of the nation’s most influential citizens.
The means by which this would be accomplished lay in convincing them that, while all these things were, indeed, moral goods, in the deeper spiritual scheme of things, however, putting their own hands to the plow and not looking back, taking direct action in the here and now to bring these things to pass, raised them all to a higher, or at least a more immediate, plane of religious importance and social imperative.
That was their private, religious tack.
The public and secular part of their strategy was directed toward business, education, and city government.
Starting first in the two largest American cities of Chicago and New York, but especially in Chicago, and from the helms of the charitable and social service organizations created by the religious institutions they had set on the path to fundamental transformation, they created parallel secular organizations funded by the city that eventually became departments of the city, and from there were expanded into state and national versions.
It was an early example of the strategy of “duplicate and replace” that would be used by leftists everywhere over the coming decades. After WW2, the communists in Czechoslovakia created a police force parallel to the longstanding official organization but completely loyal to them. When it was in place and ready to go, they simply eliminated the preexisting one rather than waste time and effort trying to coerce the existing officials and police of the old regime to adopt their decidedly different view of law.
This strategy was repeated throughout the leftist world. Most recently, Barry Obama had been gearing up to do the same by his militarizing of many federal agencies that had no law enforcement duties and by calling for a national police force powerful enough to rival the US military.
The objective of the progressive socialists around the turn of the century, then, was to supplant what amounted to a federation of independent, widely distributed charitable organizations, to use the connections with highly placed members of society and the city government they had cultivated through them and the churches, and to duplicate, expand, and incorporate into city government secular versions of those same organizations.
To lock it all into place, they created the licensing requirements for the personnel that would work in those organizations. They created the college departments. They designed the coursework and degrees required for that licensing. In the interests of public safety and uniform quality of product, they required licensing of similar organizations not yet fully under their or under the city’s control (more and more, amounting to one and the same thing), requiring them, among the conditions, to have on staff people who had successfully completed their required course of college training to become licensed social workers.
Then to broaden the avenue to more direct and unappealable access to families, because it was facilitated by force of government, they created juvenile courts, family courts, and child and family welfare agencies. They deliberately played off the xenophobia of the Protestant elite in both business and government by casting those agencies, created and managed exclusively by them, as indispensable for controlling the poorly-educated, mostly non-English speaking, mostly Catholic, beer and wine-swilling immigrant families too stupid or too uncaring to limit family size.
And at the same time that one group of progressive socialists was shaking down high society contacts in government, church, and business, their coworkers were busily at work organizing labor unions against them. A crucial factor for success in extorting employers as well as expanding the need for social services was finding a way to limit the number of available workers.
Why would they want to limit employment? Because it would give them control over business.
If that number could be driven down, then both competition for scarce workers and the resulting increases in pay would be high. But the presence of a large immigrant population made up of large families who were eager for the whole family to work, whether on the business premises or at home doing piece-work, presented a great obstacle to the labor organizers.
This was overcome in three ways:
1) By getting government sanction of labor unions and the requirement that no employer could hire anyone who was not a member of a union, 2) By limiting the number of people admitted to unions, and 3) By reducing the overall number of people who were available and willing to work.
Their progressive socialist fellow travelers in the newly-created social services bureaucracies worked with them on the third way in deliberate symbiosis by agitating for legal restrictions on “child” labor, by defining upward the notion of what age constituted “a child,” and by pushing through requirements for mandatory universal school attendance that was eventually extended through high school.
Their tag team approach to social revolution with their fellows in the labor movement had several powerful and long-lasting effects:
1) It dried up the large cheap labor supply of immigrants of all ages,
2) It vastly increased poverty among these families now deprived of their income by the actions of progressive socialists. That poverty and all its attendant circumstances in turn provided justification for the progressive socialists to ask for more funds and more power to “address” the urgent crisis that they themselves had created amongst the lower classes.
The not-so-implied threat was that the crisis could destabilize and threaten society unless those whose expertise in the nature and function of society, the sociologists, and those whose expertise in the nature of societal dysfunction and the means to counter it, the social workers, were sufficiently empowered to act before it was too late. It was a ploy that these folks and their descendants would use again and again right up to the present day.
