Know Your "Progressive" Enemy

February 20, 2010 11:17 AM

My readers will note that I usually spell "Progressive" surrounded by quotation marks, because there is nothing progressive about a "Progressive." For that matter, there is nothing democratic about a "Democrat," and nothing pragmatic about a "Pragmatist." But I digress. What I am really writing about here is the fact that there are the Old Progressives and today's New "Progressives," as well as the Old Left and the New Left, and all four of these groups are coalescing into one huge hodgepodge of political troublemakers, called, simply, the "Progressives." In my opinion, that name is sticking to them, and if we advocates of the US Constitution, capitalism, and a sound American currency want to be able to state the name of our arch-enemy, we can. Our enemy is the "Progressives."

Perhaps no public figure has identified the "Progressives" and their threat as clearly as talk show host Glenn Beck. He uses the term daily on his radio show, and makes no bones about his view, the same view I stated in the last paragraph, that the "Progressives" are the enemy of the United States and everything our nation stands for. Conveniently, however, that same enemy also calls themselves "Progressive." For example, there is the Congressional Progressive Caucus, a den of elected "Democrat" thieves that has its own website and does not mince words about what it wants to do to this nation. (Of course, they couch their goals in "Progressive" language, such as "reform," or "overhaul", rather than "hijack" or "destroy," but most of us get the idea.) Then there is a bunch of "Progressive" websites, one of which, Common Dreams, says of itself, "We use the latest technology to bring the progressive community together online." They publish a list of "Progressive" websites, which, curiously, omits the Huffington Post, led by Arianna Huffington, a former Republican who proudly calls herself a "Progressive."

But what exactly is a "Progressive?" There were three major national American parties named the Progressive Party, of which the first was organized by Teddy Roosevelt after defecting from the Republicans. There were also four state Progressive Parties and one militant far-left national party, the Progressive Labor party, which split from the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) in 1961, and is still active. The political distance between the ex-Republican president Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Labor Party might seem huge, but don't be fooled. The main theme was and is still the same: circumvention of the limits on big government imposed by the Constitution in order to establish utopian, egalitarian controls on the individual citizens of the nation through collectivism, a disdain for logic, common sense, reason, and the mind of the individual, and a perpetual call for self-sacrifice above all values.

Woodrow Wilson may deserve the dubious honor of being the most successful of the old-school Progressive "Democrat" presidents. (The Old Progressive presidents included Republicans from Teddy Roosevelt, to, I would say, Nixon and Ford.) Among Wilson's other deeds were a drastic reduction of civil rights during World War One and the occupation of Haiti by the USA in 1915, complete with Jim Crow racial segregation at its barbaric worst. The occupation didn't end until 1934 when another Roosevelt, FDR, was president.

Prohibition (of alcoholic beverages) from 1920-1933 was one of the peak achievements of the Old Progressives, passed by Congress over the veto of Wilson. President Herbert Hoover, the last president before FDR, was a Progressive Republican, and although today's "Progressives" blame him, and nineteenth-century Republican free-market policies, for the Great Depression, Hoover operated, and blundered, under disastrous mixed premises.

Meanwhile, growing out of a convergence between the labor movement and Marxist ideology, socialism began to outstrip the old-school Progressive movement. The Communists were kicked out of the American Socialist Party in 1919, but soon took the lead as a Marxist party advocating the violent overthrow of the US government. Rapidly falling under the rigid control of the Soviet Union's communist party, the CPUSA was the Old Left personified, described with great clarity in a book, "Masters of Deceit," published under the name of the FBI chief, J. Edgar Hoover. Those were the days, during World War Two and the Cold War, when communists were communists, before communists became "Progressives" as they are today.

The Old Left began to be replaced by the New Left around 1968, when a world-wide student uprising led young people to question the wisdom of the Soviets. The demise of the USSR in 1991, in my opinion, brought a formal end to the Old Left, because there was no longer a Soviet Union to dominate the US party. What we have today, the "fuzzy left" agenda of Barack Hussein Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, is a mixture of Old Left ideology, New Left strategy, and, to be blunt, fascism.

I wrote here about the difference between fascism and socialism. For another, more detailed view about the connections between fascism and the old-school Progressives, I recommend the first chapter of Jonah Goldberg's book, "Liberal Fascism." A "liberal," by the way, in my opinion, is a man of mixed premises who is somewhat sympathetic to socialism and "Progessive" ideas, somewhat supportive of the Constitution and capitalism, and more than somewhat hopeful that the mixture of ideologies will lead in a positive direction rather than inexorably towards disaster. The label "liberal" has gone out of fashion, as has the label "communist", but "Progressive" is all the rage. I believe that there are some conscientious older journalists who are still "liberals" and are still willing to write more or less objectively about political and international affairs, with a viewpoint only partially polluted by "Progressive" claptrap.

For a complete, fundamental understanding of why "Progressives" will destroy the United States of America, I recommend the works of Ayn Rand, all of them. For a history and detailed analysis of the old-school Progressives, I recommend the Jonah Goldberg book mentioned above, and for an understanding of the strategy and tactics of the Soviet-dominated Old Left, which are very much in evidence in the Obama era, I recommend "Masters of Deceit."

Good reading, and good fighting!