Not my intent to spam you, so on that level let me offer a bit of an apology.
In any case, I posted this a few days ago. This is me, not reading any “conservative commentary” and instead going to the fountain.
How long ago did progressives start using American history to attack the Founding Fathers?
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/4229764/posts
I quote an original source, page 67, I do not have any need to rely on the commentariat who most of the time get it wrong.
None of them has stood the test of time. Why though were they so influential in their day? Was it because Progressivism is so innately attractive a bundle of ideas that, like a potent narcotic, a few doses and the country was hooked? I think not.
The better line of historical analysis is to ask why Progressivism was so attractive to so many people in its originating era.
I think that Progressivism resonated with Americans as a political movement because it offered answers to problems that otherwise seemed insoluble. As Americans urbanized, they found that their teeming cities had a host of problems: crowded and dangerous tenements; a lack of clean water and sanitation; unhealthy drugs and adulterated food; alcoholism and opiate drugs; crooked politicians, law enforcement, and judges; rampant crime; corrupt business practices; and poor and exploitative working conditions in service to employers and industries that enjoyed great wealth.
The first generation of Progressivism identified these as problems and put forward solutions, often based on scientific and expert recommendations. There were building codes to assure safety and limit crowding; municipal water and sewer systems and waste disposal; restrictions on the serving of alcohol; new and higher taxes to finance public improvements and regulations to effectuate reforms; pure food and drug acts; anticorruption legislation; reforms like the direct election of US senators to get around the habitual corruption of state legislatures; and much else.
The opposition focused on constitutional arguments and had considerable success in court for many years. This in turn inspired anti-constitutional arguments and attitudes by later Progressives and an embrace of theories of history based on race and economic interests.
For some time, Teddy Roosevelt and Republican progressives coexisted in an uneasy truce with the conservative wing of the party. Sadly, Roosevelt and Taft split the GOP in 1912 and opened the way for Woodrow Wilson. That began the ascendancy of aggressive Leftist Progressivism.