3) It necessarily increased the number of domestic problems exacerbated by the progressive socialists’ artificial creation of poverty. They used this domestic dysfunction to call for even more funding and power for family courts and child and family welfare agencies to deal with the urgent crisis. This was an early version of the politics of self-interest employed later by:
A. FDR, who used federal welfare to co-opt black families and alienate them from the Republican Party which had been their party of choice since before the Civil War, their ensuing poverty caused by that welfare then blamed on the Republicans.
B. LBJ, who designed his War on Poverty drive many black families into even greater poverty by eliminating a father or man in the home as a requirement for continuing to receive federal welfare, leading to an explosion of crime and drug use in less than ten years, increased difficulties for kids in school, all of which were used to launch urgent appeals that even more money and authority be given to the same people who caused the problems to fix them through programs designed to
i. Get kids started in school even earlier (Head Start), ii. “Help” struggling mothers and infants (WIC), as well as to iii. Encourage mostly minority mothers to climb out of poverty by aborting their illegitimate babies,
all the while warning them not to support Republicans who could only be counted upon to take away all those wonderful things.
C. Jimmy Carter and later Bill Clinton, who used the Community Reinvestment Act to force lending institutions (evil business) to make loans to low income people who were incapable of servicing the debt because “everyone should be able to own his own home,” leading to defaults on loans, greater poverty, the creation of the toxic assets crisis, all laying the groundwork for calls to solve the problem by giving more money and more government control over banking and financial services to the very people who created the problem,
D. Barry Obama, in an address to the SEIU at Loyola, who called for the establishment of government programs that would meet all the needs of the poor so they could be converted into a political constituency in perpetuity.
4) It led to larger numbers of now-unemployed youth looking for other ways to earn some income for their families or to occupy their time, which led to the creation of the concept of the “juvenile delinquent,” which led to the progressive socialists demanding more money and power for juvenile courts, for juvenile detention centers, for the seizing of children from those dangerous homes capable of producing such “delinquents” and placing them in institutions or in foster care to deal with this urgent social crisis.
All these things served only to increase social dysfunction and criminal behavior at the same time they furthered the assault by the progressive socialists on the institution of the family, the formerly more-limited city governments, and the businesses and wealthy citizens who were taxed to fund it all.
At the same time that the progressive socialists considered all three to be their targets for destruction to further the revolution, they told the poor that they were victims of the wealthy business owners but told the wealthy business owners that their high taxes and philanthropy were truly doing the Lord’s work in helping to care for these, the least of the Lord’s brethren.
All of this laid the foundation for targeting the existing, very excellent US school system, including the newly-created (but not by them) public schools. In the present day some mistakenly assume that literacy in late 19th century America was not widespread. It was, however, nearly universal, at a much higher level of ability, at a much earlier age than now, and all accomplished before the progressive socialists took over education in the US. When they did, they implemented what they claimed were modern and scientific methods of pedagogy, their sales pitch being that because they were recent and allegedly scientific, they must be better.
In the colleges and universities, the progressive socialists branched out from their newly-created departments of social work, sociology, and psychology to take over the schools of teacher training. Once there they were able to train prospective teachers in their progressive world view. They controlled the licensing requirements for teachers. And they did as much as they could to impose those requirements on private and parochial schools.
Their collusion with their counterparts in the labor movement to dry up the labor pool through restrictions on “child labor” and mandatory school attendance, once it was extended beyond 8th grade to high school, vastly increased the number of high schools (The reason some places like Chicago still have grammar schools of grades 1-8 is because 8th grade was the top grade for most students, a relatively small number going on to “high” school, and an even smaller number going on to college). This, in turn, vastly increased the number of teachers required, who would then largely be supplied from the schools of education that had been taken over by the progressive socialists. Compulsory attendance that led to the creation of truancy officers, combined with increasing the required number of years in school by almost 50%, served to feed ever larger numbers of truant kids and their families back into the juvenile and family courts and city social welfare organizations that also had been designed, staffed, and run by progressive socialists.
But that wasn’t enough for them.
On the private side, they were expanding into the fields of entertainment and journalism to shape public opinion, and had already established a base in what had become the progressive churches, but those were Protestant churches, and the majority of the poor immigrant kids in the public schools from Italy and Ireland were Catholic.
Now that they had started to take over the public school system through mandating compulsory attendance and restricting child and youth employment, they moved to expand their control by implementing a curriculum to facilitate the inculcation of their political views in what was by then their single largest captive group in the US.
