August, 2012.
The Great Rediscovery is in the headlines:
“Senate
Candidate in Texas is Known as an Intellectual Force ”
— The New York
Times
“Romney:
Media trying to ‘divert’ from real issues with focus on foreign
gaffes.”
“Romney
praises Poland as model of economic liberty”
To borrow from Bob Dylan: “The times, they are ‘a changin’”
There is no accident in all the headlines cited above, you
know.
America is in the midst of the next chapter in what Ronald
Reagan called “the great rediscovery” of American values.
And the Other Side knows it. Which is why the aroma of
desperation that emanates ever more distinctly from Team Obama and
its media allies.
Let’s take the eagle eye view here, shall we? From about, oh,
September 14th of 1901 until today, August 2nd of 2012.
On September 14, 1901, William McKinley’s popular Vice President
Theodore Roosevelt became president with McKinley’s sudden death at
the hands of, ironically, a leftist man of anarchy named Leon
Czolgosz.
With that accident of history, the first of America’s
“progressive” presidents moved into the White House. A century-plus
of “progressivism” was launched, its political tide ebbing on
occasion (the Harding-Coolidge years) but increasingly flowing with
all the force of the Atlantic in the grip of an endless series of
hurricanes. From TR to Woodrow Wilson to Herbert Hoover (yes, myths
aside, Hoover was a “progressive Republican”) and on to FDR’s New
Deal and LBJ’s Great Society, the color of America’s political
waters ran from blue to bluer to bluest. Whether elected or
appointed Republicans (the moderately blue Eisenhower, Nixon, and
Ford), there was, seemingly, no way to stop the whirlwind.
The first effort to seriously put a halt to all of this was, of
course, Barry Goldwater’s 1964 nomination. Goldwater’s loss became
the ultimate victory — the first serious step forward for the
conservative resistance. It was here to stay. By 1980, the Reagan
Revolution had begun.
The mistake made by some was to think the Reagan Revolution was
somehow over. It wasn’t. As Ronald Reagan was the first to say,
Reagan himself was not a “Great Communicator” because of his
personal skills. He won the affectionate nickname because, as he
said, he “communicated great things.”
Those “great things” are at their core utterly American. Said
Reagan in his
Farewell Address:
They called it the “Reagan Revolution.” Well, I’ll accept that,
but for me it always seemed more like the great rediscovery, a
rediscovery of our values and our common sense.
The great rediscovery of our values — American values — and
common sense. American common sense.
It is precisely this “great rediscovery” that finally is
beginning to give conservatives the edge over progressives.
Why?
Because the progressive movement is at base a foreign — which
is to say “non-American” — idea that had zero to do with America’s
founding principles based on English liberty.
Our friends at National Review devoted the considerable
part of an issue back in December of 2009 to “The
Four Horsemen of Progressivism: The Men Who Created Our
World.”
In four articles by NR’s Jonah Goldberg, the University
of Dallas’s associate professor of politics Tiffany Jones Miller,
Bradley C.S. Watson (of, respectively, St. Vincent College, the
Claremont Institute and the Ashbrook Center), and the Manhattan
Institute’s Fred Siegel — the political creation of progressivism
was put under the microscope.
Using four men the group collectively considered as what we
might call progressivism’s “founding fathers” — exploring how
America got here from there. “There” being late 19th and early 20th
century America.
Their careful analysis can provide for a considerable
understanding of today’s political headlines from the Ted Cruz
victory in Texas to the Romney remarks on Palestine and Poland. Not
to mention the
polls showing Romney on the verge of upending Obama’s
progressive presidency.
First, the “Four Horsemen of Progressivism.”
- · Richard Ely — A professor at both the John
Hopkins University and the University of Wisconsin from the 1890s
forward.
- · John Dewey — A graduate of John Hopkins who
taught at both the University of Chicago and Columbia
University.
- · Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. — Holmes was,
famously, a Theodore Roosevelt appointee as Associate Justice of
the U.S. Supreme Court.
- · Herbert Croly — A progressive activist who
founded the New Republic magazine.
Ely, wrote Goldberg, laid the foundation on which is built
today’s “house of contemporary liberalism.” Ely “wrote dozens of
books, on monopoly, taxation, land use and urban reform, and
several standard texts on general economics.”
But politically speaking in today’s climate, a fact of
progressive history that would doubtless pack political punch if
better understood, Ely was a “leader of the new generation of
German-trained or-inspired Ph.D.s” — who began his teaching career
at John Hopkins. That would be the John Hopkins that was, in
Goldberg’s words, “conceived as a German-style institution in
1881.”
Which is to say, Ely was what we might call today a Europhile. A
political trait vastly popular still today among American
progressives (does the name Barack Obama ring a bell?) who are
correctly accused of wanting to turn the U.S. into a European-style
socialist state. Without doubt Ely’s most famous student when
teaching at Johns Hopkins was a young Woodrow Wilson, while he
counted among his ardent fans others such as Teddy Roosevelt and
Wisconsin’s Governor Robert La Follette Sr.
