Posted on 02/01/2010 9:54:10 AM PST by neverdem
Our federal government, once limited to certain core functions, now dominates virtually every area of American life. Its authority is all but unquestioned, seemingly restricted only by expediency and the occasional budget constraint.
Congress passes massive pieces of legislation with little serious deliberation, bills that are written in secret and generally unread before the vote. The national legislature is increasingly a supervisory body overseeing a vast array of administrative policymakers and rulemaking agencies. Although the Constitution vests legislative powers in Congress, the majority of laws are promulgated in the guise of regulations by bureaucrats who are mostly unaccountable and invisible to the public.
Americans are wrapped in an intricate web of government policies and procedures. States, localities, and private institutions are submerged by national programs. The states, which increasingly administer policies emanating from Washington, act like supplicants seeking relief from the federal government. Growing streams of money flow from Washington to every congressional district and municipality, as well as to businesses, organizations, and individuals that are subject to escalating federal regulations.
This bureaucracy has become so overwhelming that its not clear how modern presidents can fulfill their constitutional obligation to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. President Obama, like his recent predecessors, has appointed a swarm of policy czars über-bureaucrats operating outside the cabinet structure and perhaps the Constitution to promote political objectives in an administration supposedly under executive control.
Is this the outcome of the greatest experiment in self-government mankind ever has attempted?
We can trace the concept of the modern state back to the theories of Thomas Hobbes, who wanted to replace the old order with an all-powerful Leviathan that would impose a new order, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who, to achieve absolute equality, favored an absolute state that would rule over the people through a vaguely defined concept called the general will. It was Alexis de Tocqueville who first pointed out the potential for a new form of despotism in such a centralized, egalitarian state: It might not tyrannize, but it would enervate and extinguish liberty by reducing self-governing people to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.
The Americanized version of the modern state was born in the early 20th century. American progressives, under the spell of German thinkers, decided that advances in science and history had opened the possibility of a new, more efficient form of democratic government, which they called the administrative state. Thus began the most revolutionary change of the last hundred years: the massive shift of power from institutions of constitutional government to a labyrinthine network of unelected, unaccountable experts who would rule in the name of the people.
The great challenge of democracy, as the Founders understood it, was to restrict and structure the government to secure the rights articulated in the Declaration of Independence preventing tyranny while preserving liberty. The solution was to create a strong, energetic government of limited authority. Its powers were enumerated in a written constitution, separated into functions and responsibilities and further divided between national and state governments in a system of federalism. The result was a framework of limited government and a vast sphere of freedom, leaving ample room for republican self-government.
Progressives viewed the Constitution as a dusty 18th-century plan unsuited for the modern day. Its basic mechanisms were obsolete and inefficient; it was a reactionary document, designed to stifle change. They believed that just as science and reason had brought technological changes and new methods of study to the physical world, they would also bring great improvements to politics and society. For this to be possible, however, government could not be restricted to securing a few natural rights or exercising certain limited powers. Instead, government must become dynamic, constantly changing and growing to pursue the ceaseless objective of progress.
The progressive movement under a Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, and then a Democratic one, Woodrow Wilson set forth a platform for modern liberalism to refound America according to ideas that were alien to the original Founders. Some citizens of this country have never got beyond the Declaration of Independence, Wilson wrote in 1912. All that progressives ask or desire is permission in an era when development, evolution, is the scientific word to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.
While the Founders went to great lengths to moderate democracy and limit government, the progressives believed that barriers to change had to be removed or circumvented, and government expanded. To encourage democratic change while directing and controlling it, the progressives posited a sharp distinction between politics and what they called administration. Politics would remain the realm of expressing opinions, but the real decisions and details of governing would be handled by administrators, separate and immune from the influence of politics.
This permanent class of bureaucrats would address the particulars of accomplishing the broad objectives of reform, making decisions, most of them unseen and beyond public scrutiny, on the basis of scientific facts and statistical data rather than political opinions. The ruling class would reside in the recesses of a host of alphabet agencies such as the FTC (the Federal Trade Commission, created in 1914) and the SEC (the Securities and Exchange Commission, created in 1934). As objective and neutral experts, the theory went, these administrators would act above petty partisanship and faction.
The progressives emphasized not a separation of powers, which divided and checked the government, but rather a combination of powers, which would concentrate its authority and direct its actions. While seeming to advocate more democracy, the progressives of a century ago, like their descendants today, actually wanted the opposite: more centralized government control.
So it is that today, many policy decisions that were previously the constitutional responsibility of elected legislators are delegated to faceless bureaucrats whose rules have the full force and effect of laws passed by Congress. In writing legislation, Congress uses broad language that essentially hands legislative power over to agencies, along with the authority to execute rules and adjudicate violations.
The objective of progressive thinking, which remains a major force in modern-day liberalism, was to transform America from a decentralized, self-governing society into a centralized, progressive society focused on national ideals and the achievement of social justice. Sociological conditions would be changed through government regulation of society and the economy; socioeconomic problems would be solved by redistributing wealth and benefits.