They did this in at least four ways.
The first way was through the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education formed in 1913. In 1917, at taxpayer expense, the Commission published their manifesto, Principles of Secondary Education. It was a progressive socialist tract that turned on its head the recommendations of the Gordon Commission from Harvard made a couple of decades earlier that had set high educational standards for high schools to make sure those not going on to college would have a first rate education.
The Principles of Secondary Education basically said that all that intellectual stuff could be pursued by those going on to college and stressed, instead, the necessity of “producing” citizens with worthy social attitudes who would make worthy use of their time engaging in worthy activities of benefit to the community.
The Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education later adopted another name: The National Education Association.
The second was to gain control of state education agencies and curriculum requirements.
The third was to gain control of publishers of educational materials to make sure that their content was consistent with what they wanted the students to know (or not to know).
The fourth was to start extending the school downward to kindergarten and pre-K, to institute before and after school programs, and to start promoting the “if you want a good job get a good education—meaning college” line to divert students from the trades (and helping the trades to keep their numbers low and their demand and remuneration high) and into four more years of school in college, thus giving them the single largest chunk of children’s lives for up to 18 years to “educate” them in the ways of progressive socialism.
Of course, whatever they did that screwed the kids up was used, in the same way their comrades in social work and politics used both intended and unintended consequences, as an excuse to demand ever more time, money, resources, and authority to address the problem. Then a few years later the problems caused by their fix would be used in the same way to push for the adoption of the next latest advance in pedagogical innovation.
But the blame for the problems would always be placed on something out of their control, the “home environment,” maybe “latchkey kids,” a phenomenon created largely by their social engineering, on the parents, on TV, on video games, on cell phones and “personal entertainment” and on the students themselves for being “learning disabled” or “dyslexic” or ADHD, etc, the goal being to get ever more under their control.
The one place, though, the blame was never, ever placed was on the education industry itself or its employees, as seen by its hysterical opposition to standards for teacher accountability, charter schools, home schooling, and measurements of skills and knowledge outcomes as a measure of educational success or failure.
And so, in addition to taking over religious institutions, politics, popular entertainment, and the media, to keep it all going the progressive socialists created a vertically-integrated means of indoctrination in progressive socialism that is older and more entrenched than any other of its kind in the world.
What they have created in the education system of the United States is a standing wave of progressive socialism. Their twin goal is to keep it from being disrupted and to keep pumping up its amplitude.
But now the progressive socialists have a serious new rival:
1) It practices many of the same strategies of takeover that they pioneered and in some of the very states that have become the strongholds of progressive socialism,
2) Its origin, like that of progressive socialism and Marxism, was a self-serving and rather lame refashioning of Judeo-Christian history and dogma with a twist, the twist being that THEY, going all the way back to the beginning of time, are the ones it was really all about,
3) Its worldview, like that of progressive socialists, holds that the entire world system has become corrupted, and whose self-identity, like that of the progressive socialists, holds that they have been set apart by reality itself to purge the world of its corruption.
4) It tries, like the progressive socialists did (but not as successfully because of their obviously alien appearance) to keep it all on the down-low by characterizing itself in public as something other than what its members, strenuously and continuously, in the privacy of their meeting places characterize themselves to be.
5) It is able, like the progressive socialists were able to do with the socialist anarchist bombers of the late 19th/early 20th centuries engaged in terrorism against the same enemies of the progressive socialists, to cast themselves as more moderate by the contrast with those of their number whose fundamental beliefs and goals were identical but who engaged in acts of extreme violence and, so deflect attention from themselves, the peace-loving who want only to be part of the broad tapestry that is this vibrant and diverse experience in American tolerance and mutual respect. Uh huh.
6) Its goal, like that of the progressive socialists, is the fundamental transformation of all societies of the corrupt world system into their system, by any means necessary—though here and in other Western countries, just like the strategy pursued by progressive socialists a century ago and ever since, it is achieved by stealth, subterfuge, and the co-opting of existing institutions of the society they aim on taking over, a method their political tacticians in the Muslim Brotherhood describe as “cultural jihad.”
They have destroyed every civilization throughout human history. The problem is that the Go Along - get Alongs (65%+ of the population) buy into their BS until it is too late and the Left has all the weapons and power.