John Dewey spent a half-century in American academia after
leaving what Jones calls “the seedbed of progressive academia” that
was Johns Hopkins. Dewey’s entire career was devoted to progressive
principles that were obtained from a school of thought that was,
says Jones, “an academic phenomenon far removed from American
politics.” Jones cites the progressive Charles Merriam as
approvingly citing the “intoxicating effect of the undiluted
Hegelian philosophy upon the American mind” or, back to Jones,
progressivism “articulated a critique of America that was as deep
as it was wide. It began with a conscious rejection of the American
founding and the promotion of a new understanding of freedom,
history, and the state in their stead.”
Meanwhile, over on the Supreme Court, Mr. Justice Holmes was
deeply taken with all of this. Says Watson: “Holmes set forth the
essence of progressivism as a legal theory…”. And did it using his
power as a Justice. Which meant a member of the Court was using his
constitutional perch to lead “the charge to eradicate judicial
reasoning that was based on principles of natural law or natural
rights” that were central to the founding of America.
Last but not least in all this was Herbert Croly. Writer Siegel
calls Croly and his fellow progressives “America’s Bismarcks.” “To
achieve a better future,” said Croly, Americans had to be
“emancipate[d] from their past.” Which is to say the American
founding principles as put forth in the Declaration of Independence
and the Constitution should be jettisoned in favor of a
Bismarckian-style nation “placed under skilled professional
leadership” with other “special lines of work… subordinated to its
particular place in a comprehensive scheme of national
economy.”
The latter, of course, is precisely the thinking behind both
Obamacare and the Obama stimulus.
The shorthand here, politically speaking?
Progressivism now stands in the historical dock as a foreign
faith — a decidedly non-American (or, if you like, un-American)
belief system. After 111 years of progressivism, with America now
awash in the inevitable results of massive debt and obsessive
government interference in every crack and crevice of American life
— with Obamacare looming — the country is in open rebellion. A
rebellion that is specifically about the “great rediscovery” of
American values — precisely as Ronald Reagan suggested.
The political impact of this is easy to see — and the Obamaites
see it all too clearly. Hence the ferocity and or impulsive
stupidity of their attacks on Romney for Bain or his dog or his
wife’s horse and so on.
Ted Cruz won the Republican nomination for Senator in Texas
because Texas Republicans have had it with a GOP Establishment that
was acceding to what they understand instinctively are the
decidedly foreign values of the progressive movement. Values that
have no relationship to the founding principles of America.
The Obama media is trying to make Mitt Romney into a gaffe-prone
idiot because they understand in spades that his message on the
culture of free markets in Israel is in fact a threat to the
socialist culture that has combined with a messianic violence in
not only Palestine but throughout the Arab world. Mr. Romney has
wisely and bluntly
spoken the truth about Palestine’s real culture and it has
nothing to do with being Palestinian. (He also correctly called
Jerusalem the capital of Israel — a decidedly unpopular truth with
progressives.)
And American progressives certainly have no tolerance for former
Polish President Lech Walesa — a onetime union leader who was
famously a Reagan ally — giving Polish kudos to Romney. Kudos?
Walesa, who invited Romney to Poland, essentially endorsed the
Republican. Running as far away from the American progressive
values that for decades acquiesced in his country’s submission to
the Soviet Union.
Said Lech to Mitt:
I wish you to be successful because the success is needed to the
United States, of course, but to Europe as well and to the rest of
the world, too. So, Gov. Romney, get your success, be
successful.
Catch that?
Again: “I wish you to be successful because the success is
needed to the United States, of course, but to Europe as well and
to the rest of the world….”
Which is to say, Lech Walesa believes American values…..the
values Ronald Reagan hailed when he spoke of his time in office as
a “great rediscovery” of American values….are necessary for the
success of Europe and the rest of the world.
What’s happening in America — whether in 2012 in Texas with Ted
Cruz, Wisconsin with Scott Walker, Israel and Poland with Mitt
Romney, or 2010 in the GOP landslide — is an open rebellion
against 111 years of progressive politics. A furious revolt against
the deliberate injection of decidedly non-American values into the
body politic.
Americans are insisting on the “great rediscovery” of American
values that were central to the success of the Reagan presidency.
Not to mention the values that were at the core of America’s
founding itself.
They are voting for everybody from Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio
(Latinos both, it should be added) to Mitt Romney and on and on
because they understand instinctively that the great foreign
experiment with their lives that was and is the progressive
movement has failed.
From the staggering debt to the massive size of the federal
behemoth that sits astride the Potomac to the vast governmental
intrusions into their personal lives — they have had enough.
Halting and overturning all of this is a long term
proposition.
But as the results of the latest election in Texas show quite
clearly — the times they are a’changin’.
The great rediscovery of American values and common sense that
Ronald Reagan spoke about continues.
Can you say Senator Ted Cruz?