Liberty no longer would be a condition based on human nature and the exercise of God-given natural rights, but a changing concept whose evolution was guided by government. And since the progressives could not get rid of the old Constitution this was seen as neither desirable nor possible, given its elevated status and historic significance in American political life they invented the idea of a living Constitution that would be flexible and pliable, capable of growth and adaptation in changing times.
In this view, government must be ever more actively involved in day-to-day American life. Given the goal of boundless social progress, government by definition must itself be boundless. It is denied that any limit can be set to governmental activity, prominent scholar (and later FDR adviser) Charles Merriam wrote, summarizing the views of his fellow progressive theorists. The modern idea as to what is the purpose of the state has radically changed since the days of the Fathers, he continued, because
the exigencies of modern industrial and urban life have forced the state to intervene at so many points where an immediate individual interest is difficult to show, that the old doctrine has been given up for the theory that the state acts for the general welfare. It is not admitted that there are no limits to the action of the state, but on the other hand it is fully conceded that there are no natural rights which bar the way. The question is now one of expediency rather than of principle.This intellectual construct began to attain political expression with targeted legislation, such as the Pure Food and Drug Act under TR and the Clayton Anti-Trust Act under President Wilson. These efforts were augmented by constitutional amendments that allowed the collection of a federal income tax to fund the national government and required the direct election of senators (thus undermining the federal character of the national legislature).
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Looser than what?
Looser: Comparative form of loose: more loose
Loser: One that fails to win: the losers of the game
“But a funny thing happened on the way to the next revolution.”
A good article. Renewal of teaching the basics of the Founding is way overdue, neglected as it has been at least during this curmudgeon’s memory. It will require tremendous effort just to recover lost ground to the time of the ‘cold war’, much less the beginning of the slide. But it has been a startling reawakening this last year as witness the impotence of a filibuster proof congress and socialist administration to force legislation upon an unsupportive and aroused electorate. Keep it up.
Bookmarked 4 later.
Big BUMP...
I get tired of these articles that lump Teddy Roosevelt in with all of these early 20th century progressives. The only thing this article attributes to TR is the passage of the food and drug act.
Agree completely. TR advocated steady, mild progression when necessary to avoid abrupt, radical change.
I agree that while he was President, he pretty much followed McKinley’s line, but he turned way left in 1910.
If you're an auto manufacturer, you want to sell more cars, right? What if you are a lender ie banker? Well, you want to sell more loans (lend money). And as it turns out, the biggest customers of all are the respective nation-states.
What better way to fatten your wallet than to tap into the one entity that carries the force of law to confiscate private property in order to satisfy its debts to you, the banker? Answer: there isn't one; it's the best there is if you're a banker.
So here we have a marriage made in hell. Dewy eyed 'progressives' weeping over the oppressed, including women, child, minorities, the poor and whoever else. And then we have coldly calculating bankers who clearly understand the financing requirements the states needed to impose via taxes, regulations and other means to collect wealth from private parties to pay for all this "progress".
I also disagree with the author's primary thesis that Hussein over-reached & that public sentiment has now turned against him. Barry would have been successful if it weren't for the fact that the credit-leverage system has reached its terminal state of collapse. It's been expanding at an unsustainable rate for some time now, but now the bill is coming due.
We will get a restoration of the original Republic not through some enlightened return of voter common sense, but through the imposition of the harshest task master of all: economic collapse. Like the USSR, the time is coming when there won't be any there, there.
I agree with your post. Damn that...
btt
Holy Carp! I popped a double-tap on the "o"
That is hugh. Series, even.
I am in shock. Crushed, I am telling you.
"What a looser!"
uhh, you don't think...
.
“Loose those arrows me bowmen.”
And the Loosers loosed their arrows. But alas, they fell beyond the enemy and the loosers were the losers.
Loose women? Gotta read that one again.
You are having a great day with this post aren't you! ;-)
There is no reason for optimism, this Republic will fall
The Founders were adamant about not granting the franchise to morons, women, those under 21, and non tax payers.
The politicians failed to heed their warning, and all of those groups have now been enfranchised via Constitutional amendment and are the reason this Republic cannot possibly endure.
The enemies of Freedom are all around us, the 50 % of Americans that continue vote Democrat.
A populace that likes bright shiny objects, that swings wildly between left and right but the damage inflicted when the nation lurches left is never repaired, an electorate that gave the maniac algore the popular vote in 2000, elected Bill Clinton twice, and now puts a communist crypto-muslim in the White House is a populace and nation that has only darkness and despair on the horizon.
This Republic will fall, as the non taxpayers will continue to support those politicians who will redistribute money in exchange for votes.
Lets hope that in the new one that rises from its ashes, only taxpayers and veterans are entrusted to have a say on who may govern.
bump for later read
It started off a little slow but it's defiantly getting better...
:-)
Is that Freeper Island in the distance?
Well I have troll hunters all over me today so I have had better days too.
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