“Progressive socialism” = another name for Satanism. Only the devil could come up with something so evil and disastrous that has brought more misery, suffering and death than any other ideology in history.
Send them all to N. Korea.
The writer’s section on education was very good. Gave a bit of information that most people don’t know about the rise of the Left in educational planning, direction and control, including that of the National Education Association.
This is a pretty good article, did you write it? I’d like to share this, but I would want to give credit to the author.
bump for later
Remember, there are none so evil in creation as those who were made in the image of God. Satan, as a renegade created being, has power and incorporeality and comparative immortality on his side, but he’s a piker in evil compared to man.
Yes, I did, though I wish there was an edit function.
Well, I’ll just try inserting the edited version here:
Every major social, economic, and political problem in the US was either created or deliberately exacerbated by the progressive socialist movement.
It all started in the late 1800s with the progressive socialists, newly arrived from Europe, setting their sights on taking over and taking down the United States from the ground up.
They weren’t anything new.
In their European form, they had long been known to the founding fathers. John Adams referred to their grands-pères in the French genesis of “ideology” as the “science of idiocy,” the art of sinking deeper than any diver had ever gone into the depths of government and never finding a bottom.
The depths of the US federal government of the last quarter of the 19th century, though, were very shallow compared to the present day, in spite of the effort required to mount and successfully prosecute the Civil War.
And most of what we now consider to be public or secular institutions existed back then but mostly as the creations of private citizens working together in voluntary association toward goals of mutual interest. The major universities had been started as seminaries by religious institutions. Most charitable organizations, social service organizations, orphanages, and hospitals had been established and run by religious institutions. Many schools were founded and operated by religious institutions or by groups of parents of children within a small region.
So when the progressive socialists first arrived on these shores after all the hard work of nation-building had already been done by others more intelligent, daring, and forthright than them, they found a place with a national government still far too shallow for their purposes, but a place far too robustly a challenge for them in the independence of its states, its businesses, its social institutions, and too hopeful in the upward mobility of its people, immigrant and native alike, to be allowed to continue giving the lie to their already laughable worldview that identified them, the progressive socialists, as the saviors of mankind.
I mean, as missionaries, what do you do when the natives you came to save already have a better life as the product of their own efforts than anything you could offer, already have a demonstrable hope for even more in the more immediate future than anything your social revolution could deliver, with the source of it all being the very thing that you claim to be the supreme evil oppressing them?
Do you say, “Hey, screw it! I must have been wrong,” then jettison your obviously wrong beliefs, go native, get naked, take up surfing, and enjoy a new and hitherto unexpected prosperous life or do you burrow into the system and use the system to destroy the system?
Given the social and psychological pathology that animates the members of this quasi-religious sect of progressive socialism, you will destroy anything, no matter how wonderful, no matter how much more fully it is actually delivering on what, as described by you and your fellow secular missionaries, is still but a future promise, the fulfillment of which depends on the eventual success of the revolution.
Why?
Because it means they already have what you are only promising. It means that your understanding of the world is deeply flawed. It means your group’s characterization of itself as the expression of the praxis of history and savior of mankind is ludicrously wrong.
And, the cruelest blow of all, it means that nobody needs you. So you set about to seize control and make them need you, if only for nothing more than to prevent themselves from being harmed even more deeply by you needing them to need you.
But how do you even get started doing that when everything is so decentralized and distributed throughout society, every part pretty much independent of any central governmental authority that you could seize and use to control everything? Easy, you start gathering those widely distributed eggs and putting them into a series of ever larger administrative/regulatory baskets built by you to your own specifications and marketed as better, safer, more modern, and more moral.
And when that basket is big enough and contains enough of society’s precious eggs, then anything that threatens the basket you can claim threatens society and go on to promise that it’s not going to happen, not as long as you guys are around to defend the little guy, all the while hoping the little guy doesn’t catch on that it was you guys who put him into that spot in the first place: if he has you, he suffers; but if he doesn’t have you, you tell him he will be destroyed.
The question was just where to begin. Among a population that was mostly rural and had a low population density because it was spread out over a very large territory, that was lacking in easy ways to get around and to communicate, among all the towns and cities, among all the many social institutions, which locations and which tactics offered the greatest chance of success?
The personal environment that the progressive socialists found on arrival was a vastly different personal environment than today. “Personal entertainment” back then consisted mostly of things one actually had to do rather than passive viewing or listening. The only ways to communicate were by talking face to face or by written media. And though there was telegraphy, that was still only point-to-point, person-to-person communication.
The principal venues of human interaction were the home, the school, the job, the church, or recreation. Recreation or sports among adults, though, as a result of a couple centuries of Puritanism, was only just beginning to come into popularity. And there was nothing geographically or temporally immediate that was done at a distance any greater than one’s own voice could carry.
The most prevalent forms of mass communication took place in church services, classroom instruction, political rallies, public lectures, and plays. The only anonymous forms of mass communication were books, newspapers, and tracts.
So there were only a limited number of places that the progressive socialists could have significant personal contact to build useful relationships yet a necessary degree of anonymity to conceal their motives, and a sufficiently great audience, to start their attempted takeover of US society. Those places were the churches, the schools, and the workplace.
Of those three, only the church simultaneously combined the largest numbers of people from the highest levels of business and society with direct access to major social institutions that reached an even greater percentage of the “oppressed” population who could be persuaded that they were yearning for was not a better job and higher income but liberation.
The primary religion of the United States was Christianity. The primary Christian churches were Protestant. And the captains of industry and the most influential people of society, regardless of whether they actually believed any of it, were to be found in the large, well-established Protestant churches. Through the social gospel movement, the progressive socialists infiltrated and co-opted major Protestant churches.
This had both organizational and propagandistic advantages.
Organizationally, the Protestant churches opened a way for the progressive socialists to gain control of the largest charitable and social service organizations in the nation, which in turn gave them access to the downtrodden to whom those services were offered.
Propagandistically, through the seminaries supplying pastors and other religious workers, it enabled them an expeditious way of disseminating to the church-going public the modernist reinterpretations of classic Biblical doctrines, the primary one being the Marxist view of the eschaton, the meaning and focus of all human history. It was something that was right here and now instead of somewhere in the sky, by and by.
And the true apocalypse was not some far-off future spiritual battle waged by heavenly armies against a supernatural foe. It was apocalypse now, the present day campaign against that new church of mammon, of materialism and greed that was crucifying the poor on a cross of gold.
And it called out for a new generation of reformers who could use their social power, influence, and wealth to fight for those oppressed by the godless pursuit of filthy lucre, you know, the same way that Martin Luther, John Calvin, and other reformers, such as John and Charles Wesley, sought to liberate the common man from the suffocating spiritual oppression of ancient organized religion (or as their members-only characterization put it: the destruction of the existing order of capitalist oppression of the masses to be carried out by human social revolutionaries—and not too much later their version of school teachers would be referring to themselves as ‘change agents’). And did not Jesus, himself, tell them in the gospels that their future judgment would depend on how they treated “the least of these,” the naked, the poor, and the imprisoned, in the here and now?
This was still on display about seventy-five years later in the gala thrown by the National Council of Churches and the City of New York to honor Ozzie Davis for his humanitarian accomplishments, attended by a multitude of everyone who was anyone, featuring a live jazz combo, hot hors d’oeuvres, and a great open bar before the dinner of roast beef, green bean almandine, and interminable laudatory speeches leading up a slightly less interminable speech expressing heartfelt gratitude at having been so honored by these deeply compassionate people whose only goal was to lessen human suffering and desperation through a variety of enlightened, intelligently designed, and publicly-funded social programs concerning which he, Ozzie Davis, considered himself so blessed and fortunate to have been allowed to be such a small part of it all.
Since Marxism itself was a reactionary, derivative, and fairly unimaginative reworking of the most common Judeo-Christian social and historical myths and because church attendance back then was very common, the progressive socialist message could still easily be linked thematically to helping the poor, giving oneself in sacrifice, fulfilling the law of Christ, ministering to the afflicted, setting the captives free, loving one’s enemies, and doing unto others blah blah blah blah, all perceived as noble, humanitarian, and moral goods.
This ready-made thematic resonance between Marxist-lite progressive socialist-reworked Christian eschatology and a large section of at least nominally Christian society, especially the wealthier and more powerful individuals of society, offered the progressive socialists an immediate and advantageous venue to start altering the self-identity of large numbers of the nation’s most influential citizens.
The means by which this would be accomplished lay in convincing them that, while all these things were, indeed, moral goods, in the deeper spiritual scheme of things, however, putting their own hands to the plow and not looking back, taking direct action in the here and now to bring these things to pass, raised them all to a higher, or at least a more immediate, plane of religious importance and social imperative.
That was their private, religious tack.
The public and secular part of their strategy was directed toward business, education, and city government.
Starting first in the two largest American cities of Chicago and New York, but especially in Chicago, and from the helms of the charitable and social service organizations created by the religious institutions they had set on the path of righteousness to fundamental transformation, they created parallel secular organizations funded by the city that eventually became departments of the city, and from there were expanded into state and national versions.
It was an early example of the strategy of “duplicate and replace” that would be used by leftists everywhere over the coming decades. After WW2, the communists in Czechoslovakia created a police force parallel to the longstanding official organization but completely loyal to them. When it was in place and ready to go, they simply eliminated the preexisting one rather than waste time and effort trying to coerce the existing officials and police of the old regime to adopt their decidedly different view of law.
This strategy was repeated throughout the leftist world. Most recently, Barry Obama had been gearing up to do the same by his militarizing of many federal agencies that had no law enforcement duties and by calling for a national police force powerful enough to rival the US military.
The objective of the progressive socialists around the turn of the century, then, was to supplant what amounted to a federation of independent, widely distributed charitable organizations, to use the connections with highly placed members of society and the city government they had cultivated through them and the churches, and to duplicate, expand, and incorporate into city government secular versions of those same organizations.
To lock it all into place, they created the licensing requirements for the personnel that would work in those organizations. They created the college departments. They designed the coursework and degrees required for that licensing. In the interests of public safety and uniform quality of product, they required licensing of similar organizations not yet fully under their or under the city’s control (more and more, amounting to one and the same thing), requiring them, among the conditions, to have on staff people who had successfully completed their required course of college training to become licensed social workers.
Then to broaden the avenue to more direct and unappealable access to families, because it was facilitated by force of government, they created juvenile courts, family courts, and child and family welfare agencies. They deliberately played off the xenophobia of the Protestant elite in both business and government by casting those agencies, created and managed exclusively by them, as indispensable for controlling the poorly-educated, mostly non-English speaking, mostly Catholic, beer and wine-swilling immigrant families too stupid or too uncaring to limit family size.
And at the same time that one group of progressive socialists was shaking down their high society contacts in government, church, and business, their coworkers were busily at work organizing labor unions against them. A crucial factor for success in extorting employers as well as expanding the need for social services was finding a way to limit the number of available workers.
Why would they want to limit employment? Because it would give them control over business.
If that number could be driven down, then both competition for scarce workers and the resulting increases in pay would be high. But the presence of a large immigrant population made up of large families who were eager for the whole family to work, whether on the business premises or at home doing piece-work, presented a great obstacle to the labor organizers.
This was overcome in three ways:
1) By getting government sanction of labor unions and the requirement that no employer could hire anyone who was not a member of a union,
2) By limiting the number of people admitted to unions, and
3) By reducing the overall number of people who were available and willing to work.
Their progressive socialist fellow travelers in the newly-created social services bureaucracies worked with them on the third way in deliberate symbiosis by agitating for legal restrictions on “child” labor, by defining upward the notion of what age constituted “a child,” and by pushing through requirements for mandatory universal school attendance that was eventually extended through high school.
Their tag team approach to social revolution with their fellows in the labor movement had several powerful and long-lasting effects:
1) It dried up the large cheap labor supply of immigrants of all ages,
2) It vastly increased poverty among these families now deprived of their income by the actions of progressive socialists. That poverty and all its attendant circumstances in turn provided justification for the progressive socialists to ask for more funds and more power to “address” the urgent crisis that they themselves had created amongst the lower classes.
The not-so-implied threat was that the crisis could destabilize and threaten society unless those whose expertise in the nature and function of society, the sociologists, and those whose expertise in the nature of societal dysfunction and the means to counter it, the social workers, were sufficiently empowered to act before it was too late. It was a ploy that these folks and their descendants would use again and again right up to the present day.
3) It necessarily increased the number of domestic problems exacerbated by the progressive socialists’ artificial creation of poverty. They used this domestic dysfunction to call for even more funding and power for family courts and child and family welfare agencies to deal with the urgent crisis. This was an early version of the politics of self-interest employed later by:
A. FDR, who used federal welfare to co-opt black families and alienate them from the Republican Party which had been their party of choice since before the Civil War, their ensuing poverty caused by that welfare then blamed on the Republicans.
B. LBJ, who designed his War on Poverty drive many black families into even greater poverty by eliminating a father or man in the home as a requirement for continuing to receive federal welfare, leading to an explosion of crime and drug use in less than ten years, increased difficulties for kids in school, all of which were used to launch urgent appeals that even more money and authority be given to the same people who caused the problems to fix them through programs designed to
i. Get kids started in school even earlier (Head Start),
ii. “Help” struggling mothers and infants (WIC), as well as to
iii. Encourage mostly minority mothers to climb out of poverty by aborting their illegitimate babies,
all the while warning them not to support Republicans who could only be counted upon to take away all those wonderful things.
C. Jimmy Carter and later Bill Clinton, who used the Community Reinvestment Act to force lending institutions (evil business) to make loans to low income people who were incapable of servicing the debt because “even poor people have a right to own their own home,” leading to defaults on loans, greater poverty, the creation of the toxic assets crisis, all laying the groundwork for calls to solve the problem by giving more money and more government control over banking and financial services to the very people who created the problem,
D. Barry Obama, in an address to the SEIU at Loyola, who called for the establishment of government programs that would meet all the needs of the poor so they could be converted into a political constituency in perpetuity.
4) It led to larger numbers of now-unemployed youth looking for other ways to earn some income for their families or to occupy their time, which led to the creation of the concept of the “juvenile delinquent,” which led to the progressive socialists demanding more money and power for juvenile courts, for juvenile detention centers, for the seizing of children from those dangerous homes capable of producing such “delinquents” and placing them in institutions or in foster care to deal with this urgent social crisis.
All these things served only to increase social dysfunction and criminal behavior at the same time they furthered the assault by the progressive socialists on the institution of the family, the formerly more-limited city governments, and the businesses and wealthy citizens who were taxed to fund it all.
At the same time that the progressive socialists considered all three to be their targets for destruction to further the revolution, they comforted and organized the poor by telling them they were victims of the wealthy business owners but they encouraged the wealthy business owners by telling them that their high taxes and philanthropy were truly doing the Lord’s work in helping to care for these, the least of the Lord’s brethren.
All of this laid the foundation for targeting the existing, very excellent US school system, including the newly-created (but not by them) public schools. In the present day some mistakenly assume that literacy in late 19th century America was not widespread. It was, however, nearly universal, at a much higher level of ability, at a much earlier age than now, and all accomplished before the progressive socialists took over education in the US. When they did, they implemented what they claimed were modern and scientific methods of pedagogy, their sales pitch being that because they were recent and allegedly scientific, they must be better.
In the colleges and universities, the progressive socialists branched out from their newly-created departments of social work, sociology, and psychology to take over the schools of teacher training. Once there they were able to train prospective teachers in their progressive world view. They controlled the licensing requirements for teachers. And they did as much as they could to impose those requirements on private and parochial schools.
Their collusion with their counterparts in the labor movement to dry up the labor pool through restrictions on “child labor” and mandatory school attendance, once it was extended beyond 8th grade to high school, vastly increased the number of high schools (The reason some places like Chicago still have grammar schools of grades 1-8 is because 8th grade was the top grade for most students, a relatively small number going on to “high” school, and an even smaller number going on to college). This, in turn, vastly increased the number of teachers required, who would then largely be supplied from the schools of education that had been taken over by the progressive socialists. Compulsory attendance that led to the creation of truancy officers, combined with increasing the required number of years in school by almost 50%, served to feed ever larger numbers of truant kids and their families back into the juvenile and family courts and city social welfare organizations that also had been designed, staffed, and run by progressive socialists.
But that wasn’t enough for them.
On the private side, they were expanding into the fields of entertainment and journalism to shape public opinion, and had already established a base in what had become the progressive churches, but those were Protestant churches, and the majority of the poor immigrant kids in the public schools from Italy and Ireland were Catholic.
Now that they had started to take over the public school system through mandating compulsory attendance and restricting child and youth employment, they moved to expand their control by implementing a curriculum to facilitate the inculcation of their political views in what was by then their single largest captive group in the US.
They did this in at least four ways.
The first way was through the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education formed in 1913. In 1917, at taxpayer expense, the Commission published their manifesto, Principles of Secondary Education. It was a progressive socialist tract that turned on its head the recommendations of the Gordon Commission from Harvard made a couple of decades earlier that had set high educational standards for high schools to make sure those not going on to college would have a first rate education.
The Principles of Secondary Education basically said that all that intellectual stuff could be pursued by those going on to college and stressed, instead, the necessity of “producing” citizens with worthy social attitudes who would make worthy use of their time engaging in worthy activities of benefit to the community.
The Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education later adopted another name: The National Education Association.
The second was to gain control of state education agencies and curriculum requirements.
The third was to gain control of publishers of educational materials to make sure that their content was consistent with what they wanted the students to know (or not to know).
The fourth was to start extending the school downward to kindergarten and pre-K, to institute before and after school programs, and to start promoting the “if you want a good job get a good education—meaning college” line to divert students from the trades (and helping the trades to keep their numbers low and their demand and remuneration high) and into four more years of school in college, thus giving them the single largest chunk of children’s lives for up to 18 years to “educate” them in the ways of progressive socialism.
Of course, whatever they did that screwed the kids up was used, in the same way their comrades in social work and politics used both intended and unintended consequences, as an excuse to demand ever more time, money, resources, and authority to address the problem. Then a few years later the problems caused by their fix would be used in the same way to push for the adoption of the next latest advance in pedagogical innovation.
But the blame for the problems would always be placed on something out of their control, the “home environment,” maybe “latchkey kids,” a phenomenon created largely by their social engineering, on the parents, on TV, on video games, on cell phones and “personal entertainment” and on the students themselves for being “learning disabled” or “dyslexic” or ADHD, or just boys, the goal being to enlarge their control over an ever-growing educational territory.
The one place, though, the blame was never, ever placed was on the education industry itself or its employees, as seen by its hysterical opposition to standards for teacher accountability, charter schools, home schooling, and measurements of skills and knowledge outcomes as a measure of educational success or failure; in other words, anything that would lessen their authority, diminish their respectability, encroach on their territory, or threaten their educationist version of the Brezhnev Doctrine: once something was under their control it would forever be under their control.
And so, in addition to taking over religious institutions, politics, popular entertainment, and the media, to keep it all going the progressive socialists created a vertically-integrated means of indoctrination in progressive socialism that is older and more entrenched than any other of its kind in the world.
What they have created in the education system of the United States is a standing wave of progressive socialism. Their twin goal is to keep it from being disrupted and to keep pumping up its amplitude.
But now the progressive socialists have a serious new rival:
1) It practices many of the same strategies of takeover that they pioneered and in some of the very states that have become the strongholds of progressive socialism,
2) Its origin, like that of progressive socialism and Marxism, was a self-serving and rather lame refashioning of Judeo-Christian history and dogma with a twist, the twist being that THEY, going all the way back to the beginning of time, are the ones it was really all about,
3) Its worldview, like that of progressive socialists, holds that the entire world system has become corrupted, and whose self-identity, like that of the progressive socialists, holds that they have been set apart by reality itself to purge the world of its corruption.
4) It tries, like the progressive socialists did (but not as successfully because of their obviously alien appearance) to keep it all on the down-low by characterizing itself in public as something other than what its members, strenuously and continuously, in the privacy of their meeting places characterize themselves to be.
5) It is able, like the progressive socialists were able to do with the socialist anarchist bombers of the late 19th/early 20th centuries engaged in terrorism against the same enemies of the progressive socialists, to cast themselves as more moderate by the contrast with those of their number whose fundamental beliefs and goals were identical but who engaged in acts of extreme violence and, so deflect attention from themselves, the peace-loving who want only to be part of the broad tapestry that is this vibrant and diverse experience in American tolerance and mutual respect. Uh huh.
6) Its goal, like that of the progressive socialists, is the fundamental transformation of all societies of the corrupt world system into their system, by any means necessary—though here and in other Western countries, just like the strategy pursued by progressive socialists a century ago and ever since, it is achieved by stealth, subterfuge, and the co-opting of existing institutions of the society they aim on taking over, a method their political tacticians in the Muslim Brotherhood describe as “cultural jihad.”
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